Darfur: More than meets the eye?

The question mark in my title should make it clear that I have only just begun to understand what the Sudanese tragedy, encapsulated under the single word `Darfur' could really mean for Africa.

For a long time I have viewed Darfur mostly through television as a desert hosting refugees, where indescribable human suffering goes on unabated and nobody, not even the AU, can do anything about it. And that, it seemed, was that; nothing much about the underlying motives of the Sudanese government in the north except its apparent determination to wipe out black Africans in the south. Since Arabs predominate in the north you would think it was racism and Africans in recent history have experienced incalculable doses of racism - more than any other race I can think of except the Jews - at the hands of other races. But when I read Charles Moore's piece, This is why there is slaughter in Darfur in the Daily Telegraph of September 26 a bright light seemed to shine in a previously very dark place in my mind. I didn't know (and how many people do?) that the CPA (Comprehensive Peace Agreement) between the north and south Sudan has a key provision for the settling of the borders. The north "knows that if the borders are agreed, this will show clearly that most of the oilfields which earn the country large amounts of hard currency are in the south". The oil revenues are controlled by the north and the south believes it is "being. short-changed. This suits China which is in the country helping itself to to Sudanese oil at good prices" according to Moore. And there is more (sorry) I can do no better than to quote his key points in full: "Southern Sudan is all but unique in the modern world in having recently overthrown sharia rule. After yearsof officially imposed Islam ... Christians no longer have to live in daily fear... mosques and churches now co-exist peacefully. Yet one Anglican prelate ...said that he survived 20 years of persecution ... he told me that the Arab Muslim is not a giving up sort of person'. The blow to Arab pride if the south became independent would be tremendous. The threat to the south is therefore, huge. `We are the wall to the penetration of the Islamic religion to the whole of Africa,' Bishop Micah said. What occurs in Darfur concerns not only the fate of its refugee, raped, hungry, dispossessed people. The outcome will also tell the north whether it can get away with what it wants. If it discovers that it can, it will start on the much bigger prize of the south". Is everybody out there listening?

Its a long, long journey, far further south to the Sub-Saharan Africa that I know. I was born on African soil and lived there for seven decades. That continent has a great pull on my imagination even though there is not a drop of blood in my veins that is not English. Willie Musararwa, a Shona sage and a valued friend in Zimbabwe (formerly Christianized Southern Rhodesia) used to call me mwana wevhu (child of the soil). That, in his language, was a gentle compliment. He knew that the soil which nurtured me had made Africa a part of me. Darfur is in Africa so it is also a part of me.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

A THOUSAND STEVE BIKOS IN ZIMBABWE

When South African Steve Biko protested against the tyranny of the state in the years before Freedom dawned, he was beaten to a pulp and he died. Many others who were prepared to face the callous might of state machinery suffered terribly after protesting bravely on behalf of fellow oppressed. Their suffering was not in vain. The international outcry made of Steve Biko a national hero and over time and the names of hundreds of others have entered the pantheon of South Africa's martyrs.

Why is it then that even in Africa the brutality of Zimbabwe's state machinery goes unchecked? Is it because Dafur, Afghanistan and Iraq are presently preoccupying the good people of the world who make it their business to intervene in severe cases of state tyranny? Where does the African Union stand on the recent state directed assaults on trade union leaders whose bravery in taking to the streets on behalf of their starving fellow citizens is as great as any in history? The AU is too weak to mount rescue operation - its ineffectual attempt even at peacekeeping in Dafur is proof enough of that.

There are a thousand Steve Bikos buried in Zimbabwe: murdered by fellow Zimbabweans, not by colonial oppressors or settler minority elites. If the United Nations is paralysed by Sudan's Bashir who `refuses' its intervention where are the resolutions on behalf of Zimbabwe's pitiable people? Why do we hear nothing but the sound of silence from the AU?

Read The Times (UK) 18 September for ZWNEWS copy of Jan Raath's report yesterday on what has been going on in Zimbabwe's prisons this last week. It is the closest thing to a protest that a British newspaper can mount and it comes from one of the few reporters who lives and works in Zimbabwe and I fear for him. Likewise I worry about the Daily Telegraph's on-the-spot reporter Peta Thorneycroft, who bravely reports the news of the terrible people that state security officers have become. These Zimbabwe journalists and others like them are deserving of the highest honour that humanity can bestow.




Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

Coming back to blogging

I missed the whole of August and there was so much going on that I am ashamed of my lethargy. I have at last got around to disposing of my huge collection of documents hoisted over here to England and I suppose I should say that is a good enough excuse for drying up on this blogging thing. Not the same as writer's block since there is no publisher in view - only my friends and family and an occasional, curious reader of these commentaries on things present and recollections of things past.
Now I have carelessly broken my left elbow - been dragged off my feet by a very large dog I walk occasionally. So this has to be short.
The longer the time lapse since last I saw Zimbabwe, the more it seems that the politicians - wherever you look- are not doing much to be admired. I look forward to change in England now, but not as desperately, nor half as fearfully as we who love that African soil look forward to change in Zimbabwe.
That's it for now
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

DIGGING UP THE PAST

My postwars experiences
Enos Nkala, one of the last surviving founders of Zimbabwean nationalist parties is going to dig up some very smelly political bones in a book to be posthumously published, he says. I wonder if I will live to see it. If he has any sense he will be sending his MS off to a safe place even as he writes, or we shall be visiting his forensic laboratory sooner rather than later.
A less parochial past has grabbed my attention this month. I have just returned from Berlin - that great city so magnificently restored after being flattened in WW2. My hosts had memories of Berlin before, during and after the war. Klaus is a gentle doctor (retired), still internally wounded by what happened in his country: "We shall never be forgiven," was his quiet expression of sorrow. His wife, Ushie, also a retired professional, is in love with her little private garden. Five miles from her gracious old house in a Berlin suburb which was spared from the bombing, it had been badly neglected in those cold war years when situated on the wrong side of the Berlin wall. Now we visited it almost daily to save it from the searing, near-forty degree heat of an unusual European summer.

Like my friend Ushie, I was very young when the war started. My experience as a colonial child of the British empire was to hear the dreadful news of the bombing of great cities and the cruelties inflicted on civilian populations - hers was to live in fear of Russian reprisals. I never dreamed that sixty years on I would be trying to comfort my German friends, reminding them that Time heals everything when living memory has passed. Meanwhile they refuse to forget and took me off (entirely their choice)to see how painfully Germany still scrapes at the scars the nation inflicted on Jewish people.
We we refreshed our spirits with a visit to the dredged up remains of a fabulous Egyptian civilization exhibited at Gropius museum. The eathquake that buried it beneath the sea 3250 years ago left the solid evidence of fabulous statuary and artifacts, gold jewellery and coins. None of the evil that must surely have lurked, as it always has, beneath an outward show of wealth and power, has survived. Only the hieroglyphs tell the story and none can say what has been left out. So it will be after our civilization is swallowed up. If it sinks beneath deep waters, everything but stone and gems will rot. There is some comfort in this thought, especially for the survivors of 20th century wars.
I wrote a lighter memoir of my visit and will publish it tomorrow - if my browser doesn't go on the blink again!)
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

WHAT HAPPENED TO `LOOKING EAST' IN ZIMBABWE?

