HoneyCrisp 13 Cameo

A policeman stopped a drunken motorist on the road.

“Sir, step outside and take the breathalyser test. I assume you have had one too many.”

“I only had one for the road. It was orange juice.”

“No problem, step outside and take the test.”

“I don’t need a test. I have a degree in mechanical engineering.”

“You are drunk, sir.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“NO, sir that is why I insist you take the test. Who are you?”

“I don’t even know if you find out tell me who I am officer and where my home is. I will soon run out of fuel. Do you happen to have contacts for a towing service?”

13. Cameo

She was in the city of Johannesburg, probably one of Africa’s largest city founded on gold mining centuries before. It had been for almost fifteen days. Johannesburg is a city that never sleeps. Something was happening throughout the day and nights. She could hear city noises, police or ambulance sirens even when she went to sleep or woke up. Johannesburg is the largest metropolis south of the equator. She didn’t know which was larger on the built up scale, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Lagos or Cairo.

It was less than 24-hrs journey from Harare's 5th Street Roadport coach station to the gold city give or take border checks, red tape and delays. Nestled behind the Fourth Street bus terminus, Roadport Coach Station was a magnificent looking private initiative that rewarded travellers with a huge spacey place for coaches to rank. It gave travelers going both ways time to rest, recuperate or think clearly. It was not the first time she had crossed the Limpopo River into their southern neighbourhood. She was not the only member of her family to do so either.

People from her country were making South Africa their province. To some South Africa had become a shopping precinct. There were some who went in, bought goods and returned home. Politics in the southern Africa neighbourhood now affected many countries. Civil war, economic chaos, collapse or political repression created refugees into neighbouring countries of different statuses. Even murderous serial killers could seek refuge. Previously, she had been to Windhoek via Botswana. She had also been to both Francistown, Serowe, Selibe-Phikwe and Gaborone some months back. The Windhoek journey had made her reaffirm her reservations on travelling to Namibia. She had taken a smaller kombi that had about twenty something seats. It towed a trailer. She had not prepared herself for the heat especially when the vehicle was stationery. The insides turned into a microwave. The monotone of arid uninhabited millions of acres passing by their window with sketches of animals here and there had been boring.

The border had delays and queues. She had suffered cramp because of the sitting arrangement. The oppressive desert heat had worked against further jaunts. She had arrived feeling dusty, unkempt, sweaty, dirty and limping. She had sore feet and legs that had increased in volume. It had reminded her of returning from a church funeral in Makonde via Chinhoyi. Villagers had forewarned them to wear loincloths, cover their faces and mouths with doeks. They had arrived by public bus in Chinhoyi. It was fifty kilometres from the rural site. They had layers of reddish dust all over their shoes and bodies. If she felt like that she wondered how those who travelled every week felt like. Had they become accustomed to discomfort?

Cross border travel to/fro constantly and migrant labour had cost many marriages/families their stability. Thieves, hookers, side chicks, crooks, confidence artistes, hoodlums, burglars and armed robbers crossed either way heading where the money was the most. She wondered if those like drivers crossing the borders almost twice/thrice a week had any social life. How about truck drivers who could be stuck three days on the border then having to wait for a return load days later?

The locals in their next door neighbourhood, South Africa showed they liked foreign workers, business people and shoppers. They showed their appreciation in hordes that their police could not control. They went wild, chanting liberation war songs, dancing and holding weapons like machetes, spears, logs, whips and steel bars.

They went engaging in xenophobic attacks once every time they got bored. Woe to any foreigner caught in the open. Foreign owned interests were looted. Whenever they had political grievances, they dealt with them by attacking foreigners and foreign owned interests. That meant regional investors were not spared. Botswana was safer for foreigners. They deported visitors without proper papers on sight. One would end up on home territory in their pyjamas. Before then, the Tswana government would send undocumented migrants to their rural chiefs for kangaroo courts.

The penalty for illegal entry was canning. Afterwards the culprit would be bundled into a vehicle that deposited them at their nearest town back home in their country. So general advice was to go out wearing something presentable if you had no papers just in case you ended up on home territory in bathroom slippers. She had been to Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban and Messina to name a few previously. There was brisk traffic business in shoppers between Messina in South Africa and its cousin, just across the Limpopo, Beitbridge. Between these two towns, was a river boundary. It was infested with crocodiles. The reptiles fed on unlucky border jumpers once every while.

These days going out of the country was almost on a quarterly or bi-monthly basis. On the northern front she had crossed at Chirundu into Zambia seeking materials per customer order. She had sent Kayla and Keandra twice through Mozambique's borders near the Zambezi into Malawi on the same issue.

