Chinese bring Zimbabwe's black and white together
At a Harare residents’ meeting the clock seemed to have been put back 30 years
Jan Raath
The Times
16 February 2010
The ample, tree-shaded suburbs of Harare have undergone a fundamental transformation in the 30 years since the city was Salisbury, capital of Rhodesia, and the residents were all middle-class whites, except for their retinues of what were known as house boys and garden boys. Harare’s white population collapsed from 112,000 to perhaps 12,000, while the black population exploded from 340,000 to 1.6 million.
As the whites moved out, their spacious homes, lawns and herbaceous borders were filled by the new middle-class black population. In some cases whole areas were obliterated by neglect and turned into squalid townships. In others the hedges stayed clipped and the sprinklers still sparkle on the lawns.
The retinues have been retained and, interestingly, they are still called houseboys and garden boys, and still live in “boys’ kias” (small houses in the Rhodesian “kitchen kaffir” argot) in a corner of the boss’s yard.
Last month a group of active residents organised the first meeting between suburban residents and Harare city council’s managers in a church hall. Leaflets were dropped at 2,000 homes. I was not surprised that only 100 people turned up, but was stunned that everyone was white. The city managers must have thought themselves hurled back in time to racist Salisbury.
A handful of blacks eventually arrived but the edginess remained: the white residents were uncomfortable at being so numerous that they might provoke suspicion; and the managers anxious that this crowd of whites was going to turn on them for letting the Sunshine City fall into an urban chaos of dumped garbage, potholed roads and uncut verges.
The tension sharpened when a large, fat, white man with a voice like a factory hooter rose and boomed at the managers, jabbing a fat finger at them: “You sir, I want to know, waddayou gonna do.” It was about his house in Kingsmead Road. “Next door is full of Chinese, dozens of them.”
They were building an illegal four-storey dormitory to accommodate Chinese workers in tiny rooms. “When my wife and daughter are swimming in my pool, these Chinese stare at them over the wall.”
It broke the ice. The residents laughed, cheered and clapped. The manager knew all about the Chinese. He had been there to tell them they had no planning permission, but none of them could understand him. Laughter. Construction would be stopped and the building would be demolished, he said. The whites cheered and clapped him too.
It opened the gates for us to vent our grouses, and we sympathised with the city managers when they said the city has no money. Our mutual mistrust of the Chinese was the catalyst for a comradely encounter.
Near the end, a middle-aged woman turned to confide in me breathlessly: “You know, they’ve got an abbatoir near the airport. For dogs and pythons.”