> >
CHINESE BUSES
I wrote this article last year for publication in `The Zimbabwean' and having a look at it now, a year on decided to edit it and update it(since I reserve the right to use my own copyright)When I get my website up and running I shall repeat it there too for maximum exposure. Why do I do it? Because I must.
> > Zimbabwe's silver jubilee came and went last year and a jubilant
> > President strutted and fretted upon the stage at the National
> > Sports Stadium in Harare. He had made it very clear even before he and
> > his ZANU (PF) were nearly dismissed in 2000 by his own internal
> > Opposition that he hates the West. He loves the East (in the broadest,
> > political and cultural – and now economic - sense) and aims to shake
> > off, discard, trash or otherwise remove the remnants of a hated (for
> > him) age of British imperialism in a new Zimbabwe which he and his kin
> > will rule forever. It is also well known that in thumbing his nose at
> > white `settlers' he once had the admiration and covert or overt
> > support of every person of his generation who suffered the humiliation
> > of `imperialist' occupation of African soil. Possibly he was admired
> > beyond Africa - wherever full human rights were not accorded to the
> > indigenous people. At home, the history and causation of all this
> > needs no going over here because, at long last, Robert Mugabe has
> > turned his back on the past. But he is facing what he perceives as a
> > new dawn. "We have turned east, where the sun rises, and given our
> > back to the West, where the sun sets" he says.
> >
> > Mugabe was imprisoned for demanding (most eloquently) `majority rule'
> > and freedom from the`settler oppression' of black people which would
> > flow from that. The well-informed, the liberals and all Africa's
> > subject peoples understood, then, his vitriol, aimed at his country's
> > overlords, formerly the British and later, their settler descendants.
> > But is his naked hatred still in vogue - beyond the limits of certain
> > rulers of African states? Hating the West, he pretends that China will
> > take up where the West left off. The `West', including many nations
> > which had played no part in colonizing Africa, generously assisted
> > Independent Zimbabwe with development programmes. Aid, including money
> > donated and loaned, industrial goods, training, and advanced
> > technology flowed freely from the West. Trade was a normal component
> > of bi-lateral agreements. The Chinese were more keenly interested in
> > sales (or barter) of their manufactures. (See The Zimbabwean's leading
> > article, April 22, 2005, by editor Wilf Mbanga) And here is Alister Sparkes,
> > veteran SA journalist's view:
> >
> > "Mugabe's notion of "looking East" is simply part of [the] great
> > illusion. China is an emerging superpower with a hunger for mineral
> > resources, of which Zimbabwe has a modest amount. But China is not in
> > the business of granting aid to developing countries" (The Star 20
> > April).
> >
> > An insight into the preoccupations of struggling Zimbabweans is one I
> > picked up in ZWNEWS, (20 April) from a story of a Harare man [who]
> > was asked if he had not attended the Independence celebrations at the
> > National Sports Stadium because he felt there was little to celebrate.
> > "No. It was because I couldn't find petrol." "But the government had
> > laid on buses from the usual pick-up points." "I didn't know that."
> > "But they were announced on the radio." "I don't listen to
> > that...radio any more." After a while, the first man said: "Come to
> > think of it, you would not have fitted into the buses anyway." "Why
> > not?" "You are too tall. They are Chinese buses."
> >
> > Unfortunately, while fighting the liberation war, Mugabe climbed
> > aboard a bus carrying a large proportion of the world to a Communist
> > Valhalla. On board were Europe's Eastern bloc and other Communist,
> > anti-West friends. The Communist Chinese, no friends of the Capitalist
> > West, were assisting in the training and arming of nationalists and
> > their fighting forces in the run up to the guerrilla warfare which
> > erupted on Rhodesia's borders during the period of the Cold War. Now
> > both wars are over. The Soviet Union is no more and the Chinese are
> > more friendly towards the West (and vice-versa). Trading and `jaw jaw'
> > rather than `war war' has brought old enemies and former political
> > rivals into new relationships, changing the world's economic
> > frontiers. Even Mugabe's anti-Western friend, the now retired
> > President Mahathir of Malaysia no longer directs his poison into the
> > Zimbabwe `king's' ear. Cuba's Castro is old and in a class of his own,
> > while North Korea's Kim Il Jong is very isolated. Independent and
> > sovereign Zimbabwe, the once `non-aligned' nation has no real enemies
> > in any sphere. Mugabe, the old warrior seems to be lost without them.
> > There is no one left to fight against except his own people.
> >
> > The point of this article, however, is to pick up on Mugabe's
> > declaration that Zimbabwe's future lies with the East and his promise
> > to dump the West in a sort of zero-sum shift in foreign policy. Surely
> > he should first listen to the views of Zimbabweans who are being told
> > that they will be the beneficiaries of this sea change. A serious,
> > national debate on the issue has never been presented. Without freedom
> > of expression in Zimbabwe itself, this debate will, perforce, be
> > carried in foreign newspapers - mostly Western because Zimbabweans
> > cannot read Chinese or any other `Eastern' language. `The Zimbabwean'
> > editor, Wilf Mbanga, has opened a window of opportunity for wide
> > ranging views from Zimbabweans, keeping alive the flame of their
> > freedom and national identity in many parts of the world. We should
> > join this debate in earnest.
> >
> > As for re-colonization, Mugabe's big bogey, Zimbabwe elections since
> > 2000 have shown that in spite of the absence of anything resembling a
> > fair debate, a new generation of Zimbabweans who have never
> > experienced any form of oppression from `settlers' are educated
> > enough, or just wise enough to recognise the fact that they face being
> > `recolonized' by a new minority group. This is the Zezuru, clan (never
> > use theword `tribe') from which Mugabe descends, through his father,
> > Gabriel, (a `real Gushungu' from Zvimba, according to James Chikerema,
> > a close relative).
Not an awful lot has changed in a year except that Chikerema has died and the country, lacking massive investments from old friends in the East, or new ones for that matter is still going economically down the tubes.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

MODELS OF GOOD THINKING ABOUT THE LAW LORDS AND THE FOURTH OF JULY

Lucky, as it turned out yesterday we were out of onions. So I braved the heat and walked to Sainsbury's. I picked up The Sunday Times, almost straining my right arm in the process. After dumping a lot of heavy paper I was struck by the headlines and content of two thoughtful pieces on the leader page. Oh joy! Andrew Sullivan and Simon Jenkins have thrown a bright, shining light where, for me, in this age of anti-terrorist over-reaction on both sides of the Atlantic, there has been a fog of uncertainty about the political performances of Bush and Blair. `The founding fathers save America's soul' says Sullivan. Of course! Its the constitution, stupid. Jenkins' article, focused on Britain, tells us that `Judges cut through the hysteria of rulers made tyrants by fear'. They are talking about American and British responses in dealing with stepped-up international terrorism. Sullivan warns of the consequence of an overkill being counterproductive or a threat to US democracy. Jenkins says that without the constraints of the constitution in the US, with its separation of powers and without similar constraints emanating from the wisdom of the British law lords here in the UK, our democracies are in peril. Their possible demise has loomed large since 9/11 and 7/7 in the US and UK respectively. Until I was reassured by the views of these two thinkers, I had begun to wonder if the end of our world was nigh.

We have already faced, in our former homeland, Zimbabwe, the consequences of the abandonment of the rule of law. Where the constitution sought to guard our freedoms, the ruling party simply changed it. The Mugabe regime manipulated electoral law, while almost simultaneously removing the powers of the judiciary to counter impunity. This was done to sustain the necessary majority of the ruling ZANU (PF)party in parliament and has ultimately brought the constitution and the law into contempt.

There is a parallel here with regard to Bush messing with the the law;a close call on 'constitutional propriety 'for Americans. Sullivan asserts that `...new conservatives are contemptuous of constitutional propriety and limited government' The battle (for the rule of law)is still on in America and he writes,`What will ultimately decide this battle for the soul of America will be the people who elect their own representatives to check the president. The court is as evenly balanced as it has ever been.'

In Zimbabwe, Mugabe's judges have, in the majority, already been bought and sold. Just take a good look the consequences for ordinary Zimbabweans.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

SO MUGABE WANTS JUST AND LAWFUL TREATMENT DOES HE?

Poor, deluded, unhappy man - Mugabe thinks he is the only one in step. Let him allow just and lawful treatment for the people he oppresses with his iron fist.

The news from Zimbabwe that his `close confidant' Nathan Shamuyarira is still helping to prop up this pathetic old man's ego does not bode well for Shamuyarira's place in history. His name will be recorded beside that of his crazed boss, Zimbabwe's first executive President. The tyrant has already entered the category of shame and ignominy that fits men who are utterly corrupted by power. Like his patron, Nathan promised nobility but has delivered a land which will be fit only for scavengers after its surviving liberation heroes and true democrats have died or fled the country. Oh yes, as Stephen Talbot,indicates in his piece `From Liberator to Tyrant: Recollections of Robert Mugabe'[he means `on' Mugabe,surely?], the smooth-tongued politician had us all fooled at the beginning. Talbot confesses to being a starry-eyed worshipper when he met Mugabe in 1977 at the Kilimanjaro Hotel in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. I was in that same hotel, collecting nationalists' biographies for my book in late 1975, shortly after the assassination of Herbert Chitepo in Lusaka. At that moment the destiny of Mugabe and all other contenders for the prize of ruling the future Zimbabwe was still being debated by all parties involved in the matter. Bishop Muzorewa's men were there in the hotel,losing ground as the military men in the camps at Mgagau declared `We will choose our own leaders'. Ndabaningi Sithole was there also, giving interviews but already on the ropes. He had confessed it himself. He had told us,a deputation of white liberals in Rhodesia's capital city, Salisbury, quietly and without emotion:`You are talking to the wrong person (about future leadership), I am regarded as a spent force' - or words to that effect. I have a record of the meeting in Jeremy Broome's Jameson Avenue office with that old warrior, founder of ZANU. The golden light of late afternoon bathed us all. Sunsets in Rhodesia were always portentious. We had a rare close up of this one. Eddie Cross leaned forward and tapped Ndabaningi's knee and called him `Sekuru' (uncle).

