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I could not help wondering what these other men sitting near the entrance to the shopping mall thought about each day as they sat there

David Mungoshi Shelling the Nuts
Bobby Bare’s first top 10 Billboard Hot Country Singles hit was “Detroit City”, also known as “I Wanna Go Home”. Although there were other versions of the song, Bare’s version was easily the most iconic one.

It is a song that anyone away from home in a far-off place might hum, whistle or sing when times are hard and homesickness begins to set in. In the very recent past, clusters of Zimbabweans milling around a shopping mall in classy Midrand in search of the odd job or two, made the song stir in my memory. It occurred to me that without exception, each hopeful soul sitting there had left home, a dream lighting his heart like a flame, and with a burning ambition to do well across the Limpopo.

After all, this is the fabled land of gold and diamonds. Migratory waves of people from the land of Munhumutapa are a thing that has its origins in, perhaps, the beginning of the last century. Everyone has always wanted to go to Johannesburg, where according to rumour, fortunes were easy to come by. It became a mark of distinction just having been there.

A boy I was at school with at primary school crossed the border soon after standard six. When we met again a few years later on the streets of Bulawayo, he said he was coming from Jo’burg. The boy had undergone a tremendous transformation. He walked with a bit of a swagger and spoke Ndebele with a Zulu accent.

The cap on his head completed the picture and I was quite sure that somewhere on his person he had the dreaded okapi knife. The sound of the okapi’s switchblade snapping open was enough to scare even the most street-wise person.

Another boy, popularly known as Marx (not his real name), had at some point come from Jo’burg. As you can imagine, he became an instant hero amongst all the street urchins who knew him. Looking back now, I feel sure that he was probably quite surprised that people were making such a fuss about him.

At that point, he must have decided to play the part. Marx was barely into his teens, but because he wore a cap, and could play cards with dexterity, he became someone every boy wanted to be. In those days, our role models were the petty criminals, who had either done time in jail or claimed to have been to eNdazo (Jo burg).

I personally have no doubt that we were all little “tsotsis” in the making and left to our own devises, we would have ended up in reformatory school or jail. We loved these sleazy characters, who merged with the dark in the unlit streets of the townships. We loved them to pieces. Not least, we envied them, the girls that swarmed around them and often did imitations of their macho stoop and that walk like a limp that said they were men of the world.

Anyway, back to our boy Marx. One day, following a verbal bust-up with a much bigger boy during a game of head and tail, Marx carved a much bigger boy with his sharp knife all the way down the left cheek.

Those who were there said his movements were smooth and slick like those of a practised knifeman. His pedigree immediately reached the sky. In keeping with street life, the stabbing never became a police case. The other boy must have told his mother that he had fallen onto something sharp and cut himself.

The boy was an outpatient at the local clinic for some time after the incident. Later it was easy to identify him through his scar. I remember thinking rather uncharitably that Scarface Capone would have envied Gwinji his scar. Funny how one thing triggers another, infinitely! It was the same with these men, whose wives and children almost literally worship the ground they walk on.

They tell anyone willing to listen that their loved ones are “kuSouth”. The line between daydreams and reality is very thin indeed. These men were indeed in South Africa, but were they in the South Africa they had imagined? Were they latter-day Oliver Twists walking the streets of London and thinking they would soon find gold and hit the big time?

From the days of Jan Van Riebeeck, that Dutch wanderer, whose halfway house became permanent at the so-called Cape of Good Hope and since the discovery of vast deposits of high quality gold ores on the Rand, the towering gold dumps of Johannesburg have stood firm as symbols of the wealth that was there for the taking.

That was how the trek to Mzansi Africa from as far out as Tanganyika began. These men too were wanderers, dreaming big here in Mzansi, every mother’s boy. Most live for the day they can make it back home and dazzle everyone with their fancy clothes and hired cars.

On this day, we park the car and walk towards a clothing outlet. As we do so, a parking attendant hears our conversation and greets us in nostalgic Ndau. He is obviously from Chipinge and instantly becomes homesick. He wants to know about home, and how Ngwena, the Crocodile is doing.

“I tell him that like the Rex Beef that the Cold Storage Commission used to advertise back home, good beef speaks for itself.

I could have said the taste of the pudding is in the eating, but somehow felt that the mention of pudding to him would have been too mystifying.

Pudding was not and would never ever have been part of his cuisine way back in Chipinge. He gave a sad and rather wan smile and said he hoped to be visiting soon, funds allowing. I had a feeling that it would not be any time soon.

When you live and work in a foreign country, people expect so much of you and from you. So you cannot just pack an overnight bag and head home unless you are diseased and returning home to die.

Had I had the time, I might have wanted to mine the thoughts of these in “Overseas South Africa”. This is an epithet attributed by our humour mongers to the affable VP Muzenda, in his time as our Vice President. I could not help wondering what home-thoughts from abroad the parking attendant had as he did his duties, or what these other men sitting near the entrance to the shopping mall thought about each day as they sat there.

Could they possibly be echoing Robert Browning’s “Home-thoughts from Abroad” poem? Could they perhaps be improvising it and saying instead:

Oh, to be in Zimbabwe again . . . Or would they be thinking wistfully in the words of Bobby Bare’s song: Home folks think I’m big in Detroit City From the letters that I write they think I’m just fine, yes they do But by day I make the cars and by night I make the bars If only they could read between the lines

Substitute Jo’burg or some other South African town for Detroit City and voila, you have a match! The things that people go through everywhere in this world are never too different: the misplaced optimism and the deflation when reality hits home. Wherever you are, you’re in the world still.

As some would say in certain circumstances, I would bet my bottom dollar that among these hopefuls, there was always a young man nursing an aching heart. I bet also that if they knew Bobby Bare’s song they would probably embrace the verse that says:

Last night I went to sleep in Detroit City I dreamed about them cotton fields of home I dreamed about my mother, dear old pappy, sister and brother And I dreamed about the girl who’s been waitin’ for so long Some dreams come true abroad; others don’t. The rat race is everywhere. One does hope that none of the men across Zimbabwe’s borders ever have to sing with Albert Hammond: Got on board a westbound seven forty-seven

Didn’t think before deciding what to do Oh, that talk of opportunities, TV breaks and movies Rang true, sure rang true One sure hopes everyone’s package is materialising, that all the promises of better opportunities out there do in fact prove to be true for as many people as possible. The opposite would mean the blues as so vividly portrayed in Albert Hammond’s verse with the words:

Out of work, I’m out of my head
Out of self-respect, I’m out of bread
I’m under-loved, I’m underfed, I want to go home
It never rains in California, but girl, don’t they warn ya?

It pours, man, it pours . . .
One also hopes that the men never have to make the journey back home looking like the proverbial prodigal son and having to eat humble pie; one hopes that in time everyone finds their Eldorado.

• David Mungoshi is a writer, a social commentator, and an editor.