On Friday 21 May, members of the Zimbabwe Republic Police, led by Chief Superintendent Peter Magwenzi and Detective Inspector Chibvuma, appeared at the Harare offices of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) with a warrant to search for drugs and pornography. They confiscated office equipment and materials from the GALZ resource center, and arrested two GALZ staff members, Ellen Chadehama and Ignatious Muhambi, alleging that they were in possession of “indecent material.”

On Monday 24 May, when the two were to have appeared in court, the police added additional charges of “undermining the presidency,” based on a plaque they had found hung up at the GALZ offices from former San Francisco Mayor Willie Lewis Brown Jr, in which the African-American denounces President Robert Mugabe’s homophobia.

On Tuesday 25 May, the High Court refused to entertain an urgent application demanding the release of the two GALZ staff members.

On Wednesday 26 May around 6am, police raided the home of GALZ director Chesterfield Samba. Samba was in South Africa for scheduled meetings, but his brother’s wife and young son were at home. Police confiscated Samba’s birth certificate, passport, magazines, business cards and other materials.

The arrested pair were to appear in court the afternoon of Wednesday 26 May. However, by the time the arrived at court it was too late for their case to be heard. They are currently expected to appear in court at 8:30am on Thursday 27 May. The charges of “undermining the presidency” have been dropped, and the pair will only face charges of being in possession of “indecent material.”

The arrests have been condemned by a variety of Zimbabwean organisations including Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, Sexual Rights Centre, National Association of Non Governmental Organisations (NANGO) and Kubatana.net.

Zimbabwe is currently undergoing a process to draft a new Constitution. Some Zimbabweans have been advocating for a clause in the new Constitution’s Bill of Rights that protect sexual orientation from discrimination in the ways that gender, race and religion are protected. Many Zimbabweans are opposed to such a measure. The Sunday Mail of 23 May quotes Zanu PF Member of Parliament and co-chair of the Constitutional Parliamentary Committee (COPAC) as saying that the Constitutional outreach process would not involve any discussion of homosexuality.

In recent months, other individuals and organisations, including lawyer Jonathan Samkange, Nhimbe Trust, Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights) and Zimbabwe National Students’ Union (ZINASU), have been harassed by Zimbabwe’s inclusive government for a variety of reasons.

It is useful at this time to remember recent remarks by Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity – or because of their sexual orientation. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity. It is time to stand up for another wrong. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family. Show me where Christ said “Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones.” Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

Often in Zimbabwe, its difficult to separate fact from fiction; this place can be one big rumour mill. However a woman I work with had a horrible experience last night. Because of the lack of rule of law together with a very unprofessional police force, we’re all left shaking our heads as to What To Do. We thought about getting hold of the MDC seeing as they have Mutsekwa as co-minister in Home Affairs but we’re pretty cynical about whether he’ll actually do anything (just look at the circus called the Beitbridge Border post). Still, we’ll give it a bash.

So, here’s a first hand account of her treatment at the hands of the Zimbabwe Republic Police:

I had a nasty incident with the cops last night, when I was driving home from dinner on my own.  10 officers pulled me over, just outside Borrowdale School, and 2 of them threatened me with a gun, saying I hadn’t listened to the order to pull over, despite the fact that I stopped a few meters away from where they flagged me down.  They said that they were going to take me to jail, and that I had a weapon (which was actually the car fire estinguisher).  I managed to remain cool, calm and very polite throughout; and they finally let me go after about 30 minutes of aggressive intimidation and harassment from their side.  I hear that similar incidents have happened to others recently; and recommend not to go that route on your own at night.

One society that we often forget and rarely think of, mainly because, by its very nature it is isolated from our day-to-day association and interaction, is the prison. The conditions in prisons are therefore usually understated unless being narrated by a prisoner.

Recently I met a lady in her fifties carrying a basket of food and a lunch box. She hesitantly approached me and asked, “Son, do you know how I can get to the remand prison near Newlands?”