Besides me, Eddie is the only one still alive to report it. We knew that Joshua Nkomo tried to do a deal with Ian Smith. Meanwhile, Mugabe, showing only contempt for the white men who had imprisoned him, had not yet been recognised by the Frontline States as the man destined to lead the future Zimbabwe African nationalist Liberation Army (ZANLA). Fast forward, we know how that story ended. But I have news for Stephen Talbot: men like Joshua Nkomo had experienced the power and the potential for absolute ruthlessness of his brother in arms. Why else would he have preferred to try to tame the white man? Unlike Nkomo, Smith was incapable of understanding what he was up against - the advance of a great wave, the ultimate expression of slavery's retribution. Mugabe used centuries of African history to his own advantage, cleverly disguising his personal ambitions until, with infinite cunning, he had gagged and bound us all - even his so-called confidant, Shamuyarira.

As for the reason he went to Lancaster House to negotiate with the colonial master - Talbot seems unaware of the role of the late, great Samora Machel. It was he who advised that Mugabe should negotiate. It was he who had provided the important base in Mozambique from whose borders the war on the Rhodesian Front regime could be waged. He talks, on film in Granada TV's `End of Empire'- if proof of this is needed.
And now, Mugabe's end is near, he cannot live forever. His legacy: the destruction and misery he has brought to the beautiful country he inherited from his former oppressors is assured. But he rages on, like the blind King Lear:

"We tell the world from this sacred (National Heroes') Acre that Zimbabwe is not about to die, in fact it will never die. What Zimbabwe needs is a just and lawful treatment by the Western world, a recognition that it is a full, sovereign country which has the right to own and control its resources, the right to chart its own destiny unhindered".

Yes, a thousand times yes. Zimbabwe has the right `to own and control...' Robert Gabriel Mugabe has usurped it.

Copyright © 2006 Diana Mitchell

COPYCATS, PLAGIARISTS large and Small

I have been copied. Am I flattered? - since imitation is supposed to be the highest form of flattery.
My recent blog, giving unsolicited advice to Dan Brown's publishers re charges of plagiarism has elicited a comment or two. Right now the media reports are working us up about students copying their assigments from internet sites. Now this is a skill that requires you to be a dab hand at `surfing the net'. This is a habit I have not developed, neither the surfing, nor the skilled copying. But when a new friend asked if I had ever had a book published, I referred him to the internet and told him to type my name and add Zimbabwe on the end of it. {MMPZ}It dawned on me that I myself had not taken this ego trip for several years and now was a good time to check. I found, very flatteringly, a substantial body of work. Most rewarding was the occasional reference to my published Who's Whos of Rhodesia's and Zimbabwe's African nationalist leaders. (End of commercial). Most satisfying, however was to discover that my work is being plagiarized by Zimbabwe's state media. Nowadays, I have no time at all for the Herald, that grossly defective instrument for the disemination of information. Its daily dose of ruling party propaganda is so blatant as to be fairly harmless - but have a look at this which appeared on the internet in the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe Report No.38, after the ste madia's eulogising of the dead Vice President Muzenda:

"ZBC also changed its programming to make way for documentaries on Muzenda. For instance, ZTV devoted time from 7pm to 8pm from Monday to Thursday to a special programme where ZANU PF officials discussed their selected positive personal experiences of Muzenda.
This abject eulogizing saw The Herald (22/9) carry (sic) a plagiarised obituary, Life, tribulations of relentless fighter. The article, which was written by Shingai Rukwata Ndoro, was apparently lifted from Diana Mitchell’s book entitled African Nationalist Leaders in Zimbabwe - Who is Who 1980...
and
(re the closure of the independent Daily News):
"While the government-controlled media [avoided such analysis and] gave the impression that the closure of the paper was lawful, The Standard (28/9) tried to expose how the State was selectively applying the law by failing to reprimand media practitioners working for the government-controlled media. It reported that Zimbabwe Union of Journalists had petitioned ZIMPAPERS to take action against its circulation manager Rukwata Ndoro, who plagiarised Mitchell’s book in his obituary of Muzenda. According to ZUJ, Ndoro “ is neither trained nor registered and has been churning article after article, sometimes as a columnist and the latest as a reporter.” Despite this, no arrest has been made so far. Ends"

Now that was something I lifted from the internet. With attribution of course.
As to talk of arresting the hopeless Ndoro, I must say I am more flattered than offended. His bosses in the ruling party would never have allowed my tribute to Muzenda, written 25 years ago when things in the Zimbabwe garden were rosy, to appear under my name in today's screwed up Zimbabwe media. But plagiarism is plagiarism and is not to be recommended.




Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

TSVANGIRAI - PRINCIPLE UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

HAS POWER CHANGED HIM ALREADY? CAN HE HIMSELF AVOID CHANGING WITH `CHINJA(!)'?
Andrew Marr interviewed Morgan Tsvangirai on the BBC this bright Sunday morning. I was as interested in what he had to say as I was the first time he rose to address us as the Chairman of the NCA back in 1998. Marr came straight to the point: "Is the split in the MDC a personal one?" Morgan's answer, well rehearsed I am sure: "No it is ideological." Still on the edge of my seat, I waited for more enlightenment: The pro-Senate people wanted to do a deal with the regime, Mugabe's ZANU (PF) government and I did not - or words to that effect - is what he blithely alleged.

He lost me there. I have never let my eyes stray from the reports - from whatever quarter - about what went on in that catastrophic series of meetings which ended in disaster for the MDC as a bright hope for all Zimbabweans looking for new and better leadership. In a ten-minute interview, Marr couldn't possibly ask him: "What about the violence which began with the attempt on the life of one of your `internal' critics? What about the overriding of your party's constitution when you ignored the majority decision to go into the Senate?" And finally: "Is this allegation about the motives of the pro-Senate group really true? Why should some of the most dedicated of your followers turn against you? Did you not dismiss their concerns about your apparent change of character when you condoned internal violence and ignored your own party Constitution? Have you not considered that they went into the Senate because `realpolitik' dictates that you become irrelevant if you do not participate in the political process - however distasteful that may be?"

I say: Morgan, you have been less than truthful. You have a great following and they are so sick of the current regime that they will remain loyal to you no matter what. This looks worryingly like history repeating itself. Deja vu and all that. A quarter of a century ago,Zimbabweans were so sick of the suffering they endured in the liberation struggle that they allowed themselved to believe that their troubles would be over under Mugabe's leadership. Little was known about his character except that he was clever and embraced violence as the path to power. We all know where that has led us. Your own character has now been closely examined and until the first moment of the `split', you came through as a man who could be trusted with high office - a man of principle, a true democrat. Well, democracy went out of the window after that unfortunate man nearly did at the hands of your youthful thugs at Harvest House (and as you yourself narrowly missed doing when attacked by ZANU (PF) thugs at the start of your political leadership. Principle is what is now under the microscope.

The pre-independence Zimbabwean `masses' as Mugabe liked to call them, were denied access to information about nationalist leaders by the previous regime - mostly by default, since they were the rural poor, with little access to the print or electronic media. Far worse, today: positively no access to information about opposition leadership. They have only your rallies - and a few copies of the independent newspapers reaching them - to be persuaded that you are brave, that you are against the current dictatorship and that you are willing to go on leading them however hard the battle has become. What your former admirers need to know is, where are you leading them? Do you know yourself? Does your leadership require you to demolish your internal opposition by fair means or foul - just like ZANU (PF) - whatever it takes? And will you be able to hold on to the principles enshrined in your Constitution, of non-violent change and adherence to your party's promises of a better leadership? Can your leadership remain faithful to the rule of law within your own party and be ready to deliver justice to Zimbabweans within a restored rule of law - should you achieve the power to do all these things?

Weighty questions, but they need answering. If you yourself are changed too much in the process of bringing about change, what greater disaster can befall Zimbabweans?


This is an `I was there' commentary as far as his first five years in political leadership proceeded. I watched him with admiration as he chaired our NCA (National Constitution Assembly) meetings and my respect for him grew as he faced each new challenge as the undisputed leader of the MDC. This was a man who distinguished himself as a Trade Union leader: self-made, confident and daring, rather than opportunistic, in joining the NCA and taking on the leadership of the MDC at its inception. His next launching pad was made before the people and those others living outside of Zimbabwe who still cared about the country's future.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

MY RAVE ON BREEDING WHITE LIONS IN SA

I cannot resist commenting on a TV news item regarding the `re-introduction of white lions into the wild' by a wild life conservationist in South Africa's Western Cape.
Here is why:
About twenty years ago, I decided that I should try to depart from my serious and wholly unprofitable (in the financial sense) writing about the business of politics in Rhodesian Front- ruled Rhodesia. Peter Joyce, the writer,(he wrote the first published book 'Rhodesian Rebel' about Ian Smith) nobbled me with a proposal for co-authorship of a surprising (to me)genre of writing. I have since lost contact with Peter and our book was stillborn for a reason I will explain further on. He persuaded me that the way to bust out into literary moneymaking was to write a successful Mills and Boon novel! He had got stuck when his own attempt at income generation along this route (the path to a peaceful retirement to an island where the Great Novel could be written)when the first delicate episode of sex reared up in a book intended for the delight of `those bored and frustrated matrons who don't want to read anything dirty'. He warned me that the book had to be well written and would stand only about a 5% chance of publication. His own literary `Blue' from Cambridge was well up to the task. So why ask for my collaboration? "Because I can't write about those silly things you women think about" was his reply. Huffily, I picked up the three slim volumes he threw down for me to read and got through two of them before dawn the next day. "I can do this! Easier than falling off a log. Just let the imagination rip" I said.

