guest column:Miriam Tose Majome I LEARNT much more about the richness of rural living and the people that live there than just the art and skill of riding in ox-drawn carts in the two years I spent as a teacher in rural Mutoko. My ox-drawn cart adventures were narrated in the previous article. One of the most important lessons was learning that there is no typical or standard rural person. The stereotype of a rural person is a poor, uneducated, uninformed, backward villager among many other negative adjectives used to describe them. However, in truth the real difference between people who live in urban areas and people who live in rural areas is their geographical location and addresses. The term rural people is in itself a misnomer. Rural people are just people who live and work in rural areas and are not all villagers as is commonly believed. The profiles of people who live in rural areas are the same as those people who live in urban areas. The only distinction is that there are no unemployed people in rural areas. Indeed there may be lazy unproductive people just like anywhere else, but in rural areas everybody works. Small-scale farmers, commonly known as peasant farmers, make up the majority of people who live in rural areas but they are by no means the standard of rural people and they are by no means unintelligent and backward merely because they live in villages. Many people who live in rural areas, in villages or not in villages, are educated and informed and are commercial farmers, pensioners, nurses, doctors, lawyers, engineers, administrators, businesspeople, politicians, teachers, among others. There was no electricity at the school I taught, but I had a small battery-powered radio as did the other teachers. That little radio whose fragments now lie in a landfill somewhere remains one of the best friends I have ever had. It was the only company I had in insomnia-ridden nights in my tiny room with spotty cracked walls undergoing slow termite destruction. The voices of familiar strangers from distant worlds which came from the radio kept me company night after night. Through the short wave dial, I learnt about what was happening in worlds far away far different from my own small world. It was in the late 1990s and I was as informed as anyone in town, who had a television and newspapers, about Slobodan Milosevic and his role in the Bosnian conflict, the dramatic death of Princess Diana and her boyfriend in a French tunnel, Bill Clinton’s sex scandal with the young White House intern called Monica Lewinsky, Laurent Kabila’s celebrated march into Kinshasa to topple Mobutu Seseseko. On chilly Tuesday nights, we teachers gathered around a fire toasting mhandire (pan-roasted maize) or mutetenerwa (groundnuts) listening to Chakafukidza Dzimba Matenga on the then Radio 2 and on Friday nights with youthful zest we danced to John Matinde’s Friday Night Grooves on the then Radio 3. We followed local and international current affairs and news as well as music and social trends. We were people living in rural areas bu
