Dance your anger and your joys,

Dance the military guns to silence,

Dance oppression and injustice to death,

Dance my people.

- Ken Saro-Wiwa

Likely many Zimbabweans feel stuck and maybe slide into complacency. The current election crisis has left people feeling frozen, like there’s nothing that can be done to bring positive change. Also, issues such as vulnerabilities to HIV, domestic violence, gender inequalities, and others at times carry self-acknowledged complacency often due do a difficult to shake feeling that reality only allows for complacency. A couple things got me thinking about complacency and possible ways to make complacency productive.

First, I saw a Zimbabwean film The Bitter Pill and there’s complacency everywhere in the film. A married couple feels helpless they have not been unable to conceive a child. The frustrated husband goes to Canada. The husband’s best friend, a wealthy entrepreneur, pursues the wife. You feel his complacency – forex is the only way to make money and belief it’s his right and obligation to pursue any women he wants because that’s what men do (particularly wealthy ones). The film portrays a possible reality. After having sex with the entrepreneur, the wife becomes pregnant, and through meeting one of the entrepreneurs other girlfriends, the wife discovers the entrepreneur is HIV-positive. It struck me that HIV is a prominent element in the film. However, as is an accurate reality, HIV is barely discussed. Not only are the characters complacent, but the film itself, given the way HIV is engaged (or rather is not discussed), potentially perpetuates complacency. Thus, the all important question: What’s attached to disseminating the film? In a move to find productivity in complacency, the International Video Fair intends to use the film to facilitate discussion. Importantly, part of discussions will be seeing that silence around HIV may be a common reality, but silence is not the only option.

My second set of thoughts about complacency developed while reading Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain. First published in 1975, the book is a timeless classic. Additionally, I found it interesting to think about the complacency of the father-son characters Tongoona and Lucifer; they both are struggling with a feeling that many things remain unsaid. At the same time, the characters are not at all complacent. I’m fascinated by the ways Tongoona and Lucifer are, individually and in conversation, immersed in self-reflection – about life, family, opportunities, change, etc. Perhaps this is a way of reading thought processes as an example of productive complacency. Many things in the world can and do remain unsaid, yet the thought process around why they are difficult to be said is just as crucial to efforts to bring positive change. Delving into Tongoona and Lucifer’s thoughts serves as a reminder that reality has long made many people feel stuck and limited actions, but complacency to the point of being void of thought is not a place many people have ever resided.

Watching TV the other night I was horrified to see groups of South African men marching through townships in South Africa brandishing weapons of all descriptions from hammers through to axes, baying for the blood of foreigners living in South Africa. Equally horrifying were the images of members of the South African police force standing back nonchalantly watching victims writhe on the ground in pain from their assault.

These xenophobic attacks are appalling and unacceptable as are the daily high levels of violence that South African women experience in “the rainbow nation”.

Amnesty International, in their 2008 report on the state of the world’s human rights stated the following on South Africa:

High levels of sexual and other forms of violence against women continued to be reported.

According to police statistics, reported incidents of rape had decreased by 4.2 per cent over the previous six years. However, between April 2006 and March 2007, 52,617 rapes were reported. There were also 9,327 reported cases of “indecent assault” – including anal rape and other types of sexual assault which did not then fall within the definition of rape. In December new crime statistics for the period April to September 2007 included 22,887 reported rapes.

Police officials reported to Parliament that between July 2006 and June 2007, police recorded 88,784 incidents of “domestic violence” in terms of the 1998 Domestic Violence Act (DVA). The Department of Justice reported that over 63,000 protection orders were issued by the courts between April 2006 and March 2007. However, the ICD reported in November that of 245 police stations audited in 2006, only 23 per cent were compliant with their obligations under the DVA, ranging from none in Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces to all of those audited in the Western Cape.

Women experiencing violence and service-providing organizations told Amnesty International that while some police facilitated women’s access to protection orders, others referred complainants back to their families, or failed to seize dangerous weapons, or refused to take any steps unless the complainant laid criminal charges first.