Peter had worked out the plot in fine detail. But, to get back to the subject in hand, the story was of a wild life conservationist (heroically handsome) breeding a pride of white lions in a South African game reserve. We had great fun with the daily progress discussions - he left me to do all the first drafting whilst he got on with his "coffee table" books and promised to polish the final version before submitting it for publication. Unhappily for the book's future, its theme at a time when South Africa was threatened at that very moment with `disinvestment'- an anti apartheid project invented by Teddy Kennedy - our story of a rich, white Saxonwold businessman's romantic adventure with a white lady and a lot of white lions would not go down well with publishers. Without Peter, I have never had the courage to review and change the plot. Tawny lions in a Rainbow nation? Impossible.

But my point here is that Peter had researched well and come up with the facts:the white lion was an albino - not, as portrayed today, a lost species to be `re-introduced into the wild'. Certainly not in Africa where the natural tawny coat is a brilliant protective camouflage in the lion's grassland habitat. Snow lions? Well that needs further research.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

CAN `TEETERING ON THE BRINK' GO ON FOREVER IN ZIMBABWE?

The vultures who reign in Zimbabwe feed on carcases not quite dead.
In today's ZWNEWS featuring Reuter's Stella Mapenzauswa's "Zimbabwe unions back strikes amid economic chaos" I am inclined to dyslexia in mid-sentence. Should we not hope that Zimbabwe unions strike back? Without the ZCTU, the opposition MDC would never have got within striking distance in its attempt to scare giant ZANU(PF)scavengers off the dying Zimbabwe bird. The first, generally observed teeterings came from the king vulture himself in in August 1997 when the war vets camped outside his office and frightened him temporarily off his perch. He moved adroitly to a stronger one, closer to the cliff edge where he could not be reached. For (so far) another eight years he has sharpened his talons to perfection and it is his victims, critically wounded by the destruction of the country's economy, not the king vulture himself, that have been `teetering on the brink'- to borrow from Stella's words.

It is a source of amazement that with most formal commercial business destroyed or in the process of destruction(the banks being the last bastion of survival are now regularly `teetering')the ZCTU can still gather a body of protesting `workers' together. Unemployment, estimated at 80% is a frightening thought. With this week's news of the government - predictably - banning entry into the country of Congress of SA Trade Unions (COSATU)general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and turning away most international delegates invited to a two-day meeting in Zimbabwe (they include leading trade unionists from Zambia and Swaziland and Norway)we are in no doubt that Trade Unions still represent a threat to the ruling ZANU (PF). Convential wisdom has it that Mbeki's fear of COSATU power is one of the reasons he has been so dilatory in the defence of freedom and full human rights for fellow Africans in Zimbabwe.

If the trade unions' intention was, as reported by The Star (SA) on May 20, to `decide whether the ZCTU will go ahead with strikes to protest against the country's rocketing inflation and poverty' the very best of luck to them, I say. I can't help dreaming of the day that my vulture image turns to one of a dead bird, though not the allegorical albatross, strung around the neck of an ancient. Only this has to be a landlubber and if my metaphor is to hold, the ancient will have need to kill himself and thus put an end to the suffering of his victims, the people of that once great country, Zimbabwe.


Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

Slow but sure emergence of real history: part 1

WELSHMAN NCUBE
An article in The Standard (Harare) (Ncube breaks down over Gukurahundi) today describes the anguish of Prof Ncube as he recounted the terrible experiences of his family in the `gukurahundi' massacres perpetrated in Matabeleland by Mugabe's notorious 5th Brigade. At last! I wondered when these - quite literal - home truths which explain his determination to remove the ZANU (PF) regime by constitutional means would emerge. His private grief had to enter the public domain only when he was ready to introduce it himself.
Welshman, the consummate constitutional lawyer, has been unjustly accused of `supping with the devil' because he has been unrelenting in his quest for a change of regime. He is an extraordinary man; he has let nothing shift him from his objective, no matter how impossible the task may seem. His differences of political strategy which have so seriously separated him from Morgan Tsvangirai are not what this blog is about; it is about the impressive political integrity of a person who otherwise could have been driven mad, as was his beloved brother, as a consequence of the onslaught of Mugabe's agents on the people of his home region. But it has become clear that he has great resilience - possibly his seeking legal redress for his family's experience of torture and death is precisely what has made him so strong.

In the late nineties and well before the MDC opposition party was formed , Welshman attended a conference on the media held in Nyanga. This was the first opportunity I had to have a heart to heart discussion with him. His clear and unemotional views on the country's constitution were already well known. He had given generously and tirelessly of his time at every possible opportunity to explain the importance of the rule of law in a free Zimbabwe, but I was interested in what motivated him. It was on that occasion he told me quietly of his brother having been driven out of his mind by what he had witnessed happening to his family and his fellow Ndebele people.

From that day, I have never doubted that Welshman would hold firm to his resolve. He put in unconscionable hours designing a constitution for the country under the aegis of the NCA in 1998, he recruited some of the best brains and most dedicated characters in the MDC. The catastrophe of the MDC split, with Welshman leading the legal argument about the voting in the final countdown has resonated for me as starkly as the tragedy of suffering people, then as now, especially in Matabeleland.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

ZIMBABWE SHOOT - ANIMALS and PICTURES plus ROYAL ATTRACTION

CAN YOU HEAR THE SOUND OF GUNFIRE?
Its coming from the game conservancies. Ask Webster Shamu, formerly Charles Ndlovu; he is named in the The Mail on Sunday as the Zimbabwean Minister who enables rich American and other hunters to bag big game in Zimbabwe - without much in the way of care for the seasons or the sustainability of the country's wild life. The paper suggests that the national exchequer - near bankrupt at this time - is not profiting much from the slaughter. Nathan Shamuyarira should reign in his entrepreneurial relative. The Mail on Sunday has done a great job exposing the slaughter and given its British readers a four-page report with full colour pictures from a very brave woman who pretended to be a hunter. There was no other way that she could have got her stuff out of Zimbabwe. It will be interesting to see the official response: the denials, the recriminations and the blame game that will almost certainly follow.

I have a feeling that wild animals facing death in Zimbabwe will get more sympathy from the Mail's readers at this time than the thousands of innocent men, women and children similarly threatened, but by the deliberate cruelty of their own rulers. Death by starvation and disease is already stalking the land and cutting down the population. But the point of this blog is one which I am sure has already been noted by anybody who cares two new pence about a once great little British former colony. The real interest in Britain and elsewhere, will centre on Chelsey and Harry. Pictured in the corner of the Mail's front page is Chelsey Davy, a stunning little Dolly Pardon look-alike (sans the wig)juxtaposed with a shot of her boyfriend, a Prince of the Realm. Harry is rakishly attired in a pirate's headscarf and wears a beautiful tan, a hot jersey and dark glasses. We understand that Chelsey's Dad was the founder of the hunting firm from which he (the Dad) has derived a part of his fortune but that he is `distancing himself' from direct association with the ongoing slaughter right now. The full colour, full page spread (doubled again in a centre spread) shows a dead, huge-horned buffalo bull, slain by a brave young American hunter who poses triumphantly with his quarry. (His courage, sad to say, is far outmatched by that of his countrymen and women facing real danger in Iraq). Altogether, it is a dreadful but timely expose of a whole can of worms, not least of which is the naked racism of the hunters towards their black workers, as reported by Caroline Graham.

For my part, I am amazed that in these times when animal rights and the fast-diminishing strongholds of wild life have come to occupy the consciousness (and often the conscience) of the so-called civilized world - that hunting wild life for sport is still in vogue. In my childhood I went out into the Rhodesian bush with my hunting father and thought it natural when he posed for a Kodak box camera with the horns of a bull kudu and carried home a little buck antelope to eat as venison or dried meat (`biltong') and sell the skin for a few shillings. Poorer, pre-war, Depression-hit settlers were mildly hungry. Richer folk had those wall decorations - the horns of big game festooning their homes, hotels and clubs. I had hoped that all that was custom and imagery of the past. As an adult, concerned with the protection of wild life I went out with dedicated professionals, participating in `schools in the bush' organized by the local Hunters Association. Their aim was to educate the Youth about the necessity of carefully conserving wild life for its own sake as well as for tourism's attraction - and for the happiness of future Rhodesian/Zimbabwean generations.