“Oh yes mama let me show you”, I answered.

She must have realized that I was a bit interested in talking further with her, because she waited a moment longer after I had shown her directions. This was a chance I could not let go. I asked why she was going to the prison at that time of the day carrying such luggage as food. Her face suddenly changed, she turned and spoke slowly with gasps of sighs in between her words. I could see tiny drips of tears making their way along the wrinkles around her eyes. To avoid direct eye contact, she looked down and started to narrate the story of her son who was arrested and sentenced to three months in prison. She said her son was at Matapi in Mbare, and when she got there with the food this morning she heard that he was taken to the Remand Prison. Where he will be taken to after Remand, she is not sure but what she is sure of is that he was sentenced to serve three months and that she was supposed to look for his food daily for that long. She was not sure if she could sustain the three months of moving about every morning, where would she get the money for transport let alone the food itself? It seems the son was the breadwinner of the family and the old lady had to pay for his sins; the whole family behind, so to speak.

The food supply in prisons is reprehensible; families are struggling to feed their imprisoned. A one-year sentence means the family suffers for a year as well. That led me to ask a policeman what happens to those whose relatives are far from the prisons or those who cannot afford to bring food. He chose to use the phrase “survival of the fittest” and didn’t divulge much detail. He was only at liberty to disclose that cigarettes are in demand in prisons. If one has a pack of cigarettes, then he is assured of food as he can trade it with food with those whose relatives can supply it daily.

Zimbabwean prisoners might never face a worse hell than the present. The punishment ripples out to innocent family members who have to supply for food on daily basis. If one member is arrested, practically every family member is in prison. What a horrible state.

In Zimbabwe I recently traveled in the back of pick-up truck with several other people.  At one point the truck stopped to pick up a man along the route to town.  In his attempt to get onto the truck, he held onto a woman who was seated next to me. She protested; she did not fancy any man besides her husband holding her shoulder.

There was an angry retort from the man, who felt that the situation called for a suspension of what he termed ‘stupid and immature’ moral stands. There was a chorus of condemnation of the woman; with some saying it was the likes of her who pretended to be saintly in public, but were in reality, ‘snakes’. As much as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to rape a woman.

I was not happy with the way the helpless woman’s rights were being violated and I said as much.  It was well within the woman’s rights to choose who held her shoulder and who did not; the circumstances did not matter. She did not want her shoulder held by another man, end of story.

Why should anyone ever say, what could I have done? The doctor asked me to strip me naked, what could I have done? You could have said you are not comfortable and you will not do it. I have heard people say it is backward for a woman to demand that a female nurse examine her. Well, it is within her rights to demand that a male nurse not touch her and that a male doctor not ask her to undress. It is well within her rights to be ‘backward’.

Malaysia recently introduced women only train coaches.  Those women who are not comfortable with harassment from men can travel in peace. Those who are okay with their bottoms being slapped and obscenities shouted at them are free to travel on the regular coaches. That is what I call upholding human rights!

Why should we see abuse of human rights only in the political sense; the burning of buttocks, burning of homes and so on. If someone is made uncomfortable in any way then a human right has been violated, it does not matter how many believe otherwise. Human rights, especially women’s rights, have been trampled upon so much that rape is now considered a small infringement that should be ignored. Young girls cannot move in peace as ‘suitors’ lay ambushes for them. I know of a number of young girls who refuse to be sent to the shops. They would rather face the wrath of their parents than face the vagabonds on the way.

As long as we do not see the violation of human rights as making someone or group of people uncomfortable regardless of their numbers or how trivial we think their case is, then we are a long way off.  No one should ever say, ‘what could have done?’

‘The teacher asked me to come to the storeroom and fondled my breasts, what could I have done?’

‘The doctor inserted his fingers into my vagina, even though I did not understand that my vagina had anything to do with my headache. What could I have done?’

