Political lessons from the village

We Africans are proud of our villages, our traditions and our heritage. And rightly so. We are the cradle of humanity, a culture dating back to the annals of time. Obviously, there is a lot of wisdom to be found in traditions as old as ours, and nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in old African proverbs, full of wit and wisdom which help us get through even the toughest of times.

But there is another area of our traditional ways that could give us guidance in these hard times: Agriculture. We all have ancestors who toiled the earth and were connected to nature in a way that is hard to grasp for today's city-dwellers. For example, it is well-known that the coldest part of the night, the part in which plants are the most vulnerable, is right before sunrise.

This makes sense, after all. It is the moment of the night when the sun has been gone for the longest time. But this is also a valuable lesson for us in Zimbabwe right now. The hard times we are facing right now are just the darkest, coldest moments of the night. And while we are vulnerable, and it may feel the cold will never end, in reality the sun will soon start to rise.

We can see that the government is laying the foundations for this metaphorical sunrise. They are reengaging, diplomats are flocking back to Harare after years of Mugabe's disastrous isolationism, and our senior ministers find time to draw up healthy policy, receive backing from the international community and tour the situation on the ground so they don't lose touch with the citizens. I haven't seen such an engaged and professional cabinet in a long time. Even national disasters like the Cholera outbreak were ultimately addressed well, and didn't knock the government off its reform agenda.

Now we have to stop to be overwhelmed by baseless panic-attacks and trust the wisdom of the old villagers. And they know that after every cold, dark night, the sun shall soon rise again.