Zimbo James

Mike Mbifi has his work displayed on the side of the road that leads to Leopard Rock resort, in the mountains along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border. He carries on the tradition of his father, a Shona sculpture. It takes him three days to make a small lion's head, thirty-six hours. His price for this work is "10 U.S. dollars, negotiable." The website www.guruve.com lists the work of Shona sculptors for five, ten, even fifteen thousand pounds.

I had finished my first round of golf at the Hillside Golf Club in Mutare and had gone up onto a deck that overlooks the first tee and ninth green to get some water and a sandwich. The day was dry and hot, around 30C, humidity like that of a desert. I'd worn a scarf around my neck to protect it from UV. The course was parched. The rainy season hadn't yet begun, and, because there is no irrigation system for the fairways, they were brown and dusty. The course, though, in spite of the dried up grass, was an excellent British layout that was built more than a hundred years ago. It places a premium on accuracy off the tee. A stray ball ends up in the bush and lost. (Zimbos find golf balls and sell them back to golfers.) I sat down at a picnic table next to a table of locals, all white and drinking beers. Black locals were at other tables. One man, N., turned to me and asked how I'd played. Not well, I said, but it was my first time. He asked me where I was fro...

On the first Friday of every month, starting at nine in the morning, Africa University has a campus clean-up. Students and staff go around the campus, which has a soccer and rugby pitch, groves of trees which have leaves that can be eaten (I can't remember the name of the tree), and bush which looks very snake friendly. I've been told there are black mambas in the nearby hills. Trails are worn through the bush, which serve as short cuts from the classrooms to the pitches, and to a nearby illegal gold mine on the other side of a hill, where men eke out a living, looking for specks of gold, their bodies caked with mud. Truly. Those volunteering for the clean-up met behind the chapel, perhaps a hundred of us, wearing long pants, to protect our legs from bushes bristling with thorns. (Seeing the thorns, I always recall Hemingway's story, " The Snows of Kilimanjaro ," in which the protagonist, Harry, contemplating his impending death--Gregory Peck in t...