Sometimes when a person is confused and they don’t know what they want – I usually say, “Well, if you don’t have an idea what you want, at least tell me what you don’t want.”

The same goes for those facing some kind of inner struggle, identity crisis or such dilemma – I often tell them if they don’t know who they are, at least they ought to know who they don’t want to be.

The things we negate often are a reflection of what we instinctively embrace as our values, extol as virtues and they are indicative of our deeply held convictions.

I believe a scrutiny of our cultural beliefs, of the things we were socialized to reject will always be reflective of what we consider to be normal, acceptable and appropriate.

So our intolerances are a reflection of self – a reflection of who we are essentially.

Bigotry often derives from our revulsion towards that which is inconsistent with our belief system; it is like a knee-jerk reaction to that which contradicts our worldview or our interpretation of the world.

Anything that does not align with our own prejudiced perception is like a smudge marring the lens we use to view our world and we seek to obliterate it so that we may continue to enjoy the same view we are accustomed to – the status quo upheld.

The homophobia that currently informs the discourse on homosexuality in Zimbabwe is a case in point, reflecting the deeply ingrained cultural and social beliefs of what manhood entails – for what repulses many is not lesbianism but rather gays.

For a man to sleep with another man is almost inconceivable to most people and to those who can conceive of it – it is like an abomination.

And as a collective people pride themselves in holding on to these prejudices, tacitly condoning hate speech and other abusive reactions that have been central to the backlash created by the debate on homosexuality.

Of late, the media has been awash with reports of pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church – narratives of how young boys have fallen prey to unscrupulous members of the clergy who fail to curb their ‘appetites’ and resort to feeding off the proverbial flock.

The allegations also point to a systematic cover-up by sections of the church’s leadership to shield the perpetrators, silence the victims and protect the all-important image of the church.

The Pontiff, having been so vocal on the issue of condom use, reinforcing the church’s unyielding anti-contraceptive position has been rather subdued on the subject only recently making a show of weeping with the victims of abuse – a gesture many feel is contrived.

It worries me that these attitudes are prevalent even in our own societies, that perpetrators of child abuse or molesters will find a sympathetic audience in our society – and probably will be regarded as being a lesser ‘evil’ to homosexuals.

The culture of silence is one that is deeply ingrained in families and society insists on sacrificing the individual (especially a child) in order to protect the status, image and standing of the collective (especially the family and clan).

There are many who would abhor homosexuality more than they do child molestation and abuse – it is the nonchalance towards these victims that serves as an indictment to our conscience as a society – we are worse than the monsters we seek to protect through our silence.

For our silence is acquiescence, it trivializes the pain and trauma of the abused, diminishes them and diminishes us as a society.

Whilst it may be argued (as it often is) that it serves “the greater good” to sweep such cases under the carpet and retain confidence in the sanctity of religious institutions and the authority of male figures in families, our culture of silence makes hypocrites of us – for we constantly defend the status quo, refusing to interrogate our long held convictions.

If our intolerances essentially reflect who we are – then the same goes for the things we do tolerate, the things we turn a blind eye to and those heinous deeds we excuse under the guise of protecting the ‘image’ of institutions and persons of authority.

To identify what you believe – it may be necessary to know what you do not believe. I do not believe that there is any institution (religious or otherwise) worth preserving at the cost of the wellbeing, security and preservation of the rights and dignity of children the world over.

Its amazing how much life can about one’s self. We can be so consumed on what we don’t have and what we would never have. But we never take stock of what we have. I fell in that category until a few days ago when I went to a presentation on Chiezda Child Care Centre. I tell you I was moved and challenged at that moment I realized that life sometimes has to cease to be about me and what I don’t have or what I wish I had. There are children in that center that have experienced life beyond their young ages. This is where the center comes in to try and help them realize that they can be more than just orphaned people. Though the center doesn’t have boarding facilities the children are offered food on a daily basis after school. They are also taught different life skills. For example the children are given the chance to play soccer while others are exposed to sewing and raising poultry. Unfortunately the current political and economic situation has taken its toll on the centre. The centre has not escaped the limited funding and scarce donations. Like I said before I was challenged and have stopped thinking of only myself. I am going to consider other people and be involved in making a difference in at least one person’s life. I would like to encourage you to take time go visit these child care facilities and you will be surprised at how much you could do in changing someone’s life. Your help doesn’t have to be monetary – your presence can inspire those children to hope and dream beyond being just a surviving orphan.

