HIFA 2010 – day 3

29 04 2010

Tariro. Yes, I admit it, I had a few issues with this one. I generally felt it was unfinished work – it could have done with some trimming and paring (too long) and definitely a bit of polishing, like another month or so. The story had merit but was very drawn out and I don’t care about pedigrees of those who wrote, directed etc. – the play was riddled with cliches and that gets me like nothing else. I have really heard it all about us nasty white colonialists and that I guess is a point of view but when the aforementioned whites arrive on stage with pith helmets and statements such as “I say, we have run out of whisky wot?” I am more than a little unimpressed. Come on guys, use a bit of imagination? They did not use the talent available either. On the few occasions that the cast was allowed to sing it really did! However, I set myself the task of getting some good photos.

Tariro

The Dance Foundation Course is definitely my favourite local dance group. I saw them last year and got some great photos. They did not disappoint today either but they were moving way too fast to get good photos. The programme says: “Sublime technical skill combines with the spontaneity and unbridled energy of youth”. I will go with that. It was also a huge amount of fun and they did not lose the opportunity to add a bit of politics (as shows are doing this year) too. Great stuff – thanks guys!

Dance Foundation Course - After the dust settles

I didn’t have my programme on me so I just looked at the time table and saw the next performance at the REPS theatre was a show called Manolibera. Sort of Spanish sounding but I had time to kill before the next play and well, it’s HIFA, why not take a chance? It’s this sort of show that keeps me fascinated in the arts. An artist with an overhead projector, a screen and two clowns. Fish swam, smoke (sugar poured onto the overhead) clouded into a car drawn around the clowns and shopping piled up. All courtesy of the artist (who created a lot of the sound effects too) and the overhead projector. Very clever.

Manolibera

Marathon is a great story with good acting by two local actors and directed by Giles Ramsey. Two men set out on a night run and discuss life, each other, relationships and confront their own future. ‘Nuff said – see it if you can.

Marathon


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HIFA 2010 – day 2

28 04 2010

Jutro - James Cuningham and Keren Tahor

Jutro is a South African production – a story set in World War II Poland. A bomb strikes a cabaret club and the manager and cabaret singer are trapped (temporarily). Starring Israeli South African Keren Tahor as Mina the cabaret singer who dreams of fame in the USA and James Cuningham as the manager it was a well acted comedy-drama with a clever set. “Jutro” is Polish for tomorrow.

Faster Than Light Dance Company

The young German Faster Than Light Dance Company put on a display of mixed contemporary dance. Not all of it appealed to me but the piece de resistance was the last piece set to Ravel’s Bolero that went down well with the audience. A couple of other pieces had imaginative choreography too that even I could appreciate!

I did wonder half way through the South African production of Hero why I was watching it. It was a less than subtle style of acting that I see is called “physical theatre” in the programme. It was difficult to know who the play was directed at and certainly the children sitting next to me were not in hysterics. Still, I had to admire Craig Morris’s pure energy as he did all his own sound effects and stunts and by the end of it I was sufficiently won over to the story line of a childhood fantasy superhero who never really grows up to say I would recommend it. Craig was a HIFA 2 years ago with Blood Orange, another piece of physical theatre based on a South African book. I preferred Blood Orange.

Hero - a character gets suicidal

Olga Domnina is a Russian pianist with and impressive musical pedigree. I must admit that although I enjoy classical music I cannot always appreciate when I am listening to something good. However even I could understand that I was hearing something impressive in her Rachmaninov sonata No. 2 and my friend Caro (who does know what she is talking about) confirmed that it was virtuoso playing. A pity the light was so bad in the recital room where she was playing – the photo is not good. It’s also an example of where not to sit to get pianist photos!

Olga Domnina playing Rachmaninov Sonata No. 2

Last on my list for today was a play originally called Black Jesus (they changed the name to something else from what was on the progamme – I have no idea why but that’s artists for you). Excellent theatre by expat/diasporan Zimbabweans living in the UK it is a play about a play that they want to bring to Zimbabwe which explores the relationship between a prisoner accused of committing atrocities in the run up to the 2008 election, a government official and a representative of a “Truth and Justice Commission” set in a future Zimbabwe. Clever stuff with more than an occasional swipe at the current regime. At the end they asked the audience how they might change or improve on the play. I thought they should leave it as it is.

Black Jesus (or whatever it was called)


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HIFA 2010 – day 1

27 04 2010

It’s HIFA (Harare International Festival of the Arts) time again and not only have they got it together with very little money they have even got the biggest programme ever!

I went to the opening press briefing and decided that I never wanted to hear another “we are so excited” again. Still, it is necessary for the sponsors/partners and media who were out in force for the only real festival of entertainment on the Zimbabwe calendar.

Mark Nizer

Mark Nizer

Mark Nizer is an American comedy juggler who came to HIFA last year. I decided to go and see his show on a bit of an impulse and I must admit I was impressed. He is polished, imaginative (yes, computer graphics, lasers etc.) and very funny. HIFA 2010 was definitely off to a good start. He claims to have actually entertained the jury for the O J Simpson trial and won a world juggling award in 1994. Well that’s what it says in the programme and I can believe it.