‘The taxi driver asked us to pile into the taxi, women on top of men, what could I have done? The situation demanded it.’

‘The police officers whipped us, despite the fact that it is taboo for a man to lay hands on a woman without her consent. What could I done, he is a police officer.’

‘The human resources manager asked me to hold the desk. What could I have done, I wanted the job desperately?’

No one should ever say, what could I have done? Because there is always a choice, always a decent and dignified way out.  I remember a case when I was growing up of a man who used his wife to pay off his gambling debt. He instructed the guy he owed money to, to go to his place and ‘have’ his wife. The wife ‘consented’. After years of abuse, she could not think of going against her husband’s wishes, but she could have. In narrating her ordeal, the refrain was, ‘What could I have done?’  She could have said no, because she was not comfortable with the whole nonsensical setup. But she did not take the dignified way out.

In our fight for human rights, we should make sure that no one ever says, ‘What could I have done?’ What could I have done is not the dignified way out.

When I was a little girl of just four, I remember the family maid calling me to the spare bedroom to play a game with her. The game, she explained, would entail her lying down on the spring base single bed  and me jumping over her stomach.

Initially, I had concerns that such a game would cause her pain. But, in the way that only four-year olds can be convinced, she reassured me that the game would not hurt her at all and that it would instead be a good workout for her belly.

Somewhere in my mind, I can still hear the sound of those springs squealing as I jumped away to my heart’s content.

Recounting the new game to my mother that evening however,  put an end to it immediately.  It also put an abrupt end to Sisi Anna’s job.

A few months later, we heard that Anna had given birth to a healthy baby girl, thereby bringing unspeakable shame to her family who had already cast her off as a moral felon.

Her crime?

Anna was unmarried and the father of her child, who was apparently the married gardener from a few houses away, was refusing to take responsibility.

I am still filled with abhorrence at the thought of the role that Anna had wished me to play as her abortionist.

But with the passage of the years, I have grown to appreciate what levels of  desperation and despair must have led her to approach a clueless little child to assist her in finding a way out of her predicament.

Make no mistake; I don’t condone the measures that she took, especially since they involved an innocent party, myself. Rather, I am more open to understanding why she took such recourse.

Abortion is a topic that leaves a sour taste on many people’s tongues.

Walk the streets of Harare in Zimbabwe and you will come across many metallic placards featuring messages against the act, even citing biblical scripture about the detestability of murder in God’s eyes.

But just as we moralise and rationalise on end about whether or not sex work represents deviant behaviour, and whether or not it should be decriminalised, we go down the same torturous path when it comes to the abortion debate.

And the simple truth – as with sex work – is that regardless of the discourse and debates that take place, abortions continue to happen, whether sanctioned by the state, or deemed illegal.

Every day, young women all over Africa are having abortions.

According to research released by the Guttmacher Insitute last year, 5.6 million abortions were carried out in Africa in 2003. Only 100 000 of these were performed under safe conditions – that is, by individuals with the necessary skills, and in an environment that conformed to minimum medical standards.

And with only three African countries (Cape Verde, South Africa and Tunisia) giving unrestricted legal access to abortion to women, it would be safe to assume gross underreporting when it comes to figures pertaining to rates of abortion on the continent.

I’ll give a practical example of why I believe this is so.

Some years ago, when I was in university and living in a hostel, one of my hostel mates had an unsafe abortion. She told no one about it until she was forced to. Having  bled continuously for three weeks and in the process having exhausted her supply of sanitary ware at a time when this was a scarce commodity in Zimbabwe, she was forced to confide in a few of us that she needed help.

It’s not that we couldn’t tell that she was unwell. She had stopped interacting with anyone and when she surfaced in the communal bathrooms she looked wan and weak.

But finally, she decided to break her silence and share that she’d visited an old woman who’d given her a tablet to take for her ‘condition’. This tablet, my hostel mate, confided, made her uterus burn with acid pain and soon, she began to bleed.

