Grind at the sugar factory for my mother's gravestone business in Harare
Memories from Kiev, part I - the story of Ralph from Zimbabwe, the mighty central train station, brownshirts against homeless babushkas
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Living in Ukraine was, and no doubt is, a remarkable succession of chance meetings with unusual individuals. Though I haven’t been since March 2022, my remaining (not of their own volition) friends regale me with tales of the Syrian, Peruvian, Yemeni, Brazilian, American, Columbian, Nepalese ‘visitors’ they see staggering about their sleepy west Ukrainian towns, fresh from - or on their way to - their newest ‘assignment’. I can only imagine the people one could meet in today’s Ukraine, though I’m not sure I’d like to.
This story starts with my chance meeting with a great guy - Ralph. It was a hot summer afternoon in 2021, and I saw a young black man walking in my direction, along ‘Victory Parade’, the glorious, enormous Soviet road I used to live and work on. Depending on the time of day, one could see all kinds of characters along the vast parade, this huge artery aimed straight at the city Centre, Kreschatyk street, maidan - delivery boys for the various uber duplicates, all legal in Ukraine in the daytime, prostitutes when it got dark, and by the late hours of the night, young, hard boys smoking cigarettes, waiting with packed plastic bags for buses headed out of town.
The man seemed confused, so I asked him whether he was lost. He answered in English, so I switched to it. He answered that he was, he was trying to find Vokzal - the central train station. He was heading in the opposite direction, and Vokzal is quite a place, so I decided to guide him to his destination.
Vokzal is, like any central train station, especially in this part of the world, quite chaotic and perhaps unpleasant. I quite enjoyed walking around Vokzal, perhaps because I didn’t have to go there too often. My partner, who had to wake up early each morning and navigate the fighting drunks at 7:00AM at the Vokzal metro station, was of a different opinion.
Anyway, I have a sort of sentimental attraction to this sprawling network - some would say rubbish heap - filled with just about everything. Private buses carrying tough young men and women to and from regional cities. Second hand clothes markets run by grinning Africans and Turks, themselves located somehow on top of venues like ‘American Burger and Shashlyk Pub’. Leering rightwing veterans with startling tattoos - ‘Munitsipalna Varta’ (City Security) in brown-shirt uniforms - on the hunt for the ubiquitous Roma women, themselves not amiss to ruffle around some pockets.
I actually wrote a whole article about the out and proud Hitlerians that run the Kiev city council-funded Mun-Varta. I wrote it in a cafe opposite Vokzal, nervously drinking coffees while trying to keep my computer screen oriented away from the potential gaze of wandering brownshirts.
The main characters at vokzal were certainly the homeless, mainly elderly. There are entire rooms inside voksal filled simply with elderly homeless women. According to activists I followed on social media, there was a room at the bottom of voksal where homeless with terminal diseases paid to live in while they slowly died. The homeless would occasionally be hounded out of vokzal by the brownshirts or the ordinary police. Apparently, any homeless at vokzal has to pay rent. Those that didn’t, including the elderly babushkas, were ruthlessly pushed out, kicked on the ground by protectors of public peace. I remember one episode somewhere around 2020, during the depths of covid, when dead homeless started appearing in the cold underpasses beneath Victory Parade, right outside my apartment. They had been poisoned. The story that I received was that they were being hunted down by the vokzal mafia for refusing to pay rent….
Apart from all that, there were plenty of drunks with red puffy cheeks and primitive, inimitable tattoos on their knuckles. They would sit on the steps near the entrance to the metro, occasionally trying to pull passersby into alternatively erudite and crude conversations, but mainly coming to accounts with each other, sometimes engaging in near ritual brawls. Serious discussions with policemen and brownshirts, man to man, was their other main activity.
Anyway, as I said, I feel quite a lot of attachment to Vokzal. One could find all kind of interesting things being sold, realistic replica guns, knives, pastries. I met a drunk (in the deadly serious way that vodka gets you), funny, and quite scary military general there one midnight walking along with my partner, who tried to recruit me into teaching English on a naval ship off Odessa (to sweeten the deal, he informed me several times about his experience killing people), bidding us farewell with ‘Slava Ukraini’, upon which we (well, my partner) meekly replied ‘slava geroyam’ (I doubt you would have had the courage to reply much otherwise, dear reader). I liked getting cheap haircuts there. It was filled with tantalizing stickers advertising for work, the kind that you find less and less the further west you go in Europe -
Good money available, military experience necessary!
Looking for buff boys for debt collection!
Easy $700 a month working in an office! (obviously a scam and/or a call centre)
and, most popular of all, no object in Kiev was free of at least 5 of these:
Work in Poland!
