Zimbabwean writer on the wealth gap, ghosts and donkeys

[BBC]

Zimbabwe has been in the grip of a spectacular heatwave, which has had the bell-shaped jacaranda blooms on Harare's expansive avenues wilting and popping on the burning tarmac in the more than 30C heat.

After a long absence, I took a road trip from neighbouring South Africa and found Zimbabwe not as broken as it once seemed.

But, of course, I am not an impartial observer in search of news - the single malt tastes better in the dust of my townships and my thoughts are as far removed from dead dictators as it is possible for them to be, despite the clamouring newspaper fliers displaying the bloodied body of a departed colonel on every street corner.

But sooner or later the conversations turn to politics and it is common now, as we look at the fallen dictators of 2011, to discuss the fate of those rulers who have passed more than two decades at the helm - Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Angola's Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, Cameroon's Paul Biya and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe - even though the Arab Spring is so very far away from us.

BBC