Check out the blogs on New Internationalist if you want to access some refreshing reading. Blogger Jo Lateu recently shared some words of wisdom on homophobia from Desmond Tutu. Of course, the hysterical homophobic elements of society are likely to be as reactive as ever, but more fool them. If there are any pearly gates, the haters among us are certainly going to struggle to gain entry when they pop their sandaks.

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. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. 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 many of 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 against 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. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counselling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding – away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offence is that it is being done in the name of God. 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.

‘But they are sinners,’ I can hear the preachers and politicians say. ‘They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished.’ My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin colour, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

The writer is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

The article first appeared in the Washington Post.

According to an article published on www.africanliberty.org, “Rejoice Ngwenya simply rejects Mugabe’s cohorts anthem of western sanctions being responsible for starvation in Zimbabwe.” Instead, Rejoice demands that Africans stop blaming others for self-inflicted misery.

Robert Mugabe’s brutal thirty year-old reign in Zimbabwe, compounded by a frenzied ten-year mutilation of property rights, is once again on the cover page of the country’s annals of food insecurity.  The pillaging, plunder of strategic commercial farms and national resources by privileged political elite has over the past decade emaciated our country’s productive capacity. At the epicentre of this carnage is central bank governor Dr Gideon Gordon who masqueraded as the benevolent bankroller of the curiously named ‘farm mechanisation program’ that mostly looted NGO funds to prop up Mugabe’s plummeting political fortunes.

To rub salt to injury, habitual ZANU-PF choirmaster Dr Joseph Made, now head of an apparition termed ‘ministry of agricultural mechanisation’ has been spewing brain-damaging propaganda via the Mugabe-owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. He trumpets the discredited theory that ‘illegal Western-imposed sanctions’ are to blame for all our harvest misfortunes.

Progressive Zimbabweans know that white farmers were evicted overnight from their properties with no time to pack, and then whole villages frog-marched to vast tracts of arable land that now lie fallow. Confronted with high-value assets but no expertise, these Mugabe foot soldiers looted the once profitable farms, unplugging irrigation pumps, uprooting pipes and stripping electrical fittings for quick disposal on the black market. Now, in a show of award-winning naivety, Joseph Made tells the world that ‘resettled farmers fail to produce because Western-imposed sanctions limit their access to equipment spares’. He must think we Africans are daft!

The Red Cross and World Food Program predict patched lips for Zimbabwe’s legion of rural citizens in 2010. Ironically, sophisticated farmer and MDC agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennet faces the hangman’s noose for a yet-to-be-substantiated terrorism charge while his counterpart, Tendai Biti conspires an epic cap-in-hand safari in search of food aid. My question: if ZANU-PF moguls are hoarding multi-million US dollar diamond mine claims in Marange, why would a sensible government want to further burden suffering citizens with more debts?

The cause of inevitable starvation is not all about scrappy weather patterns and as ZANU-PF apologists would like to claim, ‘illegal sanctions’. For almost a decade, Gideon Gono and Robert Mugabe poisoned our minds with a false doctrine that ‘Government is God’ so much so that dependency became habitual. Now that a more sustainable fiscal management and national accountability system is in place, ZANU-PF’s seemingly eternal pool of benevolence has evaporated. In any case, for all the so-called investment in farming that Gono spearheaded, there is nothing to show for it except a ‘ministry of mechanisation’, de-forestation, the first lady’s Gushungo Dairy Estates and two million vulnerable citizens!  Zimbabwean villagers stare starvation in the eye, yet there is a cruel twist to fate linked with this plot.

It was in the year 2000 that Robert Mugabe and his militant gang of ‘war veterans’ dismantled organised farming. To achieve their sinister political motive, they exploited idle village idiots, wherefore this rhythm of destruction was replicated in subsequent elections, causing internal and external displacement of millions of Zimbabweans. Ironically, these Jurassic ZANU-PF outcasts and their families also now face starvation. Arguing from a pedestal of high moral ground, the Tsvangirayi half of government cannot worry only about the welfare of their supporters, even where most beneficiaries of free land, free fertiliser, free seed and free fuel were ONLY ZANU-PF activists. The machinery of patronage, running right from the president’s office through to provincial governors, district administrators, chiefs, headmen was and still has ZANU-PF imprints. Former military officers control the Grain Marketing Board to compliment this toxic cycle of patronage. Remember that in all election years, Mugabe used to ‘ban’ NGOs from rural areas, claiming that food humanitarian agencies were ‘advancing a regime change agenda!”

