The woman who sold Zimbabwe

Published: 19 May 2018

The place is Durban.

The weather is curiously autumnal for a city that knows not winter. Not as we know it anyway.

A man with a clean shaven head and bright multi-coloured scarf beckons me excitedly. He wants to show me a woman with a rather curious task. Well, curious at cheap first glance.

The woman is tasked with selling her nation. Something she has been doing for a bit of a while. Close to half a year in fact.

"She will give you a good audience and tell you all you need. We are proud of her," he says.

But who would be proud of someone who sells their country? Is that not as Fifth Columnist? A traitor? Quisling? What pride is derived from peddling your own country to foreigners? What pride indeed?

The woman is a stern mature woman with discerning eyes. Dressed in an African design-style garment whose colour levitates to the eye climbing between atomic tangerine and several spittle of apricot. At the collars, it has varying leaf shaped tears from magenta, tea rose, melon to violet, forming a fabric embossed and indented necklace of sorts.

Her eyes brighten when she sees the man accompanying me in acknowledgement of his arrival, her face lighting up a bit to break into something.

It is not exactly a smile. But a radiant acknowledgement that could pass for the Mona Lisa smile. As if her face has suddenly been worked on by the brilliant Leonardo Da Vinci. But she is not Lisa Gherardini.

She too curiously wears that colourful scarf!

And unlike Ethel Rosenberg or Virginia Hill, she is not selling her country in a bad way. She is the chief diplomat for the tourism industry tasked to breathe life into a portfolio that had all but died under the previous administration, and she wears that smile because she has to warm hearts and minds and encourage people to start visiting Zimbabwe again.

The woman is none other than Tourism Minister Prisca Mupfumira.

The event is the African Travel Indaba. The man with the clean-shaven head is her chief diplomat in the parastatal circles Karikoga Kaseke. The man who alongside her has to boost tourist arrivals to the Jewel of Southern Africa, Zimbabwe. Why, the jewel of the universe even!

She is a tough as nails in her diplomacy. No woman pushover. She wants things done because every economy once in recession and troubled starts blossoming from the tourism industry.

"I want to make sure you come home to Zimbabwe and see that indeed we are open for business like we have been saying.

"We are saying we are different from the old order and want to see people trek back into the country and visit our beautiful lands," she says addressing international delegates and buyers later on that evening.

In the rooms where she entered, a brightness followed her not least because of her appealing apparel but because here truly is a diplomat who knows how to sell her country and keep the title deeds!

She interacts with a mother's warmth and negotiates with the painful strength of nails.

And it is that delicate and pretty balance that makes her a unique and inimitable minister of tourism for the great nation she represents.

Karikoga Kaseke smiles later on. After a turbulent relationship with his erstwhile minister, whom like Voldemort is never named anymore, he is comfortable with this woman of valour that treats him as the diplomat that he is and also doubling as a mother to him. Calmly bobbing her head from time to time to offer her advice to him and his team.

"Vese ava vana vangu" (these are all my children) she says pointing to Kaseke and his team as they nod in acknowledgement.

"You see?" Kaseke asks me much later on as we converse at the dying embers of the day; "I told you she was an amazing woman!"

And at a time when Zimbabwe is re-entering the Commonwealth of Nations as a non-rogue and non-pariah, it is people like this that the doctor ordered for curing Zimbabwe's curse of notoriety that had long dogged the nation's image.
- the herald

Tags: Mupfumira,