Blues stay away from me this January CHRISTMAS TIME . . . Without fail, the radio stations start playing “Bhonasi”, the ageless hit song from Patrick Mukwamba and The Four Brothers: a very danceable tune that multiplies our BP - Buying Power as the inimitable Paul Matavire would have put it
CHRISTMAS TIME . . . Without fail, the radio stations start playing “Bhonasi”, the ageless hit song from Patrick Mukwamba and The Four Brothers: a very danceable tune that multiplies our BP - Buying Power as the inimitable Paul Matavire would have put it

CHRISTMAS TIME . . . Without fail, the radio stations start playing “Bhonasi”, the ageless hit song from Patrick Mukwamba and The Four Brothers: a very danceable tune that multiplies our BP – Buying Power as the inimitable Paul Matavire would have put it

David Mun goshi Shelling the Nuts—

It is that time of year again that we love to hate. Can you unravel that? We just had festivities galore time with Christmas, the one big day when everyone thinks they deserve a surfeit of everything their little heart’s desire: a whole cow to braai, perhaps a goat and even a hog, depending on one’s culinary tastes.

Chickens have become poor man’s fare. Everyone who wants to can have a chicken. Chicken is a leveller; it makes all feasting upon it equal. It matters not that you may be feasting on a scrawny road runner that had just caught itself a juicy house lizard before you claimed its head as rightfully yours, or that you have the fattest broiler rolling and dripping as the barbeque gets ready and tastier to the look.

My brother was once roommates at a British university with a South African exile from Soweto who really loved his roast rabbit and roast chicken and would be absolutely drooling as the prized roast neared completion. The boy was a storyteller and he punctuated the roasting with naughty stories from Sowetan shebeens and often stopped to break off a piece to calm his by now riotous appetite.

The funny thing was that he would ask my brother if he wanted a bite, but never gave him the chance to break off a piece. Things became quite humongous (as the Americans would say) at Christmas with the prestigiously gifted young gourmet outdoing himself in the quantities he ate. Different people celebrate Christmas in different ways.

Another of my brother’s college friends was so taken with the disco and night-clubs that he clean forgot what he had come to Great Britain for in the first place. He became a club crawler more or less, looking for ever-wilder kicks. It was no surprise that he went back home with nothing, just his stale memories of night life. All his academic energy had dissipated in frivolous pastimes.

But perhaps the most bizarre case was that of the huge Samoan Prince who calmly told my brother just before going off home for Christmas that he had to go back home and get rid of an annoyance. Someone was cuckolding him in his absence.

When he came back looking glossy and satisfied he said he had had a most gratifying Christmas after beheading the man who had been helping himself to his harem of pacific island beauties. Whichever way one looks at it, excess and indulgence are the defining characteristics of Christmas in the 21st century.

In the USA and now here in the UK there is a commercial frenzy around their mad Fridays, with people buying and buying and buying. The restaurants do roaring business and Vodafone has an understanding according to which a good Vodafone customer can go to a restaurant and get a 20 percent discount.

Now this is all very well, the eating, the drinking and the dancing, sometimes till the break of day, especially at New Year. The South Africans sometimes do this celebrating thing in a somewhat gruesome manner, especially in places like the notorious Hillbrow and Berea areas of Johannesburg where it is sometimes safer to leave town altogether.

Sometimes people settle scores by throwing an enemy or rival to certain death some several stories below. In these streets New Year isn’t New Year unless there are these macabre casualties. The “kinder” revellers throw out anything that they can jettison: freezers, cookers, furniture and so on.

It must be because they believe the year coming in has lots of better things in store for them. It then becomes taboo to hang on to the relics of a dead year. In this hustle and bustle our beloved Zimbabwe stands out.

It all starts with the payment of bonuses when the bonus is available. That means we must get our bonus no matter what. It has nothing to do with performance, volumes of sales or export levels. We are entitled to the 13th cheque with which we can, just this once in a year, behave like we are close cousins of some fabled billionaire.

Without fail, the radio stations start playing “Bhonasi”, the ageless hit song from Patrick Mukwamba and The Four Brothers: a very danceable tune that multiplies our BP – Buying Power as the inimitable Paul Matavire would have put it.

We spend money like it has gone out of fashion. No more opaque beer, that’s for peasants in the countryside! It’s a time for everything and anything exotic: vodka on the rocks, gin and tonic and whiskey, that exotic brew that some drunken bard praised with the words:

Rye whiskey, rye whiskey

You killed my poor father

Now damn you, kill me!

And all the pretty city girls in frills seek their thrills at the table where Jonasi is having a whale of a time with his chosen few. But there will obviously be a price to pay for all this, come January.

Some meet their Creator at these end-of-year parties when surfeit and excess appear to be the target. One hapless drinker in Gweru died when he tried to knock off a straight of whiskey at one go, just gulping and gulping as if he was downing a glass of honey!

But do people ever learn? Oh no, the orgies just go on and on! If somehow one has these end-of-year parties escaping them, there is always Christmas and New Year to show one’s mettle and largess. No effort is spared by revellers in making each festive season a memorable one.

We all know what the end result will be but we never allow that to put a damper on our festivities. Life goes on, as does our indebtedness! The way of the world is that a man made of flesh, bone and blood must have his fun whenever he can.

This is how we justify our perverse fascination with gloss, glamour and wastefulness. But who is to argue with the faultless logic of a deprived human being having this one occasion when they can assert their humanity by exercising free will and choice in the most overt ways possible: getting as drunk as a lord and eating like Fu Manchu.

We buy fancy cars and clothes, eat and drink beyond what is normal and reasonable, all because we have this money that we have saved or borrowed or earned. And how can anyone know that we have money unless we spend it loudly and recklessly?

So the feeding and the drinking go on until the time of reckoning arrives, and it always does, with a vengeance. The papers start it all, as always, with the usual “Back to School” announcements. Now we begin to sweat and swear. What we ate is resurrected (Chatakadya chamuka) and time moves on relentlessly towards our humiliation. It couldn’t possibly happen to us but it has!

We find ourselves thinking of Paul Matavire’s iconic song, “January Disease”! The January disease is a Zimbabwean financial epidemic when money is especially difficult to come by. The fees must be paid. The satchels and school uniforms must be bought. The stationery must be bought too.

Then the provisions and tuck money too have to be secured. These things have become as essential as the air that we breathe. And we can’t allow our neighbours to go one better against us. Oh no, that’s unthinkable!

Which way are we going these days? Perhaps it’s time to forestall the ravages of the January disease once and for all. We need a new dispensation and product to enable us to never to have to sing with The Delmore Brothers:

Blues, stay away from me.

Blues, why don’t you let me be?

Don’t know why you keep on haunting me.

When the pressure mounts and the little ones look at you with beseeching eyes, you wish there was a strategy you could have used to avoid the situation. If the children do not go to school because you have not paid their school fees, you are not such a hero then. And of course the rates must be paid and there must be food in the house.

If any of these things are compromised there is “Trouble in the House”, and willy-nilly you find yourself whispering with the once bitten and twice shy persona in Tobias Areketa’s song: “Gentlemen, I don’t like this system. Everything must stay in the house: sugar, tea, paraffin, must stay in the house.”

Come on insurance people! Deal with the January disease. If farmers have short- term insurance, it should be possible to extend that same facility to other areas of existence. Of course, there has to be a lot of research and a lot of what economists call macro-economic stability. The basics must be right, and information must be plentiful and accessible.

David Mungoshi is an applied linguist, a poet, short story writer and award-winning novelist.

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