Its bad enough that people are starving now in Zimbabwe and having little choice in the matter of consuming their wild game if and when they can poach it. Far worse is foreigners killing for sport - and paying relatively cheap prices for their kills. Worse still is the fact that most of the profits from the slaughter are not going back as to villagers as they once did under an organized conservancy program, in a once-civilized Zimbabwe.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

SELF DESTRUCTION - ZANU (PF) STYLE

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

DO WE NEED AN UPRISING? ZANU (PF)IS DESTROYING ITSELF.
As each day passes the news becomes worse. Looked at another way, its getting better. If the army is now underpaid and the police are reluctant accomplices to tyranny and the judiciary is severely intimidated... we could go on but all this is known... how much longer can the great liberator hold on? A starving population, too weak to fight him may not need to shed a single drop of blood for freedom this time around. This is the achievement of ZANU (PF). Africa's leaders, please note. God willing, the people can hold on to precious life a little longer than the 37/33 years now estimated as the general life expectancy - and live to see a better day.

IN YOUR FACE: CLIMATE CHANGE

When should we panic?
The global warming alarms are part `cry-wolf’ and part fashionista. Or are they? They’ve been hollering on about climate change with more than the usual heat lately. I say ‘they’ because some of us first felt an urge to press the panic button more than thirty years ago. When the Friends of the Earth first used a giant computer to concoct elaborate graphs illustrating the combined scientific findings of doomsday prophets - the collectively concerned Club of Rome - they published a serious warning signal in their book,`Limits to Growth’. That was in 1972, I think. Okay, so `concocted’ has only a nice alliterative ring to it and you will be wondering where this piece is going. Ballistic it is not, but the closer we come to the year 2008 – the crunch point according to the Club - the nearer, in my view, looms the end of the old, wasteful world as we knew it. I remember 1972 as the same year in which there was an international fuel crisis caused by an OPEC gear change. Also, man called Schumacher was, at that time, preaching `small is beautiful’ and this chimed well with the conclusions of the Club of Rome. And there's more: international opinion-makers of the top rank were meeting at Cambridge University in 1972 to discuss employment opportunities within a global perspective. Their main conclusion: de-throne GDP as the sine qua non of economic happiness and aim (as the Club of Rome had advised) for equilibrium, for sustainability; cut down on growing dependence on a limited supply of hydrocarbons, check the unlimited growth of populations, industrial pollution and nature-destructive monoculture. I think the Kyoto Protocol was only a small genie to emerge from the greenhouse gas bottle after all that.

This week’s Time magazine with its cover showing an ice-beached polar bear, insists that we should be worried, in big, red letters, we should be VERY worried. In a special report on global warming the message screams “EARTH AT THE TIPPING POINT”. I have a feeling in my water (as my mother used to say) that we profligate humans really are beginning to drown in our own wastes. We are still cutting down huge forests, building and buying 4 x 4s, playing with nuclear fission, putting up two fingers to prophets of doom or generally playing God with our wonderful technology. In the meanwhile, the media, bless them, are steering a nervous path between reports which may cause us to worry ourselves silly or cautiously administering soothing doses of analgesics because an overdose of purgatives might set us off on a dangerous panic stampede.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

NEED HELP? ITS ALL OUR OWN FAULT

Who will put the coint into the old man's hand now?
I read in today's ZWNEWS that Zimbabwe's Government has swallowed its pride - or whatever unhealthy deadly sin that has made it so dangerously ill these past years - and asked for help.

White Rhodesians invented an apt, not necessarily racist aphorism which I can't resist using at this time. "Even Lobengula's oldest and blindest wife could see that..." Starkly obvious is the fact that the Mugabe regime's ill-considered destruction of the agricultural base of the economy would end in tears. One thing has led to another and now, not only are the people starving but things have finally, but not quite yet fatally, fallen apart in Zimbabwe. Perhaps it really is our own, stupid fault, be we the former colonizers or the colonized.

I want to advance a little thesis as one possible explanation of what it is that ails Zimbabwe's current leaders. Remember that they are, in the main, old men. I am thinking now of the arrogant octogenarian, Robert Mugabe, mortally wounded by 56 years of pre-independence racial discrimination and of his all-powerful, opportunistic sidekick, Didymus Mutasa. They are still afflicted with the mindset of the colonized. Could it be that Rhodesia's eighty eight years of colonial paternalism juxtaposed with a Christian brand of humanitarianism gave these oldest Zimbabwean descendants of dispossessed ancestors a false idea of how the world really works? Weren't they led by missionaries (at Catholic Kutama and Anglican St Faith's)to believe that God would eventually restore their sovereign birthright after all the injustices they endured under the colonial yoke? Wasn't it the Cold War that convinced them that the enemy was the imperial West and that Communism's help against the oppressor would give them back their country? It is true that European (white) colonial overlords were either afflicted with the imperialist's zeal to teach the natives how to live or, more lately, were overburdened with guilt for past political incorrectness. Is Zimbabwe's `liberator' still obsessed with the belief, long ingrained, that the white man has always been his patron?

A white man put the coin in the child's hand as he held open the farm gate; missionaries taught him how to read and write; healed him with modern medicine and preached (cynically as it turned out) the gospel of a great Western, Chistian civilization. The child has grown up and the hero liberator has been let down: no more patronage and not nearly enough money. New, non-Western patrons: Cubans, Russians, North Koreans, Libyans, Malaysians have been sought. Nothing much forthcoming. Only the Chinese are left. Surely somebody should have come to the rescue by now? All that determined effort to wipe out the last vestiges of the colonial grip has come to nought. What has happened to the expected, new patronage? Who will put the coin into the old man's hand now?


Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

THAT WAS PAT PEARCE'S INYANGA

Pat has left the world at last, at ninety seven, in England and far from her old home in Inyanga. I can't help feeling that a great spirit has deserted those lovely Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe and wondering if her legacy, that spirit, her inventions, her great productions have all gone with her - like so much else that was good about the past. An artistic, strong-willed English gentlewoman, she made Inyanga and its people the centre of her creative life decades ago. She drew upon the natural and human resources, developing and promoting village industry. She sought out and encouraged the pefection of beautiful crafts, useful ones too. She built up the pride of an industrious people. She did what only a few white women of her days in Inyanga could do.
Writing her obituary yesterday set me thinking again about Inyanga (Nyanga).

Remembering.

Only a few hours'drive from Salisbury (Harare) on the Umtali (Mutare) road.

You passed through Marandellas (Marondera)with Peterhouse school, a hotel and lots of untidy little shops on your right. Dombotombo township out of sight across the empty ground was over on your left. You had to watch out for township people crossing in front of you on foot or wobbling on bicycles or creating a traffic hazzard with their little donkey drawn scotch carts. Way back in time, as you journeyed on, there was a little roadside cafe called the Crow's Nest; a cutout metal crow silhouette was a sure sign that holiday treats: tea and freshly baked cream scones were waiting on a yellow check cloth in the tiny, spotless shop. Or out in the shady garden. When this disappeared with its farmer-owners there was only a broken down bus, a kind of deserted scrapyard.

But then there was Malwattee, a better stop off for the return journey, nearer Harare. Farmers wives made this a lovely place. You parked under tall gum trees, sat down at wire tables and basked in the afternoon sunshine. White coated waiters or chocolate brown girls in black uniforms and clean white pinnies brought your refreshments or you could go inside the guesthouse and choose your decorated cakes glistening beneath the glass counter with the bright light above it. You watched the peacocks and the bantam chickens pecking about the lawns around you or among shady trees on the far side of the circle of chairs and tables. There was a rose garden. You could tour the little shops, inside the guest house or in the crazy, domed little pink place someone invented to save the cost of roofing. It was stocked with local crafts, plenty of stuff you didn't want if you were not a tourist. Outward again and, Eastward, Halfway house came later, after Zimbabwe's Independence. You passed through the cavernous shop overflowing with farm produce and home baked cookies and sweets. It was a great hit, especially over weekends, crowded with tourists guzzling cokes and pies in the grassy courtyard, surrounded by litte tourist outlets on cool verandahs. There were clay pots, hand knitted jumpers, plants, beadwork, artefacts, some nice and some nasty. With its tall, gabled roof visible for miles, it soon grew to almost industrial proportions, the dusty car park overcrowded. It even provided a little zoo with a couple of fenced lions guarding their bloody rib cage lunch. You watched the browsing zebra or hand fed the small antelope with its damaged hind leg.

After the long, straight road has passed through a quiet wattle plantation, you could fill your fuel tank in Rusape, take a left turn out of the town and bowl down the narrow tarred strip taking you on to Juliasdale. The mountains begin to rise up and the little forests of Umbrella acacia trees near the Punchbowl Inn give way to huge forests of pine trees. Somebody remarks that these foreign trees are becoming quite a nuisance if they are not severely cut back for timber. Giant granite rocks next; they have recognizable contours. They are are all around you as you wind through low kopjes and steep hills, and there is your favourite, high above your holiday cottage, over there on the far horizon. It is a rock formation we know: The Crusader. He is granite man stretched out on his back across the top of the rocky mountain, his shield on his chest and his toes turned towards cloudless blue skies. This is summer weather. Sometimes, especially in the early mornings, the misty clouds descend to moisten the hardy natural protea bushes on the ground and promote the growth of a thousand wild flowers ... who could forget those fragrant herby scents?