She counted herself blessed that a set of former church mates had bludgeoned her into coming to do business there with the option of looking further into the looking glass of settling down in Johannesburg. They had relocated here in Johannesburg running away from an economic crunch that was drying financial wells. Cross border women and men doing buying and selling spent the day shopping before returning to the same bus they had disembarked from early in the morning. They slept, washed, ate and exercised in their coaches.

Her blessing had been an upmarket double storey residence. She had a bedroom to herself. Even the well-connected resourcefully were finding it easier to carry out business with less restrictions in South Africa. There was an ensuite toilet and shower cubicle fitted in a corner. There was an OpenView decoder and a 35-inch flat screen television set if she wanted to enjoy a different channel to what was showing downstairs.

Downstairs there was DSTv which she could reach via her laptop through DSTv's own WiFi system. She normally started with home and beauty programs if they were there. Then she liked programs on exercise, CNN or BBC to get news, business, sports and weather on the world's perspective. Her father was strict on watching France24, Alzajeera, BBC or CNN news on a daily basis, morning and evening. All the four were not approved by her home government. They were accused if biased against the revolutionary government. That was before her father sat down at the end of day, having concluded his chores. Then he could watch SuperSport's many channels. His interests were in La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A or best of all English soccer. She had taken it somewhere. Within her parcels, she had golfing and motoring magazines. Her father would pour over articles like a Master's degree student studying a desertion. The cookery, flower arrangement, home and family magazines were for the female queen to increase her resourcefulness.

The local news in the old country tended always to be centred on one party and it's policies, one thrust and the state president. Viewers and listeners were reminded of the need to defend hard won independence which was the joy and privilege of a very select chosen few now.

Videos, music, boring drama productions, soaps and programs leaned towards the party policies with the exclusion from airplay of rebel music or any anti-government programs. There was nothing as frustrating as watching a single state run television channel repeating programs or saying programs were repeated by popular demand!

She preferred watching music videos early in the morning. She was a morning person. She was used to be up and jogging before 0500hrs around their family home or on the treadmill. Outside her home territory, she did her exercises without disturbing her host family while watching television. In the evening she went social, pooling human resources with others to chat, sing, eat then finally after prayers, she went upstairs. They went each to their beds to sleep and dream.

She had been walking on her toes busy doing her errands fulfilling her business commitments. Quality was a product she kept measuring her efforts on, not quantity. Far from home she worked hard doing trustworthy, reliable and durable service. She took time to look at the vast arrays of available products for home improvement to appetize potential customers with free funds to import. References drew income into a business. Good workmanship was like a charisma or catalyst to success. She and her partners in crime had done makeovers of homes as they had been instructed.

She bought materials and machinery with her proceeds for use back home. She had kept her camera, a Canon handy in order to move videos and pictures to her laptop. After editing some were now on her social media accounts. This was the new craze. Social media helped sell business even though there was stiff competition from many countries. Videos when professionally done, accompanied by well-spoken instructions were downloaded or shared, increasing coverage. There were likes, dislikes and comments with some bordering on vulgar or hate to be deleted as soon as seen.

On YouTube, Keisha had for a year been doing a weekly video upload of one project or another edited to less than 10-minutes. The viewership was in the thousands now. While in Johannesburg she had uploaded a video of a bed make over explaining every item used and its links. Then she had done curtains for a bedroom and lounge with a balcony in an apartment block. Viewers could use the links to purchase. That earned her credits and a few dollars if not outright orders.

After loading her wares, she boarded a coach at Park Station in Johannesburg on the way home. If the vehicle started off around 1000hrs CAT maybe with luck they would have cleared Beitbridge customs and immigration by midnight. This was not during major public holidays which clogged border posts. The migrant populations of Zimbabwe, Zaire, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique to name a few thronged the posts on their yearly migration back home for a few weeks of rest and recuperation.

People were behaving like wildebeests and other animals in Kenya and Tanzania. These animals migrated in yearly seasons across the borders in search of fresh green grass when the rains had just fallen. In turn they helped feed predators and crocodiles along the way. Calves were born enmasse, ready to run to keep alive. This was the rat race with people filling coaches to/from South Africa for whatever reasons. Hopefully she would be knocking at her parental home before they had breakfast.

Wasn’t it wonderful to have a home cooked meal served in reverse to what she used to do at home, serving her younger siblings and their parents? When holidays were on, she was the patron of her younger boarding based siblings. She made sure they had what they wanted. She was a hard worker even after she had spent her fair hours at work. Her mother had taught her that a busy person did not fall into mischief, impatience or temptations like gossiping and rumour mongering. They were always doing things. How do you speak the latest sizzling news to someone concentrating on their work?