If you had not heard already the National Youth Programme is going to be reintroduced under the GPA. My question is, can these centers facilitate a youth friendly environment for full participation, especially of young women. With this weak coalition government and economy do we really need this now? I think these centers should only be reopened when they ensure that they are gender sensitive and enhance a culture of learning unlike the military style designed institutions. If these centers are going to be reopened then, as the youth, we should advocate for an independent National Youth Service Commission to be put in place after the amendment of the National Youth Policy. This commission and not the inter ministerial Committee should be responsible for the formulation of the national youth service policy.

I mean hey, do you teach anybody to be patriotic or should it be instilled in us to be so? I don’t need to be trained as a soldier to feel patriotic. The National Youth Programme must be based on a shared national vision. But here is the bigger question: is Zimbabwe really prepared to have this programme again seeing that the national healing and reconciliation programme has still not reached its peak. Why open up the wounds of the people who suffered under the youth militia by reopening the same centers that taught the youth and groomed them to cause so much harm and pain. What do you think any person who had a loved one killed or maimed by these youths is going to feel after hearing that our country is still manufacturing these weapons of pain?

Before these centers are reopened the matter has to be taken to society. The minister needs a vote of confidence from parents and the youth themselves given the magnitude of alleged abuse by the so-called recruits and Zimbabweans in general who suffered under the militarized programme. Can the national budget sustain this programme given more urgent issues faced by the inclusive government such as constitutional reform, social service delivery and economic growth based on a productive and not consumptive economy?

As youth we need a non-partisan national youth service and the policy implemented should comply with the standards of the international association of national service for best practice. I think the government should temporarily postpone the reintroduction of the National Youth Programme and instead utilize the transition period to put in place measures that will ensure the programme does not carry the negative perception from the past. My bat is for the programme to be implemented fully, the government has to identify what the youth need; not what it needs and force it on the young people.

Rejoice Ngwenya wrote an “independence special” for Kubatana which I share with you here:

Your City, My Land

Conte Mhlanga and Daves Guzha are two of the best playwrights in Zimbabwe. One resides in Bulawayo, the provincial capital of Matabeleland that took the biggest brunt of Zimbabwe’s post-independence ‘genocidal’ human rights violations in the 1980s. The other is based in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, the seat of one of the most brutal and senseless government in modern history. Both men are my friends, having met them last year at a regional arts workshop.

I am so impressed by their history of protest activism. Once in a while, their ‘play houses’ are visited by the proverbial men in dark glasses who want to glean anything off their plots that vaguely pokes fun at our very own ageing dictator Robert Gabriel Mugabe. My view is that there is no play or work of art worth its salt if it makes no reference to the liberation of Zimbabweans from ZANU-PF fascism. This may sound really negative; indeed, oppression of citizens is a negative force. Those like Mhlanga, Guzha and I who have the courage and rare opportunity to say our opinions, we might as well have fun doing it – messages full of laughter, tell me about it!

And so during that workshop – in a spontaneous feat of bravado – I foolishly committed myself to contesting for the ‘best playwright of the year’ and promised to deliver a gem to Conte and Dave. Mind you, the nearest I ever encountered playwriting was only reciting lines that were shoved at me by Bev Parker, my ‘old’ lecturer at United College of Teacher Education. Some things are easier said than done!  The title of my play was simply going to be Assegai Technology with a curiously named main character Your Excellent Sir, the Good Leader-for-Life – a sophisticated, enlightened but unorthodox, crude and jovial middle-aged cell-phone addicted dictatorial president of an African country called Haraland.  He is obsessed with this compulsive and paranoid idea that someday, King Bengula who died one hundred years ago in Bengula Province south of his country would lead an insurrection to challenge his authority.  Your Excellent Sir, the Good Leader-for-Life is afflicted by this recurrent dream that King Bengula will incarnate through Team Impi – four rebels based in Bengula Province to spearhead this rebellion. He claims that a fellow dictator Yoom Shin Sha of an Asian country called East Kora, has promised him portable guns with rubber bullets laced with radio-active material to suppress the rebellion. Problem one: Haraland has no money to pay for the guns, but his wife owns a diamond mine which he can persuade her to give away to Yoom Shin Sha in exchange for the guns. Problem two: The mine is located in a national game reserve, so the East Koraian also wants to have a licence to hunt the endangered rhino! Your Excellent Sir, the Good Leader-for-Life tells Yoom Shin Sha to wait until after the elections. Yoom Shin Sha promises or claims to have delivered the contraband even before the elections, but of course he is lying.  Problem three: Team Impi are all geniuses of different professions who are designing an advanced model of a Bengula assegai that bounces off bullets to the sender, much like an Australian boomerang! In the play, all this ‘conspiracy’ is only seen and heard from conversations that Your Excellent Sir, the Good Leader-for-Life has on his cell phone with both Yoom Shin Sha and ironically, Team Impi.

