When should we panic?
The global warming alarms are part `cry-wolf’ and part fashionista. Or are they? They’ve been hollering on about climate change with more than the usual heat lately. I say ‘they’ because some of us first felt an urge to press the panic button more than thirty years ago. When the Friends of the Earth first used a giant computer to concoct elaborate graphs illustrating the combined scientific findings of doomsday prophets - the collectively concerned Club of Rome - they published a serious warning signal in their book,`Limits to Growth’. That was in 1972, I think. Okay, so `concocted’ has only a nice alliterative ring to it and you will be wondering where this piece is going. Ballistic it is not, but the closer we come to the year 2008 – the crunch point according to the Club - the nearer, in my view, looms the end of the old, wasteful world as we knew it. I remember 1972 as the same year in which there was an international fuel crisis caused by an OPEC gear change. Also, man called Schumacher was, at that time, preaching `small is beautiful’ and this chimed well with the conclusions of the Club of Rome. And there's more: international opinion-makers of the top rank were meeting at Cambridge University in 1972 to discuss employment opportunities within a global perspective. Their main conclusion: de-throne GDP as the sine qua non of economic happiness and aim (as the Club of Rome had advised) for equilibrium, for sustainability; cut down on growing dependence on a limited supply of hydrocarbons, check the unlimited growth of populations, industrial pollution and nature-destructive monoculture. I think the Kyoto Protocol was only a small genie to emerge from the greenhouse gas bottle after all that.
This week’s Time magazine with its cover showing an ice-beached polar bear, insists that we should be worried, in big, red letters, we should be VERY worried. In a special report on global warming the message screams “EARTH AT THE TIPPING POINT”. I have a feeling in my water (as my mother used to say) that we profligate humans really are beginning to drown in our own wastes. We are still cutting down huge forests, building and buying 4 x 4s, playing with nuclear fission, putting up two fingers to prophets of doom or generally playing God with our wonderful technology. In the meanwhile, the media, bless them, are steering a nervous path between reports which may cause us to worry ourselves silly or cautiously administering soothing doses of analgesics because an overdose of purgatives might set us off on a dangerous panic stampede.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
Friday, March 31, 2006
Saturday, March 25, 2006
NEED HELP? ITS ALL OUR OWN FAULT
Who will put the coint into the old man's hand now?
I read in today's ZWNEWS that Zimbabwe's Government has swallowed its pride - or whatever unhealthy deadly sin that has made it so dangerously ill these past years - and asked for help.
White Rhodesians invented an apt, not necessarily racist aphorism which I can't resist using at this time. "Even Lobengula's oldest and blindest wife could see that..." Starkly obvious is the fact that the Mugabe regime's ill-considered destruction of the agricultural base of the economy would end in tears. One thing has led to another and now, not only are the people starving but things have finally, but not quite yet fatally, fallen apart in Zimbabwe. Perhaps it really is our own, stupid fault, be we the former colonizers or the colonized.
I want to advance a little thesis as one possible explanation of what it is that ails Zimbabwe's current leaders. Remember that they are, in the main, old men. I am thinking now of the arrogant octogenarian, Robert Mugabe, mortally wounded by 56 years of pre-independence racial discrimination and of his all-powerful, opportunistic sidekick, Didymus Mutasa. They are still afflicted with the mindset of the colonized. Could it be that Rhodesia's eighty eight years of colonial paternalism juxtaposed with a Christian brand of humanitarianism gave these oldest Zimbabwean descendants of dispossessed ancestors a false idea of how the world really works? Weren't they led by missionaries (at Catholic Kutama and Anglican St Faith's)to believe that God would eventually restore their sovereign birthright after all the injustices they endured under the colonial yoke? Wasn't it the Cold War that convinced them that the enemy was the imperial West and that Communism's help against the oppressor would give them back their country? It is true that European (white) colonial overlords were either afflicted with the imperialist's zeal to teach the natives how to live or, more lately, were overburdened with guilt for past political incorrectness. Is Zimbabwe's `liberator' still obsessed with the belief, long ingrained, that the white man has always been his patron?
