Then one day, I happened to witness a white person, here in Zimbabwe, shout at a black woman in the street. I didn’t see what started it, and I still can’t think of any reason to justify it. Her vitriolic, hate-filled, racist outburst shocked me to my core. It was so terrible that I’m sure many people wouldn’t believe it if I repeated it. I remember opening my mouth, thinking I should say something. Help in some way. But then I looked around, and every single person – both black and white – just stood and stared as she continued. Finally she stormed off, got into her car, and drove away. The woman she’d been abusing shuffled off, the tears on her cheeks apparent for all of us to see. Still, we stood rooted to the spot. The way people do. Not wanting to get involved, no matter how wrong what we were witness to was.
Shock might have had something to do with it, but the incident never left my mind in the weeks that followed. I thought about the things I’d witnessed growing up in apartheid South Africa. Things that shouldn’t be happening any more. I asked myself how could it be, that in an independently ruled African nation, such abuse still took place. And why had we all just stood there staring, and said not a word? Then one day, quite a while later, I was sitting at my kitchen table, writing a shopping list. I got as far as toothpaste, and then African Me & Satellite TV took over. Right there under the toothpaste, out came the first sentences of the book. The incident in the street must have triggered so many memories of the small or huge hurts I’d seen so thoughtlessly inflicted during the course of my life, that it had stewed in my subconscious, until it suddenly popped up as a story that I just had to tell.
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