Zimbabwean names often reflect the mood or reaction of a family to the arrival of the new member. At a rural mission school in Matabeleland I taught Blessing, Immaculate, Charity and Unique Faith. But Penniless Ngwenya was the best and brightest of my students, the one most likely to graduate from university and lead her family from the teeming townships of Bulawayo to the relative comforts of a middle-class suburb.
I once played the Billy Joel song, 'River of Dreams', to my senior students. It seemed to capture all of the hopes, doubts and anxiety of a generation determined to take advantage of their window of opportunity. After all, barely a decade ago, Zimbabwe was flying.
Sure, thanks in part to the IMF's Structural Adjustment Program, there was a mounting debt problem, and Robert Mugabe seemed welded to his presidential palace, even then. But, superficially at least, there were numerous positive signs.
The state-run press media had lost its monopoly, and independent newspapers, particularly the Daily Mail, were thriving. With tremendous natural assets like Victoria Falls and Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe had become a tourist mecca. It was safe and had infrastructure the envy of the rest of the continent.
Investment dollars were pouring in and a stock exchange had opened. Optimism that, in tandem with the newly liberated 'rainbow nation' to the south, Zimbabwe could drive development for southern Africa, seemed justified.
Penniless achieved a strong A-Level score and was offered a place in the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. It wasn't what she wanted, but a passport to a better life nevertheless. Penny wrote to me before going to university and included a poem she had composed in her second year of high school. The final verse:
Lonely, desperate, hungry,
Angry and in sorrow
Hoping for a better tomorrow
The poor man's daughter
She clutches her sack of books
Makes her way to the classroom
There, it all disappears
The loneliness, desperation, hunger and anger
The wise words are uttered
Her troubled mind is dismissed
With it all the poor man's daughter will be as good as any.
For me, the saddest aspect of Zimbabwe's disintegration is the shattered aspirations of Zimbabwe's youth, for whom the 'valley of fear' must seem endless, the 'jungle of doubt' impenetrable. There are few jobs waiting for them, even if they do graduate. In the age of hyperinflation many of those who have jobs find that the