Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteAlthough I don't believe in God as an old man with a white beard who presides over a cloudy land of diminutive nude girls playing harps, much less in a greedy devil who presides over an underworld of fire, but from time to time, I've had cause, directly, to believe in ghosts.
Underground streams hosting odd electrical signals, unknown combinations of short bandwidth energy, emblems and patterns left in traumatized old rooms and across the swamps of thorny landscapes: one may hope that Robert Mugabe will not only look over the poisoned fruits of his efforts to produce a black, socialized Zimbabwe but even in death encounter legions of the dead left to haunt the country for all time.
For Reuters, Emma Batha reports:
"Jacobs said many people in the Zambezi Valley, the poorest and driest area, were now surviving on a vile-tasting, fibrous root called makuri.
"It's got no nutritional value whatsoever. It tastes disgusting and it also has a parasite which attaches to it which is toxic," said Jacobs, who has just returned from the region."
The numbers are meaningless: five, fifty, five hundred, fifty thousand--the UN has pegged the population drawing close to famine at 5 million.
Children, being children, not only gnaw on makuri, which is not digestible and "creates terrible stomach pains," but in their huts chase after "tiny rats" for food.
All the fine talk on the government's side about criticism from the west and on the opposition's side about "power-sharing agreements" fails to produce meaning. Such talk has lost all significance. It's babble and noise and wishful utterance: Zimbabwe, plainly, had become in its infancy the breadbasket of central Africa, even if perhaps too much an Englishman's frontier settlement and rustic paradise,and now this drawing toward the end of the Mugabe thugocracy, installed for decades, beggers all belief, faith, and imagination.
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Batha, Emma. "Zimbabwe children eating toxic roots, rats." Reuters, September 25, 2008: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/B273559.htm
Oppenheim, James S. "Zimbabwe: Peter Godwin's Book & How a Country Deconstructs." Oppenheim Arts & Letters, February 19, 2008: http://commart.typepad.com/oppenheim_arts_letters/2008/02/zimbabwe-peter.html
Oppenheim, James S. "Zimbabwe: Robert Mugage's Birthday." Oppenheim Arts & Letters, March 14, 2008: http://commart.typepad.com/oppenheim_arts_letters/2008/03/zimbabwe-robert.html
Oppenheim, James S. "Zimbabwe is Burning." Oppenheim Arts & Letters, July 2, 2008: http://commart.typepad.com/oppenheim_arts_letters/2008/07/zimbabwe-is-burning.html
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