A white man put the coin in the child's hand as he held open the farm gate; missionaries taught him how to read and write; healed him with modern medicine and preached (cynically as it turned out) the gospel of a great Western, Chistian civilization. The child has grown up and the hero liberator has been let down: no more patronage and not nearly enough money. New, non-Western patrons: Cubans, Russians, North Koreans, Libyans, Malaysians have been sought. Nothing much forthcoming. Only the Chinese are left. Surely somebody should have come to the rescue by now? All that determined effort to wipe out the last vestiges of the colonial grip has come to nought. What has happened to the expected, new patronage? Who will put the coin into the old man's hand now?
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
I read in today's ZWNEWS that Zimbabwe's Government has swallowed its pride - or whatever unhealthy deadly sin that has made it so dangerously ill these past years - and asked for help.
White Rhodesians invented an apt, not necessarily racist aphorism which I can't resist using at this time. "Even Lobengula's oldest and blindest wife could see that..." Starkly obvious is the fact that the Mugabe regime's ill-considered destruction of the agricultural base of the economy would end in tears. One thing has led to another and now, not only are the people starving but things have finally, but not quite yet fatally, fallen apart in Zimbabwe. Perhaps it really is our own, stupid fault, be we the former colonizers or the colonized.
I want to advance a little thesis as one possible explanation of what it is that ails Zimbabwe's current leaders. Remember that they are, in the main, old men. I am thinking now of the arrogant octogenarian, Robert Mugabe, mortally wounded by 56 years of pre-independence racial discrimination and of his all-powerful, opportunistic sidekick, Didymus Mutasa. They are still afflicted with the mindset of the colonized. Could it be that Rhodesia's eighty eight years of colonial paternalism juxtaposed with a Christian brand of humanitarianism gave these oldest Zimbabwean descendants of dispossessed ancestors a false idea of how the world really works? Weren't they led by missionaries (at Catholic Kutama and Anglican St Faith's)to believe that God would eventually restore their sovereign birthright after all the injustices they endured under the colonial yoke? Wasn't it the Cold War that convinced them that the enemy was the imperial West and that Communism's help against the oppressor would give them back their country? It is true that European (white) colonial overlords were either afflicted with the imperialist's zeal to teach the natives how to live or, more lately, were overburdened with guilt for past political incorrectness. Is Zimbabwe's `liberator' still obsessed with the belief, long ingrained, that the white man has always been his patron?
A white man put the coin in the child's hand as he held open the farm gate; missionaries taught him how to read and write; healed him with modern medicine and preached (cynically as it turned out) the gospel of a great Western, Chistian civilization. The child has grown up and the hero liberator has been let down: no more patronage and not nearly enough money. New, non-Western patrons: Cubans, Russians, North Koreans, Libyans, Malaysians have been sought. Nothing much forthcoming. Only the Chinese are left. Surely somebody should have come to the rescue by now? All that determined effort to wipe out the last vestiges of the colonial grip has come to nought. What has happened to the expected, new patronage? Who will put the coin into the old man's hand now?
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
Friday, March 24, 2006
THAT WAS PAT PEARCE'S INYANGA
Pat has left the world at last, at ninety seven, in England and far from her old home in Inyanga. I can't help feeling that a great spirit has deserted those lovely Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe and wondering if her legacy, that spirit, her inventions, her great productions have all gone with her - like so much else that was good about the past. An artistic, strong-willed English gentlewoman, she made Inyanga and its people the centre of her creative life decades ago. She drew upon the natural and human resources, developing and promoting village industry. She sought out and encouraged the pefection of beautiful crafts, useful ones too. She built up the pride of an industrious people. She did what only a few white women of her days in Inyanga could do.
Writing her obituary yesterday set me thinking again about Inyanga (Nyanga).
Remembering.
Only a few hours'drive from Salisbury (Harare) on the Umtali (Mutare) road.
You passed through Marandellas (Marondera)with Peterhouse school, a hotel and lots of untidy little shops on your right. Dombotombo township out of sight across the empty ground was over on your left. You had to watch out for township people crossing in front of you on foot or wobbling on bicycles or creating a traffic hazzard with their little donkey drawn scotch carts. Way back in time, as you journeyed on, there was a little roadside cafe called the Crow's Nest; a cutout metal crow silhouette was a sure sign that holiday treats: tea and freshly baked cream scones were waiting on a yellow check cloth in the tiny, spotless shop. Or out in the shady garden. When this disappeared with its farmer-owners there was only a broken down bus, a kind of deserted scrapyard.
