The cycles of the seasons.

• Author: Hove, Chenjerai

The phone rings, ruining my morning silence. I hesitantly pick it up. The caller: my son, a student in South Africa.

"Yes, Papa, everything is fine. But there is something strange here in Johannesburg. The streets are covered in snow, the whole town. It snowed last night. People don't know what to do, or what to call it. Even the elders do not remember a single local language with the word 'snow'. There is no name for it. Children are being warned by their parents not to go out. They say it is a bad omen."

Anguished wonder in my heart, on my face!

Snow in my village. Snow in a country where the name for it does not even exist.

In my youth in the 1970s, summer rains came on or about 15 October and ended by the first week of April, with celebrations of joy and gratitude to the Creator for the granaries which would soon be filled with fresh food and hope.

The rainy season was regular. Farmers knew when to prepare the land for the coming of the rains of life. The rain songs and dances flourished in our season-tuned hearts.

Forty years later, in 2009, farmers no longer know when the rains will come. Seven in ten rainy seasons are almost rainless. Livestock die, and the once prosperous farmers depend on the humiliation of food handouts. It is no longer a thing of pride to farm.

"The skies have humiliated us," my elderly mother says. "Maybe there is something we have done wrong," she continues.

The local vegetation has changed. Trees that always bloomed with leaf and flower, are dying, withering away. The fireflies of the dark summer nights are only left in the nostalgic stories which parents dare tell their children.

In Norway, where I now live, skiing, and the love for this Norwegian sport, is becoming endangered like all those animals in Africa which now have learnt to sniff at the empty sky as their forests dwindle and they fight for space with humans.

A losing battle! The ice and snow melt faster than ever before in Norway. The sportsmen and women are miserable at the prospect of their offspring not skiing within the next hundred years.

Our race, the human one, will be known for pouring our rejects and...