At Kubatana we get emails from people sharing their reflections on just about everything. Here’s some original writing about discovering the Harare of today. Thanks to Tendai for writing to us.

I did my primary level education down there in Zaka and I always had dreams to go to Harare. It was now my time to go to Harare. I never slept; I hated the night because it took long for me. All my imagination was happiness, everything flowing.

I came to Harare. I saw big buildings and I thought those are called Harare. When I was taken to our house I got worried because I felt that we were now out of Harare because the house was small. But it smelled of Harare. We used to eat what we used to call Christmas down in Zaka. We have electricity and I enjoyed watching television. I could bath as many times as I can because no-one was telling me that I was wasting water.

Harare today. 3/4 of the day there is no electricity if not for three days. Television is now just like a carpet that you just need to clean and then leave it. To get news you have to make sure that you meet someone who is lucky to have electricity that day to update you. Newspapers are too expensive.

If only it was possible to leave our noses in our rural areas when coming to Harare. It would be better because everywhere, even in the town, sewage is almost getting in the shops.

1/2 of the trees in Harare are now used for apostolic churches. You cannot even trust a tree because it is tied up with a red or black cloth and some bottle drinks are put there. So you cant even take a rest in Harare today.

If you do not look where you are putting your leg while walking in town today in Harare you will step on top of tomatoes because every single space is now a market for someone.

Someone once asked whether I thought women could ‘ever’ be equal to men. I told them that I did not think women could ever be equal to men because as far as I was concerned women have ‘always’ been equal to men – they were just conned into thinking otherwise.

The very fact that the matter could be subject to debate, dispute and indeed controversy points to how a people can be so indoctrinated as to miss the truth that is staring right in front of them. Can there be anything more ludicrous than relegating one group of people to subservience just because they don’t happen to possess the right anatomy?

How then have we managed from one generation to the next to perpetuate, authenticate and reproduce the same patriarchal attitudes and values that disempower women and privilege men?

Even in the most glaring inequalities and the most ghastly social injustices, we are led to believe that a woman’s inferiority is a natural consequence of having been born female – that it is ordained by some deity or divinity.

So to challenge the status quo, we are forced to commit the great unforgivable sacrilege of pointing out the fact that women folk are oppressed by a system that rests solely on the idea of male supremacy. Those of us who have the temerity to point out what is so obviously wrong with the status quo are treated with hostility by the very women we would hope to liberate for even a captive starts to believe that their captivity is the will of God and having made peace with it – they become reluctant to believe anything to the contrary.

Years and years of internalizing patriarchal values have created in us a deeply ingrained belief in our own ‘inferiority’ and the spaces we have been given to occupy suddenly seem appropriate and natural to us – we feel we have no right to aspire for more.

And who is more enslaved than the person whose chains bind the mind and whose shackles tie the soul?

For the things we imbibed in our childhood become so much a part of us that to conceive of breaking them seems unnatural – yet we can never be free until we start to question, to query, to prod, to interrogate, to inquire and if need be – to challenge, to reject and even to rebel against those beliefs that would keep us caged by our anatomy.

We have believed a lie, we have lived a lie and we have fallen victim to the greatest con of all time – we have believed that our womanhood obscures our humanity. I would rather be a human being than a woman any day – because womanhood is a social construct – a figment of some man’s imagination, a prescription derived from the sexist ideology that places people’s biological make up above their humanity.

Before I toe the line – I demand to know who drew it. Before I measure myself against any yardstick – I demand to know who carved it.

Before I stop myself at any boundary – I demand to know who set it. Before I confine myself to any space – I demand to know who created it.

For if we are to be free we must know the answers to the questions and we must be the answers; for too long we have not cared to know the answers for we have not even been allowed to ask the questions.

So now we, those of us who have been told we suffer from the ailment of too much schooling, constipated and ruined by ‘excessive’ education – we who are not afraid to desecrate the shrines of silence our mothers erected – we question the status quo.

And the sound of our voices is like a thing of shame – that we should have the audacity to ask questions and the nerve to demand an answer – we are a generation hell-bent on calling culture’s bluff.

The pigeonholes of stereotype can no longer contain us; in our minds we carry the resolve that we will not be our mothers’ daughters.

For our mothers bestowed upon us so narrow a path, so limited a scope of choice and so silent a voice that we could not speak up and be heard.

We believed the myth of male superiority, bowing before the tyranny of patriarchy and accepting miseries and misfortunes with the stoicism of cows standing in the rain.

So we chose to be feminists because feminism is the radical notion that women are people too and that patriarchy is nothing more than male supremacy posturing as ‘culture’.

