Average Joe's Blog

I was not a model pupil at school. No, I wasn’t. Even the very idea that I could do anything exemplary during my years at Mangwana Primary or later at Vuravhi Secondary School was at the very least ludicrous. Granted, I was n either your archetype of the opprobrious pupil w ho bull ied f ellow students ; nor w as I a right nuisance for the authorities. You could say I secretly waged my wars from somewhere near the oblivion of furthest corner of the back benches where the teacher never bothered to look when looking for answers to his questions; because he knew no hand would venture from there, except if someone wanted to leave class for the loo. I was not one to strive for those extra, goody two-shoes things that children who ended up being prefects did; when the teachers were looking the other way. I actually stuck my nose at such sacrilege. Take bathing, for instance. I hated it. I think there was time when even my own mother grew tired of having to chase me into the b

"Admittedly, Zimbabwe had some world class players back then, with Andy Flower at one time being ranked as the leading Test batsman in the world, and Streak was constantly ranked among the top bowlers in the world. "But did the team produce the kind of result that represent greatness, or their success has been a myth that should be embraced and celebrated without being tested? Well; what do the results tell us, because in sport its all about the end product, the result?" That is our Godfather,  The Herald sports editor,  Robson   Robson Sharuko 's anaylsis of our cricket before everything went tits up into Krakatoa and Versuvius in 2003. I don't know why, but I'm reminded of the good Dr, Alex Magaisa's theory of equalisation in politics, where one party wants to paper over its cracks by the lame excuse that the other party is just as bad.  In other circles, the call it Whataboutism. Sharuko's dispiriting analysis of our team was precip

Why the fuck were we fighting again? I don't know. I do not have any fucking idea why. And that, honest to God, is the truth. You may have asked me the question yesterday. You may ask me today. You may ask me tomorrow, the day after or the year after. My answer will remain the same – I don’t know. I really do not know. We just did it. Maybe it was just written somewhere in the stars that we had to exchange blows and pretty much every dangerous weapon we could get our hands on every time we met as two gangs in the grazing lands. I don’t know why we always engaged in our own mini-version of the Waterloo Battle – only our battles were sporadic and never seemed to come to an undisputed conclusion – whenever we met while looking after our cattle at the pastures. All I knew was, there was a this village that shared our border due South, and for some reason every young male offspring from this village was an enemy whose life we were supposed to make a living hell whenever w