Africa University, Students, and Golf

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 the movie adaptation--is slowly dying from a festering wound caused by a thorn. I never knew until reading that story that being pricked by a thorn could be fatal.)

Dr. Shiripanda, in the Department of International Peace, Leadership, and Governance, welcomed everyone and talked about being humble, that even if we were educated that didn't give us license to be irresponsible and ignore the problem of trash, particularly the non-biodegradable stuff that will out live all of us. We should, in fact, see it as an opportunity to influence others. We were to pair up, each person holding onto a black plastic garbage bag with one hand, and, with the other, pick up plastic bottles, candy wrappers, and bits of Styrofoam, plus a lot of other things I don't want to detail, except for the soles of a few shoes.

Dr. Shiripanda at the end of her talk said she was happy to see some of the teaching staff there, and then turned to me, asking who I was. I said I was an English Language Fellow, working with the Embassy in Harare. The man next to me looked my way and said, "C.I.A.!"

I assured him that there was nothing in Zim that the C.I.A. would be interested in spying on, and he said something about colonization and exploitation of natural resources. (The Chinese operate a diamond mine near town and even import their own toilet paper, a security guard told me, contributing very little to the local economy.) The continent's history of being exploited, both for its natural resources and its people, went back centuries. The man next to me was making a joke. But it had an honest truth to it, the kind of joke Trevor Noah might make.

The student I teamed up with, Alford Wiggins, was all too familiar with that exploitation. He was from Liberia and was working toward his master's in intellectual property rights. I said to him, incorrectly, that his ancestors had been Americans, when, of course, they hadn't. They'd been property. But he wasn't too interested in discussing Liberia's history. So we headed off to pick up trash.

We went down a red clay path, and then into the snake friendly bush, and through that to the rugby pitch, where there were a lot of bottles and cans and wrappers of things I don't want to mention, but which students use from time to time as a safety precaution (we were wearing rubber surgeons gloves to pick things up). I knew about this trashy area because from time to time I go down to the rugby and soccer pitches to practice golf. There's a golf course in Mutare, about 20km away, over Christian Pass, which was excavated by the British during their colonial rule of the country, and I'm vain enough to think I'll play as well as I once did, many years ago. The game is a test of one's humility. In a book about the current president, "Commander in Cheat," the author, Rick Reilly, quotes P.G. Wodehouse: "If you want to know a man, play golf with him." President Obama, an avid golfer, managed to lower his handicap while in office, a remarkable feat. He is, I've heard, a stickler for playing by the rules.

Alford and I ended up at the main gate, about a kilometer from where we'd started, and dumped off our bag of trash there and returned to the chapel, where the others had gathered and were drinking water in the shade of the chapel's roof. Wednesday and Thursday had been exceptionally cold and rainy, very unusual, the cold, I was told. Maybe down to 15C, when summer is on the way.

In the shade, drinking water, I talked to a few of my students from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I hadn't really gotten along well with many of my students, who seemed hostile to even writing a personal history about themselves, but in the shade, drinking water together, they asked me if they could have their photos taken with me. This request made me feel that I had turned a corner with them. I thought that being demanding but compassionate toward my students might work out after all.