The poem, Jasmine, by Zimbabwean poet and writer John Eppel has just been selected poem of the week by The Guardian. “John Eppel explores the duplicities of the word freedom while, in characteristic style, evoking the odours and symbolism of flowers.”

Jasmine

When they cried freedom, when the sweet
mingling of woodsmoke and jasmine
with dust – grass, granite, antelope
bone – gathered into wrists which turned

light the colour of blood, darkness
a memory of the colour
of blood – when their voices lifted
that song and sent it echoing

across Africa, I knew it.
Sibanda had taught it to me,
polishing the family’s shoes,
squatting outside the scullery

door. We both wore khaki trousers
many sizes too big; no shirt,
no shoes. I spat on the toecaps
while he brushed: and while he brushed

we sang: ‘Nkosi sikelel’
iAfrika…’ over and over
till the birds joined in. August birds.
‘… Maluphakanisw’ udumo lwayo …’ *

It comes back to me, this August,
now that the jasmine is blooming
and the air is stilled by woodsmoke;
how they cried freedom, and how I

knew their song. A lingering chill
pinches Zimbabwean sunsets
into the cheeks of my children
squatting beside me as I write.

It is their song too. I teach it
to them, over and over, till
my tired eyes are pricked with tears
held back, sweet smoke, dust and jasmine.

*(Zulu) “God bless Africa … Raise up her spirit.”

Recently the Prime Minister announced a cabinet reshuffle. He said the main reason for doing so was to regain the people’s confidence in the new administration amongst the electorate by addressing weaknesses in the party. Ministerial reshuffles are not anything new on the political front. This move might serve to confirm three basic points, 1. That rumours of fissures in the MDC party are real. 2. The MDC has not performed per expectation in the GNU. 3. The party is not hesitant when it comes to addressing serious issues.

The prime Minister did not talk about the reshuffle as firing anybody – he chose to call it a redeployment of the people: “…within the party to strengthen and add momentum to party programmes.” However Fidelis Mhashu, one of the axed ministers, speaking on ZTV expressed surprise at the reshuffle and said that he was shortchanged and he feels demoted.

Putting politics aside, the axing of Engeer Mudzuri is worrisome. Unless the party does something to paint him white, his career has been tarnished. Before assuming the ministerial post, Engineer Mudzuri was also uprooted from his Mayoral post that he had democratically occupied. It was Chombo’s axe that saw Mudzuri controversially replaced by a commission led by Sekesayi Makwavarara at the helm of the town house. The move was interpreted by many as a more politically inclined issue than a professional performance one. As a result Mudzuri was an MDC hero, who through the firing from the council office, had proved to be a real threat to the ZANU PF bigwig Chombo, the then Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing.

Complaining on the suspension of Mudzuri the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition said:

“The arbitrary suspension of Mudzuri represents a double standard in the application of authority by the Minister of Local Government. While other local authorities continue to suffer under poor service delivery, similar action has not been adopted. Indeed, the whole country is a victim of mismanagement and poor service delivery, and yet not a single member of the executive has been fired. Hospitals are largely dysfunctional, as are schools, colleges and universities. There are rampant food, fuel and foreign currency shortages. Surely if service delivery were so important, the entire government would have been fired by now”

Now that Mudzuri has failed to escape the first axe of his trusted Master, Morgan Tsvangirai, does this confirm that Chombo was right when he said Mudzuri is incompetent? The two consecutive firings are a bad mark on the engineer’s curriculum vitae. The MDC has to take appeasement action towards its Party’s National Organizer, otherwise his professional sheet will not be clean.

From Angus Shaw in Harare, here is an inspiring article on the Positive Ladies Football Club:

Soccer is a life saver for HIV Positive Ladies

DOMBORAMWARI, Zimbabwe — For members of the Positive Ladies Football Club, playing soccer is much more than just a way to have fun.

All its members are women infected with the virus. In this impoverished district outside the Zimbabwe capital, having an outlet and a bond with teammates has helped the players keep up their spirits as they fight the disease and the stigma that goes with it.

And now is a special time for the club. It fields a team known as the ARV Swallows which will compete in a tournament in neighbouring South Africa while the World Cup is being staged.

The Swallows have already triumphed in one local women’s league, and they’ve kicked stigma and prejudice off the field at their home ground at Zinyengere government school, about 20 miles southeast of Harare, said Ivy Choga, a nurse with Medecins sans Frontieres, or Doctors without Borders, the international medical humanitarian organization.

