Zimbabwean writers, poets, sportsmen and women, journalists, entrepreneurs are making Zimbabwe proud. Pity our politicians aren’t doing so as well.

Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled ‘Hitting Budapest’. The Chair of Judges, award-winning author Hisham Matar, announced NoViolet Bulawayo as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held last night at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Hisham Matar said: “The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles.  Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho, a gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these are children, poor and violated and hungry. This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language.”

NoViolet Bulawayo was born and raised in Zimbabwe. She recently completed her MFA at Cornell University, in the US, where she is now a Truman Capote Fellow and Lecturer of English. Another of her stories, ‘Snapshots’, was shortlisted for the 2009 SA PEN/Studzinski Literary Award. NoViolet has recently completed a novel manuscript tentatively titled We Need New Names, and has begun work on a memoir project.

Source: Booktrade.info

To be honest I’m not sure why Zanu PF spies would want to expose scandalous stories of MDC politicians sexploits. In general Zimbabweans aren’t fazed by them. In fact it seems like the more small houses, Pajeros, shiny suits, shoes and foreign trips a politician goes on, the more Man they are.

I’ve seen a headline in today’s Herald, Air Zimbabwe resumes flights.

I’m sceptical; I can’t imagine the structural changes that would be required to make Air Zimbabwe a viable business have taken place. But I’m also relieved. I recently flew from Victoria Falls to Harare via Zambezi Airlines, the Zambian carrier which had been roped in to fly Zimbabwe’s local routes whilst our national airline was out of commission.

The experience was a heart wrenching example of economic decline. The plane left on time, and got us to our destination – exactly what Air Zimbabwe has developed a reputation for not doing. But I was flying within my country. I was going from one of the country’s tourism hot spots to the country’s capital, crossing no international boundaries. But I did so in a plane from Zambia, with Zambian crew. We were served crisps from South Africa, ginger ale from China, and soda water from Malaysia.

Zimbabwe’s manufacturing sector is struggling enough to recover from the economic decline of the previous decade. Can’t we at least have our national airline plying our national routes – and serving drinks and snacks made right here in Zimbabwe?

Zimbabwean activist Grace Kwinjeh recently shared the following article with us.

And … as a matter of interest – you might well have missed it – in a recent Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) statement published in The Sunday Mail the ZRP has already concluded that “MDC hooligans” murdered Inspector Mutedza in Glenview. Proclaimed guilty even before trial.

Cry Woman cry, cry beloved Zimbabwe!
By Grace Kwinjeh

“Another weekend in for my child, is that it??? Cynthia was picked up from her town residence, not in Glen View, and she was never in Glen View, why, why is this happening to my child and why to her little boy?? How do I tell a little boy that he can’t see his mother because she was arrested for no crime at all??” Anna Manjoro.

The above are the cries posted on the social networking site, Facebook, by Mrs Anna Manjoro, Cynthia’s mother. Cynthia is one of the 24 Glenview residents accused of killing a police officer, Petros Mutedza . Above is the shrill cry of anguish coming from a mother and grandmother for her daughter, Cynthia, who has left behind a son to whom she has to explain the ‘criminal’ enormity of his mother’s arrest.

Problem is there is no criminal enormity here! Only, perhaps, a coldly calculated ‘political enormity’. An eerie cloud of premeditated spitefulness that hovers ominously over Cynthia and three other women who have been transferred from the female section to the male one at Chikurubi Maximum prison– a holding centre for the most vile and dangerous criminals.

The psychological impact is unimaginable!

Just to prove where the real deception behind the arrests of the 24 lies is the fact that Cynthia herself, even the police admit, has not committed any offense, but her arrest is meant to ‘lure’ her boyfriend who, as they allege, is also behind the killing of the police officer in Glenview.

Anna’s cries are deep from Zimbabwe’s own belly, mourning for her beloved children.

Arbitrary arrests, torture, hate speech – you name it – characterize a relentless campaign by President Robert Mugabe’s acolytes in the top echelons of the army, police and intelligence to intimidate and instill fear in an otherwise restive population. This unfortunate group, it should be noted, is not the first since Zimbabwe’s independence to endure the brutality of similarly seeming mindless incarceration as a result of trumped up charges.

When political temperatures rise, women and children are the most vulnerable. But who cares?

