Summary
Oracle of the Povo
Her vision's scrubland
Of out-of-work heroes
Who yesterday a country won
And today poverty tasted
And some to the hills hurried their thirst
and others to arson and blasphemy
Waving down tourists and buses
Unleashing havoc no tongue can tell –
Her vision's Droughtstricken acres
Of lean harried squatters
And fat pompous overlords
Touching to torch the makeshift shelters
Heading to magistrate and village court
The most vulnerable and hungry of citizens –
Her vision's Drought Relief graintrucks
Vanished into thin air between departure point
And expectant destination –
In despair, she is found in beerhalls
And shebeens, by the roadside
And in brothels: selling the last
Bits and pieces of her soured vision.
I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I have read this poem, but every time I do I am more touched by its beauty, amazed how in one long breath, in a rhythm carried forward by sounds exquisitely placed and paced, in images astounding and yet lucid, the poem encapsulates the malaise at the core of the newly independent country.
I cannot say much about the life Dambudzo was leading before I met him. I once heard that the ‘German commune’, young people sharing a house in Alexandra Park, had given him shelter but, as was usually the case, once he had emptied the fridge of all things to eat and drink without replacing them, had chucked him out. He then slept on their ping-pong table in the garden.
The park-bench diary is the best record of his life then, in his own words, in that typical mixture of deep insight, scorn and self-mockery.
I had nowhere but the streets and skidrow in which to sleep – for all the days that would come, I had not rejected the notion of human brotherhood; I could not accommodate its materialist ends. Now and then I would meet someone who would give me a floor and I would sleep easy in a snug sleeping bag. Come morning, with her six o’clock alarm rasping my dream apart, I would find the hazards of the street terrifyingly waiting for me with open arms. But first: food.
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- They Called You DambudzoA Memoir, pp. 55 - 57Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022