Just recently we featured some homegrown Zimbabwean poetry penned by Bella Matambanadzo on Kubatana.net. The poem is called The Kanga, Part 1, in response to the Jacob Zuma rape case in South Africa.

Several readers requested a copy of Bella’s poem but unfortunately one of our subscribers in Chiredzi had his email blocked because of “inappropriate language”. Can you imagine how many pubs would be shut down in Zimbabwe if the swear word police came down as hard as the email censors?

Here’s Bella’s poem.

The Kanga: Part 1
Isabella Matambanadzo
August 04, 2006

The girl lay under bedding of felt-soft yellow sheets. The corners were neatly turned down in a nurse’s envelope.

He takes it out
Already dripping

Face up, she felt the leaves of the garden of flowers running in neat rows across her single bed tickling her bare, chubby feet.

Holds it with both hands
As if it will break

She didn’t squeal with delight as girls her age are meant to. She kept very, very still. She did not want to make a mess of her new hair.

His pants, belt around waistband, drop
Plonk.
Upon brown laced up shoes.

Her mother had spent the Sunday afternoon melting her tough curls with a Vaseline and a hot comb, etching out fantastically even cornrows. She was careful.

He calls his mothers name in a grunt
No surprise he is back in the thing that pushed him out.

The smell always reached her first. Filling the follicles of her nostrils and bursting past her tonsils into her mouth. A mucky mingling of heavy mucus and swallowed tears that she pushed back into her stomach.

He pulls it back into checkered underpants, hands apart this time tucks the shirt tails in.
Funny thing, that. How they can always fuck with their shoes and socks on.

That smell. And then there it was. The sound of metal turning hinges. Unrolling wood against a green carpet into puffs of dust dragged to life by turned up trouser ends.

And funnier still how Judges can get away with telling you
that you are the sick one, need help.

Get braids, not AIDS is the title of an article on the work of Population Services International (PSI) in HIV/AIDS prevention in Zimbabwe.

PSI have been training female hair dressing salon owners to disseminate information about the female condom to their clients. Maria, a young hair dresser in Chitungwiza, said this in an interview with ZimbabweJournalists.com:

My clients are mostly young girls from a nearby college who are forced to engage in unprotected sex with older men because of economic pressures. They visit the salon on a regular basis and I take this opportunity to talk to them while they are having their hair done on the benefits of using the female condom.

Meanwhile the Government of Botswana has turned to advertising and marketing to give the usually unpopular female condom more prominence in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Female condoms have been re-launched in Botswana under the name Bliss. The new name and marketing campaign are expected to encourage more women to engage in safer sex. Apparently women in Botswana have been using the rings of the female condoms as bangles while discarding the rest.

Reports today also indicate an investment of US$37 million from DFID and USAID in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe.

But at the end of the day, in the bedroom or on the street corner, the majority of women cannot insist on their right to protect themselves during sex with their partners or their clients. HIV/AIDS education needs the involvement of both men and women so we’re looking forward to PSI’s barber shop campaign.

The United States Embassy in Harare regularly publishes a newspaper called News and Views from The World. The August/September 2006 issue’s theme is Democracy and Good Governance.

On the front page the editors include the following information from the World Bank:

According to the World Bank, good governance is characterised by the following features:

- accountability of government officials including politicians and civil servants
- transparency in governmental procedures
- predictability in governmental behaviour and expectation of rational decisions
- openness in governmental transactions
- the rule of law and an independent judiciary
- free flow of information and freedom of the press
- respect for human rights
- decentralisation of power, structure and decision making

I wonder if the U.S. Embassy included these guidelines in their newspaper as a reminder to America, Zimbabwe or both?

An article entitled Chinamasa proposes amending Domestic Violence Bill in this week’s Zimbabwe Independent caught my eye. Commenting on the demonstration that took place to protest MDC Timothy Mubawu’s statements on women, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party said:

“We did not see these kinds of demonstrations when other women such as Lucia Matibenga were brutally assaulted by police while in custody. Violence is violence and it must be condemned.”

I had dinner with a couple of foreign visitors on Monday night. They were in Zimbabwe to check out the state of civil society and take the political temperature. I have to say that my jaw dropped (almost into my bowl of Thai noodles) when they said they were upbeat about the new Save Zimbabwe Campaign.

One thing that civil society is good at is re-inventing itself into coalitions or alliances by a variety of names. Brian Kagoro said in a recent interview on SW Radio Africa, that he felt it was unfair to say that civil society coalitions hadn’t really worked in Zimbabwe. But one has to wonder what the difference is between the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition and the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, for example? Has this been clearly articulated? Because if it has, I haven’t read the analysis.

When I heard about the formation of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign my first thought was that it sounded all too familiar. Hadn’t we been there and done that? And indeed a Save Zimbabwe Campaign was formed in 2002 with the Movement for Democratic Change being a key participant in its formation. The 2002 Save Zimbabwe Campaign has either fizzled out or become moribund.

Is this going to be the fate of the 2006 Save Zimbabwe Campaign?

The 2006 Save Zimbabwe Campaign claims to have brought together all opposition political parties and major civil society organisations – one would imagine that the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) is participating as well. So, where was the 2006 Save Zimbabwe Campaign on September 13th during the ZCTU protest in Harare?

As one visitor to our offices said on September 13th, “I went looking for the revolution but couldn’t find it.”

Will the Save Zimbabwe Campaign actually materialise, and Do Something, or will it continue to be little more than references in the press?

Its been interesting to observe how defensively some Zimbabwean men have reacted to the Protest March organised by the Women’s Coalition which took place on Tuesday in response to Timothy Mubawu’s comments about the Domestic Violence Bill and women.

And Now To The Notebook, a column in the Financial Gazette, vigorously supports Mubawu’s right to freely express his opinion in Parliament. Do you remember what happened to former Movement for Democratic Change MP for Highfield Munyaradzi Gwisai when he freely expressed his opinion on the MDC having “right wing tendencies”? He was promptly expelled.