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Published: February 16th 2007
Upon our return to Jo’burg, we invited Khanyisa to have dinner with us. We appreciated his traveling with us, even though he had spent most of the time sleeping as we traveled to and from Duduza. He declined because he had a friend from college who was awaiting his return. We then extended the invitation to include his friend, and that was immediately accepted. We picked up his friend, Tafadzwa who is attending graduate school at the University of Fort Hare. Both Tafadzwa and Khanyisa had completed bachelor’s degrees at this prestigious black college. During the days of apartheid, Fort Hare had been one of the only institutions of high education to survive in the homeland of Ciskei. It had become a haven for black intellectuals and was also supported by white faculty. The alumni list of Fort Hare reads like a list of “Who’s Who” in the black history of South Africa.
After picking Tafadzwa up, we headed for a local restaurant that we have come to enjoy. Tafadzwa was from Zimbabwe, and we began to appreciate the difficulties that country was facing as we got to know him better. School had finished a week earlier and Tafadzwa had put off returning home because of the burden it would cause his family. With shortages in virtually everything, the residents of Zimbabwe can not obtain the most basic staples for life. Tafadzwa had arranged to travel home on a bus that would not restrict the amount of luggage he was carrying. He had accumulated a cache of goods that would help support his family upon his return, including several liters of cooking and fuel oil, bags of rice and millet, canned meats and vegetables, and toilet paper and soap. Because of the devastated nature of the economy in his country, he is now serving as a lifeline into the more prosperous South African economy.
As the evening wore on, we became more and more enlightened into the nature of Zimbabwe’s social and economic condition. In an effort to establish equality after many years of revolution, the government of Robert Mugabe had seized all of the white owned farms and divided them up among the blacks population, particularly among its war veterans. The problem was that few of these people knew how to farm and the white population that had the “know-how” was not encouraged to stay. A nation that had at one time been the breadbasket of southern Africa could not produce enough food to feed itself. Since those days the economy of Zimbabwe has continued to spiral downward out of control. Inflation has grown by several thousand percent, and Mugabe has used the Zimbabwe military to quell dissent.
It was not until we were well into the meal that we realized Tafadzwa would not be able to eat until we stopped asking him questions. His solution to this problem was to ask us questions, like who were we, where did we come from, and why were we in South Africa? He is a political science major who was quite interested in how it was possible for the U.S. to offer the world so much in the way of foreign aid. He listened with great intensity, and his questions became more and more specific. He began to take notes and asked if he could quote us. His questions also included a series of inquiries about 911 and U.S. support for Israel. As the evening wore on he began to ask us about what the average American thought about Africa and the issues the continent was facing. He asked us about how we felt personally. Bob believes there are too few college students in the U.S. who approach learning with the intensity this young man exhibited. His admiration for us became embarrassing when he realized that I was a licensed civil engineer with a graduate degree, here in a part of the world where a bachelor’s degree was the standard and only men had those. This didn’t stop when he learned that Bob was a retired college professor. He then, with great admiration, said, “university professors live in the future.” Surprised, I jumped in with, “You don’t even know what he teaches.” Tafadzwa’s response was immediate, “It doesn’t matter!” He said, “The ideas that university professors teach do not become reality until long after they are gone. Their students put those ideas into practice 30, 40 or 50 years after they were first exposed to them. University professors have a mortality that exceeds their life span.” Bob was surprised and speechless.
Moments later our waiter began to speak to Tafadzwa in Shona, one of the dialects of Zimbabwe, and they greeted each other as if they were family. Our waiter had left Zimbabwe in order to make a living in South Africa. Then Tafadzwa asked him if he could have a container for the food that he had not eaten. The waited nodded knowingly, and we began to realize that there might have been something more to not eating all of his dinner. The leftovers would serve as a lunch for bus ride to Zimbabwe the following day. We talked all the way back to the Baha'i Centre, where the guys were staying, and spent the rest of the evening feeling humbled and blessed to know them.
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Sandra
non-member comment
Point of correction
Shona is a language and not a dialect. Ta!