But then there was Malwattee, a better stop off for the return journey, nearer Harare. Farmers wives made this a lovely place. You parked under tall gum trees, sat down at wire tables and basked in the afternoon sunshine. White coated waiters or chocolate brown girls in black uniforms and clean white pinnies brought your refreshments or you could go inside the guesthouse and choose your decorated cakes glistening beneath the glass counter with the bright light above it. You watched the peacocks and the bantam chickens pecking about the lawns around you or among shady trees on the far side of the circle of chairs and tables. There was a rose garden. You could tour the little shops, inside the guest house or in the crazy, domed little pink place someone invented to save the cost of roofing. It was stocked with local crafts, plenty of stuff you didn't want if you were not a tourist. Outward again and, Eastward, Halfway house came later, after Zimbabwe's Independence. You passed through the cavernous shop overflowing with farm produce and home baked cookies and sweets. It was a great hit, especially over weekends, crowded with tourists guzzling cokes and pies in the grassy courtyard, surrounded by litte tourist outlets on cool verandahs. There were clay pots, hand knitted jumpers, plants, beadwork, artefacts, some nice and some nasty. With its tall, gabled roof visible for miles, it soon grew to almost industrial proportions, the dusty car park overcrowded. It even provided a little zoo with a couple of fenced lions guarding their bloody rib cage lunch. You watched the browsing zebra or hand fed the small antelope with its damaged hind leg.
After the long, straight road has passed through a quiet wattle plantation, you could fill your fuel tank in Rusape, take a left turn out of the town and bowl down the narrow tarred strip taking you on to Juliasdale. The mountains begin to rise up and the little forests of Umbrella acacia trees near the Punchbowl Inn give way to huge forests of pine trees. Somebody remarks that these foreign trees are becoming quite a nuisance if they are not severely cut back for timber. Giant granite rocks next; they have recognizable contours. They are are all around you as you wind through low kopjes and steep hills, and there is your favourite, high above your holiday cottage, over there on the far horizon. It is a rock formation we know: The Crusader. He is granite man stretched out on his back across the top of the rocky mountain, his shield on his chest and his toes turned towards cloudless blue skies. This is summer weather. Sometimes, especially in the early mornings, the misty clouds descend to moisten the hardy natural protea bushes on the ground and promote the growth of a thousand wild flowers ... who could forget those fragrant herby scents?
Where are we staying? Sometimes at the chalets in the Rhodes National Park where you can trout fish in the Mare dam. Don't forget to visit the museum sparsely occupied with photographs and artefacts to remind you of Rhodesia's founder,Cecil John Rhodes. He bequeathed this park to the nation. Be careful of tiny ticks as you walk through the long grass at Urdu dam. The chalets cost only ten dollars a night. They have bare furniture and simple beds with candlewick covers and the cookers are sometimes pretty antiquated. The kids love the kind of seaside atmosphere at the Inyangombe waterfall which tumbles over shallow rocks not far from the road bridge. There is a little beach of warm sand where buckets and spades come out and some of you venture into the icy cold water. Higher up on the mountain there is an expensive tea at the five star Troutbeck hotel. Conemara, higher still, is where you stay at your friend's sloping mountainside smallholding of rasberrie and trout ponds. Here you can gaze across the green valley to the rivers and lakes of distant Mozambique. World's View is even higher up the mountain than Pat Pearce's eagle's eyrie.
The views are still there and perhaps for a time, the emptying hotels. but all the rest of this is not only a dream of the past; it is a scene that is past. The people who sustained so much of it are going, or like Pat, have all gone now.
I once drove up there with a young, black friend who had grown up in Inyanga. We headed towards Inyangani, the mysterious mountain where walkers have disappeared. One of my friends lost her two daughters up there, like the girls in the spooky Australian film `Picnic at Hanging Rock'. They vanished on a walk one Sunday afternoon. My passager warned me `Never point your finger at that Inyangani, it is dangerous. My mother told me that there are powerful spirits up there. If you point, they will harm you'.
Yes, Inyanga is a place full of spirits, not all bad.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
Writing her obituary yesterday set me thinking again about Inyanga (Nyanga).
Remembering.
Only a few hours'drive from Salisbury (Harare) on the Umtali (Mutare) road.
