“Almost doesn’t fill a bowl.” That’s what I expected Baba to say to me once he found out the truth. Either that or “Second place is the first loser.” His favorite sayings crossed my mind as the plane touched down in Bulawayo. The last time he’d said the words out loud to me was six years ago. I was twelve, and we were playing tsoro yematatu. Before I could make my winning move, Baba made a calculated one. I threw my hands up. I had almost won. “Almost doesn’t fill a bowl,” he said, taking away the six pieces from the board. You don’t get partial credit for failure.
Baba had hand-carved the board when he was a little boy. It was his most prized possession. The board was a triangle with a cross carved inside it. This gave us seven possible points to put our pieces. There were six pieces in total, and winning the game meant placing them three-in-a-row. “Rematch?” said Baba, a childlike joy in his eyes. “What color pieces do you want this time?” But I pushed back against playing this stupid village game all the time. I told him that I would be better off playing a more sophisticated board game like chess, not this African thing. Baba reminded me that there was plenty you could learn from this African thing. That tsoro yematatu was a game of strategy and mathematics, and that I needed to think fast, figure out the probability that my opponent would make a certain move and block it beforehand. “I can do that with chess,” I said, folding my arms. “What if people at school find out I play this village game? Everyone will laugh at me.”
I never played tsoro yematatu again after that.
I shook the memory away as we walked down the stairs of the South African Airlines plane and onto the tarmac of Joshua Nkomo International Airport.
“I’m so excited,” Chad said into his iPhone camera.
He was making a video for his YouTube channel. It had over 50,000 subscribers so far, and his end-of-the-year goal was to reach a million viewers. He told his viewers that this was his first time in Africa, drawing out the continent’s name as if it were some wild creature, a new species just waiting to be tamed and domesticated.
When he’d first introduced himself as Chad during an Orientation Week icebreaker at Cornell, I’d remarked, “Chad? Like the country?” He and everyone else in the group had stared at me blankly.
I was still bitter that Chad had gotten a majority of the votes to be president of the International Students Union, a position I had campaigned for for nearly a year. Chad wasn’t even an international student, but his blond hair and hip charm had won over everyone. Second place is the first loser.
“I’m out here with my friend from college, Dineo,” Chad said. “Say hi to everyone, Dinny!”
Chad shoved the camera in my face and I flashed some teeth. I hoped he wasn’t going to have that camera on all the time. I could imagine the horror on my father’s face at being recorded.
Chad rambled on about how we’d flown from the resort town of Victoria Falls to my hometown, Bulawayo. He ran his fingers through his blond hair and took a deep breath. “Even the air smells fresher here,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. Airport air was definitely not fresher, but I let Chad enjoy being an American tourist.
Baba picked us up in his white Isuzu. He seemed older, weighed down. I knew things in the country were getting worse. Inflation kept rising and rising, and there were projections that soon we’d be resorting to barter and trade as currency. Being away from home for a year, I hadn’t noticed this change in Baba through our WhatsApp video calls. He’d been cheerful as always when we chatted.
“Welcome to the City of Kings,” Baba said to Chad.
Chad thanked my father for hosting. “I’ve always wanted to visit Africa,” Chad said. “How do you say ‘thank you’ in the local language?”
His camera was pointed outside the car window. There was nothing fascinating on the road from the airport into town, but Chad stared wide-eyed and repeated the words “so cool” several times. Baba and I exchanged a look.
“It’s ‘ngiyabonga,’” Baba said. I didn’t detect any annoyance in his voice. My father was too well-mannered to ever be rude to a guest. “So how was your first year at Cornell?”
“Ni–gee–bonga,” Chad said, butchering the word. He told Baba about how he had chosen to live in the international students dorm because he wanted to “widen his horizons” and that’s how he had met me and other “diverse people.”
“Dineo, you told me you were campaigning to be president of the International Students Union. How did that go?” Baba asked.
“I’m president,” Chad blurted out before quickly adding, “but Dineo worked so hard that I made her Diversity Chair.”
Baba didn’t respond. Over the silence I could almost hear him say, second place is the first loser.
Our car approached the robots. Where there should have been a red, amber, or green light was completely black. During the power cuts, the robots stopped working.
Chad watched fascinated, leaning forward from the backseat to see everything up ahead. He asked, how does traffic stay orderly without working traffic lights?
