How to celebrate your countries Independence?

For some it is seen as a day that can finally be spent at home, sorting all the things pushed aside for too long, or maybe just kicking back and enjoying a day off. But thirty-three years on, what do we celebrate as an independent country?

As I watch the Independence celebrations on ZBC, I notice there is not much enthusiasm – the crowds are small and barely awake throughout the long, hot day. Even away from the main event there seems to be little interest.

Times have changed, thirty tree years ago, it was a big deal. Even Bob Marley came out to celebrate with us! Yet the excitement is gone, and I wonder … is it that Zimbabweans have forgotten their great struggle, or maybe they are just tired of dwelling on the past and would now rather look to the future?

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
- T. S. Eliot, from The Hollow Men

Via browsery

The ‘war’ between kombi drivers and police officers has been going on for so long and because there is nobody to police the police, the ordinary citizens are suffering. Over the recent years police have been using forceful means to deal with public transport drivers in the country. From smashing of windscreens to Hollywood movie style chases this has been the order of the day. These forceful means have fallen short as citizens are harmed or lose their lives. There are reports of incidents of police smashing windscreens and injuring passengers. I have witnessed such incidents. Just when we thought this was bad enough the kombi operator-police war has yielded the unbearable – death. As kombi drivers try to escape from police officers they do so at full speed and in so doing go against road rules and place the life of other motorists and pedestrians at risk. In the past two months two people lost their lives in such scenarios at the Copacabana rank alone. The most recent was of an old lady who was dragged under a kombi for more than 100 metres leading to her death. The kombi was running away from a police officer.

Death is something never prepared for, but for anyone to die in this manner is more painful than the word painful itself. Even if the driver gets a life sentence or a death penalty the root cause of the problem will not have been addressed. For kombi operators and the police officers it’s now  ‘a mice sees cat game’ at the risk of passengers, pedestrians and other motorists. On one hand, the mice don’t care how they will run away from the cat, as long as they don’t get caught. On the other hand, the cat will use all the powers vested in him to chase the mice. But then again at the centre of all this fight, is a mother on her way to work, a boy on his way to school, an old lady on her way to her rural home crossing the street unaware that a mouse is on the run and that their life might end. For how long will we watch lives being lost at the hands of this cat-mice fight?

I read a Herald headline that said, “Manicaland: Be decisive, Zanu PF urged” and imagined it could have easily read: “Manicaland: Be divisive, Zanu PF urged,” because that is exactly what is happening.

Perhaps the “stalwarts” behind the Manicaland divisions are staring reality in the eye that there really isn’t much to be done about their impending confinement to the much loved “dustbin of history” metaphor. You can only browbeat the peasantry to an extent, that constituency of course being the favourite of Zanu PF’s claim of popularity in the rural areas, yet we know from the violence of March 2008 that this is very much thanks to cudgels and sjamboks as the party’s preferred tools of political persuasion.

After all, some political theorists long noted that divisions that emerge within African political parties are their ultimate Achilles heel that author their attrition and thus harbinger or point to their loss of relevance to the national political ethos, Jonathan Moyo should have told them!

But then here we are dealing with a cabal that seeks to defy all laws, from gravity to commonsense, yet we do get solace in knowing that when the big guns fight for the control of the party, it gives other political parties ample time to regroup, set up their own Praetorian guard for the new political dispensation project and invest their energies in the most pressing matter at hand, that is winning the election. It could indeed be yet another lost opportunity if Zanu PF opponents do take advantage of the party’s squabbles. Else, not just history, nay, none but ourselves shall judge hashly the political strategists of these parties.

Sarah Norman, reader, reviewer and all round cool gal has just reviewed a book I’ve enjoyed quite a bit. This is how you lose her by Junot Diaz. Sarah quotes a line from one of Junot’s short stories that is both funny and true: “Show me a beautiful girl and I’ll show you someone who is tired of fucking her.”