WE read with trepidation an article in a local paper alleging that Gideon Gono, former Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor, could possibly succeed President Robert Mugabe in the future.
In case people have very short memories, we jog their memories with this piece produced in hindsight of the worst year in the living memory of Zimbabweans.
It was December 2008 and to be honest I was among those who thought Zimbabwe would never have made it that far.
The big story of the year wasn’t whether people would slip into the New Year unscathed.
Unlike my friend Don who decided to clamber over his gate in a state of high intoxication. All that advice about going around wearing a helmet replete with bull-bars gone to waste.
It was about the possibility of the Christmas of 2008 being celebrated quite literally in the absence of money. It gave the term “cashless economy” a whole new meaning.
Zimbabweans found themselves having to go through hell and high water just to get their hard earned cash.
Banks resembled garrisons patrolled by menacing riot police as citizens laid siege.
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Even the local tabloid Umthunywa asked: Yikhisimusi bani engelamali? (What kind of Christmas is this without money?) After all, Christmas was supposed to be a time of giving, not about taking away!
Gono would be known as the man who stole Christmas. The act of the disappearing Zimbabwe dollar given graphic meaning through his name by a creative writer who jotted: “Gono, Gone, G0000000000000ne!”
By the end of that year, Zimbabweans were left holding onto trillions of worthless dollars.
But the critical issue for many, was not being able to visit their beloved relatives in the rural areas. Christmas in the communal areas — khisimusi eyereseva — with all the sentimentality of spending quality time with the old folks in the sticks was gone.
The acrid smoke in the pole and dagga kitchens and having to use Blair toilets were the least of our worries. How was one going to catch up on the best gossip of the year?
We would surely miss being animatedly told about how uSibanda from behind the anthill had bewitched uMoyo from the swamp because his truant son uBigboy had impregnated uSibanda’s star daughter uEsinathi who was earmarked for an arranged marriage to uNyathi the local businessman.
Never mind the fact that uNyathi was secretly seeing NakaNtombi, uSiziba’s vivacious second wife. Her latest baby’s paternity already in question as a result though no one dared to tell uSiziba!
That man could wield a mean knobkerrie mzala!
What about old man Dube from near the mission, struck by lightning on a clear day after kicking Zulu’s emaciated hunting dog?
We would also miss seeing our relatives from the Diaspora (across the border eGoli) pouring over the Beitbridge border on those much anticipated humanitarian missions.
They would bring anything that was not nailed down, from water to whisky, food and fuel, plastic drums and junk and of course the precious rands.
They had a nasty shock the last time they came. Discovering – in their borrowed lingo — that ekhaya mara, kuyabheda ne! (Things had horribly gone bad at home!)
Apart from learning that their rands were no longer worth the paper they were printed on, the booze proved to be way too expensive for them to buy every Tom, Dick and Amkela.
By then inflation had reached the stage where any kind of currency, be it the US dollar, British pound or euro, would have its value vanish within minutes of being brought into the country.
Our shocked relatives were back across the Limpopo River as if shot through a catapult!
You also would do the same if you discovered that there was simply no bread. Let alone the Sun jam which we always looked forward to.
No rice to accompany the fried chicken whose taste was now a distant memory.
No water for cooking, let alone take a bath in. No beer to celebrate with and, wait for it, no money to buy anything available.
It became hard to imagine that the Germans of the Weimer Republic in 1923 had plumbed such depths of economic ruin.
In their case at least they had just emerged from a war which was quite understandable.
Yet, here was a country wallowing in abject economic disaster, during peace time and we all lived to tell the tale!
While in 2007 we had a black Christmas, in 2008 we certainly had no Christmas.
It was so bad that we thought that the ruling party would table an urgent recommendation at their annual conference to cancel Christmas altogether.
It would probably be watered down to an indefinite postponement instead.
I rest my case.
Lenox Mhlanga is a social commentator
