The western view of catastrophes is very strange to me!! But they like the idea that everything in life has a pre-existent order, that there is some invisible essence in the system of life, indeed in the system of the economy of the whole, that automatically punishes evil and rewards good. It's the idea of the inherently just universe. So the first thing a westerner will do, if you tell him of a misfortune, is to pan through your background to find any evidence of sin. Once he thinks he has found it, he alights upon it with an enormous sense of glee and self-congratulatory fervour. He has managed to put you in your place (lower than he) and at the same time assure that his life, the universe, and everything make sense again -- that events are not arbitrary (as they seem) but fully ordered and organised by a providence that distributes pain to the guilty and pleasure to those who work hard and do right.
The Shona way is much more humane and more delightful. It is better to laugh at things that go wrong than to put on the dour face of punitive seriousness and get out one's whipping stick.
I narrowly avoided -- I hope -- becoming thus, "western" in my memoir-writing, by trying to turn some of the weight of evidence against myself (even though I don't actually believe it belongs there). That is the way to try to alleviate the heavy load that providence alone would have to bear, in assuring we all live in a just universe.See
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