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Sekai Nzenza  On Wednesday
We are driving along Leopold Takawira Street in Harare, going north, to a coffee shop. With me are two friends visiting from Europe and Dubai. They both marvel at the beauty of the jacaranda trees, the purple flowers above and the carpet of flowers in the ground. 

I drive slowly, because I feel like a tourist guide, so my visitors can enjoy Zimbabwe’s beautiful splendour during this time of spring.

Back in the village, we did not have jacarandas, but we saw the changing colours of the musasa, mupfuti and mutondo trees.

The fresh colourful red, orange and green leaves, pfumvudza, gave us shade and protection from the heat of the sun.

When we get to the coffee shop, there is yet another massive jacaranda tree in the garden.

The purple flowers are scattered on the green lawn. Birds are singing.

“And to think I am in Zimbabwe? Who would have imagined that?” said my Dubai-based friend, relaxing and enjoying the warm sun.

“We have 365 days of sunshine. We have some of the most fertile land in Africa. There is no mineral that you cannot find in Zimbabwe,” I said, continuing my marketing Zimbabwe campaign.

For a moment, I felt like I had a full time job with the Ministry of Tourism.

Since coming back to Zimbabwe three years ago after many years wondering in the Diaspora, I have finally settled back here.

I am in love again with the country.

It’s not like I did not love Zimbabwe before. No.

It is because I did not see the beauty before I left.

How could I have seen the beauty during the days that I was growing up in the village? Only now, when I look back to that childhood, do I see the beauty of that past.

When I left the village many years ago and read more about Africa, I learnt that I came from a very backward place.

It was uncivilised, primitive, underdeveloped, and full of poverty, tribal wars, and diseases and later on ravaged by drought and no democracy or rule of law. Africa was a bad continent.

I did not want to be associated with backwardness. When Zimbabwe fell out of favour with the Western media, it was difficult to say you are from this country. Like others living outside Zimbabwe, I forgot about this country’s beauty.

When I lived in Australia and the United States of America, I avoided conversations about Zimbabwe. Standing among European people, sipping wine slowly the way cultured people do, I hoped that nobody was going to ask the inevitable question: where are you from? Once you mentioned that you came from Zimbabwe most people turned their heads. They gently came over and proceeded to do a friendly informal interview.

“How long do you think your people will live like that in Zimbabwe?” This is a common question by people who have never been here.

“It is quite safe,” I said.
“It is not as bad as people think.”

At the end of one conversation, I recall a nice elderly man commenting on how well I spoke English and how brave I was to have successfully left such a scary country.

Now I am back here in Zimbabwe. When you sit here at this coffee shop and order a nice meal, a cup of coffee or a drink, you could think you are in any Western country.

“Zimbabwe, like many other countries, has many faces. The problem is that outsiders focus on the negatives only,” I tell my visiting friends, as I dig into fresh avocado salad with salmon, a taste acquired over the years.

The spring burst of new leaves is here. While the hills and valleys still burn from the wild fires, some trees are celebrating new life with pfumvudza. The other day, we drove to Mbare market, with my cousin Piri and I.

As we were passing the Kopje, I decided to tease her about her knowledge of Zimbabwe, like I did before.

“Have you ever been to Victoria Falls?” I asked her. Piri shook her head to say she had not been to Victoria Falls.

“And have you been to Great Zimbabwe?” She shook her head again, her eyes focused on the road ahead and at the colourful cloths of the Mapositori on the road side. I teased her some more, deliberately.

“Have you been to Mana Pools? Hwange Safari Lodge? Nyanga in the Eastern Highlands? Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River? Matopos in Bulawayo?” She shook her head again, not saying a word. I already knew that she had never been to any of these places. In fact, Piri has never crossed the Zimbabwean border to go anywhere. Ever since she left the village, she has only been as far as Harare and Bulawayo. She is still very angry with me for not taking her to Honde Valley in the Eastern Highlands when we visited our daughter in law’s village few months ago.

“Where is it beautiful? Kunaka pai?” Piri asked, looking at the crowds of people selling all kinds of goods along the road to Rufaro stadium.

“Because you have not been to these places I mentioned, you cannot fully appreciate Zimbabwe’s beauty,” I said. Piri looked at me and laughed with some slight tone of sarcasm.

“You run away from this country to seek a better Western lifestyle, education, jobs, good money and nice clothes, nice everything.

“Then you come back here after many years and say Zimbabwe is beautiful. Was it not beautiful when you left it? Where is it beautiful now?

“There is poverty and hunger. AIDS, lack of water and firewood, lack of food, bad rains. The US dollar is hard to find. If I had a passport and a visa, would I still be here? No. I would be in the Diaspora too, cleaning old people’s bottoms in nursing homes. ”

I know that Piri is right because she is seeing the world with eyes that have not seen much of the outside world.

The other day I saw a golden sunset over the mountain, followed by a big yellow moon rising in the east and the changing colours of the sky. A
t sunset, there was this magnificent golden glow of orange and purple — so beautiful you could eat it. All this looked new, like I was seeing it for the first time. Yet it was always there from the time we grew up in the village to the present. I could see the various colours of the trees, announcing the beautiful spring season of the pfumvudza.

I could see and smell the never ending beauty of Zimbabwe with all its contradictions and ambivalences.

I sit and listen to the sounds of the real Zimbabwe and see the beauty of the landscape that is not written by the Western press.

I see the bright new bright orange and red leaves, the shape of the musasa trees, the purple flowers sprouting between rocks in the dry season, muchirimo.

I welcome the heat.

We only begin to see and appreciate Zimbabwe’s landscape and beauty because we have new eyes or we have been alienated by faraway places we wanted to call home.

Zimbabwe is a unique country, a contrasting place where one’s experiences can be harsh, terrible and yet uplifting and inspiring.

It is the place where the beauty of home still exists, where the umbilical cord will not leave the soil where it is buried, rukuvhute haruchabvizve muivhu.

Good or bad publicity, Zimbabwe is home. Sound of the cicadas and the blooming of the jacarandas everywhere.

Take a walk in the avenues of Harare today.

When you come to the end of Leopold Takawira, turn back and drive up along Josiah Tongogara.
You will see that the ground along the road is all covered in purple.

Along the avenues, especially on Eighth Street, the gardens are glorious.

On Sunday you will see people lazily and slowly walking along the purple trees and yellow wattle trees. Mapostori in white, praying near the purple carpet.

This country of mystery loved and hated by many, even by those who gave birth to her.

They have left, wandering in the Diaspora, doing great work in boardrooms, cleaning hotels, emptying hotel rooms of their rubbish and changing the sheets, waitressing, doing nails, cooking, sleeping with men for money.

Young men doing what they would not do if they were still here.

They have left. And yet, hard and difficult as it might be, Zimbabwe is still the beautiful land it has always been.

On Saturday late afternoon it rained after several months of dry spells.

The rains our elder used to call bumharutsva, the rain that clears all the dust and the smoke from burnt grass and trees.

The next day, the sky was blue and all the dust was gone.

Even in Mbare, that hazy glare and hot sun was kind to the eyes after the rains.
Piles of rubbish were soaked wet with rain.

Soon the rubbish will decay and disease will threaten.

That is the way it is. The beautiful and the ugly sometimes stay close together. We strive for the beauty and one day, we should hope to see only the beauty.

But life is not like that.

We embrace both and celebrate the freshness of new life, like the coming of the spring season of the pfumvudza.

• Dr Sekai Nzenza is the CEO of Rio Zim Foundation. She writes in her personal capacity.