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and great music.
It has also shown us that beneath its veneer of fine living is a harshness, a meanness that can only be defined as devilish.
Perhaps it is this juxtaposition of the good and the uncouth that has given birth to a rich body of poetry from the American South.
Not surprisingly, the best of this poetry dwells on the ugliness that Ame-rica so often tries to hide.
Somewhere in the 1930s, while we as an unborn nation were trying to find the feet that would lead us to 1980, came the lines that a lady named Billie Holiday would later put to music under the title “Strange Fruit”.
A Jewish high school teacher called Abel Meeropol (using the pseudonym Lewis Allan) – who ironically was in an American ghetto at a time Hitler had so many to offer – wrote the poem by the same name.
He wrote: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
Billie Holiday, like any black woman in America, was a tragic figure.
She soon enough realised that her wonderful singing would never be enough for her to be treated as a human being in a white world.
Her forebears – like all of ours – are the progeny of a continent doomed to be the wretched of the earth.
Her blood was of that same texture consigned to singing songs of unrequited love for a world that waters itself with its redness more than it craves for water.
Her tears – like too many of her blood-bought stock – are the crushed matter that litter our sub-terrain with stones we call diamonds.
Granted, Holiday did not write “Strange Fruit”, but had she not sung those poignant lyrics, me in faraway Zimbabwe would never have known about it.
The poem/song talks about lynching of blacks in “the land of the brave and the home of the free”.
Lynching is as American as apple pie.
The last really horrific lynching, though all were and are demonic to say the least, was that of 14-year-old Emmett Till back in 1955 in Mississippi.
Officially, lynching went on until about the 1970s though there are unconfirmed sporadic records of that shame-ful legacy well into the next decade.
Today America has the black president Holiday never thought would come when she sang “Strange Fruit”, or when young Emmett Till naively believed it was possible for a man of colour to wolf-whistle at a white Southern belle.
We have many constant reminders of the strange fruit that is produced whenever our stock comes in contact with white hate, fear and greed.
Just this week, hundreds upon hundreds of black bodies were dug out of a mineshaft somewhere in Mt Darwin.
It seems these are the remains of people who were killed for merely wanting to control their own destiny, for daring to be free.
Many such mass graves have over the last three decades emptied themselves of their strange fruit and not once have we heard a word of regret from the people who today tell us about democracy.
A few years ago Tony Blair made some garbled remark about Africa being a scar on the world’s conscious.
The West has sought to salve that wound by applying sanctions and generating more strange fruit.
It would also be nice to hear what Messrs Tsvangirai, Biti and Chamisa think of the strange fruit found in Mt Darwin.
It would be wonderful to hear them explain how they reconcile this strange fruit and its progenitors and their love for all things Western.
Maybe while they are at it, they could tell this blood-bought nation how they sleep at night knowing that they have been colluding all these years with the same people who in 90 short years managed to plant so many mass graves across the length and breadth of Zimbabwe.
What we are seeing in Mt Darwin is but one example of the hatred we have to contend with before we can rightly claim to be a sovereign nation.
We have to contend with forces that believe we are Hitlerite when we claim our own land.
We have to contend with forces that are convinced it is downright malevolent for us to say the minerals in our earth belong to us.
We have to contend with principalities with an inherent sense of superiority over anything that is not white.
For our sins, we are sanctioned so that hospitals limp along, schools stagger, our factories shut down and general service delivery grinds to a screeching halt.
The net result – strange fruit.
If they could they would throw us all into mineshafts – some of us alive – and douse us with acid and bury everyone so that they could have this world all to themselves.
As Billie Holiday sang, their perfect world would be a “pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh”.
Our choice as a people is really quite simple.
Whichever way we go forward, the oppressor’s intention is the same – to eventually leave us as strange fruit.
It does not matter how much noise we make in defence of foreign capital and in opposition to indigenisation.
The most spirited efforts to outdo each other in denigrating everything Zimbabwean and extolling everything Western will earn us the same fate as clinging passionately to our flags – for the West we are strange fruit.
Fighting on the side of the oppressor in getting our gems classified as blood diamonds will not endear us to them.
Many have walked down that path and come to grief for their pains.
Our survival, our growth, our strength – that is something that should come from within.
Any other route leads us straight to strange fruit.