And in the years that have gone by we have gradually come to realize that we suffered needlessly from internalizing the doctrine of one group of people seeking to protect the privileged status quo that was their due merely by having been born male. Simply by being taught two different sets of catch phrases – we grew up marginalized, relegated and subjugated.

The oppression of women rested firmly on the greatest con there ever was – it rested on the fallacious belief that women were ‘natural’ subordinates of man and lesser beings.

Zimbabwean social and political commentator Rejoice Ngwenya discusses protest consumerism in his article entitled “Citizens are the real heroes” . . .

I am not a street activist, but more from the irritable pool of intellectual key-punchers who hope that Robert Mugabe and his cronies are literate enough to notice how collective resentment and hatred for shameless, fascist dictatorship is better expressed in the written word. This I say because there is a fallacy pervading Zimbabwean society that the number of times and period that one is beaten and arrested is the only means of verifying serious political activism.  And perhaps there is precedence to this malnourished viewpoint, given that the icons of Africa’s liberation struggle have, at one time or other, had a bruising encounter with local justice systems.

The tragedy is that nationalists, like Mugabe, have used this as a basis for extended stay in power, arguing that long periods spent in colonial gaol gives them the right to oppress their countrymen.  Critics of Professor Arthur Mutambara have raised the same argument that he never received as much political bashing and detention as Morgan Tsvangirayi, thus his claim to political fame is flimsy and frivolous. The good news is that this viewpoint is devoid of good judgement and destined for extinction.

In awarding Magodonga Mahlangu the coveted Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, United States President Barack Obama mentioned that the firebrand Zimbabwean activist has been arrested more than thirty times. No doubt all progressive cadres of the struggle against Mugabe’s ‘scientific’ tyranny will and should applaud Mahlangu’s recognition, but I am one of the few who do not particularly subscribe to the theory that the number of times one is convicted for a good cause emits a force equal to or equivalent to the motion towards liberation. Moreover, the struggle  takes a further mortal knock when one, like Mahlangu does,  goes further to justify activism purely on the basis that his or her parents, friends, neighbours and relatives were at one time or another, victims of Mugabe’s Gukurahundi genocide.

More often than not, we Zimbabwean activists exaggerate our encounters in the struggle.  ZANU-PF has always been reminded that everyone fought against colonialism, thus heroism is not only a preserve of former Mozambican and Zambian exiles, members of the Central Committee or victims of post-independence detention and genocide.

Girl child activist Betty Makoni is currently exiled in England, advancing, like many of those Zimbabweans who inhabit that land, another case of persecution by the ZANU-PF government for exposing alleged ministerial girl-child abuse. No doubt she is in line for another award of recognition for her ‘struggle’ against tyranny. There is no doubt that other cadres like former political hostage Jestina Mukoko, human rights lawyer Otto Saki and constitutional activist Dr Lovemore Madhuku deserve all the accolades they get from the world movement for democracy. A crucial part of the struggle against oppression is confronting and defeating ZANU-PF it in its natural habitat – in the streets, but to limit recognition of this struggle only to the number of times one is arrested from the trenches belittles greater good.

My point is that the struggle to unseat tyranny is not about ‘rented’ college students doing street push-ups, old women and lactating mothers sacrificed on the altar of fiery fury of the dragon, merely to score political points. More often than not, strategic partners of governance and democracy have been accused of supporting only institutions that ‘raise hell and dust’ in running battles with Mugabe’s uniformed sympathisers in the alleys. This is a narrow view of resistance, for there is more like us who find pride in pounding tyranny from the keyboard. It may not be glamorous, elicit blood or swollen foreheads, but the message spreads far and wide. Street activists accuse us of ‘conference room activism’ because there is no glitz and glamour accrued from making interviews for CNN from hospital beds.

The moral of my argument is that when seminar attendance registers and police charge sheets become the only genuine evidence of political activism, strategic partners have taken the eyes off the ball.  ‘Anniversary’ day activism manifested in protest handbills and posters, glossy advertisements, angry press statements and red roses handed out at street corners are part of the continuum of the struggle against ZANU-PF dictatorship.

However, the demands of modern day transformative revolution require that we shift the gear from mere defiance to a higher pedestal of popular resistance. The answer lies in paralysing the business supply systems that keep the ZANU-PF dragon bite venomous. Restrictive and targeted sanctions are part of this exciting high-yield strategy; the other is embedded in protest consumerism.

Mr. Rejoice Ngwenya writes for AfricanLiberty.org.  He is founder of Coalition for Liberal Market Reforms, a Zimbabawean think tank.

