“If you’re going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.” Keith Richards

Zimbabwean activists and journalists should explore using the much talked about WikiLeaks web site as a conduit for exposing the corruption and profiteering of those in power in Zimbabwe. Apparently WikiLeaks receives an average of 30 classified documents every day from sources around the world. Read this extensive interview with Julian Assange, the inspiration behind WikiLeaks.

Many prisoners incarcerated in Zimbabwe’s prison cells are suffering from a lack of food, clothing and medical attention. A recent meeting with a community activist who visits a central Harare prison each week made it clear that prisoners need our help.

Here are two requests:

1.    Old ice cream or any other plastic containers are desperately needed as makeshift plates.
2.    Many prisoners do not have any shoes. If you have old shoes, especially size 7 and up, please consider giving them a new home.

If you can donate one, or both of these items your help will be very gratefully received. Please contact Kubatana via our web site to find out more and get details on a drop off point.

Read community activist Theresa Wilson’s account of assisting Zimbabwean prisoners here

If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
~ Bob Hope

A new title is now available from Weaver Press:

Narratives of Hope: It Starts with us
Full-colour illustrations
pp.128; 180 x 235 mm
Price US20

Documenting Development through Stories of Change

It Starts Within Us is the product of a group of Zimbabwean NGOs who sought to discover their relevance in promoting development. They named this exercise ‘Makadii-Linjani’, or ‘How are you doing?’ and engaged with communities to discover if their development partners had benefited from their intervention – or not.

This important book not only documents stories of change but interrogates the process of evaluation, allowing members of marginalized communities to speak for themselves, and providing the reader with a ‘narrative of hope’. We discover how the need to change and develop begins with the harsh realities of poverty – exacerbated in Zimbabwe in the past decade by the effects of an economic, social, and political crisis of debilitating proportions.

Insights about how a people-centred approach to development can be sustained, even in difficult operating environments, will be of interest to any development practitioner, researcher or academic as well as to the general public interested in restoring development to a country that has seen much that has undermined the process.

The Makadini-Linjani project and this publication is supported by the Church Development Service (Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst – EED), an association of protestant churches in Germany.

‘Poverty was screaming in my household, at one time I ended up thinking that poverty was mine.’ Sarah Matongo

For more information and to buy a copy of Narratives of Hope contact Weaver Press via their web site

A couple of weeks ago I published a blog about Africa’s Old Men and how they insist in staying in power for so long. In a print publication we re-published this blog and asked Zimbabweans to text us their suggestions as to why these old men don’t, or won’t, take early retirement.

Here are some of the text messages that we received:

Dictatorship keeps african leader in power for so long. They use guns and the army to put fear in people.

African leaders stay in power due to undemocratic methods they use to rule their states.

They kip in pwer 4 so long becoz they are 2 greedy and ful of coruption.

Afraid to be arrested greedy cruel uneducated etc

AFRICAN LEADERS FEAR THAT ONCE OUT OF POWER ICJ WIL AREST THEM THEY KILED TORTURED IMAGINE HOUSES DEMOLISHED ZIMBABWE

African leaders keep in power for so long because of (i) Power hungury & (ii) they don’t respect the voice of us unpriviledged poor and the majorite.

African leaders keep in power for so long becaz they are all dictators and they fear to answer cases if the leave the office.

Many afrcn leaders abuse public offce and as a result they fear to resgne and wil hold on to power even if it means starving or killng their people they d.nt mind.

African leaders stay in power coz they are all dictators. Most of them comited crimes of genocide so they hang on 2 power 4 fear of possible persecution.

Eat Out Zimbabwe has posted an inspiring write up by Theresa Wilson, who has been helping prisoners at Harare Central for the past year and a half. Wilson shares some of the challenging and humbling observations of her work:

St George’s College has now been involved in helping at Harare Central Prison for almost eighteen months. The school has formed a prison committee, made up of six members of staff. On a weekly basis Father Freyer, the resident priest at the school and Mrs Theresa Wilson, a teacher at the school, visit the prison with all important goods for the plus or minus 1300 inmates imprisoned there.

