Too Many Walls, Not Enough Bridges
Whenever my daughter wants to imitate me, she will assume a wistful tone, look into the distance and say something along the lines of: ‘When I was a child, none of the gardens had walls. We just roamed free, wandering across neighbours’ lawns, picking flowers and swinging from the trees. Nobody locked their doors either, so we just walked through their houses as well, helping ourselves to whatever we wanted.’ Ok, I get the point. It is easy to look back at the past through rose-drenched glasses and imagine a fairytale world in which there was no crime and everyone loved each other. It’s par for the course when you get to a certain age and even more common in older Zimbabweans who view the past as a virtual Eden from which they have been ejected. I will try and be as objective as possible. We were never like some parts of the world, like America, where one lawn seems to run into another and where boundaries are marked by driveways. When I was growing up in the late 70s a
