When you deal with a neighbor, you don’t just deal with them like they don’t exist. Those were ANC Secretary-General, Gwede Mantashe’s words in an interview with 3rd Degree yesterday concerning the current xenophobic attacks in SA. It did not take a rocket scientist to figure out whom he was talking about. I was reminded of what President Mwanawasa once said that a good neighbor should not just watch when a fellow neighbor’s house is on fire. Seems we’ve been getting a lot of this diplomatic politics with no action. Even Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of our favorite mediator highlighted that the SA government hasn’t done much about the xenophobic situation, or about the issue of putting in place proper mechanisms to accommodate immigrants. The political analyst explained that this kind of thing is bound to happen when pressure piles on the poor. The situation apparently degenerated into serious competition for limited resources and opportunities, which later saw resentment grow towards ‘foreigners’ who were supposedly stealing jobs, women and accommodation of the locals. Mbeki further explained that the South African government has for so long ignored the growing shantytowns that make up most of Alexandra that in effect government helped to extend them.

The man has a point there. I shudder to imagine the kind of costs this whole excitement around the 2010 World Cup will amount to. Imagine a whole new stadium and refurbished hotels among other opulent perks to impress visitors alongside unimaginable poverty that makes up the life of a majority of South Africans.

However, I am beginning to slowly but surely understand President Mbeki. It took him a good four days after the xenophobic attacks to even say something, and all he could say was that the police needed to act more swiftly and that a panel had been formed to look into the attacks. No crisis there either hey?

Even if it’s trust that foreigners are “taking over” jobs, accommodation and even the women too, is that reason enough to actually kill them? We’ve seen harrowing footage of people being stoned or necklaced apartheid style. Not even defenseless women and children appealed to the humanity inside the perpetrators. Never mind the fact that South Africa requires Zimbabwean skills and no amount of hate-crime can change this. In fact, South Africa still lacks a lot of crucial skills. People forget that immigrants are often willing to do sometimes menial and not-so-glorious jobs shunned by locals. Should they not be recognized for that effort? Zimbabwe was at some point in history a place to be for Mozambican and Malawian immigrants who were willing to do the tasks disparaged by locals, but the tide turned and now our professionals are ones nursing the old and scrubbing toilets elsewhere. The tide can also just as easily turn for South Africans.

It is clear South Africa is not a safe destination or host for the 2010 World Cup and FIFA or whoever it is in charge ought to withdraw that privilege – even only as a boycott to show that they do not condone human rights abuses. FIFA president Joseph. S. Blatter risks eating his words that “It is a question of confidence and trust in a country like South Africa, a well organized country, able to organize this competition.” There is still two more years to go and that’s enough time to decide a new venue for this international event.

If Africans are foreigners in South Africa, I shudder to think about the whole lot that will, come 2010, flock from all corners to a country some of whose people are so unfeeling as to burn a living, breathing human being alive like a worthless effigy. How about the prospect of sheer embarrassment that when ‘foreigners’ came to Africa, they lived in perpetual and real fear of barbaric savages who have no respect for life.

It’s almost a month since a close friend lost his two beautiful and vicious dogs. They just woke up one morning throwing up all over the place and foaming at the mouth. They had obviously been poisoned. I had never once seen a man so distraught, weeping over loss of life of animals. Of course, life is life and to have it so unfeelingly snuffed out can be a most traumatic ordeal. Somewhere in the middle of much weeping and cursing emerged the opinion that whoever did this must have had a strong motive. Maybe they wanted to come back and steal something. I wondered to myself if dog killers and people who are cruel to animals always have justifiable motive.

The deputy RBZ governor Edward Mashiringwana was reported by the Independent to have seized Friedawill farm near Chinhoyi while the owner was absent. He reportedly refused to allow the SPCA to feed the animals. This led the pigs, demented by thirst and hunger, to consume their young. Did Mashiringwana have any particular motive in refusing to let these animals be helped, or just a senseless heartless thrill that doesn’t necessarily benefit anything?

I can draw parallels to the business of the Chinese An Yue Jiang whose whereabouts some of us are no longer sure of, but are pretty certain is eager to offload its cargo no matter what. That is if it hasn’t already if loudmouth Matonga’s claims are anything to go by. Everyone knows the situation going down here, but it seems to have fallen on deaf Chines ears that those weapons of mass destruction are intended to annihilate innocent civilians whose crime was simply expressing new political interests through the ballot. One wonders what’s the motive in this case or they simply don’t care? Or is it a case of letting the poor country self- destruct, then come in for easy plunder. But of what? Nothing hardly lives here and they have already literally flooded our market with defective Chinese zhing zhong rejects.