There is no section which we have not visited now and the conditions, although not as desperate as early last year, are still concerning. The prisoners are tightly packed into the cells and they are still all sleeping on the hard concrete floor. The prison was initially built to house about 700 prisoners, full capacity. On our last visit there, there were 1400 prisoners and I measured a cell by pacing – about three and a half metres by three and a half metres, in which seven prisoners were to sleep, they could hardly even fit sitting up. The corridors, with cell blocks on either side, have even been made into makeshift cells, with very little air streaming through. A ‘single’ cell, of about a metre and a half wide, housed three men.

Oddly enough, those with the so called biggest individual space are those in death row who have a cell to themselves, however, this is no consolation for them as one cannot even open ones arms out to full extent when measuring the width of the cell. The condemned prisoners stay in this tiny tomb for 23 hours a day, with one hour to shower, exercise and receive their food. The only reading material they are allowed are bibles, of which Father Freyer has sourced for the 54 prisoners there. There has not been a hanging, the method of execution in Zimbabwe, for three years now, but on each door is the prisoner’s name, his weight and height, measured to be strung up when the time comes. Many of them have lived like this for over ten years. It is a privilege to even be allowed within this area, and we go into the heavily secured “B Hall”, the doors are individually and laboriously unlocked and we have a few seconds interaction with these men. They are often the most grateful for our attention, as the non-judgmental shake of a hand and enquiry as to their well-being is usually more appreciated than the goods we bring them.

The International Red Cross continues to provide soap, oil and beans for the prisoners and Prison Services provides mealie meal, their staple diet. We have been supplementing this with fruit, whatever is in season, usually apples, oranges or bananas. Boiled eggs are a popular alternative, given in the holidays when the College kitchen can boil the 1300 required to give to all of them. Toilet paper is also a necessity and we try to bring them at least a roll a month, hardly sufficient, but provides a scrap, literally, sometimes, of dignity. The St George’s students have collected old ice-cream containers and old 2 litre juice containers for the prisoners. These serve as their plates and cups for the sadza and water, which they take into their cells to consume. We are presently encouraging a ‘shoe drive’ at the school, whereby students bring old trackshoes or slops for the prisoners to wear.

When we provide the food for the prison, we make sure that we take it to each and every inmate, a process that usually takes about two and a half hours. This is to ensure that all the prisoners get their fair share and goods are not stolen in the process.

Read more

I love reading Sarah Carter’s writings from the Bally Vaughan animal sanctuary.

Here is a small excerpt from her latest newsletter:

When Bart the Jackal arrived, having been found on the university campus, he was a tiny fluffy scrap, almost catatonic with fear. For several months he haunted the marshy thickets at the bottom of his enclosure, constantly on the move once the sun went down, nowhere to be seen during daylight hours. I sat with him each evening as he chased flying ants and grasshoppers and the quicksilver little fish in the stream and he kept a cautious eye on me, circling within a metre or so on his endless, effortless laps, but no closer. I noticed that he was intensely interested in the caracals, serval and dogs living in my garden adjacent to his enclosure and showed no fear of them. At this stage, Rover the Wriggly Red Dog was a puppy and each day he would be carried up to the jackal enclosure for a play date with Bart. Bart adored this but Rover, ever the curmudgeon, loathed it and would sit with his back pointedly to the prancing little jackal, hogging the toys and hoovering  up Bart’s food even though he had usually just eaten his own breakfast. Eventually I gave up trying to rehabilitate the playground bully and Bart went back to relying on rather unsatisfactory interaction through the fence with my animals for company. Exchanging nose kisses with Smeegal the serval cat was part of his routine, and to my surprise Smeegal seemed to seek out the little jackal, lying along the fence line and watching his antics intently.