In this southern African nation, where nearly a quarter of the adult population is estimated to be infected with the virus that causes AIDS, people with the disease were long shunned in local communities. Infected women were banished from families.

“They were hidden away and getting very sick. Families were planning burials,” Choga said.

In Domboramwari, or Stones of God in the local Shona language — named after the district’s bleak landscape of granite rocks — the “Positive Ladies” on Saturday were helping a group of their members prepare for a trip they once never dared dream of.

The Swallows are competing in a 5-a-side tournament of HIV positive women in South Africa scheduled July 2 and organized on the sidelines of the World Cup by Doctors Without Borders from its HIV treatment projects in southern Africa.

They will be led by coach Jonas Kapakasa, a former goalkeeper in a Zimbabwe club side.

“Everyone is very excited. We’re ready to show what we can do,” Kapakasa told The Associated Press.

He said he cancelled practice on Wednesday after a child of one of the Swallows became ill. Teammates rallied around to help get the child to the district hospital.

“It was a real team effort,” he said. “I’m so proud.”

AIDS groups have warned that foreign funding for life saving medication is diminishing. The so-called “Halftime” tournament in Johannesburg calls on international donors not to cut back on antiretroviral funding when the fight against the disease is only half over.

“Imagine the referee stopping the match against HIV/AIDS halfway through. … Nobody calls it quits at halftime,” Doctors Without Borders said in a statement.

In this arid Zimbabwe district, with regular power outages and no electricity at all in some parts, unemployment and food shortages are acute. Players in the Swallows grow and sell their own vegetables, some make basic handicrafts and artificial flowers from grass and scrap materials and others receive food handouts from independent charities. They receive their medication from the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders.

Annafields Phiri formed the team in 2008 after a Harare businessman launched a women’s football league to promote his skin and hair care products.

Choga, the nurse, said regular exercise strengthened the women and helped them throw off years of depression, discrimination and isolation. Singing and dancing goes along with their practices three times a week.

There have been injuries on the field, but neighbourhood skeptics who now turn out to support the Swallows had learned more about the risks of HIV infection from unprotected sex, often a taboo subject in Zimbabwe — and how the risk from cuts and bruises is minimal, Choga said.

Defender Nyarai Bengina, 33, said being diagnosed HIV positive in 2006 was the saddest time of her life. Seeing her drawn body, wracked by tuberculosis and near death, neighbours had taunted her to take poison to end it once and for all.

Now the beaming, smiling mother of three will soon be enjoying soccer in Johannesburg and rooting for Argentina.

“We’ve got our lives back,” she said.

The most oddly soulful of Ms. Hilltout’s images are of objects: the homemade balls fashioned by children from plastic bags, old socks and rags, tied up with string or strips of tree bark. Some children inflated condoms — commonplace and free on a continent beset by AIDS — wrapped them in cloth to make them heavy, then in plastic bags to seal them and finally bound them in twine. These ingenious, improvised balls bounce like real ones for a few days before the air escapes.

Jessica Hilltout jumped into her father’s 1976 VW Beetle and travelled across Africa to capture images of grassroots football. Read more

Jacob Goldstein shares a great photograph from Zimbabwe’s talented Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi in his blog about washing US$ notes to get them clean. Increasingly the filthy US$ notes that we’re handling look like they harbour a million diseases.

Rejoice Ngwenya on civil society, free media, party politics and political vuvuzelas . . .

The vivacious Violet Gonda is a Zimbabwean journalist of persona non grata in her country simply because of being a rare breed of courageous radio broadcasters willing to take on a rogue state. Such is the paranoia in Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF regime that broadcast laws that deliberately prevent alternative opinion are entrenched in the legislative DNA. The positive spinoff of this scenario has been a proliferation  of shortwave and internet broadcast stations spanning the globe, the most popular being VOA Studio 7 news based in Washington DC, Voice of the People in Botswana and Violet’s own SW Africa radio in England.

On many occasions, Zimbabweans and gullible Africans have been made to believe that vice and toxic rumour is embedded in such alternative viewpoint. In more ways than one, it is for this reason that ZANU-PF refuses to take the Global Political Agreement forward, claiming as long as Morgan Tsvangirayi’s MDC does not influence closure of such stations, Mugabe will refuse to cooperate. Bulls eat grass, but the fresh results of their digestion are unpleasant to the eye. Had there been a more family-friendly term to describe the product of this biological process, I would have had no problem labelling ZANU-PF opinion.

