Censorship is the sincerest form of flattery.
- From Ethan Zuckerman’s blog

I enjoyed reading The Standard editor’s latest instalment about Mudenge. I also took notice of the paper’s “Quote of the week” where Saviour Kasukuwere spoke about the black man’s right not to remain poop when the spoils of war resemble Aladdin’s cave. Kasukuwere speaks the language of Supa Mandiwanzira – or vice versa who a few weeks ago told us the indigenisation crusade will not be around forever and exhorted exiled patriots not to wait until “things are okay.” Yet Mudenge takes the cake as he reminds us about his love for game meat, meat which war veterans enjoyed in unforgettable barbecues during the height of farm invasions that claimed Martin Olds and other nameless black farm workers. Then we heard the same government complaining about the falling numbers of the national herd. Now when Mudenge speaks about wantonly killing and eating game meat, what does it say about Francis Nhema on the other hand crusading about the conservation of wild life? And  it goes further, Patrick Zhuwawo leading the takeover of tourist resorts and Walter Muzembi selling the country as a safe tourist destination. These are people supposedly working together! And we are expected to take them seriously?

“The best time to listen to a politician is when he is on a street corner, in the rain, late at night, when he is exhausted. Then he doesn’t lie.” Theodore H. White, US journalist (1969)

But I figure Mudenge, Zvuwawo and all still well-heeled as they are and protected from the elements are not lying. As the Carlifornia guv would say back in the day as a celluloid thespian, Zwuwawo said, they will back at Kuimbashiri. Are cops listening? You bet!

Charles Arthur writing for The Guardian:

Google and Twitter launch service enabling Egyptians to tweet by phone: Voice-to-tweet software allows citizens to send news from Egypt despite internet blackout

Google and Twitter have launched a service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by leaving a voicemail on a specific number after the last internet service provider in the country saw its access cut off late on Monday.

The new service, which has been created by co-ordination between the two internet companies, uses Google’s speech-to-text recognition service to automatically translate a message left on the number, which will be sent out on Twitter with the “#egypt” hashtag.

Ujwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow and Abdel Karim Mardini, Google’s product manager for the Middle East and north Africa, said in a blog post that “over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection … We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time.”

Google listed three phone numbers for people to call to use the service. They are: +16504194196; +390662207294; and +97316199855.

No internet connection is required. That will be important for users in Egypt after Noor Group, which had been the last internet service provider connecting to the outside world, went dark late on Monday. It had remained online after the country’s four main internet providers – Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr – abruptly stopped shuttling internet traffic into and out of the country last Friday.

At about 11pm local time Monday, the Noor Group became unreachable, said James Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, a security firm based in Manchester, New Hampshire, which monitors huge directories of “routes”, or set paths that define how web traffic moves from one place to another.

The Noor Group’s routes have disappeared, he said.

Cowie said engineers at the Noor Group and other service providers could quickly shut down the internet by logging on to certain computers and changing a configuration file. The original blackout on Friday took just 20 minutes to fully go into effect, he said. However it is not clear whether the Noor Group’s disconnection was planned or accidental.

Mobile phone service was restored in Egypt on Saturday, but text messaging services have been disrupted during the continuing protests.

In an op-ed for the New York Times Egyptian author Mansoura Ez-Eldin gives a personal account of the Egyptian protests:

ON Friday, the “day of rage,” I was in the streets with the protesters. Friends and I participated in a peaceful demonstration that started at the Amr Ibn al-As Mosque in Old Cairo near the Church of St. George. We set off chanting, “The people want the regime to fall!” and we were greeted with a torrent of tear gas fired by the police. We began to shout, “Peaceful, Peaceful,” trying to show the police that we were not hostile, we were demanding nothing but our liberty. That only increased their brutality. Fighting began to spread to the side streets in the ancient, largely Coptic neighborhood.

…Clearly, the scent of Tunisia’s “jasmine revolution” has quickly reached Egypt. Following the successful expulsion in Tunis of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the call arose on Facebook for an Egyptian revolution, to begin on Jan. 25. Yet the public here mocked those young people who had taken to Twitter and Facebook to post calls for protest: Since when was the spark of revolution ignited on a pre-planned date? Had revolution become like a romantic rendezvous?

…In Suez, where the demonstrations have been tremendously violent, live ammunition was used against civilians from the first day. A friend of mine who lives there sent me a message saying that, Thursday morning, the city looked as if it had emerged from a particularly brutal war: its streets were burned and destroyed, dead bodies were strewn everywhere; we would never know how many victims had fallen to the police bullets in Suez, my friend solemnly concluded.

After having escaped from Old Cairo on Friday, my friends and I headed for Tahrir Square, the focal point of the modern city and site of the largest protests. We joined another demonstration making its way through downtown, consisting mostly of young people. From a distance, we could hear the rumble of the protest in Tahrir Square, punctuated by the sounds of bullets and screams. Minute by painstaking minute, we protesters were gaining ground, and our numbers were growing. People shared Coca-Cola bottles, moistening their faces with soda to avoid the effects of tear gas. Some people wore masks, while others had sprinkled vinegar into their kaffiyehs.