She bled for all of a month and prohibited us from telling the matrons or even seeking medical assistance for her. All we could do was supply her with iron tablets, cotton wool and pads and eventually even mutton cloth to help her cope with the bleeding.

And that abortion, as well as many others, was not ever officially registered.

Why, you might ask, would women go to such desperate lengths to have an abortion?

For many young women, the cultural stigma of being an unwed mother is so strong that they feel they have to go to any length to avoid bringing shame and disgrace to their families in this way. A few years ago, a family friend committed suicide because her boyfriend had disowned the five-month-old foetus burgeoning within her womb. In her note to her parents she stated that it would be better that she died than bring humiliation to their Christian name.

Inherent in this cultural stigma is often the desertion of the partner or male responsible for the pregnancy, thus relegating the woman to position of a single mother.

And let’s not also forget that sometimes, a pregnancy is unexpected and unwanted and that the woman decides that she is simply not prepared for motherhood.

I doubt that this is ever an easy decision, but it is surely made more difficult not only by the lack of access to services such as hygienic abortions and counselling, but also by patriarchal hegemony that still prescribes the roles of women in society (ie. if you are unmarried you have no right to know anything about sex, let alone have a child).

Also, I am sure that the social perception of contraceptives, particularly condoms( which research has shown diminish in levels of usage as a relationship grows) plays a large role in the frequency of unprotected sexual acts, thereby putting women at risk of unplanned pregnancy as well as a host of other sexual infections.

Culture is the cohesive glue that binds communities together, but for many women, it is the hangman’s noose on which their freedoms are choked.

As I write, I wonder whatever became of Anna and her daughter; whether she grew to accept the child that separated her from her family; or whether her family ever took her back into their fold.

It is indeed a tragedy that so many women have to sacrifice one thing or the other for the sake of saving face in society.

For us, freedom and parity are still but utopian concepts.

We were recently invited to a crusade at our local police station.  The main speakers at the crusade were Sergeant Zimbeva and Sergeant Sibanda. My wife was skeptical.

“Do police officers actually go to church?” she enquired.

I told her there is no way of knowing who is a teacher, who is a nurse or who is a police officer at Sunday service. Her skepticism was based on the deplorable behavior of police officers: At best it is not Christian and at its worst, it is criminal. I have always known that public perception of police officers was not good, but I did not know it went as far as bunching them up into a group of heathens.

There were powerful messages at the crusade, like Word Power, A glimpse into the Future, Why so Much Suffering, One Life that Changed the World, Created for Eternity, Right and Wrong – Does it Really Matter and many other messages. Those two police officers who were doing most of the preaching were not the cocky, arrogant, corrupt, violent officers we see on a daily basis.

We stay close to a police station and we witness the rotten behavior of police officers on a daily basis: the constant arrest and beating up of people by the police at the shops, apparently for public drinking. But then we see police officers drinking and urinating right in front of our children. We see police officers setting up roadblocks a few meters from the police station for the purposes of collecting bribes from emergency taxi drivers. The police officers move in droves whenever they are broke and are in search of bribes, but do not take on actual crime: when there was a spate of muggings in our area, about fifty meters from the police station, we reported the matter to the police. They did nothing, did not even bother posting a patrol.

A cell phone recently disappeared at the small shop that I run. The young woman who had lost her cell phone reported the matter to the police. Three male police officers came to the shop to ‘investigate’. After they had left, it was generally agreed that the police officers were being so diligent because a beautiful young woman had reported the case. They were interested in sleeping with her but not the case was the general opinion. I suggested that the main problem was that Zimbabweans do not know the law. Someone countered by saying that it does not matter whether you know the law or not, because the law is not followed.

I found this rather disturbing. Does the Minister of Home affairs, well, the Minister(s) of Home Affairs actually . . . do they know that the police officers out there do not have a shred of dignity? I guess the police need to do a lot of public relations. The logical starting point would be doing their job and doing it properly.