Limpopo | Praise Song for Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Tsitsi Jaji (bio) Limpopo Tsitsi Jaji, 2014 what a croc. This riveris the crooked line betweenrand/dollar. Neither is ours.We cannot even afford our own money. This river has caughtthe national disease, hunger.This river playsthe national pastime, hunger, like a champion.This river wears ournational dress, hunger, like a string of hip-beads.This river teems withcrocodiles. We cannot afford to house them in a parkthese days. So they are just swimming in the Wild Wild. To bury your Ambuyasend one thousand usasto the morgue for the releaseof the body. Eeh. This has broken our hearts.It has cracked up our sincerity. It has made ustraitors. We had rather live far, far fromthe extortionism of health ministry, the indefinite suspension ofpower, the reliable humiliation of hunger, our national philosophy. O, to cross that river, that beautiful, that beautiful river. [End Page 53] I imagined once there were njuzu swimming in the Limpopo,water spirits to charm but yes truly, to charm.I imagined they were the magical traces of spirit worlds I could graft myself into—they sounded more beautiful and more serious than the revelations of Rev.Bitchington et al. I imagined that those njuzu might choose a favorite—naturally,me— and that I might survive with my morals in tact. I might wander, lustily. O the river has crossed us.It has done what it was always doing:it has flowed.It has flowed over us.It has flooded itself with the saliva of crocodiles.It has gone crimson with the blood of a missing limb.It has eaten us. Ah, border of our national philosophy, hunger. Look at you.You are just eating money, sitting there, dazzling in sunlight, confounding thetravellers in muddy swirls. You are seated, eating us,eating our son, the one we ground dovi for so he could sell peanut-butter sandwiches and raise bus fare,eating our daughter who did not tell us she was pregnant, nor by whom,eating our old science teacher who can no longer afford transport to school. O river, o mighty Limpopo, your hunger is greater. Your borders are more absolute. Your demands are more ravenous.O Limpopo Seventeen, what we have fished this week has taken our bellies andfilled them with mud . . . we are full of the silted earth of your last national steps.Did you not know how to swim? Eeh. Did it not help? Going kuSouth to scrape by in the land of ExDorado,crossing this river with nothing noble in mind, no moral edge, no ideological vision, no song,crossing the border in the utter banality of hunger,here, among the crocodiles, we are with our own. [End Page 54] We are ravenous mouths.We are skins hardened into allegory.We are ones who steal the pronouns of others. I am not crossing the Limpopo. I am reading a headline: “15 Zimbabweans drownin Limpopo River”. I am reading the total this week now comes to 17. I am reading this as a Zimbabwean. I am not coming back across this river. If I come, Iwill fly, I will land in a plane and feel embarrassed by the squat tower designed byhis excellency’s nephew, the lion. I will remember some story about monthlyblood transfusions in LookEast holding aids at bay for the vips. I will notice that there is no water in the ladies toilets. I will be cheerful. I will not know any of those 17 people who crossed the border at the Limpopo andstopped halfway. I will spend a week, or two, or a few more, interrupting aperfectly good game of national hunger with a few overly casual usas, surrogatesfor true care. Surrogates for knowing who you hunger with. Surrogates for properniece feelings . . . I no longer know how to find my own children, my aunts left tome. Ah, we did not have to cross the Limpopo to have severed limb from limb. You want to know what they call a coloured in Shona? Muzukuru, the child ofyour sister...