Shopkeepers handed out bottles of mineral water to the protesters, and civilians distributed food periodically. Women and children leaned from windows and balconies, chanting with the dissidents. I will never forget the sight of an aristocratic woman driving through the narrow side streets in her luxurious car, urging the protesters to keep up their spirits, telling them that they would soon be joined by tens of thousands of other citizens arriving from different parts of the city.

…Hour by hour on Friday evening, the chaos increased. Police stations and offices of the ruling National Democratic Party were on fire across the country. I wept when news came that 3,000 volunteers had formed a human chain around the national museum to protect it from looting and vandalism. Those who do such things are certainly highly educated, cultivated people, neither vandals nor looters, as they are accused of being by those who have vandalized and looted Egypt for generations.

…Late Saturday, as I headed toward Corniche Street on the Nile River, I walked through a side street in the affluent Garden City neighbourhood, where I found a woman crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that her son, a worker at a luxury hotel, had been shot in the throat by a police bullet, despite not being a part of the demonstrations. He was now lying paralysed in a hospital bed, and she was on her way to the hotel to request medical leave for him. I embraced her, trying to console her, and she said through her tears, “We cannot be silent about what has happened. Silence is a crime. The blood of those who fell cannot be wasted.”

I agree. Silence is a crime. Even if the regime continues to bombard us with bullets and tear gas, continues to block Internet access and cut off our mobile phones, we will find ways to get our voices across to the world, to demand freedom and justice.

They have become real dare devils, and you begin to ask if these are the sort of people who would be on the frontline of street protests. They are so far the only members of an “organised union” who have stood up – rightly or wrongly – to assert their right to “fight the power.”

With their daring demeanor – perhaps psychedelic based as the stereotype goes – they have become a pain in the arse for law enforcement, and one has to imagine that determination being transfered into the broader public psyche as an ingredient for street protests. All over the country they have been tagged a lawless lot, and that’s exactly what street protestors pushing for democratic reform have been called.

Sometimes you just have to marvel at the valour of the kombi drivers and touts as they take on the cops – all else notwithstanding!

In her obituary of Yvonne Vera, Ranka Primorac wrote: “The most courageous among them [her other books] is The Stone Virgins, the first work of fiction that openly exposes and condemns the government sponsored violence [Gukurahundi] against civilians in Independent Zimbabwe.”   Primorac goes on to praise its “stylistic mastery and political bravery.”  Yet The Stone Virgins has never been banned; Vera (who, curiously, received the Tucholsky Award of the Swedish PEN for a writer in exile or undergoing persecution) never went into exile, was never persecuted, never even harassed.  The novel was published in 2002 when the government’s policy of re-crafting and subverting the law to support its ideology of “patriotism” was in Operation [upper case deliberate].  How come they left her alone?  I can think of two reasons: first, that Primorac is wrong about Vera’s political courage; second, The Stone Virgins is a novel written in turgid English, and was never likely to influence the restless povo, for most of whom books are unaffordable, and English is very much a second or third language.

By blurring distinctions between dissidents, pseudo-dissidents, and soldiers; between war and massacre; by the timing of the atrocities described in the novel, Vera creates self-protecting ambiguities.  For example, the brutal murder of the shop owner, Mahlatini takes place in 1982, before the Fifth Brigade was officially mobilised.  His killers are called “soldiers”.  Just before he dies, the author puts a suggestive thought in his mind: “He did not want to see who was killing him, just in case he recalled something about the eyes, the forehead, the gait of this man.”  Just in case his killer was a local?

The saintly man, Cephas, associated with the mazhanje (umhobohobo) fruit of the eastern highlands, is Shona (his tagged on surname, Dube, notwithstanding); the diabolical man, Sibaso, associated with the marula fruit of Matabeleland, is Ndebele.  Dissidents and pseudo-dissidents did commit atrocities, some hundreds, mainly against whites and so-called sell-outs; but the Fifth Brigade, targeting innocent rural folk, killed, raped, and maimed tens of thousands.  Vera’s choice of perpetrator in this context seems somewhat skewed.  No wonder she wouldn’t allow copies of Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace, to be displayed in the Art Gallery shop when she was the Director – the same art gallery where Owen Maseko’s exhibition remains sealed off to the public.  So, Ranka Primorac is wrong – there is nothing in The Stone Virgins that” openly” condemns and exposes Gukurahundi.  On the contrary, it is full of lyrical self-censorship.

The second reason why the authorities might have left Yvonne Vera alone recalls the words of the writer, Stanley Nyamfukudza: “One of the best ways to hide information in Zimbabwe is to publish it in a book.”  The Board of Censors tends to overlook the written word because the vast majority of people in this country have little access to books, especially fictional books.  The visual arts, township drama, and performance poetry are another story!  The Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiongo was imprisoned not for his novels in English but for his plays in Kikuyu.  The authorities don’t want the masses to get too excited.

So, why Owen Maseko?  Again, I can think of two reasons: first, his exhibition is courageous to the point of recklessness in its exposure of what has now been officially classified as genocide; second, as a visual artist his work is immediately accessible to the restless povo.  It speaks a universal language.