Keisha could not remember her father taking time to speak to neighbours for hours on end. He was always friendly but firm against gossip. He normally talked to the younger male generation on soccer issues. Most days her father took his walk through their neighbourhood for about an hour. He always came back with the day's newspaper under his arm. The best was to count time by staying on her toes, busy in her vineyard dressing the stalks.

Had it been a holiday? Keisha had been staying with a church mate briefly. Partially, though she had been doing some brisk business. She did not like to overstay her welcome. Interior décor was her mainstay. Some did it as hobbies or sidekicks. It was a rock castle she hid under when her emotions where in turmoil. How many times had she worried about the tipsy-turvy nature of the economy? How many fruitless nights had she watched in horror as politicians enacted what she knew were laws that hurt instead of grew the economy?

How many nights had she been in trepidation whenever there were elections or her area had by-elections? When the hurts were on, she took solace in creating with her hands and mind. She could also swallow away stress and pain by going through their greenhouse tending to tender plants. These days interior décor had spilled into computer based programs where she worked with analysts, programmers and manufacturers. She could now provide 3-D set ups of what places would look like to her clientele. She worked on board with seasoned artistes like canvas painters, carpenters and fashion designers ready to do projects at a moment’s notice. She treated each new job as something separate.

“Is this seat taken?”

The voice was a bass resonance. She had occupied a window seat with the idea of watching terrain and towns whooshing past especially eerie lights at night. They appeared like receding ghostly caricatures. On a raised highway, it was thrilling to watch smaller craft by their lights moving underneath them.

“No.”

Keisha stood up and gathered her long flowered dress around her body. She edged closer to the window. Her brown jacket reached down to her knees protecting her from the bite of South African winter weather. She made sure her hand hold of a bag did not intrude onto the other seat.

On one hand she was holding her iPad while taking a look at what her Google search had unearthed. She was still using Celsy data left over from the last time she had loaded. In her mind she had been looking through her iPad. Somewhere in her handbag was the Canon digital still camera with which she took photographs while in Johannesburg for inspiration. The memory though big had sagged under the videos that she had taken. Some of them she had loaded on other storage devices.

“Thank you.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” she had replied.

What did the French mean when they said there were clichés? Why did he need to thank her when there were rows of two by two seats separated by a passage? She had only booked one seat not two on the coach. She had yet to see someone book more seats than they could take just to have privacy. The seats had numbers. Their tickets had numbers i9ndicating where someone was sitting. That way the computer program knew when the coach was full. He was just being polite. He would just have said, move over! Why was she using a cliché like that used over hundreds of years? Why not any other set of words to fit the occasion? She looked around. The coach was filling up with its bookings. It had a scheduled arrival and departure time.

He offered her a hand. He had taken it out of a set of winter gloves. Johannesburg was much further from the equator than Harare. The chill here in winter was worse than in their home town. In Cape Town, her former classmates said the wind would bring rain squalls at times. Further in the icy waters of the two oceans, Indian and Atlantic, the wind howled like a werewolf when the moon was full. It was bad to feel cold. It was terrible to be both cold and wet. Handrails were useful in windy spaces like Cape Town, just in case. Slender human models in windy conditions needed check weather warnings lest they would be sucked up and plucked out of the oceans. In windy weather humans ought to walk around near chains sunk in the foundation as anchors in case they went flying.

“Hello ma'am Keisha.“

“Hi,” she shook the hand. Keisha? You know me padre, but I don’t.

The handshake was very warm. She was not wearing gloves. She had been warm in the coach for a few more minutes more than him. Her coat had deep pockets. He loaded his hand luggage on the racks above them.

“How was Harare the last time you were there?” he had asked.

“It was fine the last time I left,” she had replied. "I think everything is still okay. The government is still running, people are born and some get to die. The seasons are the same give and take a few differences here and there."

Maybe because the end destination board of the coach included Harare he had assumed she was dropping off in there. Why not Blantyre, Mount Mlanje or Lilongwe? The coach was a regional enterprise. It started off in Cape Town going through Johannesburg, Pretoria, Pietermaritzburg, Louis Trichardt, Messina, Beitbridge, Masvingo, Mvuma, Beatrice, right up to Harare on its way to Nyamapanda via Mutoko thence to Malawi.

A musical video by Zimbabwe superstar Oliver Mtukudzi was on the screen, Ndakuvara. How had he assumed she was going to Harare? It was a long 440-km plus haul between Beitbridge and Harare going through the town of Masvingo via Ngundu, a sleepy stop over. From Johannesburg, she assumed it was about a thousand one hundred kilometres. The roads were better this side than back home. Here the trunk routes were dual carriage ways.

