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While we lawyers disagree about many things, one thing that all of us, whether lawyers of whatever vintage, law students, law professors, “thinking about law school” peeps, agree on: the nightmare that is the bar exam, that last hurdle to getting licensed (assuming you’ve passed the moral fitness test and whatever other things lurk in the shadows).

The bar exam: destined to freak out the most stoic, stolid, and calm. It strikes terror in the hearts and minds, even the most outwardly self-possessed. The bar exam: purportedly designed to test the minimum competency required to practice. And that’s the rub, what exactly is minimum competency? How to define it, how to test it, how to use it as a tool to determine who gets that license. How to decide what subjects should be tested. How to decide whether the exam should be in one day, two days, or longer. (Perish the thought, although when I took it in dinosaur days, it was a three-day exam.)

More than 30 states, along with D.C. and the U.S.V.I. have adopted the uniform bar exam. California has not. (A nationwide uniform bar exam might make it easier to argue for multijurisdictional practice, which would be something I would like to see along with many others.)

Although the bar exam is not a marathon, it feels like one. Everyone who finishes it is exhausted and broke. Is the juice worth the squeeze? That depends on who is asked.

Is the bar exam I took all those years ago obsolete? Yes and no. This is not a trick question. There’s much intellectual wrestling going on among law professors, bar administrators, and others interested in the quality of new admittees.

What should the bar exam look like? What should it test? Should it test what some call “rote memorization,” the reciting of legal principles? I think that memorization has its place because I don’t think you can analyze an issue without knowing what the law is to apply to the fact pattern in the question. However, I don’t think the bar exam needs to test whether we can recite the Rule Against Perpetuities.

Should the bar exam be “open book”? One could argue that the practice of law is “open book,” since we should look up what the law is before advising a client. Aha, say some, precisely the point, since “rote memorization” does not have any place in any practice. True, but isn’t there at least some reason for being able to “show what you know” on the bar exam? Reasonable minds can and do differ.

What about “soft skills”? Should those be tested on the bar exam? Can they be? How would you go about doing that? What would be the “soft skills” that should be tested?

Do the courses that formed the backbone of our legal education, and thus the bar exam, still merit inclusion on that test? Does “minimum competency” mean “bare bones” competency, or should it be something more than that?

Should areas of law that didn’t even exist at the turn of this century, let alone in my dinosaur days, be tested now? Should the bar exam remain an unwavering, unchanging monolith without acknowledging that times have changed, and the practice is pretty much unrecognizable today? Should there be more time to answer essay questions? More time to plow through the multiple-choice questions? (You need to be able to respond quickly to a judge’s question in court, but even then, you may be able to get time to brief the issue.)

There are major huddles going on as to what to do about the bar exam. Minorities don’t do as well on it, and as we become more diverse, we need more diversity among lawyers. (Not a new topic for me or for the many others who regularly rail about the issue; there’s a comfort level in being represented by someone who looks like you.)

I don’t think any idea, no matter how wild or crazy, should be off the table when considering how to test minimum competency, enlarge the pool of successful bar takers while maintaining applicable standards, and, yes, I know the cut score here in California is a huge sore point.

While I don’t know what the requirements are in other states for the CPA exam, California requires one year of work experience in order to obtain a CPA license. (Anyone for legal apprenticeship?) Also, since the average pass rate is 50%, applicants can retake those portions of the exam they didn’t pass the first time.

There’s no similar provision for bar examinees: it’s all or nothing. Should that change? I can hear the arguments against it, including administrative headaches, timing of exams, and student loan debt, among others, but we’ve got to think about innovative ways of changing the bar exam so that it better serves both the examinees and the public. Maybe testing in one “swell foop” is not the answer.

We have to find better ways to make the bar exam relevant to today’s practice and more representative of society, while still requiring minimum competency. We are thought to be smarter than most, at least we think we are. Let’s prove it. Step right up here with suggestions, no matter how silly or left field they may sound. We gotta start somewhere.

Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

Numerous articles on this website have already discussed how law firm partners are not always the best business managers. It makes sense that just because you are good at practicing law does not mean you are good at running a business or managing people. For that reason, many law firms invest in trainings and use consultants in order to improve their administrative practices. However, one of the most important things partners should keep in mind when managing associates is that they should try to communicate with associates directly rather than passing a message through someone else.

When I was 19, I worked as a politics and government teacher for AmeriCorps. As part of our training, all of the AmeriCorps workers needed to attend conflict resolution courses and other classes. One of the things we learned in the training is that people should try not to “triangle” messages through other people. When you pass a message through someone else, you risk the possibility that some or all of the message will be miscommunicated. In addition, it is much harder to receive feedback about a plan if the message is being conveyed through someone else.

Although partners should know that they shouldn’t play a game of “telephone” when communicating with associates, I have seen partners many times throughout my career communicate to associates through other people. When I was working in Biglaw, there was a much more established chain of command than there was at any other point of my career. The senior partners would usually give large tasks to the junior partners, who would loop in senior associates, who would then provide assignments to junior associates. To be completely honest, that process is sometimes unavoidable in Biglaw. Oftentimes, some Biglaw assignments are so large, and the senior partners are so busy, that it is impractical for the senior partners to dole out all of the work and communicate with everyone about tasks.

However, this “waterfall of work” has negative consequences. By the time associates heard about the facts of a case and the specifics of an assignment, this information had already passed through a number of people and was not always accurate. Oftentimes, people did not want to seek clarification from individuals above them for fear of being accused of not paying attention the first time.

As an associate in Biglaw, a colleague of mine had to conduct an extensive amount of research for an issue in a brief. However, my colleague mistakenly thought that our client was a defendant, when in reality, our client was the plaintiff! Thus, the research my colleague had spent hours conducting needed to be extensively revised before it was submitted to the partner. From speaking with my colleague, it seemed that the information about the case had been so distorted, since several people had already relayed the details, that our client’s role in the case was unclear.

Another time in my career, I suffered consequences because a partner, for whatever reason, gave me a task through another person rather than communicate with me directly. As an associate at a midsize shop, I was once informed by our office manager that a senior partner told her to tell me that I needed to scan and upload deposition transcripts to our document management system. The office manager informed me that I could not work on any other tasks until the assignment was complete. I have absolutely no idea why that mundane and unnecessary job was so important that I had to spend all of my time for a week on it. In any case, since the order had come through the office manager, I could not directly seek clarification from the senior partner.

A lot of deposition transcripts needed to be uploaded, and literally anyone in the office, including a number of administrative professionals, could have completed this project. In addition, the project was substantial and took me a number of days to complete. However, since the partner had chosen to communicate this assignment through the office manager, I had no way of making suggestions or noting the size of the project to the partner without looking like I was going above the office manager’s head.

As a result, I spent five or six solid days scanning and uploading transcripts that people would likely never read to our document management system. Our firm probably missed out on thousands of dollars in revenue on the billable hours I did not log since I was conducting this administrative task. Maybe the partner was just being punitive when he tasked me with performing the assignment. However, if the partner had just communicated this assignment to me directly, I could have quickly responded with suggestions or feedback about the size of the project and saved our firm from losing substantial revenue.

I am not sure why partners feel the need to communicate with associates through other people. Some partners are definitely afraid of confrontation, and they feel that communicating through someone else helps avoid directly confronting people. In addition, some partners are just really busy, and there are definitely issues with micromanaging associates as well. However, partners should strive to communicate directly with associates whenever possible. This helps ensure that associates can provide feedback and that associates understand all of the information related to a project.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

With increasing focus on the strains the profession places on mental health, Reed Smith has announced a global Mental Health Task Force to help Reed Smith’s team address mental health issues as they arise.

