Trips to Glen View, a Memoir Piece

August 20th, last day in Harare. I had arrived in the city on August 4th, had spent a week, had proceeded to Zvishavane, where I spent another week,  and had returned to Harare to spend the four remaining days of my visit to Zimbabwe. I had paused to ponder why moments like this--of return, of reconnecting--had not been possible sooner, earlier, but I would end up with not much time to reflect, aware that soon I would be returning to the United States, so I had tried to utilize each moment, to pile up certain experiences that would, perhaps, be handy for some purpose later, maybe a short story (because I write those), or a whole book of poetry... And as each day passed so too did pure wonderment, and concrete had taken over, living now with the little aches of being in a physical place in real time. There had been much walking in Mazvihwa, and I had caught a cold, had visited a local clinic, (thinking, this is a rural clinic, I can't believe this, thinking, but I used to come to clinics like this, thinking, this is what made me who I am today, and noticing that yes, there were pills for everyone who needed them, pills with UNESCO labels...thinking, this is donor-funding, et cetra), a local clininc, Gudo, where I had been told to watch my weight. I needed that, what with what we ate back (now) home... And I had finally left the village, floating--not sitting--in a kombi, a painful commute to Mandava Terminus in Zvishavane, where we (I now had a crew of six people) would avoid Kukura Kurerwa bus and get on another Kombi that took us to Gweru, where, barely after we left the Kombi we had been whisked to a waiting (revving-to-go) Bulawayo-Harare bus. We had arrived safely, had hired a [private] car that took us to Borrowdale West, my Harare base.

 Last day in the country, urgency filled the air. I had a few people to see, having already given up on visiting everyone. But the one place I had to visit again before leaving Zimbabwe was Glen View. My first two visits had been to reconnect with Glen View 1, the last place I had called home before I left the country 16 years ago. I reconnected with my nephew, now a grown up man running a welding business from home, and I had met his wife and his two nieces. I was touched by his hard work: he makes and repairs everything from door frames to window frames, entertainment centers to commuter omnibus seats. He is a good example of Zimbabweans' resilience in the face of scarcity. Customers seemed to knock on his door every thirty minutes, so he and I didn't get to do much together, but on our next trip  (my sister was traveling with me), he would accompany us to the Mbudzi Cemetery to see the graves of the departed relatives. And when it came, that visit was a solemn moment of closure and completion of the grief that had given me sleepless nights in California. 

On these first two visits to Glen View, one via Mufakose, I had taken lots of photos,  photos of the mess created by endless vending stalls. Everyone seemed tobe selling something, and I wondered who the customers were, or if everyone was getting into some kind of barter trade: I sell tomatoes, you sell potatoes, that one sells airtime, that other one handsets and shoes ,and yet another sells eggs and chicken. I buy your chicken, you buy my vegetable bundles and we both buy airtime or popcorn. It was fascinating to see, and overwhelming, even for my camera, which betrayed me by giving the impression that it had captured twenty images of the Glen View 1 Shopping center, when it captured nothing.

So on this third visit to Glen View,  I would get a chance to take more photos. But before we ( my niece, her daughter, and I) got to Glen View 1, we passed through Glen View 3 and 2, in that order, and we came close to getting to Glen View 4 when at one time we got lost. But we discovered the road (path really) we needed and saw a familiar feature, the Glen View 2 Satellite Clinic, and we knew we were close to 40th Crescent--where it all began: the place I once called home, the house where my niece had lived as a new-born baby, the setting of more than half of my Mukoma stories, also the setting of my Shona novel manuscript, "Zvinonditadzisa Kuzvara".

One section of 40th Crescent, Glen View 2.

The sight of 40th Crescent brought joy, and I experienced some deja vu: I had had some painful dreams of return, painful because I would wake up to the familiar silence of a Sacramento night.  But this time the return, this pilgrimage, was real. I had even run into novelist Aaron Chiundura Moyo near the ZBC homes in Glen View 3, and he had walked with us all the way to the Clinic. The return to 40th Crescent was real-- I was walking with my niece, and we were headed to her birth home. But this prospect hadn't been the only or first interesting feature of our visit; we had already seen other interesting places, recalled  other interesting memories.

First, my niece had shown me the college she had attended her Forms 3 and 4; a college near the outer limits of Glen View 3, closer to Willovale Motor Industries than to the rest of the Glen Views. She said, "Babamunini, this is where I failed O-Level." And of course, she didn't say this, but I saw the institution and thought, "This is where you failed O-Level." She said, "This is the school I attended." And I said, "Wow, what a nice school. No wonder it was expensive. All that money I sent." She laughed. I laughed too because it really was a nice school in the middle of the chaos that Glen View has become. I didn't quite believe that her time there had been wasted; she had learned something, and one day she would be able to articulate what she had learned there.

