I was amused by the above list, sent to me recently by a friend, of eleven memories you have if you grew up in Zim. It's a great list and I'm sure it could have been fifty pages longer, but it's a good start... Wait, well... that is, if you could afford it... What so many Zimbabweans able to access things like HIFA and Sam Levy's and this internet page so quickly forget is the fact that this broad blanketed "Zimbabwean childhood" actually only describes about five percent of the population, if that.
As I recently answered a classroom full of excitedly squirming kindergartners all raising their hands with questions about how people lived in Africa, it became very clear very fast that for every question there were two starkly different answers I could give. One involved what people with a lot of money lived like. Answers tended to describe people attempting to live as Westernized of lives as they could while "making do" with the challenges of living in Africa. And one answer involved what the povertous did to survive life with almost nothing.
I just moved to a "First World" country in which people talk constantly about the stark contrast between the wealthy and the middle class and the poor. Indeed, the differences do seem extreme... until we remember almost all of us still get to sleep on a bed at night. It puts our differences in stark contrast to those living in true poverty in other parts of the globe. The list above is fun, but even better? It reminds most of us about what we seem to forget so quickly... Wherever our childhoods, wow, we're lucky!