“Traffic lights? You mean the robots?” Baba said. “Those haven’t been working for a while. I’ve even forgotten what their purpose is.”
“Zimbabweans call traffic lights robots,” Chad said into the camera. “That’s so cute.”
I wanted the leather seats to swallow me whole.
“It’s amazing that all the cars aren’t hitting each other,” Chad said.
“Same logic as an all-way stop,” Baba said patiently. “We give each other turns depending on who arrived at the intersection first.”
We’d just passed the dead robots safely when suddenly the Isuzu’s engine coughed and the car slowed to a stop. We all got out and stood by the front bumper. When Baba opened the hood, smoke plumed out. It made my eyes tear up, and Chad coughed until he was red in the face. Baba grumbled about how he should have taken the hunk of metal to a garage but their prices kept rising.
Great, this is just what I needed, I thought, Chad recording “a car breakdown in Africa” for all his new followers to see.
“Should we call a taxi?” Chad said. He was capturing the smoke coming out of the car like it was a rare butterfly he just spotted.
“Sure sure. I will call an African taxi,” Baba said, chuckling. “Get your bags out of the car, kids.”
I wanted to die when Baba began hailing cars that were going in our direction. I wanted to sink into the ground with embarrassment. Everything I loathed about this place was on full display for the whole world to see.
“We’re hitchhiking?” Chad said, uncertainly. “Is that . . . you know . . . safe?”
“It’s not hitchhiking,” Baba said. “It’s a lift.”
“A what?” Chad said.
“We call it a lift or a private car,” Baba said.
My father explained how our transportation system was unreliable, especially with this inflation going on. Chad nodded in fascination as Baba described how people just hailed a car and someone going in the same direction would pick them up and drop them off for a small tip as a thank-you.
“I’ve used my car as a lift sometimes too,” Baba said.
“So it’s kind of an informal community ride-sharing service?” Chad said. He put his camera down for the first time since we’d landed. He scratched his chin, deep in thought. This was the thoughtful Chad I saw in classes at Cornell. The Chad who could tackle a problem set by just staring it down.
“When you get into a stranger’s car, though,” he said, “aren’t you afraid of, like, serial killers?”
“There are no serial killers here,” Baba said. “Unless you count the government.” Baba laughed out loud at his own joke.
A Honda Fit stopped in front of us. A friendly old man was behind the wheel and waved at us. We loaded our luggage into the boot and squeezed into the small car. Chad took out his camera again.
“This is called a lift,” he said into the camera. “It’s a Zimbabwean ride-share.”
Chad wouldn’t shut up about lifts all the next day. I didn’t know why he was so fascinated by them. It was embarrassing that my town’s transportation system was so unreliable that we had to catch a lift everywhere most of the time. Yet Chad seemed to think it was some bright idea. He rambled on about it at dinner.
“That was so cool!” Chad said. “I still can’t believe what a brilliant idea it is. This could revolutionize the transport industry.”
“It would be nice if we had a subway,” I said, throwing a ball of sadza into my mouth. “Then we wouldn’t have to rely on strangers to get around.”
“Come on, think about it, Dinny,” Chad said. His eyes were bright. “This could be the Amazon of driving. Lifts let drivers leverage all the unused inventory that they’re carrying in their cars.”
“And what’s this unused inventory?” I said, stifling a yawn. My okra stew was more interesting than this conversation.
“Empty seats!” Chad said. “Think about it, Dinny! Zimbabwe is sitting on the biggest transportation innovation of our time!”
“Your words are falling on closed ears,” Baba said. “Dineo will never see all that her country has to offer.”
“There is no innovation here,” I said. “Just corruption, inflation, and misery.”
Chad sighed and shook his head. He looked at me as if I were lost. It was the look Baba gave me regularly. After dinner Chad continued to ask a million questions about the logistics of lifts as we sat in the living room. The boy was obsessed.
So are there lifts in every city in this country?
Do the majority of Zimbabweans trust lift drivers?
Has anyone tried to formalize the service? You know, like, turn it into a company?
I laughed sharply, almost choking on my own spit. I concluded that the African heat had turned Chad’s brain to marshmallow for him to think that lifts were even an idea worth turning into a company.
Chad rambled on about the idea until I resorted to bringing up his YouTube channel to get him to talk about something else.