Magmanus - Cirkus Cikor

Next was a Swedish based “contemporary circus”. I am not at all sure what “contemporary” means in this context but it was nothing like the circuses I saw as a child – even without the animals. I suppose the audience did laugh quite a bit but it seemed full of jugglers with angst, intentionally dropped skittles and juggling balls… Odd. I think a lot of it went straight over the heads of the younger audience of whom  there were quite a number.

Ria Mushonga of The Unsound

Occasionally at HIFA I take a complete chance on a show (well, that’s half the fun!) and it turns out to be a winner. I’d never heard of The Unsound and indeed, the band was created to put on a show for this HIFA. As individuals it seems that they have been around for a while as the Global Stage area was filled to capacity. What a talented group of musicians! Lead by Rina Mushonga who also wrote all the songs, they gave a thoroughly enjoyable and polished performance and had even got in a sizable backing choir from one of the private girls’ schools in Harare. I’d hesitate to describe the music as rock – maybe like Tracy Chapman but considerably more dynamic. So if they come to a venue near you give them your support – you won’t be disappointed!

The traditional HIFA opening show was this year replaced by a mass choir performance of Carmina Burana. I don’t do crowds well so I gave it a miss. It sounded impressive from the outside but I met more than one group of people who complained of over crowding. No excuse for that!

The Unsound


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The cupboard is bare – now it’s real

24 04 2010

I wrote on this topic some time ago in the Zimbabwe dollar days but now the government is broke again in US dollar terms.

Shelton is my professeur de Francais who I am paying to brush up my conversational French in preparation for a June visit to Europe with Sybille. He taught me French in the local Alliance Francaise a few years ago and I bumped into him again on the flight to South Africa in March. Each hour’s lesson costs me all of $10 and we got on really well.

I asked him yesterday if he was getting paid by Air Zimbabwe. He said “occasionally”. It seems that he relies on infrequent work at the Alliance and teaching the likes of me to survive. No wonder he is looking elsewhere.

Chatting to the various Saturday lunchtime drinkers and “thinkers” at the Gallery Delta just now I heard that the IMF has predicted 0% growth in Zimbabwe next year which is quite an achievement given the hole we are in. It all makes me a bit nervous about the money I’ve got in the bank – the government has raided the foreign currency accounts in the past – but there is only so much I can put “under the mattress”.


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The respect thing

24 04 2010

Last year my nursery supplied some 40,000 seedlings to the informal street market – we were not paid. It’s most usually the security guards at the heart of the theft. We got most of the trays back but the evidence as seedlings was long gone and no arrests were ever made.

Earlier in March I was on the way to the airport with Sybille when I got a text from the senior foreman saying that another 12 trays of onions had gone missing. There was little I could do at that stage but when I got back from surgery and another theft, onions again but now 22 trays, occurred I put the suspected guard in the truck and left him at the local police station to be “interviewed”. A few days later I asked the investigating constable if anything had happened. She asked me if there was any evidence left!

I recounted this story to Charles a black manager on the farm where I live and asked what he did. He laughed. They’d had a similar problem with the security guards on the potatoes so he took them off to the police station for a night’s stay and a good hiding (his words) and warned them if there was any more nonsense they’d go back for another hiding. I commented that as a white I would not get away with that (and I have to admit I’m a bit squeamish about it). I repeated the story to a white farmer that afternoon and he said that while he would not do anything himself he just gives the police a bag of potatoes and they do the dirty business.

Some years ago I was working in Malawi for UNDP and was astounded when one of my highly educated black colleagues told me that she didn’t think Africa was well suited to democracy. I had to admit that after giving a bit of thought I was not so sure she was wrong. It is no secret that Africans respect the “strong man” which, unlike the conclusion of the “Witness” BBC podcast on the Zimbabwe independence and “liberation war” I listened to, is the reason why Bob is still in charge.


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30 years and not a lot to show

16 04 2010

It took me a moment to realize why a jet should be flying low over my work this morning. It, yes only one, was practising for the Independence Day Celebrations on Monday. I suppose I should look up my notes for a year ago but really I couldn’t be bothered – I think there may have been 3 jets then. Whatever, 30 years down the line we are broke, importing just about everything from South Africa or China and the fat cats are stealing the place blind as fast as ever despite continuous “calls for sanctions to be removed”. I really don’t believe they even believe it themselves!

Nobody has been around begging for donations for the celebrations – yet. They will get short shrift from me. No doubt the masses will be coerced and forced onto busses to go and hear Comrade Bob spout the usual and the government media will fawn and exaggerate the numbers and the rest of us will take the day off. Maybe the Chinese will listen; after all he did go and celebrate his birthday this year at the Chinese Embassy!


