Moments in the 90s - CLICK on the images

A poet feeling the pain in Chitungwiza, sometime in 1994. I was there because I took the picture. It was during the Zimbabwe International Book Fair and the writers were on an excursion to Chitungwiza, just outside of Harare. On the previous day we had gone to Domboshava just to read poetry on top of the sacred hills, something like that. See the picture below:

Poet Chirikure Chirikure reciting his then signature piece "Marutsi". I know because I was there on top of the Domboshava rock mass.

The window that inspired my poem "The Teacher and the Curtain". I observed this window while I was a graduate teacher at Ndima High School in Chimanimani (1996). That year the national book week came to Chimanimani with full force and one of our students won the BWAZ short story writing competition. The students did a book march from the school to the local shopping center and they performed poetry. I remember that I read several poems from the then newly published, Chirikure Chirikure-edited collection "Tipeiwo Dariro"
The teachers' house whose curtainless window inspired the poem "The Teacher and the Curtain". I guess back then, 1996, we thought, as teachers, we had it bad because we could not travel to the towns when we wanted, that the government took a good two to three months to pay new teachers, and that once in a while our colleagues could not afford to buy curtains for their windows...little did we know that ten or so years later, teaching as a profession in Zimbabwe would be a passport to poverty and shame... Zvichanaka hazvo!

THE BUSES THAT BROUGHT US TO WORK:

My trips to work originated in Harare, and by the time I was on a bus like this one, I would have usually spent two to three days on the road, sleeping at bus terminals, often with no hope to get to work on time. And "on time" was really just a metaphor of arrival, that is, if the week started on Monday (it sometimes did), and you arrived to work on Wednesday, or Thursday, you were on time. These trips, which I could not avoid because of the need to be in the city once in a while, became rarer the longer one stayed at the school in Chimanimani. There were teachers who had not been to anyone's town in many months, if not years, and they didn't miss much. Well, back then I was the National Secretary for BWAZ, a position that required traveling widely.