You passed through Marandellas (Marondera)with Peterhouse school, a hotel and lots of untidy little shops on your right. Dombotombo township out of sight across the empty ground was over on your left. You had to watch out for township people crossing in front of you on foot or wobbling on bicycles or creating a traffic hazzard with their little donkey drawn scotch carts. Way back in time, as you journeyed on, there was a little roadside cafe called the Crow's Nest; a cutout metal crow silhouette was a sure sign that holiday treats: tea and freshly baked cream scones were waiting on a yellow check cloth in the tiny, spotless shop. Or out in the shady garden. When this disappeared with its farmer-owners there was only a broken down bus, a kind of deserted scrapyard.
But then there was Malwattee, a better stop off for the return journey, nearer Harare. Farmers wives made this a lovely place. You parked under tall gum trees, sat down at wire tables and basked in the afternoon sunshine. White coated waiters or chocolate brown girls in black uniforms and clean white pinnies brought your refreshments or you could go inside the guesthouse and choose your decorated cakes glistening beneath the glass counter with the bright light above it. You watched the peacocks and the bantam chickens pecking about the lawns around you or among shady trees on the far side of the circle of chairs and tables. There was a rose garden. You could tour the little shops, inside the guest house or in the crazy, domed little pink place someone invented to save the cost of roofing. It was stocked with local crafts, plenty of stuff you didn't want if you were not a tourist. Outward again and, Eastward, Halfway house came later, after Zimbabwe's Independence. You passed through the cavernous shop overflowing with farm produce and home baked cookies and sweets. It was a great hit, especially over weekends, crowded with tourists guzzling cokes and pies in the grassy courtyard, surrounded by litte tourist outlets on cool verandahs. There were clay pots, hand knitted jumpers, plants, beadwork, artefacts, some nice and some nasty. With its tall, gabled roof visible for miles, it soon grew to almost industrial proportions, the dusty car park overcrowded. It even provided a little zoo with a couple of fenced lions guarding their bloody rib cage lunch. You watched the browsing zebra or hand fed the small antelope with its damaged hind leg.
After the long, straight road has passed through a quiet wattle plantation, you could fill your fuel tank in Rusape, take a left turn out of the town and bowl down the narrow tarred strip taking you on to Juliasdale. The mountains begin to rise up and the little forests of Umbrella acacia trees near the Punchbowl Inn give way to huge forests of pine trees. Somebody remarks that these foreign trees are becoming quite a nuisance if they are not severely cut back for timber. Giant granite rocks next; they have recognizable contours. They are are all around you as you wind through low kopjes and steep hills, and there is your favourite, high above your holiday cottage, over there on the far horizon. It is a rock formation we know: The Crusader. He is granite man stretched out on his back across the top of the rocky mountain, his shield on his chest and his toes turned towards cloudless blue skies. This is summer weather. Sometimes, especially in the early mornings, the misty clouds descend to moisten the hardy natural protea bushes on the ground and promote the growth of a thousand wild flowers ... who could forget those fragrant herby scents?
Where are we staying? Sometimes at the chalets in the Rhodes National Park where you can trout fish in the Mare dam. Don't forget to visit the museum sparsely occupied with photographs and artefacts to remind you of Rhodesia's founder,Cecil John Rhodes. He bequeathed this park to the nation. Be careful of tiny ticks as you walk through the long grass at Urdu dam. The chalets cost only ten dollars a night. They have bare furniture and simple beds with candlewick covers and the cookers are sometimes pretty antiquated. The kids love the kind of seaside atmosphere at the Inyangombe waterfall which tumbles over shallow rocks not far from the road bridge. There is a little beach of warm sand where buckets and spades come out and some of you venture into the icy cold water. Higher up on the mountain there is an expensive tea at the five star Troutbeck hotel. Conemara, higher still, is where you stay at your friend's sloping mountainside smallholding of rasberrie and trout ponds. Here you can gaze across the green valley to the rivers and lakes of distant Mozambique. World's View is even higher up the mountain than Pat Pearce's eagle's eyrie.
The views are still there and perhaps for a time, the emptying hotels. but all the rest of this is not only a dream of the past; it is a scene that is past. The people who sustained so much of it are going, or like Pat, have all gone now.
