Even the silent ants
Trampled upon by giant elephants
Do sing a silent song
They shall surely know
How to shoot
The great foot
Weighing heavily on them

~ Albert Nyathi

I received an email about an interactive discussion under the theme Feminist Currents. I quite like the concept of currents. That individuals tap into ideas, debate, and formulate expressions around various issues. In these spaces individual and collective thought processes foster intellectual growth and abilities to envision and act on long-term strategies for the redress of injustices. In Zimbabwe there are currents which desire political change – and in my mind, they are feminist currents.

The interactive discussion proposed to examine feminist currents through posing questions, including: Was Elizabeth Edwards right when she claimed her husband (democratic candidate John Edwards) was more of a feminist than Hillary Clinton? Who should Black women support: Obama or Clinton? These two questions got me thinking about what feminism is all about and why it’s often a taboo word in Zimbabwe. Seems to me the taboo-ness is a result of narrowly equating feminism to a singular (Western) line of thought only concerning (white) women. More accurately, feminisms concern men, women, and children regardless of the colour of their skin. They seek to represent a range of voices which outline affinities and differences while also attending to the sundry mixture of divergences and paradoxes to build more pliable understandings of and solutions to complex issues within the human condition. Simply put, feminisms are lines of thinking. They are expansive, inclusive, attentive to diversity, and vibrant currents aiming to advance positive change. A poem by Betty Makoni of the Girl Child Network serves as a useful reminder of what is meant by feminist currents and the ways they are visionary. The poem was published by Pambazuka and is entitled Promises, Choices, Spaces: Voices for Women. The opening stanza is as follows:

Ever seen a four every word punctuated title?
Question mark? comma, full stop. exclamation mark ! in one
Women lives full of thus
Patriarchy domineering , feminism under backlash
Women have negotiated, still negotiate, will ever negotiate
Promises promised, never premised
Spaces shrunk, voices thwarted
Seems this men’s world, makes and breaks laws
Makes and breaks promises
Women lives punctuated, back and forth

Yes, Makoni’s poem focuses on women. However, the stanza above and the piece overall articulates feminist currents which are about change as well as the ideas, hopes, dreams, and intellect pertaining to peace and equality. I made a few word changes in the poem to further emphasis the relevance feminist currents hold in Zimbabwe and the world over.

Promises, Choices, Spaces: Voices for Zimbabweans

Ever seen a four every word punctuated title?
Question mark? comma, full stop. exclamation mark! in one
Zimbabwean lives full of thus
Patronage domineering, equality under backlash
Citizens have negotiated, still negotiate, will ever negotiate
Promises promised, never premised
Spaces shrunk, voices thwarted
Seems this government’s world, makes and breaks laws
Makes and breaks promises
Too many lives punctuated, back and forth

Every effort is being directed at putting out the light . . .

MDC have been banned by the ‘ruling party’ from campaigning on local TV
People have been told to take down their satellites as they are picking up ‘outside’ news reports
wind up radios have been declared a tool of opposition
NGO’s have been banned
recharge cards are unavailable for many cell phone networks  – no ‘juice’
many land lines are down – cables stolen
Biti is still in jail
militia camps have been set up in all high density and many low density suburbs in Harare
Zanu youth roam the streets at night
forcing people to all night rallies
to join the ranks of the destruction

E’s old father left his rural home last week
threatened by Zanu youths for voting wrongly
last night he had to return
called back by the invaders to face them
‘or we will burn the whole village’
an old man held to ransom
showing such courage
his fate is still unknown

it is a dark curtain that has been pulled over the land

and yet . . .