“I finished editing the vlog of us in Victoria Falls,” he said, opening his laptop. “I’m going to upload it tonight. Want to see?”
Baba and I huddled behind Chad and peered at the video on his screen.
Chad signs the book at the Visitor Center and high-fives a local guide, a man three times his age. He points at a map of the gorges and traces the trail to the falls. Sometimes my shadow can be seen hovering at the bottom of the frame, but I mostly avoid the camera. The video is captioned MY SUMMER TRIP TO AFRICA: VICTORIA FALLS, ZIMBABWE, JUNE 2005.
Chad is in khaki shorts, sunglasses, and a safari hat, with a backpack strapped to his back. In his fresh tan, he is the image of zeal and youth. The hike through the rainforest plays at two times speed with a jingle in the background until Chad sees a rainbow peeking through the trees, creating pockets of light amongst the greenery.
“Whoa,” he says, pointing. “We’re here!”
The water gushes down the cliff with a roar. The cascade is relentless—as if the water is angry, as if a deluge isn’t enough, as if it needs to tear through the land until everything is eroded. Chad’s shirt is soaked by the spray. He brings his hands to his ears to muffle the sound of the torrent.
“To all the Cornellians watching,” Chad screams. “This is the largest waterfall in the world.”
The waterfall is so loud his voice is drowned out. Subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen.
“We may say Ithaca is gorges but this—” he says.
We walk down a bridge that arches over the gorge at two times speed again, fast-forwarding to the moment when Chad bungee-jumps down the gorge. His hands are outstretched like wings. I can almost feel the wind between his fingers. He is so confident that the rope will not snap, that everything always turns out okay.
After the bungee jump, we stand near David Livingstone’s statue. The statue overlooks the falls. It has loomed over the falls for more than half a century. David Livingstone leans against a walking stick with a hand on his hip. Chad is dressed just like Livingstone.
“This is the explorer who discovered these falls.” Chad says, and reads from the plaque.
He bows in appreciation before the statue.
Baba cleared his throat when the video ended. He was frowning. Chad looked at us expectantly.
“Dineo,” Baba said. “Why didn’t you tell our guest that David Livingstone didn’t discover the falls?”
The shame that overcame me was like heartburn. The disappointed look in Baba’s eyes stung. Baba was going to go into a long lecture about history again. My eyes went to the door. If I said I was still tired from the flight, maybe I could go to bed early to avoid being chewed out.
“What do you mean?” Chad asked.
“The Tonga people were already living in that area long before David Livingstone arrived,” Baba said. “So how can David Livingstone have discovered the falls when people lived there?”
“I never considered that,” Chad said. Color rose to his cheeks.
“Another thing that my daughter didn’t tell you is that their name isn’t Victoria Falls,” my father said. “They are called Mosi-oa-Tunya. That’s what the Tonga people named them, and that is their name.”
“Mosi-oa-tunya?” Chad said, trying to feel the name with his tongue.
“When Livingstone went to the falls, he decided to name them after his Queen Victoria,” my father said. “Didn’t bother to ask the natives if the falls had a name, even though it was natives who’d taken him to the falls in the first place.”
Chad swallowed, a lump forming at his throat, and mumbled a “Thank you for educating me.”
Later, when Baba wasn’t looking, he uploaded the video to YouTube anyway.
On the fifth day in Bulawayo, there was a citywide power cut. It gave me a small joy to see Chad have a near breakdown when both his laptop and phone ran out of battery. I smirked when he sighed yet again and stared longingly at his phone’s black screen. We could have gone out, but he didn’t want to go anywhere if he couldn’t record it, so we stayed at home all day waiting for the electricity to come back.
When the sun set, Baba lit a candle and we sat in the dark, the faint light flickering.
Suddenly Chad pointed at the glass cabinet in the corner. “What’s that wooden thing in there?” Chad said. “Is that a board game?”
I narrowed my eyes. He was pointing at that wretched game tsoro yematatu.
“It’s just a village game,” I said. “Don’t bother with it. Why don’t we play some chess?”
“No way,” Chad said. “That looks way more interesting than chess.”
Baba retrieved the tsoro yematatu board and pieces from the display. He blew off the dust that had settled on the board.
“I have no one to play with,” he said sadly. “So it has been sitting in the display for years.”
“I’ll play with you!” Chad said.