The new task force grew out of the work of the firm’s Looking for Excellence and Advancement of Persons with Disabilities (LEADRS) group, and closely tracks the recommendations of the American Bar Association’s National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being. Partner Kimberly Gold will serve as the inaugural chair of the task force:

“The mission of this task force is to ensure that our lawyers and professional staff have access to help whenever they or their family members experience or are at risk of experiencing mental health or substance use issues. We will also challenge the well-documented stigma surrounding these issues and cultivate a workplace culture that promotes psychological wellness and positive help-seeking behaviors,” Gold said. “We are collaborating with other key members of Reed Smith’s Diversity & Inclusion team to develop a comprehensive strategy for assessing and addressing these outcomes across our global platform.”

The group has scheduled multiple events across the firm, including a Lawyers Assistance Program Panel Webinar in the United States and a Mental Health First Aid Training program. In March, the firm plans to conduct a firmwide survey to identify additional members for its advisory teams.

Hopefully more firms take Reed Smith’s lead.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Trump’s ignorance about international law governing the use of force is extreme even by U.S. standards.

— Arnold & Porter partner John Bellinger III explaining to Newsweek just how out of touch the current administration is with basic international standards. And Bellinger was the legal advisor to Condi Rice and advised the National Security Council in the run up to the Iraq War so he knows what he’s talking about when he talks about the improper use of force.

Michael Flynn will either wind up pardoned by the president or beaten to death by an enraged district court judge. These are the only two possible outcomes.

Last night the former national security advisor filed a motion to withdraw his 2-year-old guilty plea for making false statements to the FBI. Two weeks before his sentencing, after admitting his guilt multiple times in open court, Flynn now wants out of the deal.

The motion filed by Flynn’s emoji-loving lawyer Sidney Powell is only slightly less batsh*t than her tweets. Here’s a fun sample:

The prosecutors concocted the alleged “false statements” by their own misrepresentations, deceit, and omissions. It is beyond ironic and completely outrageous that the prosecutors have persecuted Mr. Flynn, virtually bankrupted him, and put his entire family through unimaginable stress for three years.

After filing, Powell hustled over to the Fox studios to detail “one atrocity after another” by the dreaded Deep State.

“They’ve been abusing their power for the last year in spades, Sean,” Powell told a sympathetic Sean Hannity. “The reason this all came to this is because they tried to get him to lie in the prosecution of United States vs. [Bijan] Rafiekian — his former business partner — and with new counsel standing by his side, of course, there was no way I was going to let him do that and he didn’t want to do that.”

Here on planet Earth, Flynn admitted in his December 1, 2017, plea to knowingly making “materially false statements and omissions” regarding “a project performed by him and his company, the Flynn Intel Group, Inc. (“FIG”), for the principal benefit of the Republic of Turkey.” But after hiring Powell, Flynn had a change of heart and decided that he hadn’t really known that the Turkish government was the real client, that it was all his former attorneys’ fault, and that he couldn’t possibly testify that he and his old partner Bijan Rafiekian had knowingly violated FARA.

Which royally pissed off the prosecutors and also blew up their case against Rafiekian. This was not the cooperation agreed to in the original plea agreement, much less the show of good faith demanded by U. S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in December 2018 when he strongly advised Flynn’s prior counsel to postpone sentencing if they wanted to keep their client out of the clink. 

So in the government’s latest sentencing memo, it changed its recommendation from 0-6 months for being a very good boy to 0-6 months with extreme side eye. And considering Judge Sullivan’s previous queries as to why Flynn wasn’t charged with treason, it’s a safe bet that His Honor is not inclined toward a noncustodial sentence.

Hence the 24 pages of gobbledygook from Powell accusing the government of “abject bad faith in pure retaliation” because “with new, unconflicted counsel, Mr. Flynn refused to lie for the prosecution.” And if that doesn’t whet your appetite, she’s promised further briefing due to “significant developments in the last thirty days.” What she hasn’t done is assert her client’s innocence of the original charge. But perhaps it got buried under an avalanche of emojis.

Let’s see if Judge Sullivan accepts Flynn’s withdrawal of his plea, or instead lunges across the table to exact just vengeance for wasting two years of the court’s time and patience. We do live in interesting times.

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Download the full report here.

Botswana: mining-dominated exchange seeking to innovate

Botswana is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. But the Botswana Stock Exchange (BSE) has just 35 equity listings and 49 bond listings. Of these, the vast majority are issued by mining companies.