the light still shines
in small bubbles

in the back yard of a mechanic’s garden
where they celebrate work completed on his minivan
by sitting in the back
and imagining the places they will visit
the mechanic, his wife, their 2 large dogs, the assistant mechanic, and the old sekuru who cleans the yard
all crowded into the back
imagined what they were seeing
a wonderful escape
all without moving

out of the isolation of having the home fires broken
they gather in an old woman’s small kitchen at night
a mother with her 3 children from a house in the next suburb
an old woman who has brought 2 girls in from the rural areas
a man who has his arm in plaster from a police beating in Marondera
all have walked through the fire

new found friends at a new fire
gently praying for this to end

in the circle at Kufunda
when they dedicate this time to gathering their gifts
and holding their spirit

in a suburban garden
where an activists sits – alone
at the foot of an oak tree
watching the leaves fall
listening to its wisdom

in a suburban garden where 70 young children
left behind in the invasion of their villages
are being cared for
awaiting their scattered parents return

on our veranda at night
watching the gold of the sunset through masasas
and the bush babies at the feeding tray
and the acrobatics of two joyful jack russels

and our back door in the morning
counting the new flowering of the sweet peas

from this place of such beauty and courage and grief
to a web of light out there that holds us
I wish you a golden sunset

Overwhelmed by the endless stories of violence all around us, I’ve had the line of a Train song in my head:

I need to know that things are gonna look up
Cause I feel us drowning in a sea spilled from a cup

But a beautifully supportive quotation sent in from a friend today lifted my spirits a bit. It’s from Dr James Orbinski’s recently published book An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-First Century. Orbinski is a Canadian doctor who remained in Rwanda through the genocide, working for MSF, when most other aid workers fled. Trying to explain his actions, he writes:

There are moments in a particular story where I knew that my fear overwhelmed everything else, and there are other moments where the implications of not acting or speaking overwhelmed my fear….What I’ve experienced is that I can’t know the future. I can’t know if anything that I do will change what happens tomorrow. I can’t know with certainty, but what I do know is if I do nothing, nothing will change.

The other day, Bev mentioned the pit outside our office. She was right. It’s been there forever. Sometime last year in October or November or so, before the rains, there was a leak in the underground piping. There was no water coming from the taps in the building – but plenty of water coming out of the ground onto the street. Eventually, the City of Harare people came to fix it. They dug up the sidewalk to get to the problem spot. They fixed the piping, but they left behind a gaping hole which eventually became a rubbish pit in the middle of the sidewalk which everyone walked around.

On Sunday, fed up, I filled in the pit. And in so doing, I was reminded of a lot of important lessons.

Timing: I deliberately tackled the pit on a Sunday when the shopping centre would be less full. In part, I wanted fewer people around to disturb with the dust and noise. But also, I wanted fewer people staring at me or wondering what I was doing.

Plan your approach: Whilst I knew Sundays would be quieter, I’d forgotten about the Scud Factor – the people who were out and about were either already drunk or well on their way there. (“Scud” is Zimbabwean slang for Chibuku – opaque beer – called this because the brown plastic containers it is sold in look a bit like scud missiles) When I first arrived on the scene, a clump of men all holding their scuds was in the midst of a heated debate right in front of the pit. I lurked about for a bit, window shopping the empty shelves of the pharmacy, until they dispersed. Once I was mid-task, I knew I could handle anyone who approached me. But I didn’t want to have to explain what I was setting off to do before I started.

Use the right tools for the job: Even though I’d walked past the pit at least 200 times, I never did a very thorough reconnaissance of it. The dirt from the pit was littered with rubble, stones, and old blasted bits of sidewalk. It had survived the entire rainy season, and had been baking under the sun for months. Much more than the spade I brought, a pick would have been a better idea.

Be comfortable with the tools you use: But the pick, which I lifted in the garage at home before I headed for the pit, was much heavier than the spade I ended up using. If the site of the crazy white girl chipping away at a crusted mound of dirt was entertaining, the site of me straining to lift the pick onto it would have been sheer hilarity. My spade might have taken a while. But at least it wasn’t more than I could handle. Besides. Not having a pick gave a lot of passers-by the opportunity to give me some advice: “Use a pick,” rather than having to offer to help.

Pace yourself: The pit was buffered by two mounds of dirt – one much larger than the other. I tackled the larger one first, planning the psychology of reward in advance. Halfway through the larger mound, I stopped for a cool drink at the garage. And was pleasantly surprised when the garage attendants said how pleased and grateful they were that I was filling in the pit. They didn’t offer to help, but the lemonade was gorgeously cold. And their support was welcome.

