Cry the beloved Bondesia

Before I even say anything else may I just mention that I am totally and utterly in love with the man who inspired the topic for this blog! That is quite a mouthful for one sentence.

But seriously, I am in love with him, in the figurative sense of course. Let me be a little bit more specific. I love how he writes. When I first read a novel by him, I was blown away. Don’t worry; it was really windy that day. It was love at first read. He was writing about a man I used to admire: Robert Mugabe. The book Our Votes Our Guns was a quite accurate account of the rule of Robert Mugabe.

Anyway back to the real issue. Martin Meredith. Ever heard of him? He is a journalist, who has travelled across Africa extensively. He kinda knows what he is talking about. Anyway, I read one of his books: The Fate of Africa. It has a lot of stories about African dictators who destroyed their countries and looted national coffers for their own benefit. My attention was drawn to Jean- Bèdel Bokassa, an African dictator in the 1970’s. Bokassa was one of those looneys, who thought that having a monarchy( with him as supreme king of course) in the French- colonised Central African Republic would establish it as a “cool” African country. The French had kinda developed the country, but he ran down the Central African Republic into the core of the earth. This got me thinking about Africans and their non-golden touch.

What would happen if the whole of France relocated to Bondesia (the fitting equivalent name for any African country), and the whole of the Bondesia moved to France? I hate to say this. All my African brothers forgive me, but the French would probably develop Bondesia into a First World country. And the Bondesians…

They would run down France so bad that Belgium, Switzerland and Germany would hurry to impose sanctions on them for violating the beauty of France. Even poor Napoleon would turn in his grave. The street light poles would be torn down and used to build chicken pens. Laundry would be hung on telephone wires. The vineyards would all be uprooted and replaced with cassava fields. There would be a civil war over who could control the Eiffel Tower. All the beautiful, cultured chateau gardens would be turned into grazing land, and donkeys would become the mode of transport in Marseille. Soon, all the Bondesians who want to live the good life would leave France and migrate to Bondesia in search of greener pastures. Worse, the French franc would fall 1 000 000 % in the first three-quarters. Nah…that’s an exaggeration, but it would lose value in some way. All the roads would be decorated with boreholes of potholes. Life would be most definitely nasty and brutish, but not short.

Thank goodness Bondesia is only a figment of my imagination, otherwise I would have been sued for every worthless Zim dollar I possess. But the attitude I have shown above is a typical stereotypical view of Africans: everything we touch seems to turn to mould; we will never develop; we are uneducated, primitive and don’t know what is going on. Well, we are not that bad. Although we have a tendency to mismanage affairs, we are the ones who give boring capitalist life a tint of humour. So, all of the Africa haters out there need to relax. My beautiful Africa is on the road to discovery and recovery.