To succeed in life – what does it mean?

Tambudzai, a Zimbabwean woman approaching middle age, is desperate to fit into the social narrative of financial stability as a sign of ‘making it’. She has been given all the tools: high school education, university degree, marketing job in Harare, and yet we find her penniless, looking for a roof to put over her head.

The thing is Tambudzai feels she is always discriminated against. Her white peers have achieved incomparably more. Younger Zimbabwean beauties have it undeservedly easy. She mourns her wasted potential and dreams of ways to become wealthy.

It is easy not to feel sorry fo Tambudzai, however poor and lonely she is, because she does not possess a drop of compassion herself. She lives by the Zimbabwean proverb of not losing appetite over someone’s problems, and the distant, overanalysed way she builds relationships with other people hints there’s something strange about her. This suspicion gets confirmed when Tambudzai starts seeing ants crawling everywhere, hyenas laughing at her and in her head, and ends up hurting others and being committed to a mental hospital.

And yet, she is the perfect guide to show readers around Harare and to unobtrusively point out the many problems Zimbabweans learned to live with. The overall picture is anxious.

It looks like the only way to make it is be working for/with foreigners (or white people who are all doing quite well). In order to do that, you have to fir into the mould of those people’s perceptions of Zimbabweans. Which pushes Tambu (and others) into self-confict: do I want to live well or true? Both is not an option.

Unless… you redefine well, as her cousin Nyasha has done. Nyasha isn’t rich, even though she studied abroad and married a German, but looks accomplished teaching writing to young women back home. So does her aunt – a freedom fighter who didn’t have to abandon her beliefs to start a company providing security services. By example and with unconditional amount of care and support, Tambu starts to see a way past appetite and towards living.