A Walk At Dusk

In the dusk of an unusually warm July evening, I go out walking. It is a long time since I last did so.  I usually take the dog to Hillside Dams, but sometimes it is nice to walk around your home area and get a feel for the place you live in. 

Hillside in Bulawayo was always known as the 'posh' part of town, although today people will tell you Burnside is.  Years of economic decline have taken its toll on the area, though its past grandeur is still evident from time to time.  Sometimes I pass huge plots with tennis courts and swimming pools and jungle gyms and swings, where nannies in smart uniforms sit with toddlers on lush green grass and fierce dogs growl and bark behind high fences and closed gates with notices give warning of alarmed premises and armed response units ready to be deployed. Enormous houses tower out of rocky outcrops, surrounded by jacarandas and eucalyptus trees, while fountains of multi-coloured bougainvillea spill over six-foot walls lined with razor wire and through electric fences that zing softly in the dying light.

Joggers panting softly as they approach the finishing stretch pass me by, as do serious walkers in lycra leggings and long T-shirts, carrying water bottles.  Domestic workers chatter noisily as they begin the long walk to the main road in search of transport to take them home.  Through a break in fences, we spot satellite dishes, solar geysers and generators.  Garden sprays, which have ticked gently all afternoon, come to a stop and gardeners wind hosepipes in.  Gates open round shiny, rugged four-wheel drive vehicles from which children alight with school bags, cricket bats, tennis racquets.

But there is another side: some plots are vacant, brown, and dry.  Tumbledown houses overlook empty swimming pools.  Old post boxes, paint peeling, lean apathetically in at the gate.  Dusty driveways lead to ramshackle houses whose aged entertainment areas with cracked paving stones give out onto yellowed grass and sandy outcrops where nothing grows.  The skeletons of flower beds may still be discerned as are the once-ambitious desires of long-gone owners for middle-class respectability. A straggle of bauhinias along the fence that leans, not so much with the weight of the trees, but with the weight of the years.

A dog yaps, a child looks shyly round the carcass of a rotting car, a mother shakes nappies from a bucket and pegs them to a collapsing washing line.  The tennis courts have long been dug up, some optimistically ploughed into vegetable patches where clumps of chermolia are the only signs of green. Ragged squares of asphalt are the only remains of the dreams of the past.

In the 1950s and 60s, when Bulawayo's Eastern suburbs were being developed, the idea was to buy a big plot of land on which to construct a house and install a swimming pool and tennis court. For the wave of new, mainly British immigrants, after the War, this was the dream they had been sold. Sunshine, blue skies and space. Seventy years later, these huge properties are considerably more difficult to maintain today than they were back then, when having a large team of staff was affordable.  A failing municipal service, regular power and water cuts and a broken economy mean that regular maintenance is costly and unreliable.

Many of these huge plots are being turned into what is locally referred to as 'cluster housing'.  This is how it works: a big plot, usually with a dilapidated house, is purchased, probably from an owner who has left the country or who cannot keep up with the maintenance and is quite happy to get it off their hands.  The house is then knocked down, the land cleared and roughly 6-15 houses built on it.  Despite the fact that each house looks exactly the same and there is either no garden at all, or perhaps a small, shared garden, these kinds of houses are becoming increasingly sought after, mainly because they are small, compact and secure.

They are not without their problems, however.  Often, they are shoddily built and without much thought for the person who is to live in them.  Windows look out onto concrete slabs and walls; privacy is at a minimum.  Municipal services have failed to keep up with the sudden increase in people living in a certain area due to poor planning and unscrupulous landowners who do what they can to bypass the law.

It is another sign of how our country is changing, and another way in which we are starting to live behind walls.  Security has become increasingly important in Zimbabwe and the idea of a place with a security guard manning the entrance is attractive to many.  

But not me.  As I come back home, I am grateful for the garden turning russet red and brown in the winter evening.  I am grateful for space and for the fact that there isn't someone living a metre away from me.  But I am also aware that this paradise might not last forever.