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By Root 1365 0

to 7,000 feet. Banket is on this ridge, and the road running from Sinoia (Chinhoyi) to Harare, and the road from Harare to Mutare. The Umvukwe mountains are part of the ridge, but the name was heard wrong, the real sound is Mvuri, and anyway, these days they are called the Dyke. I have been hearing the Dyke, the Dyke, in so many conversations, not realizing it meant only those mountains I spent so many years of my young life staring at, for it turns out this chain of mountains are considered to be the end bit (or one of them) of the Rift Valley, which as we all know, threatens to split Africa in a billion years or so. Perhaps where the Darwendale chrome mine now makes the flanks of the Dyke glitter with its spilled ores, will lap the waters of the Indian Ocean, and then this landlocked country, this plateau so high and dry-windswept, will be damp with sea winds. The Dyke is loaded with the minerals of a half a continent, pushed southwards in a tongue through other geological formations, and the whole chain is carved with small workings, both new and abandoned, some from long before the white men came. The hills of the Dyke are bald and bare, so highly mineralized trees won’t grow on them. It is hard to imagine an idea more attractive to the myth-making mind than this one, so casually proprietary with units of a million years, as is the way of those arch myth-makers, the geologists. You hear, ’He’s farming on the other side of the Dyke’. ’It’s on the Dyke, you know,’ and you are meant to gather that much more is expected of the situation than if the Dyke never entered it at all.

THE ITCZ

Similarly, there is the ITCZ, which means the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, and it seems to crop up in every other conversation. This is mostly because of the tricky rains, which did come on schedule this year, after some unsatisfactory seasons. For years the drought in Matabeleland was serious enough to figure regularly in overseas news and it killed off over a million animals, in a population of eight million already reduced by the Bush War and dissidents. In a run of bad years there can be a good one, or a half-good one, and then the rains fail again. This year began well: but that doesn’t mean it will go on well. All Zimbabwe, including Matabeleland, is green and watered, but now it is time the rains came again. The hot dry blue days that succeed each other, delighting me and other fugitives from November in Europe are making all the locals nervous. ’Why doesn’t it rain? Those aren’t rain clouds.’ And we go indoors to watch the ITCZ prowling about on the satellite pictures of the television weather programme.

I remember how, then, we used to watch the skies to the north, from where the rains have to come, we felt the heat building, with a practised sense for the different densities and weights of heat, while the clouds piled higher every day and turned from silver to black. We said, ’The storks have arrived from Russia and from Turkey and East Europe and the chimneys of Germany and Denmark, so now the rains should start.’ This year the storks have arrived well, and the fields around Harare are black with their multitudes, but the rains are holding off. It seems that the rains are generally starting later than they used. Then October was the rainmaker, some time in October the rains had to come, but now, it seems, November is when they start. The trouble is, the weather is at odds all over the world and temporary anomalies are instantly seized on as evidence for the worst. ‘Oh no, the rains never start in October these days, the seasons have changed.’

TELEVISION

Most evenings we watch television, sitting there in front of the screen as if it were a child we expect to do better if it tried. In fact television is going well. In 1982 it was, quite simply, embarrassing. Everything was awful, the presenters gauche, newsreaders unpractised, and the rhetorics of the Revolution, crude. Now the programmes may not be up to much, most of them, but these are professionals who have learned from the best. Dazzlingly pretty girls, young men