Six young Zimbabwean children, virtually starving, spend their days on the streets stealing food to eat. Their own shanty town is called Paradise; their target is an upmarket area called Budapest, where they have an encounter with a British black woman: “I’m from London. This is my first time visiting my dad’s country.”
The most unsettling thing for these children is the fact that she throws away part of her doughnut (they can’t imagine ever throwing away food) – not their permanent hunger, not the pregnancy of 10-year-old Chipo by her grandfather, nor even, really, coming across a body hanging from a tree.
I have family members in Uganda, and I wonder, when visiting, how people there view white westerners – “Europeans”, as they call us. The children in this story are matter-of-fact about the actuality of their lives, juxtaposed with dreams of travelling, becoming rich, living in big houses. The overseas visitor from London is almost like an alien, incomprehensible. The children have “heard the stories” about exploitation in other countries. One child says, sagely, that he wouldn’t want to fly anywhere, in case he couldn’t get back. He would want to go to South Africa, so he could walk home if necessary.
Poignant, unsentimental, unsettling, this brilliant story now forms part of the beginning of Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names (Chatto and Windus, 2013), a book I must read.
First published in The Boston Review, November 2010, winner of the Caine Prize in 2011. You can find it here.
A Personal Anthology 