Zimbabwe Memories

Now that I’ve started taking this trip down memory lane I find there are so many more things I want to remember! Things peculiar to Zimbabwe that only a Zimbabwean would understand and either laugh at or cry at. Like going on my bicycle down to the shops and buying marshmallow fish or a fredo for a tickey or a packet of Willards chips that “make music in your mouth” – tomato sauce was my favourite. And then there was chicken flings, Cashel Valley Baked Beans – “we are, we are, can’t you see, the best baked beans in Zimbabwe!” That funny pseudo French man who sang “Have a nice day with Bon Marche!” Being lifted up by Tanganda Tea, and in the intermission at the Movies – “Get yourself an Ice Cream Now!!!” Sandaks, those funny plastic shoes that everyone wore! Biltong, beersticks, borewors and melktart of course, the best ingredients for a braai. That wonderful ZimSun Ad “ooooohhhhh won’t you stay just a little bit looooonger, ooooohhh please, please stay”. The smell of Lifeboy soap or Dettol!

I remember going and spending hours in the sun at the Mount Pleasant swimming pool and being too scared to jump off the really high diving board! Riding my bicycle everywhere, hating my horrible, blue school uniform – remember having to wear garters with your socks! Manual labour and the prefects study – a place where I spent way too much time on a Friday afternoon! I remember when it rained the ditches on the sides of the road would be full of water, at least 3 feet deep and we would go splashing in these huge puddles of water with the steamy smell of rain all around us! Remember the fruit trees in your garden?! Guavas, mangos, naartjies, plums, avacados (if you can call avos fruit), I remember our avocado trees used to have so many avos on them that they would fall and rot on the ground. Now I have to pay a dollar for an avo and they are teeny, tiny things! We had granadillas climbing along the fence, gooseberries, dustyberries, Mexican apples – I could go on and on. And the flowers!! Jacaranda trees, flamboyants, beautiful golden acacia trees and the heady smell of frangipane flowers. Do you remember the cosmos flowers growing wild in the vlei or along the road, and the balancing rocks on the way to Nyanga. Wow! What wonderful memories we have, surely we were the most blessed of people to be raised in Zimbabwe!