The debt market is shallow, with government bonds accounting for 65% of bond listings and more than 90% of trading.

Exchange activity may be low, but future prospects are improved by innovative policies. The BSE has tried to boost listings and trading by demanding a higher free float for listings, introducing market making and promoting cross-listings with other southern African countries. In 2019, the exchange launched a board focused on small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The BSE has also launched education initiatives to improve investment knowledge. As a result, at the end of 2018, the exchange had 90,000 registered investor accounts compared with just 20,000 in 2013.

There is also an energetic attitude toward pensions, with retirement funds allowed to invest up to 70% offshore and funds starting to make allocations to offshore private firms.

In the near future, the BSE is planning to launch depository receipts, which will broaden investor exposure to international securities.

Meanwhile, the bond market is moving toward centralisation of trading, clearing, and settlement of trades, which should unlock capacity, increase efficiency, and align with IOSCO’s Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures, thereby improving the attractiveness of the bond market to international investors.

Botswana | Key numbers

Zimbabwe: RTGS dollar and online trading platform launch

Zimbabwe has one of the oldest financial systems in Africa, with the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange established in 1896.

There are 16 securities dealing firms, 16 asset management firms, 31 securities investment advisers, five securities custodians and two security exchanges registered with the financial regulator.

Beginning in 2009, to counteract runaway inflation, Zimbabwean businesses were able to use foreign currencies for trade.

The stock exchange has witnessed huge outflows: equities sold by foreigners increased by 466% from USD42 million in January 2019 to USD237.83 million in February 2019.

In February 2019, a new currency, the RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement) dollar was launched for trading.

The economic situation has complicated Zimbabwe’s attempts to stimulate capital markets, including the automation of the stock exchange and the launch in 2018 of the country’s first online trading platform, which allows trading by mobile phone.

Zimbabwe | Key numbers

In future postings… we will take a look at capital market developments in East Africa & Mauritius; Nigeria & Ghana; and Egypt & Morocco. Click here for our earlier look at developments in South Africa and Namibia.

Visit CFA Institute for more industry research and analysis.

About the report

Our tales of African capital markets’ history and future reflect the journey of CFA Institute: from a lunch group in New York City in 1937 to a diverse collection of 170,000 members and 157 societies worldwide in 2019, united with the purpose of leading the investment profession globally for the ultimate benefit of society.

Some of Africa’s exchanges were established in early colonial times. South Africa led the way on the heels of the diamond and gold rush, followed by Zimbabwe, Egypt, and Namibia (a German colony at the time) – all before 1905. Some didn’t outlive the commodities rush but others are still thriving – substantially diversified and modernised.

Some capital markets were established more recently, and their development tells of independence and nation-building: Nigeria in the 1960s; Botswana, Mauritius and Ghana in 1989; Namibia post-independence from South Africa in the 1990s. Others, particularly the East African exchanges, are new and leapfrogging toward greater participation.

All tell of how regulation, trading technology and fintech are enabling fairer, faster and lower-cost participation in finance and investment for more market participants.

The CFA Institute Research Foundation brief was developed in conjunction with the African Securities Exchanges Association (ASEA).

Authors:
Botswana
Kopano Bolokwe, CAIA, MBA, Head of Product Development, Botswana Stock Exchange
Kagiso Sedimo, CFA, FRM, Portfolio Manager, Morula Capital Partners

Zimbabwe
Dennis Murekachiro, Brighton Mutingwende & Norbert Mungwini, Investment Professionals of Zimbabwe

The writer with her sister and father in Trafalgar Square, London, in 2006 [Photo courtesy: Danai Nesta Kupemba]

“I died for this country,” is a running joke in my family; something my father says whenever Heroes’ Day rolls around, laughing so hard that tears form in his eyes.

But beneath his broad smile is a gentle reminder to me and my three siblings: that he nearly did.