Scars are still fresh from the violence of the 2008 Presidential election run -off. A woman from Manicaland Province states in a December, 2010 study commissioned by the Research Advocacy Unit (RAU) : “No place to hide. Politically motivated rape of Zimbabwean women”, “When I woke up the following morning on the 26th of June 2008, they had put a skirt on me and a ZANU PF t-shirt, I had blood all over my skirt and my thighs were swollen. My vagina was full of semen; I had wounds and cracks from being raped continuously. I could not walk because my legs were swollen.” The grisly forms of violence, endured by hundreds of women, through out the country during this dark period are well documented.

It may seem as if this is no longer the time to dwell on what some might feel to be petty struggles fought in high density suburbs like Glenview. It may, however, certainly be claimed, in some quarters, that the focus is no longer on the ability of the working class (or struggling women, on a more specific note) to mobilize and liberate themselves, and that now the focus has shifted onto the regional and African elites’ political will to offer leadership that will liberate Zimbabweans from a long time ally and friend of theirs.

Last week SW Radio Africa published the first in a six-part list of alleged CIO operatives. The original list contained names and addresses, while an amended list, published over the weekend only has names.

Responding to the public reaction to the list, SW Radio Africa Station Manager, Gerry Jackson wrote a statement saying: Experts say the CIO is the most powerful arm of ZANU PF’s security apparatus, the ‘brains behind the regime.’

According to the Council on Foreign Relations: ‘There is no public record of the CIO’s size, but it is thought to have thousands of operatives. Many Zimbabweans think the organization has a network of informers that extends into the Zimbabwean diaspora.

Jackson omits the part of the 2008 report, which states: Some analysts think the CIO’s ability to generate fear among Zimbabweans might exceed its true power.

Assuming the list is authentic, then what? How is releasing classified government information going to benefit the people of Zimbabwe?

In the article, SW Radio Africa discusses several people on the list and uses circumstantial and inconclusive evidence to link them to acts of violence and torture. Commenting on the article in NewZimbabwe Professor Tendi points out that the journalist concerned is hardly reliable: [he] once made an outlandish claim that UK-based public intellectual George Shire is Air Marshal Perrance Shiri’s brother. George suffered serious consequences, one of which was the desecration of his father’s grave, because of [his] fable.

I have several problems with SW Radio Africa publishing this list. First, it takes the CIO out of context. Gerry Jackson is right to assert that there is no legislative framework for the organization, but going by her statement one would be forgiven for thinking that the CIO was formed during the last decade to maintain ZANU PFs grip on power, but this is an institution that was inherited from the colonial government, and in fact Ian Smiths Chief of Intelligence, Ken Flower was retained by Our Dear Leader after Independence.  The CIOs lack of accountability, methodology and terror-tactics are characteristics of the Rhodesian era. In doing research for this blog I came across this quotation about the operations of the CIO:

“In the mid 1970′s, in the most closely guarded secret operation of the entire Rhodesian war, the CIO embarked on a programme of chemical and biological warfare. Doctors and chemists from the University of Rhodesia were recruited by the CIO and asked to identify and test a range of chemical and biological agents, which could be used in the war against the nationalist guerrillas. By 1975 clinical trials were performed on human guinea pigs at a remote Selous Scout camp at Mount Darwin in northeastern Rhodesia. The CIO provided victims from their detention centres, choosing little-known detainees who had been arrested on various security charges. In the secrecy of the camp, the doctors administered various chemical and biological agents to the prisoners, experimenting with delivery systems and dose levels. The local CIO Special Branch disposed of the bodies in local mine shafts.”

The bodies discovered earlier this year might very well be some of the victims of this brutal and inhumane programme.

My second problem is that publishing a questionable list of CIO operatives does nothing to address the deficiencies of the institution, and may contribute in exacerbating the situation for Zimbabweans who are being terrorized by CIO operatives. The fact of where the list is placed, online and outside Zimbabwe does nothing to help those people.

Finally, the list was published as a reactionary measure, rather than as a revolutionary one. It is conceivable that anyone in possession of that list in Zimbabwe, having taken the trouble to download and print it for local distribution, would be charged with treason. If Munyaradzi Gwisai and the 45 can be beaten, tortured and held for weeks without trial based on conjecture and rumour, then surely there are worse evils in store for anyone who actually has State Secrets on their person. It was done without thought as to objectives and consequences, as though placing information in the public domain is the end, rather than the means to it.