Where are we staying? Sometimes at the chalets in the Rhodes National Park where you can trout fish in the Mare dam. Don't forget to visit the museum sparsely occupied with photographs and artefacts to remind you of Rhodesia's founder,Cecil John Rhodes. He bequeathed this park to the nation. Be careful of tiny ticks as you walk through the long grass at Urdu dam. The chalets cost only ten dollars a night. They have bare furniture and simple beds with candlewick covers and the cookers are sometimes pretty antiquated. The kids love the kind of seaside atmosphere at the Inyangombe waterfall which tumbles over shallow rocks not far from the road bridge. There is a little beach of warm sand where buckets and spades come out and some of you venture into the icy cold water. Higher up on the mountain there is an expensive tea at the five star Troutbeck hotel. Conemara, higher still, is where you stay at your friend's sloping mountainside smallholding of rasberrie and trout ponds. Here you can gaze across the green valley to the rivers and lakes of distant Mozambique. World's View is even higher up the mountain than Pat Pearce's eagle's eyrie.

The views are still there and perhaps for a time, the emptying hotels. but all the rest of this is not only a dream of the past; it is a scene that is past. The people who sustained so much of it are going, or like Pat, have all gone now.

I once drove up there with a young, black friend who had grown up in Inyanga. We headed towards Inyangani, the mysterious mountain where walkers have disappeared. One of my friends lost her two daughters up there, like the girls in the spooky Australian film `Picnic at Hanging Rock'. They vanished on a walk one Sunday afternoon. My passager warned me `Never point your finger at that Inyangani, it is dangerous. My mother told me that there are powerful spirits up there. If you point, they will harm you'.
Yes, Inyanga is a place full of spirits, not all bad.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

ADVICE FOR DAN BROWN'S PUBLISHER

....BUT FIRST A POST SCRIPT TO MY PREVIOUS BLOG ON THE ROCKET SCIENTIST
(its frightfully important not to take sides - YET - in the MDC battle)

Other opposition spirits whose lives were wasted in battle will surely be around wherever there is a plan to help to re-unite an incredibly brave band of democrats in peace - or at the very least, to bring friendship and co-operation between the two factions. No harm in dreaming.


Here's what happened when I sued somebody who pinched my work in 1980:
I went to see my lawyer friend in Harare. "Look at this!" I shouted, "that bleary editor of the Herald has lifted my biographies of our nationalist leaders and published them without acknowledgement. No payment either!"
"So he has. Now your book will not sell because the paper is publishing biographies which people can read with their morning news".
"I can't afford to sue. You lawyers are the rich ones". (aside: Neither can I sell 40 million books, worse luck).
"Never mind that. Come into my office and sit down and count the exact number of words - they have to run in sentences - that have been lifted from your writing, then I will send the editor a letter demanding compensation - pro rata. As I am your friend, you need not pay". (Famous last words)
It took me hours picking my way through the turned-around sentences - syntax was no real disguise - nor the little frills that were supposed to disguise the theft. Since I was the only local writer who had foreseen the advent of the day our new rulers would take up the reins of power, and had rushed around interviewing those who had been left out of my first book of biographies (Who's Who, published 1977)I KNEW that the biogs were mine. I wanted compensation for the cost of self-publishing my second volume this time around and for the estimated loss of sales.
To cut a long story... my lawyer friend rang to say I had three hundred dollars - paid by the Herald for those exact words, and the amount was exactly percent of the amount I had claimed. Clever!
Cleverer still, the lawyer's firm sent me a bill for three hundred dollars.
The perfect cure for me. Counting the words in the days before computers could do the job was a terrible waste of time. Dan Brown's book is a big one and the word count is not the problem. The problem, perhaps, is with THE WORD.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

A ROCKET HAS LANDED ON ZIMBABWE'S SOIL -or ZIMBABWE - A JOURNEY TO THE MOON?

A ROCKET HAS LANDED ON ZIMBABWE'S SOIL
...and just when I thought there was no such thing as a UFO. This one carried home Arthur Mutambara who could not have landed any other way; its a dangerous journey by road and flight passenger lists are watched closely by the spooks. He is going to fight the Mugabe regime `tooth, nail and claw'. No guns I am glad to note. Not even the `axes and spears' that the gentle Enoch Dumbutshena had the temerity to mention fourteen or so years back. This one is a natural fighter, taking his cue from the sage who gave us `nature, red in tooth and claw'. The image is scary but thrilling. A REAL professor this one. We have had so many charlatans awarding themselves the title. But this new excitement of the opposition taking off with a rocket scientist - aeronautics is close enough - is dizzying.

To shift to another allusion: he came with an earthquake, didn't he? Mozambique last week experienced a huge one - 7.5 on the Richter scale and its tremors were felt as far off as Harare and Bulawayo. Even in Johannesburg. Mr Mbeki must have felt it. Tell the people that when a man of Arthur's calibre lands on Zimbabwe's soil and says he's going to help kick out the tyrant, and the earth moves, its magic. That's the sort of thing they need to believe in since all else, especially `quiet diplomacy' has failed. Only a leader proclaiming himself `the Anti-Senate leader of the Pro-Senate faction' could utter such powerful incantations. And all this in the midst of Mugabe's 82nd birthday celebrations which nobody in the opposition wanted to attend. Maybe they hadn't heard about it?

And there's more mystery. Some would call it synchronicity. What about coincidence? The MDC Pro-Senate faction has just got its 18bn worth of funding for its parliamentarians. Patrick Chinamasa, the responsible Minister, says he hasn't heard about the split: lucky he went blind and deaf for a short while when that decision was being debated in the corridors of power. It gets better: a new bill is on the way, nicknamed `crosstitution' (who was the genius who thought that one up?). MDC Members of Parliament will, under this law, be allowed to keep their seats, whatever their factional or political preference. With a little more luck, some `loyal' ZANU (PF) MPs might perhaps think about crossing to the MDC if it means the money keeps coming in. Nobody can afford to lose a job in a Zimbabwe with 70-80% unemployment.

Sad though it is that Budiriro MP for the MDC, Gilbert Shoko, has passed away at this moment of joy, his spirit will surely smile upon Arthur and his re-invigorated band of knights and damsels as they take up the fight again at a by election.

Zimbabweans, keep your eyes on the stars! Watch out as you make your flight to the moon for the spirits of Kaguvi and Nehanda hovering out there.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

MY STORY OF ZIMBABWE'S PACHIPAMWE ARTISTS

HOW PACHIPAMWE, REALLY BEGAN
by original organizer, Diana Mitchell
* Pachipamwe (Shona) means `where we are all together’

Sculptor, Tapfuma Gutsa recently featured in The Zimbabwean. This remarkable man rose rapidly after he first came to public’s attention in 1987 to become one of Zimbabwe’s most gifted, original, prolific and successful artists. Now living in Austria, he will be re-united with many of his fellow Zimbabweans and welcomed with enthusiasm, I am sure, when he accompanies a forthcoming exhibition of his work to the UK in March/April this year. I shall strive mightily to attend it.

The author of his brief biography in TZ is correct in respect of Tapfuma’s attendance at that first, 1988 Pachipamwe artists’ workshop, but Tapfuma did not organize that event. I did, and almost single handedly at that - and only because I was persuaded to do so by Mrs Pat Pearce. Derek Huggins took on the next workshop at Cyrene in Bulawayo in 1989 and I was arm-twisted again, with Roger Nichols, to organize another workshop at Barrowdale Farm, Marondera in 1990. Tapfuma and his wife took up the task in a subsequent Pachipamwe workshop held in the Midlands, where they were living at the time.

I am not an artist, but my talents were for organizing and promoting fellow Zimbabweans when called upon do so. The true story of how Pachipamwe began is known by many Zimbabwe artists who were there at the Culture Centre where we `workshopped’ in Macheke in 1988.

It was Pat Pearce, famous in her own right as an artist and inarguably the woman who first recognised the innate talent of Zimbabwe’s sculptors when she met the late, celebrated Joram Mariga, in the sixties. He was at the time an agricultural demonstrator in the Eastern Highlands where they both lived. He was carving in sandstone, plentiful in the area, and it was directly through her contacts and influence that Zimbabwe’s sculptors were brought into world prominence. Two men are next in importance in this history: Frank McEwan, the director of the National Gallery in Salisbury in the sixties and Tom Blomefield, an entrepreneurial, former tobacco farmer who set his farm workers to carving out of stone. McEwan promoted Mariga and many of the country’s early, most famous sculptors including the late, great Henry Munyaradzi who had been a labourer at Blomefield’s Tengenenge farm until international sanctions (after UDI in 1965) temporarily knocked the bottom out of Rhodesia’s tobacco industry. The magnificent deposits of beautiful stone near Bonda Mission and at Tengenenge in the Tengwe Block in close proximity to the mineral rich hills of the Great Dyke, by countless artists and their patrons made a huge contribution to the progress of Zimbabwe’s stone sculptors.