My dad was 12 years old when, in 1975, he joined Zimbabwe’s War of Independence. Also referred to as the Second Chimurenga, it lasted from 1964 to 1979, and marked the beginning of the end of white minority rule in what was then known as Rhodesia.

It was a fight against Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government (backed by Britain), which sought to protect white settler interests at the expense of the indigenous people of Zimbabwe.

Heroes’ Day commemorates those who fought and died for Zimbabwe’s independence.

With a stomach last filled a few days earlier and his adolescent chest puffed out with pride, my father had signed up to the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) alongside men two or three times his age in search of freedom and a regular supply of food.

They had a shared dream: that they would one day have their own little piece of Zimbabwe, right the wrongs of the past and take back what had been stolen from them by white settlers.

After a few days of training, my dad and hundreds of other men and boys trekked through the unforgiving terrain of the Eastern Highlands mountain range, surviving on a diet of the grapefruits that grew there. They were heading towards a training facility in Chimoio, Mozambique, and the promise of hot food. Or so my father thought.

A lieutenant my father had befriended on the trek had other plans for him. He made him his errand boy and when the time came for most of the men to march on to Chimoio, he kept my father with him. They would march further to a camp in Nyanga, he told him.

My father watched wistfully as the other soldiers marched towards the promise of a hot meal and some rest, singing war songs as they disappeared into the gaping mouth of a sloping valley.

Dozens of blisters later, my father and the lieutenant arrived at Nyanga. At the centre of the camp, a large pot sat atop a fire. The portions were generous and my father was grateful to have been taken under the lieutenant’s wing. But when he looked around at weapons so old he imagined they must have been recycled from the First Chimurenga (1896-97), he wondered if he would ever get to do what he had signed up for: fight.

So when word came that they would march to Chimoio, my father did so enthusiastically – less bothered by the trek and the diet of grapefruits than he had been before. But the lieutenant, he noticed, walked stiffly, as though his body were reluctant to carry him there.

My father smelled the death before he saw it. When he saw what had happened to many of the men he had marched with before, he was overwhelmed by sadness and an unshakeable feeling of gratitude that he carries with him to this day.

The writer, left, with her dad and sister on their last trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2009 [Photo courtesy: Danai Nesta Kupemba]

My mother’s battlefield

At around the same time in Bocha, a remote area a couple of kilometres outside what was then Umtali and now Mutare, my mother was 11 years old and being tortured by colonial soldiers – the same people my father was preparing to fight.

The soldiers had accused my mother and her family of harbouring bandits in their home. They ransacked their modest house and the small shop that was their livelihood but found no one. Then they beat my mother and her nine-year-old brother with electrical wires until their skin was raw and their throats hoarse from screaming.

A seed of resentment was planted in her. She knew then that she would do whatever she could to ensure the liberation of her country.

She would later tell me stories, her voice filled with excitement and nostalgia, about how she would sneak out of her house at night, careful not to get caught by her parents, and head to the nearby ZANLA base, where she would sing for the newly-inducted soldiers to boost their morale.

She had nothing to give them but her voice, she said, so she gave them that.

My grandfather caught her many times, but the beatings he administered did not stop her returning to the camp with the hope that her voice, soft and lilting, would make someone’s day.

At this point in the telling of her story, my mother would invariably begin singing Jehovah Mufudzi Wangu (The Lord Is My Shepard in Shona), her brown eyes alight with memories and the hope that I might join in. But Shona felt foreign and heavy on my tongue so I would stay quiet and the flame in my mother’s eyes would recede.

The writer in her Christmas jumper while her sister watches on as her mother forces her to wear a beanie hat because of how cold it is [Photo courtesy: Danai Nesta Kupemba]

The end of one war

After the war ended in December 1979 and independence was finally achieved, schools that had been forced to close reopened.

My mum joined her school choir. My dad, fresh from the army, enrolled in the same school. He says he heard her singing before he saw her, but that as soon as he did, he fell in love.

My mother, so defiant and strong, loved the soldier in my father and the youthful recklessness that mirrored her own. My father, scarred but healing from the horrors he had seen, loved the songbird in her.

