Archive for May 2015
Beauty brouhaha?
Winner Emily Kachote, 25 Many say the Miss World Zimbabwe beauty pageant is being unjustifiably militarised and that’s in bad taste. The head of the Miss Zimbabwe Trust is supermodel Mary Chiwenga, née Mary Mubaiwa (left, arriving at the Independence Day celebrations), the wife of army commander Gen. Constantine Chiwenga. He is lending a…
Read MoreRip it all up, says Mr Tome
So Edward Tome, described as a political analyst and historian, wants to campaign for Africa Unity Square, Harare’s central square, to be ripped up and redesigned. He finds it offensive that the square – its resplendent much-photographed lavender-blue jacaranda trees in full bloom once a year – was laid out as a copy of the British…
Read MoreEasy guide. How to navigate this site
On smaller screens, the upright or narrower portrait format of phones and tablets rather than the horizontal landscape view, see the white chevrons at the top left on a red background, click on the white chevrons to open extra features, the search button, monthly archives and book covers. And, once on the site, there are plenty of items…
Read MoreLet there be light.
Let there be light. Fat chance. Daily electricity blackouts now last up to 18 hours. It will be a bleak winter as temperatures drop in the southern hemisphere. The energy minister Samuel Undenge says Zimbabwe’s chronic electricity shortages should end by 2018, election year… Here’s a brief sitrep: 📍The Zimbabwe Power Company says it is…
Read MoreDon’t let the facts spoil a good story
Nice one. ‘Photoshopped’ image from Bambazonkie. Correspondent Sean warns travelers on the Masvingo-Beitbridge highway. “There are unexpected and very deep potholes along the way and right in line of your wheels, especially on the driver’s side and some are unavoidable.” The road is appalling from Chivhu to Masvingo too, says Sean. Drivers should replace worn…
Read MoreThe race card. Say no more
American cop beating the hell out of a black man as another looks on in New York What’s with this current obsession with racism? American police shooting blacks. Black football players being taunted. Racism has been there throughout the ages and isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Young Zimbabweans studying or given military…
Read MoreHow we sleep survey, and what it doesn’t tell us
New global research shows that in southern Africa we wake up earlier than in most other parts of the world. Because those of us nearer the equator don’t have long, light evenings and not much change in the time of sunrise and sunset throughout the seasons, we awake, on average, at around 6.a.m., the earliest…
Read More‘Tete Whatsapp, Sekuru Google, Sahwira Wikipedia’
Further to my last lament on the decline of the printed word through social media and the web, it no longer is just about the demise of the reading culture and newspapers and books. In Ignatius Mabasa’s excellent “Shelling the Nuts” column in The Herald in Zimbabwe, he describes the ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘lost cultural bearings’…
Read MoreThen and now, the same questions
Oh dear. Where is all this leading to? Who is running the country? Who is going to stop the tailspin we’re in? I, for one, couldn’t believe my ears the other day (17 years ago, that was) when Mr Mugabe said Zimbabwe is going to start “socio-economic” reconstruction in Kabila’s Congo. The people there need…
Read MoreMore troubles ahead. Mayday Mayday Mayday Part Two
More troubles lie ahead. Current food harvests are woefully inadequate. FEWS NET, the international non-government Famine Early Warning Systems Network, in its new April report just out, says food production by rural households in southern Zimbabwe is “next to nothing” this season and they will be suffering what they call the Crisis phase (IPC 3)…
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