Goodluck Mezembe was a merchant.  He owned a little shop on on the highway between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls, from which he sold soft drinks, local beer, bread, and other sundries to the people who lived in the small villages in the area.  A member of the Shona tribe from Zimbabwe’s eastern Mashonaland Province, Goodluck had come west to Matabeleland right out of Zimbabwe National University with his new business degree.  Unable to find work even in the west, Goodluck had taken his meager savings and opened a small shop.  Over the years, he had prospered.  The majority of his customers were from the Ndebele tribe, but this never bothered Goodluck. He often told his wife Miriam, a Shona who was born in Bulawayo, that it was only the color of a man’s money that counted.  He got along with his Ndebele neighbors, even joining them on occasion at the local beer shop in the evenings.

He was accepted them as his was the closest shop to where they lived, and he treated them with respect.  For his part, he was happy that most of them had access to South African Rand which they used to pay for their purchases.  In 2006, thanks to the central bank in Harare, the Zimbabwean currency, the Zim Dollar, had depreciated to the point where it was worth less than the cost of the paper upon which it was printed.

One neighbor in particular, Goodluck got along with; Ignatius Moyo, an Ndebele who owned a shoe repair shop just down the road from his shop.  Ignatius’s eldest son worked for a construction company in Johannesburg, so he always had a good supply of Rand.  He bought all of his supplies from Goodluck, and always paid in Rand, so both of them prospered, while many in the area, who accepted local currency, watched their net worth plummet to nothing.

Goodluck was surprised one day to see a group of young men, dressed in what looked like military uniforms, led by an older man dressed in a suit, enter Ignatius’s shop.  He didn’t recognize them as locals, but he could also tell that they were not Ndebele.  He wondered what a group of young Shona men would want in a shoe repair shop.  From where he stood outside his shop, he could see that they wore new shoes.