We were in a loud and fast kombi, so my eyes didn't have the leisure to see the full details of the architecture. But I registered a lot of brown and gray, and somehow I had started thinking of cemeteries. As we drove along Willovale Road between Glen View and Budiriro, I saw a few more signs of more private colleges that offered O-and A-Level classes, schools that were supposed to offer a better curriculum than the government secondary schools in the area. Perhaps all their students didn't succeed, but somehow these colleges had been borne out of the same enterprising spirit which had led to the sprouting of vending stalls everywhere in the townships.Everywhere here means everywhere; there are no greenbelts left in the locations; the locations are now ghettos clustered with these businesses that sell everything imaginable. With the proliferation of chaotic business endeavours is the piling up of trash everywhere; it's as if the Harare City Council has given up on cleaniliness.



I had even sent  pictures  home, pictures of Stanford.

Next, she showed me the trade school where she had started a course in fabric-something. I still remembered I hadn't really paid attention to what she had said over the phone, shy and ashamed, when she was telling me that she would train in something before she retook her O-Level  exams. I still wanted her to attend Stanford, even though I didn't know how I would afford it. I had even sent pictures home, pictures of Stanford University.

She said, "This is where I started that course."

 "Which you didn't finish," I said.

She laughed. Laughed it off, returned her attention to her daughter, who was getting hungry and restless. We had left Borrowdale,  no breakfast, nothing, because it had been too early. We had passed through downtown and had not had time to eat anything there either as I had to meet Beaven Tapureta, the coordinator of Writers International Network Zimbabwe (WINZ), to sign some participation certificates which the organization was going to send to the winners of their recent writing contest. I was doing this in my capacity as the Guest of Honour at the workshop, where I had given a speech, and handed book prizes. The certificates were a follow-up acknowledgement of participation. I enjoyed doing this, and the meeting was brief, and still, we left the place in a hurry, now looking for kombis to Glen View.

And here we were, finally, in Glen View 3, already being told that our new destination was now Glen View 3 Shopping Center instead of Glen View yese, as we had been told when the touts were fighting for us downtown. I looked at the trade school my niece had barely attended, an ugly brown structure, sandwitched between a deep ditch and a falling two-storey building. No wonder she had left this place and eloped with a young man from Mazvihwa;  my niece had returned herself to the rural areas, ...and back in America I had said to people, "Who does that? To have an opportunity at city life, and a near -opportunity for possible Stanford?"  And some understanding Zimbabweans  back there had said, "She chose that, what can you do? She's an adult now." Others had said, "You took too long to bring her here." And yet others, "She will wake up one day."

And when, finally, I had a chance to talk to her about this: "Baba, one day I will pursue my dreams".

"Fair enough," I had said.  Her calling me Baba took some getting used to. After my brother died in 1997, when she was 8, there was no one else to raise her except me, so suddenly I became the father. Much of our being together in Harare (because when I was about to leave the village she said she would come with me, if I didn't mind, and I said yes) was some form of catching up on lost opportunities for trips to creameries and Chicken-Inns and such. Only now it was more interesting, considering that we had brought along her two-year-old daughter. The boy stayed in the village...

"And Baba, do you remember this place?" she said, pointing at a huge brick building with a high veranda.

"What is this place?" I asked, looking around until I felt dizzy. "Wait, I know this place." I said, regaining perspective. " Oh my God, this is Glen View 3 Shopping Center?" Then I turned around again. "And that durawall, that's the durawall for Glen View High 1. Do you know I taught there once. You probably don't know."

"And that durawall, that's the durawall for Glen View High 1."

She didn't know. She had been too young to know anything.

"This is the shopping center!" I said, bringing her back to more familiar territory.

"As you can see, it's a shopping center alright," she spoke slowly, wiping her daughter's nose. My niece (my daughter, that is) has a healthy sense of sarcasm, and is quite humorous and can almost make you laugh. She is a committed mother and a good communicator in public. Knows hows to navigate her way in cities and villages alike, and can often entertain a kombi crowd. I sometimes see a glint of my brother in her stare.

But back to the shopping center.

The place used to be clean. There was once a bus terminus. This is where I had come every morning to board a bus to High field, where I did my A-Level. The shopping centre had been where we came to buy our groceries when we lived in Glen View 2, and "we" back then had been my Maigurus--the two wives of my brother--one of whom would become my niece's mother. We had come here, all three of us, and they would spoil me: Babamunini, buy this or that. Don't you want to buy that and that? And indeed, I would buy such and such item. I had an addiction for mints; I called them my study aids, something to crack with my teeth while studying all night in the one room  the four of us  shared. That's the room I wanted to show my niece, the room that, when she arrived back in February 1989 , would be home to five occupants. The room at 2945, 40th Crescent.

[To be continued....whenever]