I really do feel sorry for young Masikosana Ngulube who, as reported from IRIN on 18 Feb 2008 has to cycle the 30km round trip to get to Eveline High school in Bulawayo. She says the return trip is `downhill' so I guess she must live out of the city on the East side. Her brother certainly has an uphill ride from what was once Borrow Street (the location of the public swimming pool - maybe no longer filled with water?)to what was Townsend Road in the old Kumalo suburbs. Milton Junior school is in that same (former) Borrow Street. My late brother was a Milton school boy.
How do I know all this. Don't laugh, but I am an old (very old) Eveline High girl. I had to laugh at the news that Masikosana has to ride a bike to school. I rode a bike to Eveline school as did most of my school mates in the nineteen forties. But that was many decades ago. My first bike ride from Fort Street high on the Western side of the city all the way to Borrow street was all downhill. That's how I know the lie of the land. Thirty km is a bit excessive but not impossible. There was a time when I rode from Borrow Street to Baines Primary School out on the south west side of the city. That was uphill all the way. We must have had big muscles in our legs in those immediate post-WW2 days because we didn't think it hard to peddle our bikes. Cars were for the rich, or if your family owned one, they did not thnk it neccessary to drive you to school.
How things have changed. Only for the good of course -where Eveline is no longer a school for little white girls. What irony it is that Masikosana's mother's car is empty of fuel or the precious liquid is unaffordable. In the Federal years, there was a huge public protest because the Minister of Finance raised the price of a gallon of petrol from 2/6 to three shillings a gallon. World oil prices nothwithstanding, the price of a litre of fuel in Zimbabwe today would have bought my folks most of the country back in 1945.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