“How is Karla?“

Wow, she was impressed. He knew her definitely. She was the one acting stupid. Her memory was blank. In the right corner wearing a bib is the reigning decor champion. On the left corner, in a moustache and goatee beard is the challenger. Where had she met and known him before? Had he featured in her previous life? When a lady realized that a man seemed to know her, she would try and reason if he wasn’t a smart talking Alec that could have heard her being addressed if she didn't have a name tag. That was how tricksters or confidence artistes hit rock bottom against their victims.

“When I left, she was fine.”

“Keandra and Katherine?”

Wow, I am impressed. You know my siblings and maybe my family.

“I suppose the same. They were all right when I last saw or communicated with them” she had replied. "And you?"

It was rude to ask who he was. He definitely had her pinned in a corner. The referee was doing the 1-10 count. She was on the defensive.

"I am on my way to Tanzania via Harare first. I am feeding on the hoof like beef cattle raised on an abattoir franchise for slaughter and export to Europe. I am moving, always on my toes. The last time I checked, the Drakensberg Mountains were raining, treacherous roads on treacherous passes with mist coming down to block the wonderful view that has butterflies flying in our stomachs. We love the hairpin views so much we close our eyes as the driver negotiates.”

“Wow, what business is taking you to Tanzania may I ask?” she had asked looking at him.

The black messy bush around his cheeks, between upper lip and nose needed attention. It made the crest of his face appear 'sunken'.

She was thinking of the different African array of coloured fabric which came from the eastern seaboard of Africa. She used them in bringing the best of African textiles in her interior décor. Some customers need wooden carvings or stone sculptures. There were some different regional variations in this form of art across the southern African continent. Even the styles of cloth changed with distance. She thought of the Masai-Mara and Ngorongoro Crater which were cradles of tourism in eastern Africa.

“I have been playing cricket for a Durban based team for the last two years. My contract is up. I am a free agent. I had an offer in Tanzania to look up. It’s been two years and a half almost since I last saw you. You saw me as far as Fifth Street’s Roadport the last time I was in Harare.”

“Okay, now I know. I remember. I had you confused with others people.“ Keisha had replied with delight. “My, I never in the least thought it was you. You saw me home in the late wee hours on our first meeting. You were very hospitable. I was afraid of walking alone. I would have called my father had you not walked me home.”

She didn't say the reason she came home when she could sleep with the bridesmaids was there was no one at home. That was a blank cheque to notorious marauding gangs of house breaking thieves.

“I stand accused of interfering in father and daughter business.”

She had opted to pick him up and drop him there in the evening. How they had talked while they waited for the coach to start off. Why had they not communicated in between? Why was it that Keith was not a date? They shared so much in common whenever they met. She had his numbers and in reverse. What had happened?

“How time flies, yes,” he had replied.

Now they exchanged news and pleasantries. The coach readied to leave at the appointed hour. Soon they were on their way. Their luggage was secured in a trailer at the back. The normal logistics, those disembarking first loaded their goods last. They sat on the upper deck upon which the engine noises faded to a dull throb. Sometime they drifted into sleep. There was the constant reminder of engine sounds and chatter of passengers.

“I thought the South African league was more professional than the Tanzanian one. Besides which the emoluments down South look smarter than those of the eastern African side.”

“It is called franchising. I will probably be there for about three weeks before checking some fishing rods. Just in case who knows I might have caught a vundu, bream, eel, tiger fish or a used tyre.”

They arrived in Harare around 0700hrs as she had thought. There had been no major delays on the way. They cleared the border controls before midnight. It wasn't a hustle. She would be stretched out for breakfast at home before shaking off the tiredness.

“Thanks for being acquainted once again Keith. Do well in the east of Africa. Mind the troubles in Somalia. Be the pick of the bowlers, fielders, wicket keepers and batsmen in all games,” she had suggested. “Keep me posted on social media. I will continue praying for you.”

“Thank you Keisha.”

“Fare thee well,” she had reasoned. "You have the best of my humble blessings one friend to another."

The last she did was to give him a friendly motherly hug which was reserved for a very select few. She did not hug and kiss every male frog that croaked by her path. He and his wares disappeared into a black kombi. People had a way of pulling resources together to hire transport going one way which was cheaper and more secure. Slugging a few items of goods towards cheaper public transport was problematic. One would get home missing some parcels conveniently waylaid somewhere. Neither did she need wait for long. Her church mate who hated crowds like bus termini was seeking her out.

© Copyright tmagorimbo July 2017