It’s a great place to observe life go by. Have some fresh buckwheat and cutlets at ‘Puzata Hata’. Get some electricity and overhear some interesting conversations at the 2-story McDonalds
Anyway, back to Ralph. He wanted to talk to someone about a job, or look at some job openings, or look at a hostel or something in Vokzal. We chatted along the war. Later, we hang out a couple times, getting beers. Once he brought along a spoiled young Nigerian student, who kept on asking me whether I knew where to find prostitutes, since his dad had sent him off with quite a lot of money. That was one of the interesting sights of Kiev, the fact that the Nigerian students were often far better dressed - dramatically colorful suits, pointed crocodile boots, expensive waxed beards and haircuts - than the miserable Ukrainians.
Ralph was hardly spoilt. He grew up in the slums of Harare, Zimbabwe, and showed me photos of his old ‘gang life’. He had been coming to Ukraine the past couple years to make money for his baby momma and their child. His big dream was to make enough money to go back to Harare and help his mother, who he dearly loved, make her gravestone business big.
Generally, he had worked in concrete and sugar factories, in fairly awful conditions. He told me how he and the other Africans would get paid 350 hryvnia (about $15 back then), while the Ukrainians got 700 for the same 12 hours of backbreaking labor. One time, he was late to the pub. He told me the factory owner had chosen the Africans at the factory, gathered them together, whipped out a ‘doctor’, and this doctor had given them all a ‘blood test for HIV’. They sent all of them home while they ‘waited for the results’. They hadn’t been paid. Later they were told they were all healthy, but that they had no job.
Luckily, Ralph found a better job. He found work at a call centre, a classic occupation in Ukraine. Nowadays, the only booming ‘civilian’ business in Ukraine is working at so-called ‘contours’ - scam call centres sponsored by the top politicians of ‘Servant of the People’, who assure the public of the legality of their actions since they supposedly ‘only target Russians’ (and for which they are supposedly often hit by Russian hypersonic missiles).
Anyway, Ralph’s call centre was fairly typical in that sense. Registered in France, it covered several floors of a Kievan skyscraper. A whole floor of English-speakers, mainly from Africa. A whole floor of French-speakers, also African. Another floor for other languages.
The consumers: Americans, Australians, Brits. It was covid time, and business was booming, as Ralph told me, because so many old first world boomers had nothing to do but sit online. While watching youtube, they would recieve an advertisement - click here to invest in crypto or whatever else, and your investment will increase by 10% a month! Fantastic! The old man, let’s say John, clicks the link, and enters his phone number and name. No money just yet. But the trick is that once he gives his phone number and some other details, he’s caught - he will be called every single day by Ralph and his colleagues. John can change his phone number, block them whatever - they will still find his new phone. Ralph told me that these Johns, after several weeks of methodical calls, would break down in tears - when will it stop?! Well, only after you, John, make a fantastic investment of merely $100 dollars to begin with, that has every chance of making good money.
Of course, Ralph could only say ‘chance’. They couldn’t guarantee anything. In fact, once John paid that, they would keep calling, until he paid another $200. Unluckily for John, there would be no return on the investments. But for Ralph and his colleagues, they got sacked if they couldn’t get the Johns to hand over at least $1000 in their first month at the job.
Anyway, Ralph did quite well for himself at this job. He started buying extravagantly coloured suits, and went to clubs. I was happy for him, after having endured what he did at his previous jobs. He looked great, though sometimes I found it a bit hard to relate with his focused grindset mentality, foreign to my bourgeois intellectualism. We would still go to the pub sometimes, where he would tell me that he sometimes felt a little guilty about his job. I told him not to worry about it, the western parasites have too much money anyway, drain them harder!
I kept wanting to talk with him about Zimbabwe’s history, Mugabe and such. All I remember getting from him (we did get quite drunk, to be fair), was that Mugabe did great things making Zimbabwe independent, then the west strangled Zim, then Mugabe himself got a bit old, but that anyway, the opposition parties threw people to their deaths by inviting them to protest violently while the opposition leaders relaxed in their offices.
Otherwise, I had a lot of fun learning about transnational (Jamaican, I guess?) vocabulary, like bomboclat. Ralph was a great guy. When February 2022 happened, I messaged him to see if he was OK. He was living in Troeschina, a huge part of Kiev that isn’t serviced by the metro system (regarding which plenty of events have been happening recently, a topic for a future post!), where about a million people live in decrepit apartment blocks. He hadn’t been able to leave because of the transport issues, and artillery was even more audible over there, being as it was right on the edge with the forest, then a real battleground between Russian and Ukrainian forces. I sent him all the information I knew about how to leave Ukraine. Talking to him later, he had left, found it very difficult, encountered plenty of racism. Judging from instagram, he’s back in Ukraine, back at work somewhere or other.
I didn’t even mean to write about Ralph today, but I did because it leads onto what I really wanted to talk about - February 25, 2022, when I saw another lost-looking black man outside the local supermarket, in the hazy orange sunset filled with stench of gunpowder, half an hour before the 5pm curfew after which enforcers shot to kill….
Hope Ralph is okay and is killing it on the phone lines
I like how you tell Ralph to not worry about the western parasites XD