Talking eyes

Eyes smile, they admonish, they smoulder, they moisten.

The eyes show what’s going on behind them. Evasiveness and dishonesty, for starters. Leaders are lying, war mongers are mad and would you buy a used car off this man? Just look at the eyes …

Forty four years after independence from the British, it can be said our young were ‘Born Free.’ That’s in the eye of a privileged beholder. As poverty deepens, the young themselves see it differently. ‘Born to suffer’ is one refrain of the under 40s.

Their eyes ache in worry, in frustration and in hunger, but the eyes of the ‘Mercedes elite’ are glowing with content all the way to the next bundle of cash coming their way beneath the sacred national flag of freedom.

Eyes speak of resignation to the hard facts of life, of anticipation, of disappointment, sultry eyes speak of sexual innuendo.

Listening to talking eyes can also be tried on TV and news photograghs. Eyes say it all.

What, for instance, are the eyes of Iran saying, over there where the tinder box of conflagration awaits full ignition.

Here follows something from from happier days that might raise an eyebrow or two. A retro look at an Iranian state visit to Zimbabwe from my other persona Andrew Saxon’s Public Eye column.

Iran’s President Khamenei must have been relieved to arrive home in fundamentalist Teheran after his African tour, safe at last from the affronts of wine, women and song.

The Iranians boycotted a state banquet in Harare because women were commingling too freely with men, there was wine on every table and they didn’t like the “loose songs” – romantic modern ballads – being played by the police band during the warm up to the banquet.

When the Iranians failed to take their seats, the hosts went ahead and enjoyed their dinner all the more without having to make polite diplomatic conversation.

Khamenei’s whole trip turned out to be most awkward. Only male stewards were allowed on the flight to Victoria Falls visit. The Iranians toured the falls and were photographed at the crocodile farm. Anxious moments as tourists appeared nearby – some of them women in scanty bikini tops and those tiny denim shorts – but they we’re kept back, out of harm’s way.

Iran’s embassy statement later said our ‘responsible officials in the foreign ministry’ were given ample notice of the Islamic rules for dining together and it was made clear if they couldn’t be met there was no point in having a banquet at all

(*Cutting the grass for the ‘Mercedes elite’.  Eyes sting with the stench of rotting, uncollected garbage strewn elsewhere.)