Yet I have a trick Of the old rage. Bear with me, I am sick; I’ll leave it by degrees. Soft, let us see: Write ‘Lord have mercy on us’ on those three. They are infected; in their hearts it lies; They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes. These lords are visited; […]

A Plague on all your houses

• A Government That Cannot Follow Its Own Plan Has No Business Enforcing OneSeptember 5, 2026
  Zimbabwe has a problem with informal work. It also has a problem with pretending that its policies are solutions. This year, the government adopted the National Informal Economy Formalisation Strategy. The strategy recognizes what successive governments have often preferred to ignore: Informal work is not a temporary nuisance or an obstacle to urban order. It is a central part of Zimbabwe’s economy. The strategy calls …
• When the Sky Breaks Twice in Three YearsSeptember 5, 2026
  The soil has not yet forgiven the heat of 2024. In the dry lands of Buhera and the low-slung valleys of Matabeleland, the earth remembers how the maize stalks curled and browned before the cobs could form. It remembers the dust storms that stripped the topsoil away, and the cattle that dropped dead beside empty boreholes. That disaster was supposed to be the exception. Now …
• Tendai Ruben Mbofana is Confusing Etymology for IdeologySeptember 3, 2026
  Every language has a graveyard of words that used to mean something specific and now mean whatever the room decides they mean. My dear mentor Tendai has just built an entire column on the false idea that words are haunted forever by wherever they were born, and that failing to research a phrase’s family tree before you say it is some kind of moral failure. …