![]() ![]() In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. ![]() In my part of Africa, death is never far away. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. ![]() Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. “I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. ![]()
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