China is itself currently in mourning over the thousands of its people who lost their lives to its worst earthquake in three decades. It is sad how the nation mourns, how survivors are living on handouts at the roadside. I extend deep condolences to the people of China. Life is too precious to be so needlessly and violently lost. I hope they feel the same way too for others outside themselves.

Because, while I’m not accusing them of schadenfreude, it is nevertheless a sad irony that the people of China don’t seem to hold the Zimbabwean lives, which stand to be lost needlessly to the selfish interest of a cruel few, as important as their own.

Could the Chinese not lobby their government to stop the supply of arms to Zimbabwe? Or is business to go on as business, ahead of all else? Because the moment those weapons aboard the An Yue Jiang touch down, Zimbabwe, landlocked as it is will have an earthquake of its own, the kind entailing massive blood bath and purely man made.

My most cynical colleagues believe that justice has a strange and most unusual way of prevailing sometimes. According to them the Chinese have paid with the lives of their own for the innocent lives they would indirectly help annihilate through support of an oppressive government that will stop at nothing to get revenge on an electorate that simply fell out of love with it. I think there is nothing just about any undeserved death. If only we all valued life and the right to self-determination.

Currently the Chinese are also embroiled in a long-standing dispute with the Tibetans whom they just won’t allow to be an independent state. Their respect for the lives of others really becomes questionable to some of us. I mean, aside from their fear of losing face, what is stopping China from granting Tibet the genuine autonomy it desires. Alternately, in the case of Zimbabwe, are money and diplomatic politics more important than life?

*Schadenfreude, German word to describe taking pleasure in others’ misfortune

So, in order to make sure the teachers don’t strike and stop coming to work- parents of pupils at a primary school in Marlborough have been literally gypped into agreeing to fork out $100 million per child every Monday to cater for the teachers’ transport, and $400 million every Thursday for stationery.

I can understand the $100 million per child contribution towards the teachers’ transport but $400 million every week for stationery? Maybe its just me but, in class typical class of say, 35 children, multiply that by 400, just for the teacher’s stationery every week? For me, a teacher’s stationery constitutes chalk, markers, pens and probably a few notebooks, and those cost 14 billion every week? Man.

As we head towards the run- off, I sincerely hope the ‘government’ will once more consider teachers among the list of potential recipients of the huge payouts that they traditionally dole out towards elections. Most parents just cannot bear the costs and really, most parents who have no choice don’t know where to lodge their complaints in this regard. Already they are forking out so much as school fees. This is daylight robbery and the NIPC or the Ministry ought to do something about this. What is most nauseating about the whole thing is the business of holding the children’s education to ransom in order to cow the parents into submitting to impossible, unnecessary and egoistic demands.

Speaking of pupils, a colleague in our office was just pointing out how it must be for the maths pupils whose textbooks still carry stories and mathematical problems in cents. Picture them trying to solve a problem where James and John have twenty cents between them and how much each one gets in a country where coins no longer exist and cent has been replaced by billion. One can just imagine a young pupil asking, “What’s a cent?”

Going over my son’s homework with him on the weekend, I realised that this Zimbabwean economy is affecting and confusing these children in primary schools.

Their mathematics textbooks rely on $ and c – that is dollars and cents. For an example 7c was shared amongst 7 pupils and each got one cent. Correct! Now, the reality is the teacher has to start explaining to the class what a cent is, before he/she is being asked that question. A 45 minute lesson will last an hour, trying to make some sense of cents in the face of these millions and billions.

The Ministry of Education should do something about this subject which is now proving to be difficult to teach, otherwise teachers will have to ignore cents and say million or billion or (mita and bidza) as is common with even pre-school kids these days. Whatever we are doing in this present Zimbabwe, let’s remember our children in primary school, because this is the foundation of the education system.

The Musasa Project as a follow up to a previous discussion on why educated and economically empowered women stay in abusive marriages last week hosted a discussion on how men manipulate women into blaming themselves for their failed marriages. The dominant themes revolved around issues of lobola (bride-price), socialisation and the question of patriarchy.

Lobola that in principle is supposed to be a token that’s paid to the woman’s parents is now practically viewed as a return on investment. Bride-price is now so exorbitant it often feels like the woman is being sold to the highest bidder. The discussion raised the point that this creates resentment in the marrying husband that may manifest later on in the marriage. For instance the husband may use that against the wife with the excuse that since he paid for her, she has no right to refuse him anything, especially conjugal rights.

Women also largely blamed the way they were and continue to be socialised by society and especially, other womenfolk in the form of aunts and mothers. They are told from early childhood the male is the head, is always rights and that everything they do should be to please the husband. It emerges that women are the primary socialisers as well the gatekeepers of patriarchy. In essence this means women are the main oppressors of other women.