Rejoice Ngwenya, in XO2 this Wednesday, shares some thoughts on how “the people” are used in the political debate:

There are several things that National Constitutional Assembly’s Lovemore Madhuku and Paul Mangwana of COPAC inadvertently share.  Both men are chairpersons of constitutional research bodies, driven by a passion for constitutional law. They also have a sinister obsession with the phrase ‘people-driven’, albeit for different reasons. Their egos seem to thrive on incessant front page appearances.  In the quest to outdo each other for attention, the two lawmen insist that the current constitutional process is either people-driven [Mangwana] or not people-driven [Madhuku]. That leaves me and you, mere mortals, in a state of semantic quandary as to which people these learned men are grappling about.  As with literary tradition, I turn to Wikipedia that describes people as ‘a plurality of human beings or other beings possessing enough qualities constituting personhood.’

My prognosis is that one of these ‘qualities’ referred to above is the ability to think or reason independently. But because constitutionalism is fought in the realm of politics, I would assume Madhuku is more comfortable with ‘civil’ people than the ‘political’ people that Mangwana is accustomed to dealing with. If one probes further, Madhuku is convinced that Mangwana’s ‘people’ are prone to manipulation, since they are selected on partisan preferences, hence, in his view, the ‘illegitimacy’ of the COPAC process. Mangwana on the other hand will argue that because all people have a degree of intelligence, it is inconceivable that one can manipulate [all of] them, thus the legitimacy of the COPAC process.  As far as these two learned lawyers are concerned, the ‘COPAC referendum’ will be a battleground to determine which ‘people’ really matter in defining the destiny of Zimbabwe. For me, I would like to raise the argument on who the ‘real’ people are and why long before the bi polar plebiscite.

Let me start off with the marital institution I am familiar with – mine. I have four children – all boys – who I call ‘mine’, for genetic and legal reasons. However, my ‘possession’ is limited, if not situational because when the two boys are in a kombi, the driver calls them ‘my passengers’. At school, they are labelled ‘my students’ by their teacher while our pastor refers to them as ‘my church members’. In other words, ‘personhood’ is situational. My point is that both Madhuku and Mangwana are in fact talking about the same people, the difference being these humans assume certain qualities in different scenarios.

During the COPAC outreach, I met many ‘people’ who enjoy simultaneously multiple membership in NGO youth groups, the NCA, their professions, Movement for Democratic Change [MDC], ZANU-PF and several other social groupings. Some attended my meetings while other abstained because they said to me “we do not trust the other ‘people’ are at your meetings”. Nonetheless, at any one time, even a typical NCA member assumes ‘dual personhood’ that can be civil, professional or for that matter political.

Madhuku’s rational argument is two-fold: first, ‘political people’ like Mangwana cannot preside over a constitutional reform process without resisting the temptation to ‘unfairly influence’ popular opinion. Second, he argues COPAC audience was ‘people’, but attended either under duress, or some stayed away in fear of what Mangwana’s ‘political people’ would do to them before, during and after these meetings. Therefore the Madhuku conclusion is that even if it is ‘people’ that drive the COPAC process, they are not from the ‘right civic category’ in order to legitimise the process.

Mangwana’s position is predictably different, if not outright divergent. He argues that every, or at least most ‘people’ came to the meetings voluntarily. His party, ZANU-PF, invested time and energy to ‘explain’ to these people what to expect and how to respond because in a democracy, one is allowed to teach ‘one’s people’ what is good for them. This means that he is saying to Madhuku: “It would have been better to [also] teach ‘your people’ what was good for them rather than saying: “don’t go there because you will meet the wrong Mangwana people”.

My conclusion is therefore tinged with Biblical annotation. There is none but God who can designate people as ‘the right people’ or ‘the wrong people’. Those who stayed out of the COPAC process exercised their intelligent choice, while those that participated [either voluntarily or otherwise] had an opportunity to refuse. Whether you are NCA, ZANU-PF, MDC or ‘civil’, you are the ‘right person’ because of your citizenship. If you feel you were ‘excluded’ from the COPAC process, you will have an opportunity to ‘participate’ in the referendum. That makes you important to me.  Thus, in the final analysis, it will be interesting to see which ‘people’ will have the last laugh – Madhuku’s ‘civil people’ or Mangwana’s ‘political people’. Either way, it is the people that will speak!

XO2 this Wednesday may be your Extreme Opinion too!