Together, they carved out a small piece of Zimbabwe for themselves. It was not much; a small house that they shared with another family. My father got a job in the foreign office and my mother in town planning. At home, they would make sausages and buns that they would sell in their workplaces. They scraped and saved.

My father rose through the ranks and, in 1994, was posted to Germany as a diplomat. His family – my mother and my older brother and sister – went with him and enjoyed life in Bonn. They returned to Zimbabwe in 1999, a couple of months after I was born, satisfied and happy.

Posted to England

But sometimes life has a strange sense of humour.

As it did in 2003, when my parents, so deeply in love with their nation, were posted to the place they had fought – and sung – against: England.

I was four years old when we arrived and remember wondering where the sun had gone.

But then it snowed and, convinced that I was living in my very own Christmas card, my infant self was won over. Any early memories I had of Zimbabwe quickly disappeared.

It did not take long until I was completely immersed in British culture. I cried when we wore poppies and remembered our lost soldiers. I sang the national anthem word for word, proud to use the voice I had inherited from my mother to show my allegiance to my new home. I sang Auld Lang Syne, willing her to join in, but she would just shake her head and sigh.

Relatives, who often passed through our home when visiting London taunted and teased me, calling me “kasalad”, a term often used to describe “vanhu varasa tsika”, which means people who have lost their traditional ways.

They pretended to help me by telling me words in Shona, but behind their “help” they held back giggles. My mother tried to defend me but I saw the sadness in her eyes. I was not in touch with my culture, and I did not care. As far as I was concerned, I was British.

To my parents it felt as though I was denouncing my heritage; a heritage they had fought for; a heritage they had seen friends die for. They had struggled for an identity I did not want.

The writer with her sister and their paternal grandparents during one of their visits to London in 2008 [Photo courtesy: Danai Nesta Kupemba]

Smiles, snarls and sadza nenyama

Each year when International Week rolled around at my primary school, my mother would pack sadza nenyama, a Zimbabwean delicacy, for me to take in. I would have to show the other pupils how you rolled it in your hand and patted it down in the gravy before putting it in your mouth.

They would compliment me on how delicious it was. But I did not want their compliments. I wanted bangers and mash or shepherd’s pie.

I stopped participating in the food portion of International Week, wondering how I was supposed to feel a connection to this country that felt so removed from who I was and how I lived.

When 2008 came and inflation hit, common people in Zimbabwe became trillionaires who could not buy bread. For months, Zimbabwean diplomats were not paid. But my parents’ loyalty never wavered. They worried about relatives back in Zimbabwe. But they never contemplated defecting as some other diplomats did.

While other people we knew concocted plans to stay in England after their assignments had finished, my parents were busy building their dream home on the outskirts of Harare. My mother, who had drawn the plans herself, would return there for long stretches of time, meeting architects and builders. She always returned happier than when she had left, her mind imagining an expanse of trees as far as the eye could see. Their roots were rural and they dreamed of returning to that.

My father simply wanted something that was his again and to leave behind the graceless pretence of England. He had grown tired of the smiles in which he saw veiled snarls, the words with their double meanings, how polite everyone was and was not.

During our final year in England, my mother seemed to glow, she stopped going to work and focused all her energy on returning. We spent more time together. She took me ice skating, watching from the side of the rink. Everything seemed perfect.

And then I realised that she was preparing me for the loss that was to come; the loss of the only home I had known.

A family holiday in Wales in 2006 [Photo courtesy: Danai Nesta Kupemba]

Returning to Zimbabwe

When the time finally came for us to return to Zimbabwe at the end of 2010, I felt numb. I stared at my green passport in the airport departures lounge, willing it to turn maroon, to offer me the physical validation of what I felt inside: that I was British.

I cried on the plane, and asked my dad if we would ever return. He said yes, but he did not look at me as he said it.

When the plane landed, the first thing I noticed was the heat. While my parents removed their jumpers to let the sun dance on their skin, I instantly despised it.