The former is a dimension that goes largely goes unexplored because in a way it is deemed inconceivable, that women themselves are the major culprits. For starters, the word manipulate itself is quite vague and rather broad. I mean, it is hard to imagine how men sit down to plan and strategise how to subordinate their women to such an extent that they end up blaming themselves and not finding any fault with their husbands.

I believe that no one can do to you what you haven’t already done to yourself. It becomes a question of the concept of self, self- esteem and choice. Most women do not want to realise the fact that they have a choice. Most are addicted to approval and will not fulminate against societal expectations that oppress them. Some feel they just have to be married in order to have a sense of self and social standing.

On the issue of lobola, admittedly it has really gone out of hand. These days, anyone who plans to marry starts saving up for the occasion, in US dollars so that by the time they have enough, it will not have been eroded by inflation. If at some point in history a goat or one cow was sufficient to take in a wife, surely parents of today are distorting culture for personal financial gain. This is only counterproductive in the sense that it is their daughter who ends up taking the heat. In this one instance, I think the NIPC becomes a valid entity. If lobola issues are what cause disharmony later on in some marriages, then I think price regulations in this regard are well worth exploring, maybe under the domestic violence act.

At the end of it all, if we really cared about our women, it becomes important to desocialise ourselves of a whole lot of norms and societal expectations that play a subtle yet crucial role in later oppressing them in their married lives. There is need to instil new family values among which boy and girl children are seen and treated as equals, even if it starts with having boys also scrubbing floors and dishes. I believe this goes a long way in inculcating a sense of appreciation and respect of what women stand for on the part of men. I believe that a young man who grows up seeing his sister being the cook and the cleaner while he sits will at a later stage view his wife in the same way. He will not be moved to help or at least appreciate the tiring work she does simply because he was socialised to believe that’s the way its supposed to be, and this is one of the major problems faced in marriage.

I believe it is crucial to desocialise the husband-wife relationship from being a master- servant one to that one of friendship. Friends respect and treat each other as equals.

It is also crucial for society to recognise and respect women who have left failed marriages to stand on their own, not to treat them as outcasts while pinning various derogatory epithets on them for making such bold moves. They have already paid the price to be different.

Above all, it is important for women themselves to learn to feel for each other, instead of encouraging each other to hold on where things are obviously not working. They need to realise that their happiness is important too and that they have a right, as well as a choice to enjoy bodily integrity. Instead of blaming the men for manipulating them, it may do some good to do a little self-criticism because it is they that allow them to get away with it. If at all it is the case that men do somehow manipulate women, the fact that the women themselves realise this should spur them into action that will stop any further manipulation.

I’ll admit I went to see Sandra Ndebele’s show at HIFA because the description included: This show contains some nudity. My interest was not nudity (tho I don’t mind seeing naked male or female bodies, particularly if artful and/or exuding pride). More I was thinking my interest was the crowd – who was there, as well as how they reacted. There were lots of men. Lots of cell phones taking pictures. Heads shaking. Laughing. Sure, the show spurred controversy, as I understand is often the case with Sandra Ndebele. Some feel she uses nudity and sexual appeal as a marketing gimmick. That she’s using shock value to seek attention which may result in further objectifying women. She disputes this, saying quite the opposite. As the program indicates, her intent is to “revitalise and preserve cultural traditions and empower young African women through culture.”

In this case, controversy seems a good thing, gives pause for thought. Early on in the show, my interests shifted from the crowd to the importance of understanding the details of women’s lives in the past. Not women’s lives only as mothers or wives, but the ways women shared and passed down knowledge within their communities. Women’s lives in and of themselves were dynamic, full of emotion and intelligence as well as love and support for each other. Thinking along these lines made me more fully realise that the show may have contained nudity, but the content of the show was not nudity. Rather, the content – a nice blend of seriousness and humour – is a story with multiple messages.

I see no reason to provide a summary of the story. Instead, I’d say the story conveys and advocates in ways beyond restating the plot. The story is about recapturing history; rather I should say herstory. To look back in time and see as well as celebrate that the herstory of women is not one of oppression only. This is not to say oppression didn’t exist in the past. But, women of yesteryear were vibrant. And brave. Sandra Ndebele seems particularly interested in capturing the vibrancy of the clothes women wore; that these clothes had meanings and were symbols of prestige, even power. Herein lies the present day controversy: The clothes. Sexy gimmick? Or something far more insightful? I say more power to Sandra Ndebele and the 20 women in the show. What they did is proudly present both a call and an avenue to better understand not only histories, but also herstories.