KINSHASA, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, was looted and many people looked to the equatorial forests and village fields for survival. Zambia’s inability to afford to subsidise mealie meal led to democracy.
Zimbabwe, one country closer, at one point during its slide down to the present, had to obey international debt-relief conditions and trim its civil service in the early 1990s.
How did households cope?
I heard the answer in the Kalahari Desert, in the back of a bakkie that picked up paying passengers, travelling west across Botswana, between Zimbabwe and Namibia.
“I thank God for my wife,” a Zimbabwean passenger said of his companion. “She knows how to travel to places and to sell things for forex, then buy things that are short in Zimbabwe and bring them back home to sell.”
The merchandise she was taking to sell on the streets of Windhoek consisted of cotton doilies, which she could carry on crocheting while on the road.
Over time, the doily trade picked up, so much so that the female traders caused congestion at Beit Bridge border post on their way to pavements, flea markets and residential areas where they went door-to-door all over South Africa, from Pietermaritzburg to Queenstown; Nelspruit to George.
Then someone came up with a brainwave: run a train that starts on the northern bank of the Limpopo and send immigration officials on board to stamp passports while it’s rolling. And while they’re about it, end the journey at Johannesburg’s Park Station.
It officially became known as The Doily.
I combined family business in Bulawayo, joining my recently widowed grandfather-in-law for a weekend game of bowls, with the experience of the doily supply chain.
It began at a wholesaler in Zimbabwe’s second city where “doily mamas” queued to buy bales of locally grown and processed cotton. Then it was a three-hour minibus ride (now, six hours, I am told) to the border.
Once on board The Doily, we all placed ourselves on benches offered in Third Class. As the iron horse started to roll, so the passport stampers went down the rows. First the Zimbabweans who were finished by the time the train reached Musina. Then the South Africans.
Outside the sun set over the vast tracts of mopane woodland.
Doily mama after doily mama told me of how their husbands had lost their jobs due to Esap, the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme.
Crocheting away, they spoke of how they missed home but how important it was to be cross-border traders to put meals on their tables and to keep their children in school.
“We miss not eating cooked food and sleeping uncomfortably,” they said.
They chatted a lot among themselves.
It was dark by the time The Doily slid into the station at Makhado (formerly Louis Trichardt), coming to a halt beside another train.
The modest volume of the doily mamas’ evening chatting turned to excited shrieks.
“Ee-ee-ee-ee.”
Our third-class carriage looked straight into the dining car of one belonging to the luxury tourism company, Rovos Rail.
For a few minutes people from two worlds stared at one another.
A metre away from us, figuratively separated by extreme ends of a Gini co-efficient and literally by a metre and two sets of glass panes, sat a lone man at a table on which a rose stood upright in a cut-glass vase. He looked glum. Not happy. Maybe lonely, things the doily mamas were not suffering on their hard seats.
The lights stayed on all night. Many lay down on the floor to catch some sleep.
Until Polokwane.
“There are so many tsotsis here,” the women explained, stressing that it was important for them all to be close together in a carriage rather than in small numbers.
While Esap had brought an end to many state jobs, it had also impacted on the market that supported private sector jobs. Among the doily mamas were former shop tellers, domestic workers.
From Johannesburg they fanned out to selling destinations throughout South Africa, only to once again regroup with freight in the form of anything and everything people back home had ordered: wall clocks, instant coffee, cooking oil, blankets, baby clothes…
They did not only have to survive Polokwane’s tsotsis on the home-run. More were at taxi ranks in areas like Harare’s high-density area of Chitungwiza.
“They want the things that we bring back. Also our rands,” they said.
The Doily train was a feature of Zimbabwe when things were better than they are now.
South Africa hasn’t yet had an equivalent of Esap imposed on it, but if it does, South Africans will no doubt end up having to be as enterprising as the doily mamas.
In the absence of an industrialised neighbour, their innovations would have to be different.
The Independent on Saturday