My parents enrolled me in an elite boarding school where the other pupils were fascinated by my accent. They liked listening to me talk and I liked being listened to. I told them about the time my aunt had pushed me into a fountain in Trafalgar Square, about the holidays we would take to Wales, Scotland and Ireland, about snowball fights and how cold it would be in winter. They asked me if I had ever met the queen and I told them about how I almost had one time when my parents had attended an African diplomats’ ball.

They hung on to my stories the way I hung on to those memories.

My stories validated that I had been there, that I belonged there, because I felt certain I did not belong in Zimbabwe.

When they spoke Shona, my mind struggled to keep up, so I would just laugh without knowing what I was laughing at.

When the teachers called me London because they could not remember my name, I would feel a frisson of pleasure run through me. I felt seen for who I knew I was.

But then, a few months after returning to Zimbabwe, my accent threatened to leave me; my friends told me it was fading, that I did not sound the same. I heard it too; my t’s were now hard when I said water. I tried to entice it to stay by using more slang than usual; sprinkling my sentences with words I had hardly ever used in England. I became a caricature.

My accent no longer drew people in and my stories grew old and repetitive too.

It rained the day my mother casually told me that I was losing my accent. It felt like a final goodbye from England, a farewell to her unwanted child.

That was the day things changed.

I started listening to my parents’ stories more, like the one about how my father had eaten tinned food that had been poisoned by Rhodesian soldiers, or about the racism my mother had endured as she worked odd jobs in England to save enough money to buy us Christmas presents.

I understood then that their experience of England and mine had been completely different. The country I saw as home, they saw as an oppressor.

I realised then that who I was was not rooted in where I had grown up but in the people who loved me. I may never love Zimbabwe as fiercely as they do, but I know now that I love them more than I could ever love England.

Following a visit to Harare by China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, Zimbabwe has tabled proposals for funding a further six economic projects.

“The six projects are in pursuit of capitalising on China’s Belt and Road Initiative across Africa, and it will help boost the economy, especially at this time when we are seeing investment bottlenecks from the traditional Western source markets,” said a Zimbabwe government official, who was part of a committee working on the projects.

He added: “China is willing to come to the party, and we are pursuing this through this initiative, which will essentially see China commit even more funding into the economy.”

The details of the funding proposals have not yet been divulged.

Mnangagwa met Wang in Harare yesterday. The Chinese Foreign Affairs Minister was also scheduled to visit a tobacco farm near Harare, with the Asian country among the top buyers of tobacco from Zimbabwe. Tobacco is a major export earner for Zimbabwe, which also exports the green leaf to South Africa.

“He is very happy to visit. We had occasion to go over our relations and he goes back satisfied that our relations are on solid foundation,” Mnangagwa said after meeting Wang.

The Zimbabwean leader’s spokesperson, George Charamba, tweeted yesterday that “among projects discussed (by Mnangagwa and Wang) was the Batoka Hydro-Electric Project to be sponsored jointly with Zambia,” and to be executed by Sino-Hydro in partnership with General Electric.

“The project, once completed, will leave Zimbabwe in a power surplus position,” he said.

Zimbabwe is facing a crippling power deficit that is disrupting productivity despite imports of electricity from Eskom and Hydro-Cahora Bassa.

Zimbabwe is also understood to be pursuing currency back-up from China, as its monetary reforms falter through value losses on the back of waning confidence and little productive support for the local unit.

Wang said after meeting Mnangagwa that China understood the challenges that Zimbabwe – battling to turn around its economy since Mnangagwa elbowed out Mugabe in 2019 – was facing.

“China understands the current bottlenecks and difficulties faced by Zimbabwe, but we trust that Zimbabwe has the wisdom and capabilities to address well these challenges,” Wang said.

Chinese investment comes as other BRICS countries are also expanding investments in Zimbabwe, with Russia’s Alrosa signing agreements for a joint venture project to mine diamonds in the Chiadzwa area.

Russia also has a large platinum project at Darwendale, although the project appears to have been delayed in the past year because of shareholding disputes.

China has massive investments in Zimbabwe, including ferrochrome, electricity generation and infrastructure funding projects, such as the expansion of the Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport.