The Sunday News
Sibongile Ndiweni, Sunday Life Reporter
THE mad season is finally over!
Year in year out, many look forward for the festive season. A season that to many is a celebration, a time most take time to visit their rural homes.
Those in the diaspora take this time to showcase their new clothes and goods from their bases. Even our brothers and sisters working across the Limpopo will be making so many claims that it would seem like they reside in a separate time zone.
Battles and family gatherings will be the order of the day. It will be a battle of accents, as people compete to show their ‘foreign’ side. This is a season also characterised by grandparents arguing with their grandchildren about how snobby they have become and how things have changed since they were young.
Christmas spirit, the time of year that everyone looks forward to as they celebrate and forget all the essential sufferings of the world.
One could clearly mark the beginning of the festive season by the flocking in of Injiva driving their cars with foreign number plates and showing that it had been that time of the year again.
A man in a festive mood holds up loaves of bread at the construction site of Nyabane Clinic in Bulilima District (Picture by Nkosizile Ndlovu)
Like every other year. For most of the people from the diaspora, all roads led to the rural areas as it was yet another opportunity for them to showcase what they had achieved in the year 2022 and also to be seen that they had landed all the way from their foreign bases.
From helping in the fields, drinking the traditional brews to teaching the older generations a bit about technology helped in compiling their album of memories which they would show to their peers back in the diaspora.
It’s the looks and confidence from the faces of the ‘foreigners’ when they were rocking their best labeled outfits which they believe people in the rural areas do not afford as they made their ways to the growth points to be seen that they had returned from the foreign land
In reality, the idea of going to the rural areas is a way to filter out the urban influence and try to return the essence of being a true African. But well, for most people in Zimbabwe, this idea of going to the rural areas to embrace the African in them is being eroded by the modern life they adjust to in the urban cities.
The volume of traffic has increased at the Beitbridge Border Post as travellers from South Africa troop in for the festive holidays. The picture shows a long queue of buses and cars arriving at the border recently.
In an interview with Sunday Life, historian and culturalist, Pathisa Nyathi said in the urban cities, the cultural melting point is high as these communities are made up of different people with different traditions and beliefs unlike in the rural areas where communities are one and are made up of people with the same culture and the same understanding of their traditional values.
“The African culture is being eroded. It’s like the change factors are stronger in urban areas where people with different cultural backgrounds are interacting. These factors come in the form of intercultural coexistence, urbanisation, western education, and Christianity.
In a rural area a community which shares a common culture is more homogenous, in comparison to heterogeneous society in urban areas, which brings out the cultural melting points”, he said.
Mr Nyathi said it is important for the people of Zimbabwe to value the importance of keeping and embracing their African culture.
“It is important to be culturally rooted, as it enhances people’s self-esteem and boosts their egos. Such that people who understand where they culturally belong, will know where they are going. African culture is a source of pride and leads to a motivated people who are committed to the various tasks at hand”, he said.