I once drove up there with a young, black friend who had grown up in Inyanga. We headed towards Inyangani, the mysterious mountain where walkers have disappeared. One of my friends lost her two daughters up there, like the girls in the spooky Australian film `Picnic at Hanging Rock'. They vanished on a walk one Sunday afternoon. My passager warned me `Never point your finger at that Inyangani, it is dangerous. My mother told me that there are powerful spirits up there. If you point, they will harm you'.
Yes, Inyanga is a place full of spirits, not all bad.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
Sunday, March 5, 2006
ADVICE FOR DAN BROWN'S PUBLISHER
....BUT FIRST A POST SCRIPT TO MY PREVIOUS BLOG ON THE ROCKET SCIENTIST
(its frightfully important not to take sides - YET - in the MDC battle)
Other opposition spirits whose lives were wasted in battle will surely be around wherever there is a plan to help to re-unite an incredibly brave band of democrats in peace - or at the very least, to bring friendship and co-operation between the two factions. No harm in dreaming.
Here's what happened when I sued somebody who pinched my work in 1980:
I went to see my lawyer friend in Harare. "Look at this!" I shouted, "that bleary editor of the Herald has lifted my biographies of our nationalist leaders and published them without acknowledgement. No payment either!"
"So he has. Now your book will not sell because the paper is publishing biographies which people can read with their morning news".
"I can't afford to sue. You lawyers are the rich ones". (aside: Neither can I sell 40 million books, worse luck).
"Never mind that. Come into my office and sit down and count the exact number of words - they have to run in sentences - that have been lifted from your writing, then I will send the editor a letter demanding compensation - pro rata. As I am your friend, you need not pay". (Famous last words)
It took me hours picking my way through the turned-around sentences - syntax was no real disguise - nor the little frills that were supposed to disguise the theft. Since I was the only local writer who had foreseen the advent of the day our new rulers would take up the reins of power, and had rushed around interviewing those who had been left out of my first book of biographies (Who's Who, published 1977)I KNEW that the biogs were mine. I wanted compensation for the cost of self-publishing my second volume this time around and for the estimated loss of sales.
To cut a long story... my lawyer friend rang to say I had three hundred dollars - paid by the Herald for those exact words, and the amount was exactly percent of the amount I had claimed. Clever!
Cleverer still, the lawyer's firm sent me a bill for three hundred dollars.
The perfect cure for me. Counting the words in the days before computers could do the job was a terrible waste of time. Dan Brown's book is a big one and the word count is not the problem. The problem, perhaps, is with THE WORD.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
(its frightfully important not to take sides - YET - in the MDC battle)
Other opposition spirits whose lives were wasted in battle will surely be around wherever there is a plan to help to re-unite an incredibly brave band of democrats in peace - or at the very least, to bring friendship and co-operation between the two factions. No harm in dreaming.
Here's what happened when I sued somebody who pinched my work in 1980:
I went to see my lawyer friend in Harare. "Look at this!" I shouted, "that bleary editor of the Herald has lifted my biographies of our nationalist leaders and published them without acknowledgement. No payment either!"
"So he has. Now your book will not sell because the paper is publishing biographies which people can read with their morning news".
"I can't afford to sue. You lawyers are the rich ones". (aside: Neither can I sell 40 million books, worse luck).
"Never mind that. Come into my office and sit down and count the exact number of words - they have to run in sentences - that have been lifted from your writing, then I will send the editor a letter demanding compensation - pro rata. As I am your friend, you need not pay". (Famous last words)
It took me hours picking my way through the turned-around sentences - syntax was no real disguise - nor the little frills that were supposed to disguise the theft. Since I was the only local writer who had foreseen the advent of the day our new rulers would take up the reins of power, and had rushed around interviewing those who had been left out of my first book of biographies (Who's Who, published 1977)I KNEW that the biogs were mine. I wanted compensation for the cost of self-publishing my second volume this time around and for the estimated loss of sales.
To cut a long story... my lawyer friend rang to say I had three hundred dollars - paid by the Herald for those exact words, and the amount was exactly percent of the amount I had claimed. Clever!
Cleverer still, the lawyer's firm sent me a bill for three hundred dollars.
The perfect cure for me. Counting the words in the days before computers could do the job was a terrible waste of time. Dan Brown's book is a big one and the word count is not the problem. The problem, perhaps, is with THE WORD.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
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