Two Zimbabweans

This happened a couple of weeks ago and I forget to mention it. At work I was stuck with this annoying guy. He wasn’t annoying in a really bad way, but I wasn’t looking forward to working with him for another day. He had that inane chatty thing going on and after a while the desire to shout “oh, shut the fuck up!” was overwhelming. And it wasn’t me being in a bad mood or anything – I’d been having a really interesting chat with this Pakistani kid about all manner of stuff – this guy was just a jerk. Towards the end of the day it emerged that he was from Zimbabwe so in an attempt to maybe have an interesting conversation I brought up the subject of Robert Mugabe. Bad move. He starts ranting about how all the Zimbabwean exiles and asylum seekers are “fakers” who are “lying”. However, he offers no proof (or if he does it’s garbled with incoherence) and a prejudice is settling in my mind. You see, I don’t really have a strongly held opinion about Zimbabwe. I know the situation there is pretty fucked and that Mugabe is if not a bad man then certainly a certifiable nut-job, but in my limited experience of African politics these things are much more complicated than they first appear with many historical post-colonial factors and so on. However, what this jerk didn’t know is that a while back I was working with another Zimbabwean who was in exile enjoying asylum in this country. Only this guy was not a jerk. We talked about stuff including his strong desire to “go home” at some point and when the job finished we went to the pub.

So, based on this limited experience I’m falling in with the opposition. I know this is somewhat glib decision on what for some people is a very important issue, but this guy was such a toss-bag, y’know?