Yesterday was the first day of HIFA and somehow I managed to squeeze in 5 shows which is impressive seeing as I have a day job.

First up was Kupenga Kwa Hamlet with the really, really fabulous Denton Chikura and Tonderai Munyevu. Their performance at the Standard Theatre was electric and the capacity crowd enjoyed every minute of it, especially the surprising end. Go see it!

Next was The Juggler, Mark Nizer. Mark is a great performer and had the audience eating out of his hands, both when he had hands full of juggling balls AND when they were empty! Part of the joy of Mark’s performance was his humour and friendliness. He said how much he loves coming to Zimbabwe and praised Zimbabweans for being real can do people. Mark encountered a host of challenges during his first show mainly brought on by the fact that his lap top died during his travels and he had to do as well as he could without it.

Hero at 6pm in the Standard Theatre is a wonderful production performed by Craig Morris and directed by Andrew Buckland. Last year I saw Blood Orange and decided that I’ll see Anything that Andrew has been involved in.

From Hero we went on to Carmina Burana, the opening show. On our way in we bought a bucket of ice and a bottle of chardonnay and found our friends in the throng of folk who had turned out for what is usually the highlight of HIFA. I loved the singing which was rousing and beautiful but I was left disappointed by the performance and the visuals surrounding the singing. I got a text message from a friend late last night saying that she had gotten bored by the show. My boredom was kept at bay by the incredibly beautiful Zimbabwean night sky and the group of people I was with. I have to say though that we spent a lot of time talking amongst ourselves and listening to the music rather than watching the show.

It was a case of leaving the very best to last. A friend persuaded me to drop by Reps Theatre in Avondale to see Jutro, a South Africa production brought to Zimbabwe by the Embassy of Israel. It’s the story of a singer in a rundown night club during World War II. HIFA has only been going for a day but so far, if you see anything, see Jutro!

Dale Dore writing for the Voice of Democracy takes Graca Machel in his sights after she suggested that Britain should keep quiet on the situation in Zimbabwe. The “situation” by the way is actually a crisis. Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans need food aid, the formal employment sector is crippled leaving the majority of Zimbabweans with no hope of finding a job, while power and water supplies are erratic. The list of ZANU PF made ills that plagues Zimbabwe is endless. Dale Dore reckons that countries like Britain, with their helping hand of over 1 billion in aid, should be given the freedom to criticise and comment on countries that, amongst other things, consistently put their citizens on the bottom of the list when it comes to treating them right.

Here’s Dale for you:

Ignore Machel: Turn up the volume for violence-free and fair elections

On behalf of the poorest and most vulnerable people of Zimbabwe, the Voice for Democracy applauds and says a big ‘thank you’ to Britain. Despite every provocation and insult from the Zimbabwean government, and because of Mugabe’s utter disregard for his own people, the British government has given Zimbabwe over $100 million in humanitarian assistance last year: from health care and education to providing water, food aid, seed and fertilisers to the poorest households. Since Independence in 1980, Britain has given Zimbabwe over $1 billion in aid.

Yet Britain continues to be unfairly censured from a most unexpected quarter. The Elder’s Graça Machel has told Britain to ‘keep quiet’ and let SADC deal with Zimbabwe (The Guardian, 16 April 2009). We ask Machel: What has SADC, and South Africa in particular, done for the Zimbabwean people? It has kept quiet. For a whole decade it has refused to restrain a brutal and dictatorial regime that has bought nothing but violence, ruin and misery to its own people. In one election after another, SADC and South Africa have sanctioned violence-stained and rigged elections that have maintained Robert Mugabe in power. South Africa has taken an obtuse pleasure in defending Mugabe’s malevolent government while Britain and its allies in the United Nations were trying to isolate and restrain it.

Let the truth be told. If Britain has acted as ‘big brother’ – as Machel avers – it has been to care for and feed Zimbabwe’s hungry and destitute. It has been to protect the people of Zimbabwe against its bullying leader by supporting human rights, democracy and the rule of law. And what have SADC and South Africa done? They have sided with the bully. They allowed Robert Mugabe to sit at the high table of Presidents even when they did not recognise his election to office in June 2008. It was SADC and South Africa that pushed through an undemocratic inclusive government that handed back power to their despotic ally to continue his gruesome handiwork. It is they that have insisted that Zimbabwe must sort out its own problems, knowing full well that Mugabe’s only methods of negotiation is with an iron bar and through the barrel of a gun.

If anything, the Voice for Democracy believes that Britain has been too soft on those SADC countries which it supplies with huge amounts of aid. Britain and its allies in the European Union and the United States should be exerting much more diplomatic pressure on SADC and South Africa to ensure that violence-free and fair elections bring about a democratic transition in Zimbabwe. If Machel wants Britain to keep quiet then SADC and South Africa must bring an end to the brewing state-sponsored violence that will inevitably erupt during the run-up to elections. We are watching and waiting.