Baba’s mouth formed an O. It was like he couldn’t believe his ears. “You want to play this?” he said, holding up the board as if it were a mist that would fade away if he didn’t hold it carefully.
“Of course, why not?” Chad said.
I could see the joy returning to Baba’s eyes in that instant. A new energy had found its way back into my baba’s body as he cleared the coffee table and set the board down. He gave Chad the white pieces and kept the black pieces for himself.
Baba explained the rules of the game to Chad just as he had explained them to me so long ago:
You win by being the first to create a three-in-a-row with your pieces.
A piece can be moved by moving one space per turn onto a vacant point following the pattern on the board.
Or a piece can be moved by jumping over another piece adjacent to it. The jump must be in a straight line and follow the pattern on the board. Unlike most board games, there are no captures in this game.
Baba demonstrated how to make a winning move. Chad gave him a high-five. Baba sounded so excited as he spoke, as if his soul were awakening. I had never seen him this happy since I stopped playing with him. Baba and Chad both concentrated on their next move, treating each move as the most serious decision they ever had to make. They did not rush to move their pieces. Their faces did not betray their emotions. Their moves were precise and calculated. I was shocked by how quickly Chad picked up the game, as if he’d been playing it his whole life.
The game lasted a long time. Chad won.
The Herald
Harare, Zimbabwe
14 Oct 2014
US Company Profits off Zim Concept
United States company Lyft is dominating the ride-sharing market and plans to go global. The ride-sharing service offers an affordable alternative to taxis, all with the click of a button. Chad Zimmerman, Lyft’s founder, told journalists at a press conference in San Francisco in June that the idea of starting a ride-sharing company came from Zimbabwe, where car-sharing is commonplace.
“They are called ‘lifts’ in Zimbabwe,” Zimmerman said. “Despite the lack of a public transportation system, Zimbabweans are able to get around efficiently thanks to a vibrant ride-sharing movement.”
After travelling to Zimbabwe, Zimmerman launched Zimride, which was geared towards longer trips between US cities, in 2007 at Cornell University in New York State. Six months later, the service had signed up 20 percent of the campus.
“A lot of people think that the name Zimride was taken from my name,” said Zimmerman, “but it was in fact adopted from the Zimbabwean concept of community car-sharing.”
The ShortLine bus stopped at the grimy Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan and I dragged my suitcase, the only thing to my name, through the terminal, looking out for the signs to the subway. I wasn’t looking forward to the long ride to JFK Airport. I passed an electronic message board with the time. June 30, 2014, 2:00:00. I overheard two tourists passing by.
“We can take a Lyft to the hotel,” one tourist said. “Then walk around for the rest of the afternoon.”
His partner took out his phone and tapped on the screen. “Sweet,” he said. “It will be here in five minutes.”
I froze at the word Lyft.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and stared at the pink logo. I had downloaded the app earlier in the year and never used it. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and stare at it. I even avoided social engagements because I knew people would want to carpool afterward. I tried to avoid Lyfts, but they were everywhere, on everyone’s lips and on every car windshield.
My finger shook as I tapped the screen to open the app for the first time. A map filled my screen with little icons of moving cars.
Where are you going?
I typed in “JFK Airport” and selected my terminal. A driver was ready to pick me up in four minutes.
The driver pulled up in a Honda CR-V and put my suitcase in his trunk. He looked like he was in his sixties. He offered me water and an outlet to charge my phone. The car smelled like Febreze. The GPS directed us in a nasal accent.
My throat went dry as soon as I stepped into the car. Lifts at home were filled with conversations about the economy, and prayers and gospel music about how things will get better. This car was cold and smelled too sweet. When the GPS announced which street we should turn into, it sounded like it was laughing at me.
“Where are you flying to, young lady?” the driver said.
“Zimbabwe,” I said.
I felt something constrict in my heart. I’d come to America with dreams and I was leaving with only a suitcase.
“That’s a long way from here!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never been to Africa. Would love to go. Do they have Lyfts over there in Africa? Probably not, right?”
I squeezed my thigh before I answered. I wanted to scream at him but forced a polite smile. I could tell he was watching me through the rearview mirror. He was probably going to go home and tell his loved ones the highlight of his day was picking up an African.
“We have lifts,” I said.
“Wow, who would have thought,” he said.