Know when to say no . . . : A handful of the shopping centre “regulars” – like the Buddie card vendors and the flower sellers came to offer to help me out – for a fee. I struggled to articulate this to them, but I didn’t want to pay someone to fill in the pit. By renting offices in the shopping centre, we already pay the City of Harare to maintain the roads and sidewalks. They should come and fix it – surely that’s what our rates and city levies should pay for. But, since they weren’t coming, I was fixing it myself. I didn’t mind doing it myself – but I didn’t want to pay someone else to do what we are already paying the city to do.

. . . And when to say yes: As I was finishing off the larger mound, my hands started to blister. I was beginning to despair about having the strength for the smaller mound when two men stopped to chat with me. And what they started off the conversation with caught my attention. “You know,” they said, “you’re doing a really good thing here. We also have walked past this pit day after day and never done anything about it. You’re doing something about it. Thank you.” Like others had, they told me I should be using a pick. I just laughed and shrugged and said yeah, I know. Then the older one asked to have a quick go. He smiled and held out his hand for the shovel. He just wanted to do a bit, he said, to make his contribution. He and the other man, who turned out to be his son, tackled the smaller mound with speed and brute strength. They’d hacked through it and piled the rubble into the pit in under 20 minutes. As they turned to go I said I was embarrassed to think how long it had taken me to get through the first half. They said they knew – they’d walked past me hours ago when I had only just begun.

Sometimes things get worse before they get better: Pit filling is harder than it looks. Even once we’d gotten all the dirt and rubble from both mounds into the pit, there was still a massive gap between the top of the pit and the level of the sidewalk. As the father and son team walked off, I had a small leak. I’ve made the problem worse than it was before, I thought to myself. At least before you could see from afar that something was amiss and you knew to walk around the pit. Now it looks like it’s sidewalk as usual, right up until you plunge into this gaping hole in the earth. I had visions of some pensioner breaking her ankle walking to the bank. And it would be All My Fault.

Creative problem solving: I saw my neighbourhood with fresh eyes when I was looking for something to fill in the gap. Suddenly the rubble piled up outside a nearby house wasn’t waste from rebuilding a wall – it was a treasure trove of bricks, slate and panels to pile into the pit, fill in the space a bit, and build bridges of stones. It took three trips filling the boot of my tiny car, but eventually the pit was more full than less.

It’s not a perfect job, by any stretch of the imagination. But at least it’s a start. If nothing else, filling in the pit gave me a sense of Doing Something. It didn’t free the WOZA women or stop the violence. But it was my own very small act of defiance. My own mini-revolt against the fatigue and hopelessness that plagues us, a resistance to the “what can I do” helplessness that the machinery of this regime so often makes us feel.

And. Just maybe. It makes the tiniest bit of difference. If nothing else, it was bloody hard work. And as my best friend reminded me the other day: If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain.

A local NGO based in Harare is taking on the subject of Sex. Here’s some information, and a call for participation in their new project.

Have you ever felt so awkward asking your doctor about sex that you found yourself using all sorts of euphemisms and left the poor practitioner confused? Does the mention of the word “sex” make you want to run for cover or sizzle in anticipation? International Video Fair (IVF) will be exploring these and other questions in its Sex In the City documentary and is calling for men and women aged between 22 and 60 years to be participants. Whether you are worldly wise, old, young, religious, non-religious, an activist, not an activist, well known or “ordinary”, come and help unearth what the city of Harare really thinks about sex.

IVF, a non-profit regional organisation that uses mobile cinema and video as tools for social transformation, invites you to take part in stimulating discussions on what people think and do when it comes to sex and sexuality. These hot topics will be explored and recorded in an exciting, innovative way over 3-5 days in a great location in/around Harare. Transport to and from the location will be provided and participants will have to commit to the full 3-5 filming days, inclusive of nights. All meals and accommodation will be provided and a participants’ fee is included. Participants will be required to sign release forms for the documentary film, which will be screened locally and regionally.

IVF operates in Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The organisation’s vision is a Southern Africa where communities are able to access and impart to others, information and knowledge that can enhance social transformation. Sex In the City is an IVF project and conducted as part of the Zimbabwe Film Practitioners Joint Programme funded by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Harare. For more details, telephone IVF on 04-790515 / 797285 or click here for an email address. All applications must be received by Monday 30 June 2008.