A key event - Tapfuma’s installation of a burning edifice, exhibited in Harare’s public gardens behind the National Gallery in 1987 was seen by Pat Pearce. After that, Tapfuma, encouraged by his own and many talented family members’ success at sculpting, never looked back. The thread of the Pachipamwe story goes back through a British businessman friend of Mrs Pearce and of internationally famed sculptor Anthony Caro. Here, it was Caro who conceived of and Loder who helped to promote the idea of the `Triangle’ workshops where artists are closeted together (rather like celebrity Big Brother) for two weeks, to influence and inspire each other’s work.

Pat Pearce predicted that Tapfuma was a rising star among Zimbabwe’s already recognized sculptors and insisted that I invite this charismatic, dreadlocked young artist to the first Pachipamwe workshop. Mrs Pearce was right about Tapfuma. Where artistic excellence was concerned, she always was.

Surprised to find myself moving among artists at this time, I continued for many years to help Tom Blomefield whenever his Tengenenge sculpture enterprise faltered. Mostly it prospered, but that is a story deserving of a long chapter in a well researched book on art in Zimbabwe before the country was ruined, that I would rather read than write.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

DID IAN SMITH'S SON AVERT A COUP IN 1980?

Alec Douglas Smith died tragically young, recently. In an obituary (Independent Feb 2, 2006) Rebecca Saintonge states: `He was not the sort of person you'd think had been instrumental in averting a military coup.But this is what he did, and, in so doing, helped change the course of his country's history'.
I know little about Alec Smith, other than of his remarkable conversion from rebel son of the man who led my country into a disastrous rebellion against the Crown - or rather, against the British government in November 1965 - to friend of `moderate' African nationalists. But I know a fair amount about Ian Douglas Smith and a great deal about the character of African nationalism and -ists during that turbulent period of Rhodesia's history. I knew, personally, most of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's men (and a few women) including the Bishop himself and especially the Rev. Arthur Kanodereka who is the central figure in Saintonge's story. I shall do more research because thus far I have revised Alec Smith's `Now I call Him Brother' and re-read the relevant sections in Ken Flower's `Serving Secretly' - and, of course, Ian Smith's `The Great Betrayal' but it is not in these books that historians will necessarily arrive at the whole truth of the matter. Not that I doubt the claim that it was Alec who got the peacemaker, Arthur to meet his (Alec's) powerful father and thus created a bond of mutual understanding between the two men. But I seriously doubt whether it was Arthur and Alec alone who influenced the course of events leading to the averting of a potentially catastrophic coup. In any case, Arthur was assassinated long before the question of a coup was remotely considered, shot by night on a lonely roadsideby unknown assailants. This was possibly by agents bent on destroying the short, successful progress that his boss, Bishop Muzorewa, was making in his alliance with Smith. That alliance I know for sure, was forged yearsl before the events flowing from the Lancaster House peace agreement were under way. I know exactly how the RF regime `came around' to dealing with the ANC. I was there, I repeat - moving among the Bishop's ANC leaders including the Bishop himself. (Ask him: he may remember a meeting for the Bishop with Sir Henry McDowell, arranged by the Centre Party leaders, including myself). We were all agreed that dialogue was the only way to stop the war. Muzorewa poked his forefinger directly at my sternum "I see that we (the ANC) are preaching to the converted (McDowell and the 'liberals' of the CP)" he said. "go and get the people in power (your RF friends) to talk to us". I was nowhere near Ian Smith at any time, having personally and politically waged a twelve year campaign in opposition to his politics but I beat a path to the office of Senator Sam Whaley, a powerful member of Smith's party. He knew that I moved among nationalist leaders (see my 1997 Who's Who of African Nationalist leaders) and gave me a polite but defiant hearing. Then I tried Hilary Squires, my former friend and fellow student at the University of Cape Town who had joined the RF (he is currently in the SA News for presiding over the Shaik case) He was defensive of Smith but would have been sure to carry the message of the Bishop's willingness to negotiate with the RF.

So you see, I have a good memory of this and other events leading up to the Rhodesian Front's capitulation to the demands for African majority rule. As for the conditions prevailing when Governor Lord Soames was briefly in charge in Salisbury during the infinitely delicate moment of the final preparations for the handover of power to the African majority, I doubt they were conducive for the intervention of Ian Smith (and his General, Peter Walls) at that moment when there was a real danger of a coup (see Ken Flower's final chapter). But I was there (see my Foxtrot blog above) in Enkeldoorn, on the way to an Assembly point, hearing in that famous village pub, talk about the mutterings of the Rhodesian army who would have liked to stage a coup..... but more later.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

FOXROTt 3 - Moment of Danger

FOXTROT 3 The Moment of danger
Standing with the military on the podium were representatives of officials from the Rhodesian government - the Ministry of Social Welfare and other relevant arms of the administration including the CID (plain clothes police). We, the pathetic six white journalists had stood in front of the podium taking our photographs and recording the speeches which were mainly about the benefits of peace - schools, dams, homes, jobs and such enticements, all such marvelous promises. I do not recall that there were promises of land, but assume that land would have ranked high in the expectations of most of the guerrillas. It might well have been taken for granted that redistribution of Zimbabwe’s richer soils would be on the agenda since the constitutional agreement had been signed at Lancaster House a few weeks previously. Everybody was sick of the war anyway except, of course, Robert Mugabe. It has become clearer now that he would not have given a hoot if a continued war might have resulted in a scorched earth and it was Samora Machel who nudged him to settle. (By 2005, he had personally overseen an economic scorching - described by the United Nations in that year as the fastest declining of a national economy in a country not at war).

When the British flag was symbolically lowered and the Zimbabwe national flag had just been raised, military salutes and hand shaking done and speeches not quite finished the tranquil scene ended. A strange and very ominous murmur, rising to an increasingly angry pitch arose from the throats of the thousands of guerillas who started to edge forward, closing the hard square. I could make nothing of the events that immediately followed. It all happened so fast that I had to ask Elijah - now into mega-trembling mode - what was going on. A senior commander whose name I was told was Dan - spoken of with great respect I remember - blew his whistle and shouted an order for the assembled soldiers to step back. They instantly obeyed. At the same time, a corridor of British and ZANLA soldiers protecting the dignitaries opened up behind the podium and the official party was quick-marched out of the arena. A few seconds later, military helicopters flew overhead, carrying the visitors and Nhongo’s High Command out of the apparent danger zone - never mind the cluster of pale-skinned journalists left to face whatever had caused the guerrillas to frightn them.

But goodwill prevailed that afternoon. When the order came to dismiss, a huge roar of shouting, singing, ululating, whistling and stamping men and women went up from the great throng of guerrillas surrounding us. They were celebrating the end of hostilities, the end of wartime bloodletting, death and destruction. They broke into spontaneous dances, stirring up clouds of dust. I had a close-up view of the smartness of the uniformed men and the many women soldiers. It was quite wonderful to be able to photographe and record on my little machine the scene of such jubilation.

Elijah, still sweating and looking fearfully around had explained the cause of the sudden departure of the officials: a section among the guerillas had spotted a black Rhodesian, a former intelligence agent, among the officials on the podium. A deep note, like a long grunt had rumbled threateningly all around the square We could only imagine that the soldiers, these trained killers or their friends and relatives, had not been well treated in previous encounters with the former enemy whose representatives were standing there at their mercy.

But now it was it was time to go back without army escort or protection of any kind through that dangerous country - and I badly needed fuel. No luck. There was none on the ground. A guerilla leader looked at me with utter incomprehension when I asked for help and the British soldiers were nowhere to be seen. So I had to freewheel down every hill urging my little car to get us safely through the ninety miles back to Enkeldoorn.



Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

FREEDOM FOXTROT : PART 2

MILITARY HANDOVER AT FOXTROT ASSEMBLY POINT continued

In order to be present at this important ceremony I drove, as usual, in my little Ford Anglia, this time through dangerous, guerilla infested country, carrying my photographic equipment. I was determined to witness what was going on out there in the bush but had no idea of the significance of the day until I snapped that picture, capturing guerilla General Rex Nhongo at the moment of his triumph. My photo, a real scoop, was published after I sent it to Peta Thornycroft, a journalist friend, who was then working for the South African Daily Express newspaper. I was ridiculously proud of my achievement at the time.