If you still doubt the power of people, ask the ZESA bosses who locked themselves in their offices when confronted by scores of women, not violent but demanding to express their grievances over the unfair charges by the main power service provider. Surely there is a powerful force in numbers and in unity of purpose. The number of those who participated in the demonstration clearly shows that the most affected people by power cuts are women who have the load of looking for firewood for preparing meals. They are the ones who feel the gap left by power cuts and the pain of looking for alternatives and preparing food in smoky fireplaces. People now resort to traditional meat preservation methods, because fridges are no longer reliable.

And all this is putting pressure on the sparsely distributed population of flora around the city.

If birds and rabbits had the capacity, they should have joined the streets in protest for their natural habitat is no more in and around Harare.  Even the fish of the Mukuvisi River should have joined in because deforestation coupled with poor practices of urban farming that have seen streams losing their depth.

Since 2008, when the Forestry Commission encouraged the urban authorities to consider tree planting as a means of curbing further deforestation, nothing has been seen on the positive front. Axes are at work on a daily basis, but no seeds are being planted to replace the trees.

Not only is this predominant in the cities; even the countryside has almost doubled, if not trebled, a tree devouring appetite. New farmers have for the past decade been clearing forests for farming, building homesteads as well as for firewood. The use of firewood for the preparation of the best paying farming crop, Virginia tobacco, is also a cause for concern.  Almost every new farmer appreciates tobacco as the best paying crop and wants to grow it. There is no electricity or coal for preparing this crop; only available is the natural tree that has taken thirty years or centuries to mature only to fall in less than a few minutes destined for preparing tobacco.

Agricultural extension officers are doing their work in teaching people how to grow tobacco, how to prepare it and how to sell it. But I wonder if there are any initiatives on how to plant new trees, how to preserve the existing ones and also on the use of alternative power sources.

Global warming is seeing a shift of seasons, and an unreliability of rainfall, a phenomena that should be of concern to farmers and yet, only the axe is at work. It is high time the authorities start giving value to the natural vegetation.

I want many people to wake up and do something for the sake of our environment, in unity so our voices can be heard.

Chiredzi is a small town in the south of Zimbabwe. We’re kept informed of the situation there by a Kubatana subscriber who sends us regular updates. Here’s one of his latest:

ZANU PF are hijacking NGO project meetings, hospital meetings, and cattle sales in the Zaka, Mwenezi and Chiredzi constituencies. Project leaders have been interrogated by CIO officers and now have to advise them where and when the gatherings take place. The project leaders have been instructed by the CIO that when the CIO appear at these gatherings they must leave so that they the CIO can address the people. It has come to light that ZANU PF are having a problem getting people to come to their own political meetings and that is why they are hijacking other gatherings and forcing the people to listen to there angle of politics and threats.

Commercial business in Chiredzi has take a significant down turn as they only get electrical power one day a week, this includes all the butchers and supermarkets, which means a shortage of fresh bread, meat and milk.

The local townships are all overcrowded with people who have moved in from the communal areas to try and find work and food; this has caused crime to increase dramatically in the area.

I found it rather ironic recently that just after reading in the Mail & Guardian of this week that Zimbabwe’s Chikurubi prison has for the past 5 years been struggling to find a hangman; I encountered the Fingaz’s opinion by CZ bemoaning the death sentence in Zimbabwe. He was especially bemoaning the fact that opponents of the death penalty are amazingly silent at a time they should be making a lot of noise while the constitution is currently being debated. According to the M&G, the absence of an executioner has meant that some 50+ men on death row have been leading traumatized lives awaiting execution.  Others have gone as far as 10 years on the waiting list, living in isolation and at real risk of losing their sanity. If these reports are anything to go by, it means for the past five years or so there have been no legal executions in the country (if that’s any consolation to CZ), thanks to the job nobody wants notwithstanding the 94% unemployment rate in Zimbabwe as observed by M&G.

Because CZ was extremely impassioned about the issue of capital punishment to the extent of expending three quarters of the Notebook – where there are usually numerous brief paragraphs of other stories, I started to interrogate my own feelings about the death penalty. While I appreciate the observations CZ made concerning wrongful execution and the irreversibility of death, I could not help but think (and this is a very personal opinion) that I wouldn’t want complete abolishment of the practice in view of the fact that in some situations, only the death of an offender will give other people peace of mind.

Most of my colleagues are completely opposed to the idea of any human being taking it upon themselves to kill another asking where anyone obtains the moral high ground to play god. Well, the very same ground from whence criminals obtain the impetus to commit heinous crimes against humanity I have said.

The declaration of rights says everyone (including rapists and murderers) has the right to life and security of person, and that our exercising our rights shouldn’t impinge on the rights of others. The declaration is ofcourse silent on what should happen in the event of impingement of rights.

CZ in his article intelligently observes that the death sentence ‘…serves no particular use…unless one argues that they derive satisfaction from people being dead!’ I would like to point out that people sometimes do derive something valuable; namely peace, closure and a sense of retribution! Remember Stephen Chidhumo and Edward Masendeke  – the notorious armed robbers and murderers who in 1995 escaped death row and relentlessly terrorized citizens.  Did not the collective exhale of society happen only after their respective executions? Sometimes snuffing out undesirables is the only way of preventing the needless deaths of others.

The question that probably begs an answer is – how does any society determine which crimes warrant the death penalty? In Zimbabwe, I know treason tops the list on the list that includes murder, mutiny, drug trafficking and any such crimes that may be sentenced by the court.  Like in Egypt, I think rape, especially of minors should also form part of that core list.

Some say that killing serial criminals is too easy, and to a certain extent I agree. But until such a time they devise a higher form of punishment more severe than just a lifetime’s detention for heinous crimes, the death sentence might be the ultimate pain to be inflicted on those who cause the pain and anguish of others. Take child rapists for example. The only way I wouldn’t oppose their execution is if their prescribed punishment is castration or subjection to daily torture that probably entails cutting off a body part each day until they die from the agony of it.

I take you back to an issue I raised not long ago, about the rapist who attempted to molest my cousin and only God knows whose child else he previously managed to subdue. While justice still has not been obtained for my cousin (yes the hurdles continue), the man is traumatizing my aunt (who is a defenseless single parent by the way) and her children day and night. Sometimes he knocks repeatedly on her door at night like a mad man, and nobody will touch him because Labor has conveniently stepped in. May I hasten to add that the guy paid admission of guilt.

It is people like him whose necks I wouldn’t mind if the hangman (if he gets found) tightens the noose around. Hell, if I had the guts, I’d do it myself. Capital punishment should be a preserve for malcontents like him, who are guilty of heinous crimes like violating defenseless little girls, admit to such and yet show no remorse and have the nerve to continue traumatizing their victim just because the flawed arms of the law allow scum like him to slip through the clutches of justice. No sir, may capital punishment carry on especially for such because when they depart the earth, only then will peace prevail in our lives.

Capital punishment – is a legal and effective form of punishment. And if only one potential murderer, assassin or terrorist is deterred from committing a capital crime because he or she fears the death penalty, then that single act of deterrence has effectively reduced the loss of lives.
- T. Max Beer Jr, Liberia

I never imagined myself talking of volcanic ash over Europe from an Icelandic volcano. I thought what does volcanic ash have to do with a poor writer from Zimbabwe? I might never be in the vicinity of a volcano in my lifetime.

But the volcanic ash has hit my colleagues in the arts industry in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Jane Morris and Brian Jones of Amabooks, a local publisher, were supposed to travel to South Africa and on to Britain for the London Book Fair. Amabooks have published numerous books including short writings from Bulawayo. They have also published several collections of poetry by John Eppel. John Eppel was also published in the prestigious poetry anthology Fire In The Soul: 100 Poems For Human Rights by Amnesty International and New Internationalist. Also in the anthology are local poets, Julius Chingono based in Harare and myself based in Bulawayo.

I met Jane and Brian at the art gallery in Bulawayo and they were not at all pleased with the fact that they had failed to travel to the London Book Fair. And they were now trying to make frantic efforts to travel to the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA), the biggest festival in Zimbabwe. Since the Amabooks team thought they wouldn’t be around, they had not made any arrangements for HIFA. We have only a handful of festivals in Zimbabwe; these include Ibumba Festival, run by Siyaya Arts in Bulawayo, Intwasa Arts Festival that is held at the end of September in Bulawayo and the Bulawayo Poetry Festival 26-28 August. The Bulawayo Poetry Festival is run by Poetry Bulawayo and is a feast of poetry.

Another artist affected by the volcanic ash is writer Christopher Mlalazi. He was supposed to have travelled to the US for a writing fellowship on Tuesday the 21st of April. I met him on the 22nd and he was unhappy that the volcanic ash had scuttled his plans. Chris’s specialty is short stories. But he recently published a novel, Many Rivers, which tells of the many rivers that an illegal Zimbabwean immigrant has to face. After crossing the crocodile infested Limpopo River, there are still many other rivers to be crossed in the form of obstacles and hardships. Christopher is a National Arts Merits Awards winner with his collection of short stories, Dancing With Life that was published by Amabooks.

When I met Jane Morris later she had become rather upbeat. She had managed to convince the British Council, sponsors of the London Book Fair, to send them to a literary fair in Wales instead. I sincerely hope the whole volcanic ash will clear up soon so that our torch bearers can travel.