Ironically, Violet Gonda and her friends do not want to live in forced exile, because of family commitments back in Zimbabwe. But as long as they face arrest, and as long as the broadcast regulations outlaw alternative opinion, we Zimbabweans at home will continue to tune in to VOA Studio 7, Voice of the People and SW Radio for REAL news. What we know is that MDC have no chance in hell to influence closure of these stations. That makes me feel good!

But it is not all diamond that glitters from these alternative airwaves – at least according to MDC Professor Mutambara’s sympathisers. There is consensus amongst his supporters that most if not all external broadcasters have taken a position to support Tsvangirayi’s formation at the expense of all other progressive forces of democracy. Their argument is that in the haste to rid Zimbabwe of the curse of authoritarian dictatorship, these broadcasters paint anything or anyone who takes a side that opposes Tsvangirayi as anti struggle.

They continue that MDC Tsvangirayi failures are not sufficiently interrogated, while only the opinion of analysts who have something negative to say about Mutambara are given undue prominence. For example, the best news item that can ever emerge from rural Matebeleland is when councillors from Mutambara defect to Tsvangirayi’s party. Such news, Mutambara’s people argue, takes precedence over the antics of Theresa Makone, Tsvangirayi’s new home affairs boss who is related to Mugabe’s political hit man, Didymus Mutasa. The two are currently on the front page for attempting to sprout habitual ZANU-PF property rights violators form prison. ZANU-PF, who term alternative studios ‘pirate radio stations’, amplify Tsvangirayi’s internal party struggles, reminding readers that Ms Makone is the same woman whose husband ‘controls’ Tsvangirayi via what they call MDC’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. At one time, Ms Makone was accused of displacing the MDC women’s assembly leader in order to exert more influence on the party’s strategy. And all this – Mutambara’s people argue – does not receive airplay on ‘pirate’ radio stations.

As a regular contributor to these useful and value-adding radio stations, I attempt to present balanced opinions. Freelance analysts like me do not influence editorial policy, but we need to pitch our commentary from an objective perspective. I have no sacred cows. More importantly, Violet Gonda would not be able to influence what I say, but she would be in a position to decide what to publish depending on her editorial slant. For example, in one of SW Africa Radio Friday night programs called Hot Seat, Tony Reeler, director of Research and Advocacy Unit [RAU] commenting on Professor Arthur Mutambara’s position in government, tells Ms Gonda: “So he’s there by grace and favour of the Agreement but not by any other ground.”

A more mundane interpretation of this cryptic statement is that Mutambara is not in the coalition government by virtue of electoral credibility, but that he is the president of a [MDC] minority party with few seats in a remote part of Zimbabwe. Obviously with Zimbabwe’s first past the post electoral system, it would have been unthinkable to have the professor in government. Herein lies the need for progressive ‘pirate’ analysts to offer objective radio commentary.

My angle would be that the GPA brought into government hundreds of worthless politicians from all three sides. Morgan Tsvangirayi himself has on several occasions expelled councillors and recently reshuffled ministers. Accusations of corruption, underhand deals and inefficiency have plagued his party, while neutrals argue that even himself as Prime Minister, is guilty of soft-padding Mugabe in international foras. Observers insist that incomes, infrastructure and public facilities are only marginally better than before the coalition, while power blackouts hound an industry struggling to emerge from recession. The human rights sector is disastrous, with no single conviction of ZANU-PF zealots who murdered, maimed and raped innocent citizens in June 2008. His critics argue he has failed to reign in on rogue elements raiding commercial farms including those properties protected under regional bilateral agreements. Therefore to diminish Mutambara’s role in government without a rub off on Tsvangirayi’s personal political reputation is an impossible feat.

Mr Reeler himself is a product of a decade old struggle against dictatorship, a flag bearer of a contingent of brave human rights defenders that have survived determined ZANU-PF antagonism and intimidation. In this noble group of principled citizens one finds peace campaigner Jestina Mukoko, lawyer Irene Petras, constitutional expert Lovemore Madhuku and countless other civil society activists. But unlike Arthur Mutambara who has risen from mere student activism to national leadership, I and Reeler have little other than political vuvuzelas to show for our rhetoric.  My point is simple. This is no time to denigrate each others’ value propositions. If civil society was half as effective as its loud voice, Mugabe would have abandoned ship in 2002.