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Reflections Isdore Guvamombe
Goat skinner’s mentality! This is the only diction this villager from the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve could find most apt to describe the solution proffered by a senior citizen and a whole senator from Morgan Tsvangirai’s political formation.Morgan Femai, in defiance of the grey hairs and wire-brush beard on his otherwise respectable-looking person recently gathered his whole energy and wits — or precious little of what there is — told a conference on HIV that women must bath occasionally, shave-off their hair, dress shabbily and get circumcised to make them less attractive to men.
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Isdore Guvamombe
Back in the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, the animal called democracy is an idiot. To many villagers — of course deemed primitive and undemocratic — the current constitution making process is akin to asking chicken and turkeys to vote for the introduction of more Christmas Holidays per year. The irony of it is astounding!In fact, the birds, together with the multifarious array of smaller mammals that usually meet their fate on such grand occasions, would want the holidays scratched altogether from the calendar. It saves their lives.
But, wait a minute. In the village it is taboo to discuss matters of State and governance on dry throats, so this villager will chug his traditional coke for this one. -
Isdore Guvamombe Features Editor
UNLIKE all other mediums, Nehanda is believed to have two separate, equally legitimate traditions of mediums, one in the Manzou (Mazowe) region near Harare, the other in Dande, north of Guruve.
The legendary medium of the Mazowe Nehanda, a woman named Charwe, was a major leader of the 1894-96 rebellion against the new colonial state.
Despite limited resources, she led the black resistance and fought the whites with spears, bows and arrows, while the enemy used guns.
When the rebellion failed she was among the last of the leaders to be captured. Together with another leader of the rebellion, the medium of Kaguvi, she was sentenced to death and hanged by the British on April 27 but her heroic role has -
In the village, in the land of milk honey and dust or Guruve if you like, a he-goat is never a master of courtship. His is a loud massif appeal, so public that one has to make sure he or she in not in the company of in-laws or others shied.
The dangling bits are not only a shame. They make the whole courtship process a farce and a sham.
Again in the village manhood is never defined by having the biggest dangling bits, it is defined by one’s ability to live a dignified life, to act and live within the confines of societal values, norms and ethos.
A couple of years ago, Professor Jonathan Moyo cheekily said something to the effect that every Zimbabwean was Zanu-PF -
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Isdore Guvamombe Features Editor
Every Sunday afternoon, onion-shaped women competed to dance in single file, in front of a bumper crowd of men, other women not so gifted in shape and hordes of children. It was a popular dance called Chihodha or Chibhandhuru, where women, with chitenge cloth wrapped around their waists, that left them looking onion-shaped, competed in wriggling their waists, head down. What is today Sele dance.
Their waists followed a rhythmic fast music beat spiced with ear-splitting whistles and awe-struck spectators, clapped, -
Reflections Isdore Guvamombe
In the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, the war had raged on and the skies had not been very generous either. The year was 1977 and the war had spread throughout Rhodesia. The Zanla combatants continued to operate from Mozambique and remained dominant among the Shona people in eastern and central Rhodesia.
It was fast spreading to the west.
Zipra remained active in the north and west, using bases in Zambia and Botswana. They all met in the land of milk, honey -
In 1980 in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, a comet or tailed star (according to village lingo) had uncharacteristically crossed the sky and seen by everybody. Thereafter, elders studied the stars with a lot of head shaking, speculation and anticipation of something new.
That night herdboys had earlier tethered goats to the pegs with sisal ropes. Soon the goats and cattle started chewing the cud, resigning to their routine nights.
Momentarily, the village was alive with children playing, their sturdy legs caked with a mixture of dung, mud and dust. -
Reflections Isdore Guvamombe
Back in the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve where cotton wool heads reside in the peaceful idyll and serenity of the land of our ancestors, we are never short of wisdom.
Grey hair does not grow on tree stumps but on the old, the experienced and the wise heads, rarely on children still milking behind their ears.
There, wisdom is like manhood, every man undoubtedly brags about his own, yet there are universal -
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Some time in 1998, the council in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve had become so corrupt, irresponsible and plunged service delivery into the abyss, so much that this villager got so shy to identify with his roots.
Vice-President John Nkomo, then the Minister of Local Government, Rural and Urban Development, descended on the local authority and described it as a circus in which the chairman was the chief -
Isdore Guvamombe recently in CHIMANIMANI
THEY are euphemistically referred to as Chimanimani’s Adam and Eve, a white couple of German extraction that became disillusioned with modern life so much that for more than 30 years, they have -
Isdore Guvamombe
In the village in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, sex is not a spectator sport for no one sits on the terraces to watch. In the village sex, sex dynamics and sexology are not for public -
The road to Mbire serpentines due north out of Harare, past Mazowe, past Mvurwi and indeed past the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve. For more than 300km it runs between vast swathes of formerly white-owned farms, their huge farmhouses laid back, out of sight behind acre upon acre of cotton, tobacco and maize fields.
Thrice the road winds its way between communal lands or formerly Tribal Trust Lands dotted with clay-walled huts, corrugated-iron-sheet roofed bedrooms and tiny fenced off fields, before -
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Back in the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, rivers are sources of life and at times are life itself. Rivers are quiet. They don’t tell stories yet they know everything from women’s gossip to men’s waists.
Rivers have seen nude people, bathing even, yet they remain gagged.
The only sound you hear is the protest of the water as it gushes past rocks and plunge pools, meanders and hair-pin curves. This villager is in the Victoria Falls, where the Zambezi River has noisily attracted delegates from 176 countries the world over, for a general assembly.
Such is the power of the Zambezi that thousands of delegates will board planes and fly over boggy marshes, picturesque mountains -
In the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, the inevitability of dialogue between past and present is universal. In Zimbabwe, many a times villagers are looked down upon by many urbanites or pseudo urbanites, who, because of colonial prejudices banked on their minds, think
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In the village, the size of the snake is irrelevant to its capacity to kill but that fact is mostly ignored when one suddenly bumps into a snake. Again, in the village, the snake is so feared that it is never mentioned by its name at night; it is called a string, for, talk of the devil and he will appear. There is a subject that has been chewing chunks from this villager's heart and
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