Just as I am about to finish this play, I read a report of a massive land scandal at Harare Municipality – Daves Guzha’s local town and am immediately inspired to write another play I will aptly title  Your City, My Land. I want its plot to be less painful than Assegai Technology. The main character will be named Leapfrog – a young black policeman who retired from active service in 1980 to work as a security guard for a rich white banana wholesaler based in a town called Haracity. The banana man had never married, and has no children so when he passes on; he bequeaths one of his many double-storey houses to his loyal askari – Leapfrog. The house is too expensive to maintain, so Leapfrog approaches Comrade Zvamahara – a Member of Parliament from his rural village to rent the house. For almost twenty years Leapfrog continues to work as a guard-cum-messenger in a real estate company, until he is enlightened to sell his house to start an own estate agency! But there is problem. Comrade Zvamahara had deliberately forged the lease into an agreement of sale, so all along, Leapfrog thought Comrade Zvamahara was paying rentals, yet he was receiving monthly instalments!

Luckily, Leapfrog had befriended a man named Makoini, an experienced housing officer in Haracity who helps him win his case against Comrade Zvamahara. It is through this friendship that Leapfrog and Makoini ensure scores of Leapfrog’s relatives are clandestinely registered on the housing waiting list. He retires from formal employment to concentrate on developing and selling the housing and industrial stands issued to his relatives. On realising that Leapfrog is getting wealthy, Comrade Zvamahara sends an emissary to convince Leapfrog to enter politics so he can ‘one day take over as member of parliament’ of the village. The two men make more money and get more property through Makoini, but when the latter retires from Haracity, the only ‘gift’ he gets from Leapfrog and Comrade Zvamahara is a motorcycle! Makoini is so distraught and heartbroken. In a feat of diabolic rage and vengeance, he sells his story to a local weekly newspaper called The Insider and reveals the transgressions of both Leapfrog and Comrade Zvamahara. Just before the two are arrested, they escape to Zambezia, a neighbouring country.

I only hope that either of my playwright friends Conte Mhlanga or Daves Guzha will accept    Your City, My Land and perhaps, just perhaps I might join this elite team who indeed are worthy members of Zimbabwe’s protest theatre hall of fame!

Rejoice Ngwenya, 16 April 2010, Harare

Mbizo Chirasha sent Kubatana some gut wrenching words to mark Zimbabwe’s independence. Have a read:

State of the Nation

dreams and thoughts floating in stinking
bubbling sewer streams
broken pipes
broken voters
broken ballots
broken roads

banks stink hunger
stomachs of dust laden kindas thunder war
poverty shriveled chests of mothers luggage sorrow baggage
sorrows blooming like flowers every season

mothers cutting the freedom cake
with aluminum tears foiled faces
children munching the FREEDOM
cream with poverty rugged
yellow maize teeth
fathers celebrating with election chopped arms

ministers mecerdes swimming in highway potholes
corruption, the vaseline that polishes the floor of the state
flowers of Justice died with last decade sinking sun
daughters eat political regalia like omelet for breakfast
sons eating torn diplomas and
soot laden certificates for supper

peasants eating the smell of the sun
voters enjoying the perfume of propaganda again
mentally sodomized
the scars of the last season
is the signature of the next election
wounds of last winter bloom another pain in this winter

diggers of the truth bring me jugs filled with lemon juice of justice
bring the ladder to the jewel laden bethel of freedom
i am drunk with barrels of orange bitterness

freedom is the placard on your chest?
democracy is how you shake your fist?