I was watching Private Sessions on The History Channel featuring Seal. During the interview, Seal was asked about whether he was surprised by the success of his first album. He, very modestly and without any arrogance, responded that he wasn’t. He proceeded to explain that he had long visualised that moment from the time he decided he was going to be a musician. At age 11, his teacher had asked him to sing a Johhny Nash classic, I Can See Clearly, at a school assembly. He says he sang with eyes closed, trembling inside but in the end there was applause. From that day on, he began to visualise himself as a successful musician. Not visualising it in the sense of forcing it to happen as some books seem to suggest, but simply believing that he could be it and visualising it as if it already was. He used the word ‘birth right’ several times to describe why he should be successful.

The next day, I watched the very opposite mindset in The Firing Line, a documentary on freelance news cameramen who risk their lives bringing us stories that often make a difference by alerting us to atrocities taking place the world over. Firstly, of course, one celebrates the courage of these men and women who follow the same strong dream that Seal describes in getting the story. Juxtaposed with this, however, are the stark stories they expose from the bombing of a UN school in Gaza, the conflict in the DRC, Orphans in Burma, conflict in South Ossetia to children branded as witches in Nigeria. The documentary features cameramen such as Rory Peck Award winners Kazbek Basayev, and Joost Van der Valk. There is a common thread of despair in the subjects being filmed that remind one of Maupassant’s characters. There is a woeful hopelessness in the documentaries. In one of the inserts, we witness an Afghan father selling off his son to a wealthy woman to save his other children from starvation. It is the second son he is selling. In Van Der Valk’s insert, it is the harrowing story of children branded as witches in the Niger Delta. Though the filming of these scenes raises public awareness, which leads to action being taken as a result of public pressure, one cannot help but wonder how many more societies are locked in the vicious cycle of conflict, poverty and ignorance far from the intervening eyes of determined cameramen. At a personal level, how many individuals are trapped in personal circumstances they would rather not be in? What is their birth right?

What is your birth right? Have you sat down and decided what you rightly deserve from life or are you, at best, a victim of circumstance? I was a guest speaker on Thursday last week at the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) national leadership training workshop in Johannesburg. I spoke to about 200 students from South African universities and their faculty advisors and told them about people like William Kamkwamba, who at 14 years old defied his dire circumstances to determine his destiny by building a windmill at his parents’ home in his village in Malawi. He simply acted upon his sense of choice and changed his life completely. Google him! Is everyone destined for greatness? Not in the materialistic sense of the word, I think not. However, I am of the belief that everyone can act upon their circumstances and move, even if it is for an inch, to step away from hopelessness. That one step, invariably leads to another which may or may not end up in success. Greatness is not in the outcome though. Rather, it is in the ability to and the act of making that effort to step out of the shadows. When you do that, you will find you are ‘lighting a candle, instead of cursing the darkness.’ It is all in the mind. It always has.

No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don’t love anybody.
~ Rita Mae Brown, speech, 28 August 1982

Condemn the victimisation of Ugandan gays and lesbians.

Writing on her blog Ramona Vijeyarasa quotes the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law who said that this Bill is an attempt to “wish away core human rights principles of dignity, equality and non-discrimination, and all Ugandans will pay a heavy price if this bill is enacted.”

Speak out and sign the online petition here.

Poetic Journey is the story of Zimbabwe told through poetry and mbira music. A young man refuses to celebrate the GNU because he can’t afford electricity, water and a host of other necessities. He realises that whilst he lives in poverty; the leadership is living in the lap of luxury.

The play was scheduled to premiere on the 25th of November and run from 26-27 November @ Amakhosi Theatre Upstairs.

The premier went very well on the 25th, with the audience interacting with the writer/director  and the cast after the show.

Trouble began after the performance on the 26th. After the show we walked into town; two members of the cast and I. We went our separate ways when we got into town. I decided to go into one of the smaller supermarkets along Leopold Takawira Avenue. As I was standing by the fridges, a guy in his late thirties approached me and asked a seemingly innocent question about the price of yoghurt in US dollars.

After buying what I wanted I walked to 6th Avenue to look for transport. The guy I had met in the supermakert was there and I immediately bacame suspicious and got into the nearest combi. He got in as well and sat next to me.

Speaking in shona,  he said, “you getting too clever”, and he left.

The next morning I received a lot phone calls from people who were saying they had been “advised” not to attend my show.

On the 27th I met the cast for our final show at Amakhosi. Two guys showed up around 6.30 pm. They pulled me asside and said my show wasn’t in the spirit of the GNU and I needed to stop the nonsense or else. They refused to identify themselves, but I recognised one as a police officer based at Queenspark.

I wanted the show to go on since it had not been officially BANNED but the cast members except one, were too scared to perform.

We had to turn people away and close the show.