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Categories : History

Els

5 04 2010

Now in her 74th year, Els is still a strikingly good looking woman. By her own admission she likes to talk but I suspected that she was also lonely and she’d certainly had an interesting life so I just sat back and listened. I’d taken a small present of a digital camera and a wind-up torch that Sybille had left over to her riding school on Saturday and I’d nothing else to do.

In the early 1970s she came out from Holland to what was then Rhodesia to stay with a friend in the Nyanga area and at a function met her future husband. Two months later they were married and moved onto his remote farm in Nyanga North, some 35km north of the village of the same name. A thoroughly resourceful woman she set about fixing up the run down homestead and raising a family in what she described as the happiest time of her life – her children had free range of the farm and she felt very comfortable out in the bush (“…the silence, oh the silence was marvellous!”).

My father and mother met in the same area also having come out from Europe (though some 20 years previously) so we enjoyed chatting about some of the characters in the area though they were a generation earlier than me. There was Major Mac (McIllwaine) who could always be found by the fire in the reception area of Troutbeck Hotel. Legend has it that the fire has never gone out and Els remembered that he could never remember her name either. There were also the Wyrley-Birches, one of the white pioneer families of the area in whose first house running water meant the stream through the middle of the house. My father (who’d known them well) once told me that when a favourite dog died Colonel Wyrley (as he was known) would have the dog skinned and the skin put on the back of  a chair in the lounge. I didn’t believe him, my father loved to tease, but I remember a particular visit as a teenager to their house below Mt Inyangani and sure enough, there was a retriever type skin on the back of a sofa!

As the war in Rhodesia escalated Els and her family had to move off their farm and her husband got a job at the Clairmont Estate near Juliasdale, south of Nyanga village. It all went tragically wrong one afternoon and he was murdered whilst checking up on a potato spraying operation in 1979. Ignoring family pleas to move back to Holland, Els moved to Harare where she established her riding school (she’d worked  and qualified at a riding school in Holland where she’d taught the current Queen Beatrix and has a photo of the young queen on a horse) and where she still is today. She mentioned to me that her eldest son, married with children and working in Holland, was coming back to Zimbabwe as Holland was in his opinion no place to raise children – he missed the space in Zimbabwe. Els grew up in a house which had no garden and she was not allowed to keep pets. We sat on her verandah and admired the tortoise lumbering across the lawn and the 80 m or so of garden to the gate that was out of site.

Yes, despite all it’s problems Zimbabwe can still be a great place to live – if you have a reliable income! Harare probably has one of the best climates of a capital city anywhere – it is seldom more than 35 degrees C and rarely goes below 10 and then only at night. Crime by South African standards is very low, most people are very friendly and there are still fascinating people like Els to talk to!


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Time off

29 03 2010

I was totally unprepared for the “aftershock” of the neck surgery in Joburg. I guess I was a little naive in thinking that after nearly 5 hours of surgery I’d be up and about in 5 days or so and ready to do a bit of easy shopping. The pain was intense and not very well managed. Nursing varied hugely from non-existent to professional which was not great for what I’m lead to believe is the top private hospital in Joburg. One thoroughly nasty little woman on hearing that I wanted some pain killers plonked them down on my bedside table with a glass of water and walked out leaving me flat on my back and unable to sit up unassisted. Another nursing aid could not understand English and had no idea how to adjust the back of the bed. Thank goodness for Moira, the hilarious Scottish physiotherapist who could not do enough for me and always had some amusing anecdote.

The surgery consisted of a 3 level cervical spine fusion and a corpectomy on the C4 vertebra. Now I am held together by a titanium plate and screws. The surgeon was pleased with how it went though on the 4th night I woke to realize that I couldn’t get my right arm off the bed and my left hand was also losing strength. Panic! The surgeon ordered another X-ray and MRI but they showed nothing untoward and my left arm recovered fast. My right is back to about 70% pre-op level so I am hopeful.

Initially I was scheduled to have the surgery done here but on advice I brought my offshore medical aid to use and had it done in Joburg. Subscribing to this medical aid some years ago has been one of my better decisions as I am not at all confident that the 79 year-old surgeon who was going to do it would have been up to the task. Not doing anything would have been disastrous eventually leading to a form of quadriplegia.


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You know you are in South Africa when

10 03 2010

I had to chuckle. There below the list of things not allowed into the MRI room in the Milpark Hospital was written: “Firearms”. I guess this IS Joburg!


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Financing

4 03 2010

It was not before time, I thought. Austin was looking for finance to upgrade the equipment in the gym. I couldn’t recall any new equipment being added to the circuit training selection in the 12 or so years that I’d been going to the gym and it was looking a bit dated.

Finding finance for business in Zimbabwe these days is a tricky affair. The banks are looking for extortionate rates and silly conditions for collateral. It seems the route to go is private lending. My cousin “Jumbo” was listening in on the conversation. He is a wheeler-dealer extraordinaire and knows anybody who is anyone about town. He seemed to think that one of his contacts could be tapped for a repayment rate of 1% per month which is not at all cheap when compounded but Austin had done the maths and it seemed acceptable to him. It all sounded rather dodgy to me but the gym DOES need new equipment.


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