After years of fighting for press freedom in my homeland, Zimbabwe, this opportunity is a wonderful gift. I now sleep better. I don’t have to worry about anybody scaling my wall and coming into my garden to spy on me, my telephone here is not bugged and I can talk freely to anyone. I have no fear that someone might be following me, or that they might come to arrest me again. I am aware, not only of an absence of fear, but of a sense of real freedom. It feels very good. I am grateful to the Stichting Vijplaats Tilburg, which has made this possible.
I can imagine how difficult it is for someone who has never lived under a repressive regime to understand what life was like for me in Zimbabwe. My government regarded me as its enemy.
After waiting for six months for my visa, I expected the immigration officials to be rather bureaucratic. But much to my surprise, the lady was most efficient – and made me feel very welcome in the Netherlands.
As the train rolled towards my new home in Tilburg, I felt surrounded by water. Although the train was moving away from the sea, there still seemed to be water everywhere - canals, ponds and lakes, boats of every description, even the sky looked like water. Zimbabwe is a dry land, the rainy season is only three months out of 12 and there is often drought. The earth is hard and brown. The sky is usually bright blue and without any trace of moisture.
Then I noticed the bicycles. Thousands of them, everywhere. Bicycles are a luxury in Zimbabwe. Even now, with the desperate shortages of petrol, they are not very common.
And then there were the shops – so many of them – stacked full of goods. Coming from a country plagued by shortages of all basic commodities – including bread, sugar, mealie meal, petrol, electricity, water, cash , I constantly have to remind myself that I don’t need to hoard anything. It will all still be there next week, and the week after that.
In Zimbabwe, if you happen to see anything you need – you buy as much as you possibly can afford to, because you never know when you will find it again. And if you do, it will be much more expensive as the inflation rate is above 400%. This has resulted in widespread hardships and abject poverty – more than 80% of the population lives below the poverty datum line.
The affluence that is apparent everywhere in this country makes a stark contrast. There are no street children here, begging for food and clothes. There are no people living, eating, sleeping, dying in the streets. And the streets are so clean! No piles of refuse anywhere, no stench of waste in the gutters.
But more than these surface differences, it is the atmosphere of freedom that I breathe here which refreshes me most.
All columns by Wilf Mbanga
| Wilf Mbanga, one of the founders of the independent Zimbabwean daily newspaper "The Daily News", is currently living in Tilburg, the Netherlands. He writes about the differences between Tilburg and Harare. His column is printed weekly in "Het Brabants Dagblad". |