Now here is my rationale. In Somalia, Uganda, Sudan and DR Congo, food relief is known to be routinely ‘hijacked’ by insurgents either for re-sale or personal use. More often than not, these are the same clowns responsible for food insecurity in those regions, but are first in handout queues when peace prevails. Now that Morgan Tsvangirayi and Tendai Biti are – to use ZANU-PF lingo – in ‘control of food relief’, Mugabe supporters are screaming ‘murder!’ and yet those are the same marauding gangs responsible for causing the current food production deficit in the first place! My humble submission is that these shameless citizens and members of their families should not be allowed within a fifty-kilometre radius of ‘MDC or NGO-sourced’ food distribution. Instead, Gideon Gono and Joseph Made must be hauled before a court of law to explain how the so-called ‘farm mechanisation’ and the freebies doled out since 2000 have added zilch to our country’s strategic food reserves. What we see, however, is Mugabe and his cronies persistently refusing to allow an official land audit in the hope that this gigantic fraud called ‘land reform’ will remain confined to a sealed black box.  I want to ask: of what use is a land revolution if all it produces is mass starvation, a tattered country reputation, few wealthy political elites, broken families and half a million displaced farm workers?

So what am I saying: the cruel reality is that everyone who participated in the plunder and destruction of Zimbabwe’s food productive capacity must not taste a single morsel of food relief. Those who are in the current echelons of governance like Made, Gono and even Mugabe – must be subject to a Parliamentary enquiry to explain why millions of US dollar investments in free agriculture inputs over the past ten years have failed to yield sustainable food surpluses. The sanctions story will be excluded from the repertoire of defence. It is not only an excuse of small minds but an insult to our intelligence. Community-based organisations and progressive activists can identify ZANU-PF collaborators who beat up, maimed and exiled villagers, publish names to inform them that they will not receive anything from an MDC-inspired humanitarian effort. Just for once, we Africans must learn to be responsible for our actions and refrain from time-worn scapegoats.

The caption from The Herald front page on Friday sums up more than this photograph – it seems sadly apt for the progress of Zimbabwe’s inclusive government as well: “Morgan Tsvangirai (out of picture).”

From one of Kubatana’s subscribers living in Glen Norah, Harare:

My dreams for Zimbabwe are to see a transformed nation. A nation where rule of law exists. A nation united and growing to be Africa’s power house. My dream for Zimbabwe is to make Zimbabwe the breadbasket that it is supposed to be. It is to see a Zimbabwe with freedom of expression and democracy. I mean real freedom, not talked freedom. To see the politicians respecting the human race; not treating them as their stools to stand on, and only to throw them away. – James

Self interview by Mgcini Nyoni, Poet, Playwright and freelance writer based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. With poetry published in FIRE IN THE SOUL 100 poems for human rights (New Internationalist / Amnesty International UK 2009), Intwasa Poetry (Amabooks, Bulawayo 2008), Poetry for Charity Vol 2 (Nigeria 2008). Creative director of Poetry Bulawayo www.poetrybulawayo.webnode.com.

Q: Why poetry?
A: Poetry liberates you. There is no right or wrong way of writing poetry, really. I remember Loyd Robson saying you can paint a picture and call it poetry.

Q: Sounds confusing.
A: Only if you don’t understand poetry. I don’t appreciate hip-hop so I was a bit confused when a hip-hop person was trying to explain that there is good shit and bad shit.

Q: But hip-hop is poetry.
A: What aspect of life is not poetry?

Q: What inspires your poetry?
A: Life. Like if I am thing that I would love bacon with my bread and I can’t afford bacon; It sort of formulates into a poem, like:

they are eating
bacon and eggs
in the state house
The man in rags
eating burnt bread . . .

Q: That’s political.
A: Life is political. Everything can be traced back to a politician either doing well or messing up. Most times they are screwing up.

Q: Is there real hope for poetry?
A: The numbers of artists who write poetry is increasing. And because everyone is literate, there is a lot of self-expression using poetry. Poetry Bulawayo is trying to give all these people a platform.

Q: There is a sort of rebelliousness associated with poetry.
A: Not really. There are people who always take things too far in anything: eating, sex, poetry…

Q: Last word.
A: Brace yourselves; the poetry movement is about to take over the world.

Students in tertiary institutions have faced a lot of challenges in their academic lives due to the governance crisis in Zimbabwe. Hence the Student Christian Movement of Zimbabwe has given them a platform to say out their anger and bitterness through the ‘I’ Stories Booklet, aimed at helping the students to heal, accept and forgive.

I spoke to the National Coordinator of the Student Christian Movement of Zimbabwe, Mr Innocent Kasiyano, and asked him why they put together the ‘I’ Stories Booklet. I also ask him what challenges were highlighted in the booklet that students are currently facing in tertiary institutions and what the vision of the Students Christian Movement of Zimbabwe is. Listen here