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Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
“That old man is beating up his wife,” says my cousin Piri. Then she bursts out laughing. It is 6 am on a very misty and chilly morning. Winter seems to have come early. We are at the traffic light on Golden Stairs Road in Harare. We are on our way to Mbare market where I will drop her off to do her business of selling second hand clothes illegally imported into Zimbabwe from the United States and Australia.
I can see a man, standing in the mist, boxing and kicking the air. There is no wife in sight. Is Piri dreaming or what?
The man in question must be in his late 60s or maybe 70.

It is hard to tell just by looking at him. He is wearing a big white T-shirt and cream shorts that stop just above his knees.
His big stomach is covered by a large long white T-shirt.

The man jumps up and down, his stomach bouncing along with him. Then he boxes this way and that way, like he is really hitting his opponent very hard. Piri cannot stop laughing.

“Unopenga here iwe? What is so funny?” I ask, with a tone of irritation in my voice.
You cannot just look at someone and then laugh, especially so early in the morning.

“Sis, that man is beating up his wife. He has left her in bed at home. They had a fight last night or this morning. Because he is so scared of her, he has to get up and box the wind to get over his anger,” Piri says, laughing and pointing at the man again.
I shake my head and tell Piri that she is totally and absolutely wrong.

That man at the traffic light is doing exercises to keep healthy. What he is doing is a great achievement. This old man deserves a lot of praise.
How often does a man look at his stomach in the bathroom before he goes to bed and says to himself, “Yes, this stomach is now too big. This is unhealthy. I will do something about this.” Then he goes to bed thinking about it.

Before 6am, this man leaves his curvaceous warm and lovely wife in bed. He sneaks out to brave the mist and cold. He stretches, walks, runs like a young man and stops at the traffic lights. Because he does not want to lose momentum by stopping, he jumps up and down, kicks and boxes the wind.

If he keeps doing this every morning, leaving only Sunday to rest his body, this man could have a six pack of muscles in just a few months.
To fight obesity and bad health, this man is showing discipline, determination and hard work.

I could do with such an attitude too and burn off some of the flab that seems to creep on around the abdomen and thighs when I am not watching. Piri could do with getting up early too and exercising like that old man at the traffic light.

As I drive along Second Street, I look at Piri’s stomach and thighs.
She is getting fat. Really fat. And she is so proud of it too.

She admires her back side almost on a daily basis. Her business in second hand clothes is doing reasonably well despite the hard times.
Like most people at Mupedzanhamo and Mbare markets, Piri has her breakfast and lunch there. Two weeks ago, on our way to the village funeral, we stopped to buy cabbages at Mbare market and Piri took me to her usual restaurant.

Right in the middle of the stalls full of grains, there were three women making tea, cooking sadza, cutting onions, frying meat and cleaning fish.
Many dishes were being cooked on small paraffin and gas stoves at once.

We were offered one crate and a bucket to sit on. Piri got a big mug of sweet tea half covered with a plastic sheet to stop flies getting in while you drink.

Accompanying the tea was a big piece of homemade chimondimwii, corn bread with a bottom layer of margarine and another layer of peanut butter on top of the margarine. The slice was so big and she could not finish it. The tea and the bread was only one dollar.
Next to us was a man with a big mountain of sadza, one piece of meat and copious quantities of gravy.

He sat on an empty crate of beer turned upside down to become a stool.
The man rested his plate on his stomach, eating sadza and chatting away to us about the high price of onions.
The time was only 8am and he was eating a mountain of hot sadza.

“Will you eat again at lunch time?” I asked. He said yes, why not? It was cheaper for him to spend US$3 on his three meals a day than to cook at home. “When you are full, it is healthy to drink beer because the beer has somewhere to sit on,” the man said.
“No wonder our men are getting fatter and fatter,” I told Piri later on.

I reminded her that the week before on the radio, sometime in the morning, there was a Shona and Ndebele programme about Americans and the food they eat.

The two radio announcers said there are homes in America where people live on takeaways and do not cook food at all. They make tea and eat cereal in the morning. Then they call for pizza delivery in the afternoon, Mexican food or hamburgers and chips for the evening. The desert consists of huge cakes, ice-cream and many other sweet things. At a restaurant in America, you can ask for a soft drink and the waiter will keep refilling your glass until you cannot drink any more of the sugary and caffeine laden drinks. One day we will be like that unless we stop to think about this health hazard called excess food and drink with no exercise.

Ever since we left the village to work in the city, some of us now spend the whole day on a chair working on the computer, taking time to drink tea and coffee. We live a more sedentary lifestyle, taking in high fat diets and consuming high carbohydrate sadza.
Check out the lunch time sadza and mabhonzo portions at the Harare showgrounds and elsewhere.

The servings are huge.
Back home in the evening there is yet another large portion of sadza with meat and vegetables. Sadza is just one of those diets that we do not get bored eating.

And yet, in the old village days, we ate various types of organic millet, sorghum and rapoko sadza.
Preparing the food was time consuming and labour-intensive.
But then again, we had all the time in the world.

Piri is fat. She really should stop pointing at others and calling them fat the way she does.
If she keeps on eating the way she does without exercising, Piri will soon be obese.
I told her so and she said, “Ah, why worry about being fat if you can get the food? Remember the days when we did not see meat for weeks when we lived in the village?” I remembered that very well.

In those days, fat used to be beautiful. But these days, it is a health hazard.
Piri, myself, the man at the market and the man boxing the wind on Golden Stairs Road are not alone in getting bigger and fatter.
Our nation might be hungry sometimes but we are getting fat. And so are our children. The children spend time in front of the television or playing video games. They are on the Internet all day.

They take breaks to eat. They hardly walk anywhere.
In the past we walked to school and played a lot in the school grounds. But these days, children are driven to school and they get picked up.
Unless the school forces them to exercise, they do not. It is not their fault either.

Urbanisation, increasing lack of activity and easy access to cheap and affordable foods, especially deep-fried foods, breads, soft drinks and foods high in salt, sugar and fat is making us too fat.

Not only that, we have to battle the wrong uninformed perceptions of people like Piri who are not used to seeing elderly men who get up early to exercise.

Soon, with some massive persuasion, you will see me and Piri in tracksuits, jogging very early in the morning. Do not laugh. Times are changing. To stay healthy, we can all get out of bed too and box the wind.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is Chief Executive Officer of Rio Zim Foundation. She writes in her own personal capacity.