For every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable. For every boy who is burdened with the constant expectation of knowing everything, there is a girl tired of people not trusting her intelligence. For every girl who is tired of being called over-sensitive, there is a boy who fears to be gentle, to weep. For every boy for whom competition is the only way to prove his masculinity, there is a girl who is called unfeminine when she competes. For every girl who throws out her E-Z-Bake Oven, there is a boy who wishes to find one. For every boy struggling not to let advertising dictate his desires, there is a girl facing the ad industry’s attacks on her self-esteem. For every girl who takes a step toward her liberation, there is a boy who finds the way to freedom a little easier.

Poster from CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective

This morning four of us piled into a car and went to observe a Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) gathering in downtown Harare. They wanted to deliver a petition to the Zambian Embassy requesting SADC to get more energetically involved in helping to solve the crisis in Zimbabwe. I thought that WOZA’s tactic of getting people to witness their event in order to provide factual and independent accounts is a good one. WOZA initiated their march at the UNDP building and they had reached Julius Nyerere Way when a bakkie full of riot police arrived to “put them in order”. What interested me was the behaviour of the police; they didn’t seem terribly excited or keen on beating the WOZA women. One of the women taken away was Jenni Williams, WOZA’s tireless co-ordinator.

I’ve been reading various news reports and articles by Zimbabweans that emphasise the need for Zimbabweans to go and vote in huge numbers in the presidential run-off. Of course a very high turnout of opposition voters will make it more difficult for Mugabe to steal the election, but steal it he will. In which case I wonder if the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has a post election strategy in place this time. We are likely to see a re-run of the last election when the MDC claimed victory but failed to convert their win. As I’ve written before, the liberation of Zimbabwe will only happen when Zimbabweans and the leadership of the MDC realise that we have to do more than vote and hope that the international community will come to our rescue.

Working out a post election strategy is not easy in a dictatorship, but, whether we like it or not, we have to.

Public actions like WOZA’s today give me some hope. But their actions need to be multiplied and replicated all over Harare and other parts of Zimbabwe to create sustained pressure on the illegitimate Mugabe regime.

At this time the MDC should not be putting their efforts into printing yet another batch of election posters, or fliers. They should be:

- forming resistance cells and collaborating with a variety of pressure groups like WOZA and the NCA to create rolling actions when the election is stolen
- lobbying key business leaders to shut down the country once the election is stolen: banks, fuel providers, taxi operators, teachers, supermarket owners
- bringing the armed forces and police onto the side of justice

It is largely agreed that the majority of Zimbabweans (including members of Zanu PF) and personnel within the armed forces and the police want Mugabe to go. It is a minority that want him in power to further their own corrupt and power hungry agendas. Therefore we need to stretch the regime to bursting point, and burst it will. But only if we refuse to be complicit in our own oppression.

Some Zimbabweans, as well as the MDC leadership have said that they won’t organise protest marches because the army will fire upon civilians. This is already happening in the rural areas and the high density areas where people have been murdered, assaulted and made homeless. If the MDC and Zimbabweans continue to use this excuse for inaction, then it isn’t Mugabe who is oppressing us, it is ourselves.

Power itself is not derived solely through violence. Governmental power is frequently violent in nature, but it is primarily maintained through oppression and tacit compliance of the majority of the governed. Since silence and passivity is interpreted by the government as consent, any significant withdrawal of compliance will restrict or challenge governmental control. Struggle and conflict are often necessary to correct injustice. People’s apathy in the face of injustice implicates them in the moral responsibility for that injustice. (For more, click here)

The liberation of Zimbabwe will be achieved because of a variety of interventions, including:

- creative and courageous leadership in the opposition
- creative and courageous leadership in civil society organisations
- regional pressure
- international pressure
- internal pressure
- the withdrawal of co-operation by ordinary citizens
- the non-cooperation of the business community
- the withdrawal of support for Mugabe by the police and the armed forces

And I believe the most important of these is sustained internal pressure.