freedom sing me a song
erase these wounds from the charcoal of violence
machetes signatured leadership name tags on mother breasts
pink bras coughing blood beside dead ballot boxes
bullets wrote epitaphs for funerals of children unlimited
black cockerels drinking black eggs in dying winter nights
black nights
acid of politics bleaching the trust of the flag
colors melting in the vaseline of grief

bring me the sneeze of murenga
download the cough of nehanda from her chest
blow the wind into the ears of mutapa stone
silence went with them to sleep, away from today’s wind

wind of change changed its compass
barometers cant stand the pressure
godfathers breakfasted promises of change
bathing with some bath-soap in froth filled tubs of corruption

rise for me the sun, that i see the club mixed color of the east
sink the sun for me that i smell the smelling breath of the west.

paparazzi smiling to the bank after recycled headlines
i am tired of the rhetoric

sing me the song of self discovery
for my identity is beyond the lotion of my skin
my identity is beyond the paint of my eyeballs
and the vaseline on my tongue
it is beyond the state of the nation

the nation that i baptize in my poetic ritual cleansing

the moonrise with chopped breasts
the sun rise with scarred forehead
I am a poet born in grapevines of colonial bitterness
and groomed in apple groves of freedom hatred

liberation. what?

light me better candles for another poem
a poem with freedom rhythm
and liberation rhymes

that politicians will weep in the hovels of their slogan rituals
and voters hear the real jesuses of their stomachs
that fat cats decide to run or to dance
and big fish fried by the oil of metaphors

political ghosts turn in their graves
after a ritual of poetic grapes
the sweetness and bitterness of words
repent dictators into democrats

for the womb that carried this freedom griot
have eaten grains of sand for lunch in the villages of dust
that last smelt the state motorcade last ballot season

If you have spent any amount of time in Harare, you’ll know of a popular spot called Mai Faffy’s. Located in the heart of Avondale – at one of the city’s busiest shopping complexes – Mai Faffy’s serves some of the tastiest sadza and relish to be had in Harare.

And as with any place named in such affectionate terms, there is a story behind  Mai Faffy’s – a story  I recall Faffy herself telling me.

After a spell of giving birth to only baby boys, Faffy’s mother finally had a baby girl – a girl she named Tafadzwa.

Faffy was the term of endearment that the family used to call Tafadzwa and it stuck so hard that everyone called her Faffy from then onwards.

Even to the day she died.

Faffy died in a car accident last week Monday, on the 12th of April  – a needless loss at the young age of 24. She would have turned 25 in October.

I only learnt of her death last Thursday from her best friend who sent me an SMS to tell me the shocking news.

It’s still unbelievable.

You may not have known Faffy, but on behalf of all who did know her – and in particular her friends and family – there is need to remember this remarkable young woman who has left this earth too soon.

What do you say when someone so full of life and promise dies so prematurely? Where do you start?

I remember getting a call from Faffy the day before I left to relocate to South Africa in November last year.

Faffy called me early in the evening wanting to make a plan to go out as her farewell gift to me.

I told her that I had a heap of ironing to do and would have to think about it first. Her response was typical Faffy.

“Stuff the iron in your bag and get all that done when you get to SA!”

In her world, there was too much living to be done without having to worry about mundane chores. I obviously didn’t listen to her, but now I wish I had and had just seized the moment and added yet another memory to the collection of brief moments that I spent with her.

When I asked her best friend, who’s also called Tafadzwa, what she’d like me to share about Faffy, she gave me  a long list of things.

But perhaps the most striking thing she shared was the range of people who attended Faffy’s funeral this past Saturday to pay their final respects to her. The lady who sold tomatoes from the corner of the block where Faffy lived came. Her neighbour, who named her child in honour of Faffy for escorting her to hospital in the desperate final stages of labour, also came.

Her kindness and accommodation of all people was well known and celebrated by those who loved and appreciated her most as they bade her a fond farewell.

Tafadzwa and I wanted to let you know about our remarkable friend, about the girl who always made time to brighten someone’s day, about the girl behind Mai Faffy’s.

She will live on in the vibe and atmosphere of Mai Faffy’s, in the laughter and chatter of friends and strangers alike who gather there each and every day.

So long Faffy, and thank you for the memories of a life well lived.