Smeegal came to us as a refugee from an invaded farm. A pampered and adored pet, he spent three happy years on the Chirundu sugar estates with Jon and Chooks Langerman, sleeping on their bed under the air conditioner and enjoying gourmet meals prepared for him by Jon. Life in my home was somewhat different. Detested by the xenophobic caracals and chased from the house by them at every opportunity (as they do to all visitors including members of my family), he took up residence in a little thatched structure in the garden, sneaking in to the house to unroll the toilet paper and chase the shampoo bottles round the bathtub when the caracals weren’t looking. Each evening he cut a solitary figure as he made his lonely way down the garden, and I felt that he was rather sad.

One evening I returned to my house to find Bart lolling triumphantly on my front lawn. He had tunneled under the fence and made himself totally at home. Unfazed by my dogs, deliriously defiant of the caracals and enamored of the huge serval cat, he set about organizing a life to his satisfaction. He pointedly ignored his own dinner of chopped chicken and offal in favour of the dog food and soon was getting his own portion in a green plastic dish on the lawn each evening. He adopted a teddy that he carried about until Harry the caracal ripped its head off and pulled out the insides, and he learnt that peanut butter toast is an excellent and delicious source of protein for an omnivore. Each morning as I sit down on my veranda with toast and coffee, Bart appears, trotting busily on his tiny feet, fabulously bouffant tail bouncing behind him like an outrageous fashion accessory, and snatches up pieces of toast I throw to him. The caracals firmly believe only they should receive hand-outs and stalk him relentlessly, but he relishes this. A jackal’s psyche is all about scavenging from scary predators, and he is so swift and so cunning that my portly, couch-lolling caracals have no hope of catching him.  (Harry the caracal’s reputation as a Fearless Super-Predator was  irrevocably damaged recently when he was discovered actually sitting on an enraged puff adder. Harry was oblivious to the potentially lethal threat under his capacious bottom and fortunately the puff adder seemed equally dense, striking furiously at the fence post in front of it as it struggled  to free itself from this inglorious situation).

Incredibly, Smeegal and Bart have become inseparable. These two unlikely companions, who would be sworn enemies in the wild as they compete for the same food, can be seen in my garden playing wild games of chase, grooming each other tenderly and sleeping curled up in their shared bedroom. Each morning they slumber in the sunshine together, nestled in picturesque harmony in the wild flowers bordering the stream. They love to hunt insects together, pouncing and leaping in the late afternoon light through the grass in search of grasshoppers, and one memorable moonlit night I saw the two of them hunting a bushbaby. They were so absorbed in their task, stalking silently through the silvery shadows, gazing intently up into the trees where the bushbaby was feeding, that they walked straight into each other, like two slapstick comedians, and gave each other a terrible fright. After a bit of muffled yelping and hissing, they sat down with their backs to each other and groomed themselves ferociously to regain their composure, watched with disgust from the window by the two irritable caracals who had been roused from my bed by the commotion.

At last, two creatures whose lives had been irrevocably altered by circumstances totally beyond their control have found a new and happy life, together. With two caracals, a serval cat, a jackal and two dogs living in my home, life is a little chaotic. Breakfast time degenerates into a melee every morning.  The caracals like to sit on their own chairs at the table. Quite often they jump on the table, knock over the coffee or lick the topping off the toast. They leap off their chairs when Bart appears and chase him with their lolloping, rabbity gait around the garden before returning to their seats to glower and hiss at the dogs who are relegated to the floor. Sometimes Harry, a true feline eminence, will casually extend an immense, savagely-clawed, furry foot and rest it on my wrist so he can wash it, licking my hand at the same time and purring intermittently, just a few breathy rumbles to indicate that he is content, before resuming his reign of terror amongst the other family members.

To find out more visit www.ballyvaughan.co.zw or email sarah [at] ballyvaughan [dot] co [dot] zw