My old friend, what are you looking for?

After years abroad you have come back

with images you’ve nourished

under foreign skies

far from your own country - Giorgos Seferis, Return Of The Exile.

As my plan to return to Zimbabwe, a country I had not seen for nearly two decades, drew closer to realisation, I found myself reflecting on these words. I do not consider myself a huge fan of poetry, but they articulated my apprehension about what I would find in the land of my birth. It was very hard for me to think that I was going home, or even to what was once home. As in Return Of The Exile, I could see myself asking those who had remained behind about the places I knew. These places were my home. I lived there. I had carried them with me that cold winter’s evening at Harare International Airport when I boarded a flight for London.

For this reason, I saw my imminent journey back to Zimbabwe not as a homecoming, but a scouting mission, a quest to find those places that I knew and called home. I wanted to find the boy in this picture, standing alongside his father and younger brother. This picture was taken in 1980, the year that Zimbabwe came into being, the year where my earliest memories begin. My younger brother lives abroad too, and my father passed on. Yet, they are still there, in those spaces that I will seek out when I land at Harare International Airport.

Daddy will buy us Lyons Maid vanilla ice-creams in paper cups, and explain to other adults that we were not twins; in fact we are a good two years apart. We would go to the library near Rotten Row, and later the museum where a huge vundu fish sulked in its aquarium. I am sure that giant fish is still there. Unlike everything else from that time, I have not heard or seen somewhere on the internet that it has emigrated or died.