The Lyft driver mentioned that he was a veteran. He had been one of the first drivers to sign up when Lyft started. “If it wasn’t for Lyft,” he said, “I wouldn’t have enough to keep a roof over my head.”
He flicked the rosary that dangled from the rearview mirror. New York’s skyscrapers seemed to close in on me.
Business Insider
22 Mar 2016
Battle of the Transportation Titans
Long before there was Uber, Chad Zimmerman traveled to Zimbabwe on a summer break in 2005. There he discovered a form of hitchhiking that shuttled people around the chaotic streets of an African city. Inspired by his discovery, he returned to the United States and launched a ride-sharing company called Zimride in 2007. In 2013 the company rebranded under the name Lyft.
Today, Lyft is a distant number two to Uber, its main competitor. Founded in 2009, Uber has innovated beyond Lyft. Uber now has its own Research & Development facility to develop autonomous cars and is expanding into food delivery service. As the company expands, however, so too have its problems. Drivers are striking all over the USA, condemning the company’s predatory structure. Both Lyft and Uber have put no effort into providing benefits for their drivers, and have steadily opposed all attempts to
I threw my phone across the room before finishing the Business Insider article. Baba, who was playing tsoro yematatu by himself, barely glanced at me. These days he talked to himself and moved the pieces on the board as if an apparition were sitting across from him.
“It’s not fair. He got that idea from us,” I said. “If it weren’t for us, he wouldn’t have that stupid company, and even Uber wouldn’t have been a thing.”
Baba looked up at me, his hand looming over a game piece. “I seem to recall that you laughed in his face when he proposed turning lifts into a company,” he said. “You called it a stupid African thing. Just like you call this game a stupid African thing.”
Pangs of guilt and regret brought me back to when Chad and I were still friends, when he was sitting on this very couch playing tsoro yematatu with my father. Now he was a millionaire and we didn’t speak. Life had gone marvelously for him ever since his trip to Zimbabwe. He already had a successful company by the time he graduated. I had nothing. I came back to my corrupt country with no job prospects or hope. I sat all day in the living room applying to companies I’d never hear back from.
“Tell me, Dineo, how do you measure success?” Baba said. He made a three-in-a-row on the board and sat back. “You don’t think anything is valuable until it’s given to you by a white person. Now that a white person has made lifts into a company, suddenly you think it’s a good idea.”
I remembered my last conversation with Chad after the summer trip in 2005. It was on campus, right under the clock tower. The alma mater was chiming.
“You really need to give up this Zimride idea or whatever it is you’re calling it,” I’d said to him. “It’s so stupid. It would never work in a developed country like America. What sane American would ride in a complete stranger’s car?”
“It’s sad that you can’t see the innovation in your own backyard, Dinny,” Chad said.
His tone was so sanctimonious, so full of pity that I shook with anger. How dare he speak to me as if I were a child? How dare he expect me to be proud of my backyard when it was people like him that had pillaged that same backyard in the first place? When it was people like him that used my backyard as a punchline?
“You’re just a culture vulture masquerading as a hippie,” I spat. “You’re no better than that colonizer David Livingstone.”
Chad flinched and stepped back as if I’d struck him. Something flashed in his eyes. I couldn’t tell if his grimaces were anger, embarrassment, or sadness.
“I think it’s time for us to go our separate ways,” he said.
I watched his back recede into the sunset on Ho Plaza. We never spoke again after that, and the campus was big enough that we never ran into each other again.
I pushed the memory down and watched Baba start another game by himself in our living room. The overhead lights went dark. I cursed ZESA and the endless power cuts as I tried to light a candle. Each match refused to light, breaking every time I slid it against the matchbox. Baba stopped playing his game, came over, and took the matches from me. The match lit on the first try in his hands.
“Even lifts are now an import from the West,” Baba said, shaking his head. His voice had a quiet I-told-you-so timbre to it. He went back to his game. He seemed so at peace playing tsoro yematatu in the dark. The truth and my own shortsightedness stung.
“You know what makes me sad?” Baba said. “Chad saw a nice thing people were doing for each other and thought—how do I make money with it? That’s what makes me sad.”
The rage I felt made my skin hot. I charged towards Baba and grabbed the tsoro yematatu board from the coffee table, the game pieces flying across the room. I smashed the board on the ground, and it shattered into a million pieces.