It had been quite a business getting to Foxtrot Assembly point. There were moments of real fear among my three companions, hitching a ride was a Portuguese journalist from Sao Paulo called George, a Belgian girl whose name I have forgotten and we were accompanied by our official Zanu PF liaison officer guide, a beefy, squat fellow named Elija Gararurimo. Elijah's fear was palpable. He probably knew better than we three ignorant whites in the car with him, just how dangerous was the territory we were entering. I suppose I was too stupid to be frightened. We were travelling ninety kilometers from the small town called Enkeldoorn, once a dubbed `The Repulic of Enkeldoorn’ because, as its Afrikaans name implies, it was a stronghold of Afrikaaner farmers. (The place has since been renamed Chivhu). For me, in the driving seat, the day was to end with heart-stopping worry about getting back before dark in that wild, destroyed part of the country. It was touch and go whether my little old Ford Anglia would make it back to civilization and reach a petrol pump.

I had set off on our epic journey in a tiny convoy with two other small cars, each driven by foreign journalists. They probably thought that I knew what I was doing. I should have guessed at the danger because, considering its news value, the event was seriously under-attended by members of the Fourth Estate. When I went to pick up my `permit' to enter the Assembly point, I found that a former, BBC reporter friend, Justin Nyoka, was in charge of issuing the permits from ZANU PF’s headquarters at 88 Manica Road in Harare. He was clearly on edge, scared stiff about the possibility of a mauling at least and a massacre at worst of white foreign journalists venturing into terrorist/guerilla territory. He was likely to be held responsible for our safety and any deaths among observers could set of a ripple of panicky violence and put paid to the whole peace process. When he saw me in the offices for the first time since we had met in Lusaka five years earlier (I went there to interview exiled nationalist leaders – another story here) he refused point blank, at first, to give me a pass. “You are a local writer – this is not allowed,” he said sternly. Who knows what was passing through his mind. He is long since dead, a tragic victim of a disease that is currently killing Zimbabweans at the rate of three thousand a week. But standing with me in his office that day were two of my colleagues and friends. They knew that I was well acquainted with most of the country’s future leaders through my political contacts (revealed in my published Who’s Who). My new friends ganged up behind me and told Justin that they were determined to go and they would not leave without me. Justin rolled his eyes, shrugged and caved in. Elijah Gararirimo, a former information officer from ZANU (PF)'s Maputo office in Mozambique, was assigned the duty of accompanying us. After the introductory formalities, he planted his ample rear on to the back seat of my little old car. The sight of my ancient vehicle, I realise, with hindsight, was reason enough for Elijah to appear extremely fearful of our prospects of traveling safely through former terrorist-infested terrain. It was almost deserted bush country and the roads were rough.

Just off to the sides of the tarred roads we passed small, rural villages that had been totally destroyed during the seven years of a bush war. The sight of the burnt out remains of the pathetic little trading stores along the route should have caused me to me quiver a bit, but I was only too happy to be able to get my first sight of the war zone. We had been safely insulated in the cities from all but some rare sounds war, the rumble of distant explosions when a very few small bombs had been planted in churches in Harare and a single fuel storage tank had been sabotaged in the industrial sites by infiltrating guerrillas towards the war's end.

Our first sight of a human being came as we neared the Foxtrot assembly point.
A British soldier, serving with the international monitoring force overseeing the ceasefire came out in his military vehicle to escort us into the camp, driving to meet us across a stony river bed that marked the boundary to its entrance. Before we reached the camp and following behind his sturdy, camouflaged vehicle, marked with the white cross of the monitoring forces, our soldier escort had warned us, “Whatever happens, DO NOT STOP, just follow me into the camp”. We were loaded to the back axles with photographic equipment, handbags and effects filling every space inside the car - and Elijah’s girth wasn’t helpful. Unsurprisingly, we got thoroughly stuck on the rocks in the middle of the crossing. Emerging from beneath the trees lining the river banks, a small swarm of guerillas advanced towards us. They swiftly inserted their arms inside my vehicle, trying to grab our bags. Now I understood why Elijah had been sweating so freely; he had seen them in action in the war. They killed people, especially white people.

But the British soldier, as I learned that day, is a brave fellow: Our escort stopped his vehicle and came raging (all alone mark you) towards the would-be thieves. Roaring loudly at them he ordered them to fall back. I doubt they understood the words, but there was no doubting his body language. They shrank back, clearly having been given orders and dire threats by their own commanders about breaking the peace. `Shamwari chete” (only friends) they said meekly and melted back among the trees.

The Moment of danger
All had gone well with the speeches and the final raising of the new Zimbabwean flag, a multi-coloured one - now unfortunately identified as a ZANU PF flag rather than a national emblematic symbol - until after the handshake ...

PART 3 tomorrow

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

FOXTROT ASSEMBLY POINT 1980 - I was there

I promised the Foxtrot story - not a ballroom dance but,literally, Zimbabwe's first dance of freedom. My blogspot went missing yesterday and I have reminded myself not to be paranoid about the Mugabe regime getting their Chinese friends to blot out my blog. So here's the first instalment of an eyewitness story which is going into the book I have been taking so long to complete.

FOXTROT
February 17th 1980:[check exact date] That was the day when the Rhodesian army Commander Bertie Barnard and the ZANLA guerrilla supreme, Commander, Rex Nhongo (now Solomon Mujuru) ceremoniously shook hands. They stood, for the first time side by side on a raised podium, saluting the Zimbabwe and British flags as they were raised and hauled down respectively (and respectfully I might add). Formed up in a hard square in front of them were thousands - call it a battalion or two - of ZANLA guerrillas smartly turned out in full uniform. The men and women stood rigidly to attention in the hot sun, guns at their sides, facing their officers and the dignitaries who had arrived by helicopter to conduct a solemn ceremony.

I was there that day, fully accredited for the occasion as a photo-journalist - the only Rhodesian (or new-named Zimbabwean) present with five foreign journalists to witness that historic event. We were there to record the death of Rhodesia's military machine and the first ceremonies heralding the birth of independent Zimbabwe. The scene would have justified the roar of a cannon or a roll of British military drums or, better still, a message carried by an African drumbeat. But the awesome moment passed in a resounding silence, far from the capital city, out there in the African bush. There was scarcely a movement anywhere, not a leaf trembled in the still air and there was not even the faintest bird call; indeed, nothing but quietness - like the moment of an eclipse of the sun.

I wished I could join with the solemn salute of the military officers, but I grasped my cameras and with a click of the shutter, my colonial Rhodesia had gone forever. On that historic day at Foxtrot Assembly point, I was greatly moved by the dignity and the finality of the event.

Before the day ended there was a dramatic and dangerous turn of events, but that is described in my next blog about Foxtrot.

A post script: Ian Smith's rebel Rhodesian Front rebel flag and the colonial Rhodesian flag (I have one in my collection of memorablia) had been consigned to history during the six weeks that the British governor, Lord Soames, had returned and re-raised the Union Jack in Salisbury. As Britain's last, legitimate representative of the crown it was his duty to sever his government’s ties with the `self-governing colony’ of Southern Rhodesia. The British flag had not been seen for more than fifteen long years of Rhodesia’s false Independence.

Once the peace agreement at Lancaster House had been concluded and the new dispensation began to evolve, there were several `handover' ceremonies, but one I had witnessed was truly unique in that the military supremacy of Ian Smith's army was formally and finally relinquished on that day. It was only after it was all over that the news filtered through that the Rhodesian army had plotted a last-minute coup, but was dissuaded by some sensible counsel prevailing in the political hierarchy. In any case, there were contingents of Rhodesian soldiers present in several designated assembly points and any attempt to bomb or blast the soldiers gathered in the camps would have taken their lives as well as those of the British monitoring force and, at Foxtrot, perhaps mine too. I was thankful, as on previous occasions, to come out of my adventures unharmed.



Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

CHEWING BITS OF STRING

`The chief defect of Henry King/Was chewing little bits of string.' HILAIRE BELLOC's whimsy is a long time favourite. I began my blogging in October last year with half a borrowed and a wholly fractured quote:`Let go the hand of Nurse' for my title. `Nurse' back then was my computer guide and helper. I was reluctant to strike out on this blogging thing without him, the worthy Parafeen. I was led to believe, when I left the political arena, that what I had to record, especially about Zimbabwe, might be worth a few minutes of a reader's time.
Now that the splintering of the MDC opposition party has taken us back to where we started in 1998 - with the search for a new constitution - we democrats are left with nothing new to say. We are left chewing little bits of string. The state is tottering, people are looking desperately for hope, for help ... and for now, for all of them, trapped by an infamous regime, there remains only a tyrannical old Nurse to hold on to. Methinks there is a long wait ahead... So now,I must go back and correct that quote:
`And always keep a hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse'

I shall keep slogging ... and blogging away on this machine. I plan to thrill my reader, starting tomorrow, with some excerpts from my memoirs - a Two for the Price of One, for the time being.
I leave you with a message of hope, more of Belloc:
'Oh let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about'

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell