TRIALS OF GORDON BROWN AND MORGAN TSVANGIRAI COMPARED

Britain's Prime Minister, Labour leader Gordon Brown is struggling to come to terms with his party's recent catastrophic losses in the local government polls. He is faced with much the same uncertainty for the future as is Zimbabwe's Morgan Tsvangirai (pronounced changiraiyi). In Africa, Tsvangirai who is the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party leader, is known to have won handsomely in recent general and Presidential elections, albeit the ruling party with its boss, Robert Mugabe, is attempting to steal the MDC's victory.

How can you compare these two men, Brown and Tsvangirai? Brown bleakly watches his political fortunes plummeting while Tsvangirai's hopes, aye, even his chances of attaining high office appear to be rising. Simply: neither man has much chance of being able to deliver on any but the most elementary of promises to their supporters in the short term.

That is as far as can be seen right now.

Brown is accused of failing to listen to voters whose concerns are of a rapid decline in their spending power. Credit is being cut off, banks are nervous and mortgages are no longer easy to find while houses are getting harder to sell. Brown failed a former Chancellor of the Exchequer to save during the fat years. No need to extrapolate. The word recession is too frightening to use, but the British are entering the lean years.Its not going to be easy for government, any British government.

Tsvangirai has to stay alive and is currently in voluntary exile, awaiting the long-overdue acknowledgement by Mugabe's government that its days of plenty for the few (while the rest starve) are coming to an end. When a new government comes into power, no matter what its name or who its leader, Zimbabwe's economy, like so many in Africa, will have to be dredged up from the bottom of a very murky lake (there is no sea in Zimbabwe). The expectations of Zimbabweans for an improvement in their lives will be high. Government is not going to be easy for any new Zimbabwe government.


Brown is accused of failing to listen to voters whose concerns are of a rapid decline in their spending power. Credit is being cut off, banks are nervous and mortgages are no longer easy to find, while houses are getting harder to sell. No need to extrapolate. The word recession is too frightening to use, but British people are entering the lean years

Its not going to be easy for government, any British government.

Tsvangirai has to stay alive and is currently in voluntary exile awaiting the long-overdue acknowledgement of the Mugabe's government that its days of plenty for the few while the rest starve, are coming to an end. When a new government comes into power, no matter what its name or who its leader, Zimbabwe's economy, like so many in Africa, will have to be dredged up from the bottom of a very murky lake (there is no sea in Zimbabwe). The expectations of ordinary Zimbabweans for an immediate improvement in their lives will be high.

Government is not going to be easy for any new Zimbabwean Party leader.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

PARLIAMENT WITHOUT POWER

I am reminded of yet another of ZANU (PF)'s copycat convulsions - harking back to the last days of Rhodesia. The present ruling party's apparent acceptance of its demolition, its loss of its parliamentary majority in the March 29 2008 elections (leaving aside the Presidential non-appearance of results for the present)has an interesting precedent.

There was a time - following the Rhodesian Front's March 3 Agreement with Bishop Abel Muzorewa's ANC party - prior to the introduction of a `transitional' government when parliament was dominated by the ANC while the Rhodesian Front's Ian Smith, the ZANU (Ndonga)'s Ndabaningi Sithole and ZUPO's Chief Chirau appeared to share the Prime Ministerial position. It looked good for a handover of power from whites to blacks in Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Everyone could talk their heads off in Parliament, but where was the real power? One cabinet member in Muzorewa's line-up was the estimable, the late Byron Hove was on to this deception. He made a huge fuss, blowing the whistle on the powerlessness of the transitional government with its newly `Africanised' parliament. What kind of power do you have, he asked, when the police, the army, the civil service and the judiciary are all dominated entirely by whites still loyal to Ian Smith? The liberation struggle went on with its consequence of the Lancaster House agreement and as we all know (to the country's cost) ZANU (PF) took over.

My point here is that it seems that ZANU (PF) has no fear of an MDC majority in parliament so long as the abovementioned state institutions remain loyal to Robert Mugabe.

We await the final outcome of the current political shenanigans with bated breath.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

Progress is a word

Peregrine Worsthorne has let fly today in The First Post (sorry I haven't mastered links yet) at "Crimes committed in the name of progress". His logic extends to the end product of "progress" in several countries but it is Tibet's renewed travails that have aroused his attention. Clearly he is remembering the romantic setting of old Tibet, unsullied by the "progress" of Chinese domination. I have no quarrel with the exiled Dalai Lama's proper place in Tibet or of the will of Tibetans to return to their past and their special brand of sovereign rule, but I must take issue with his sweeping condemnation of "progress", particularly as he sneers at the concept of "liberal progress". I quote:

"Other countries are doing [the name of progress] a good turn by breaking and entering in the name of progress: communist progress, fascist progress and liberal progress, the last of which has done more dispatching of so-called backward societies to the knacker's yard than any other".

I understand the general drift of his argument, but his First Post piece is too short and therefore emits more heat than light.

My own focus on "progress" inevitably settles on Zimbabwe, the country where I was born. It took 88 years of imperial domination of one kind and another to bring "progress" (originally by force)to that colonized country. Eventually, Zimbabwe was handed over to its rightful owners, its indigenous inhabitants, as a well-developed little state, a "gem" of a country. Ask any `native' (as a non-African, I would be described merely as a `sojourner') if he/she would prefer to be living in the pre-colonial environment, devoid of the "progress" of modern institutions, modern technology and so on and I know the truthful answer would be "don't ask a silly question".

I was (and am) a liberal, and a student of African history. As a former Rhodesian and later, a Zimbabwean, I believed most devoutly in "progress" for my fellow citizens. To that end I once helped "break and enter" - to borrow Worsthorne's expression - a relatively undeveloped, rural region in order to work with women through the establishing of Savings Clubs. Its a long story but not only did our organization's newfangled ideas of proper land husbandry and functional literacy bring new hope for further "progress" (better diet resulting from food self-sufficiency, a cash surplus from sale of crops to be spent on better technology and so on) but also it gave the women a choice - whether to remain poor, or to prosper. Their families benefited greatly from this "progress" offered them, in this case, by "liberals". I had what is called `hands on' experience. Ask Doris Lessing about women's progress. She travelled around Zimbabwe to witness "progress" with a similar "liberal" organization and she marvelled at it.

All this was before Robert Mugabe's rule began to wreak havoc throughout the country.
He and his followers are returning the country to its undeveloped past - lack of safe water, no electricity, transport only for the rich (he will have to resort to being carried again - as he was at the start of his political career - on the shoulders of his admirers when the last drop of fuel disappears)... and so on ad infinitum.

"Progress" be it communist, facist or liberal (and Zimbabwe has experienced all of these)is being undone. I look forward to the day when the tyrant is despatched and "progress" once again means change from a grossly unsatisfactory situation (call it rotten in today's Zimbabwe) to an improved and hope-filled future.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LAUGH

I really do feel sorry for young Masikosana Ngulube who, as reported from IRIN on 18 Feb 2008 has to cycle the 30km round trip to get to Eveline High school in Bulawayo. She says the return trip is `downhill' so I guess she must live out of the city on the East side. Her brother certainly has an uphill ride from what was once Borrow Street (the location of the public swimming pool - maybe no longer filled with water?)to what was Townsend Road in the old Kumalo suburbs. Milton Junior school is in that same (former) Borrow Street. My late brother was a Milton school boy.

How do I know all this. Don't laugh, but I am an old (very old) Eveline High girl. I had to laugh at the news that Masikosana has to ride a bike to school. I rode a bike to Eveline school as did most of my school mates in the nineteen forties. But that was many decades ago. My first bike ride from Fort Street high on the Western side of the city all the way to Borrow street was all downhill. That's how I know the lie of the land. Thirty km is a bit excessive but not impossible. There was a time when I rode from Borrow Street to Baines Primary School out on the south west side of the city. That was uphill all the way. We must have had big muscles in our legs in those immediate post-WW2 days because we didn't think it hard to peddle our bikes. Cars were for the rich, or if your family owned one, they did not thnk it neccessary to drive you to school.

How things have changed. Only for the good of course -where Eveline is no longer a school for little white girls. What irony it is that Masikosana's mother's car is empty of fuel or the precious liquid is unaffordable. In the Federal years, there was a huge public protest because the Minister of Finance raised the price of a gallon of petrol from 2/6 to three shillings a gallon. World oil prices nothwithstanding, the price of a litre of fuel in Zimbabwe today would have bought my folks most of the country back in 1945.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

Danger and a king-sized political cockup

When I read on Friday 25th January about the political shenanigans between the former, Ndebele ZAPU members of Mugabe's political elite and his Shona ZANU (PF)adherents my heart sank. As if poor, broken Zimbabwe was not in enough trouble already, this apparent reappearance of old, so-called `tribal' animosities is the pits.

My information is that the Ndebeles, from whichever quarter are fed-up with the way they have been treated by the overlord Robert Mugabe, especially as they were virtually force-fed the 1987 Unity Accord (another `so-called' it seems) which old Joshua Nkomo had to swallow in order to save his people in Matabeleland from what looked like an attempt by Mugabe's lot at genocide in - the national army's 5th Brigade assault, called `Gukurahundi'. An uneasy peace has lasted ten years and Nkomo is long gone. But his right-hand man Joseph Msika lives on, placated, bribed, if you like, by high office as one of Zimbabwe's two vice-Presidents. Until recently he has been remarkably loyal to his present boss.

We had almost forgotten about Dumiso Dabengwa, the former Zipra commander, jailed by Mugabe after independence (was it perhaps to prevent him from leading a revolt against the Shona who had grabbed most of the spoils of the liberation war?). Anyway, he was released after nearly five years; he succeeded as a business magnate (ironic in view of his former incarnation as a Soviet trained guerrilla known as rhe Black Russian) and then was coaxed into Mugabe's cabinet. (Readers are asked to forgive me for so boringly and repetitively invoking the name of Mugabe because it is really rather pointless avoiding the fact that it is from him that all else flows in today's policy making in the country). Back to Dabengwa: by 1997, as Minister of Home Affairs, he functioned as the man responsible for the police until he lost his Matabeleland seat in parliament to a member of the opposition MDC party. He was pretty quiet until his recent move to openly challenge Mugabe at a recent ZANU (PF) party politburo meeting. Angered by Mugabe's cavalier treatment of his vice-president when RGM showed huge favour to Jabulani Sibanda, the disreputable, dismissed `war vet' leader in Matabeleland and sycophant-in-chief to Mugabe, Dabengwa has resurfaced. Seconded by Msika and supported by party chairman John Nkomo and others they look set to fracture the delicate peace between the Matabeleland and Midlands region and old enemies in Mashonaland. I heard Fergal Keane on the BBC today saying that the mayhem in Kenya was not a manifestation of tribalism: he claimed that it is poverty which causes people in different regions within African states to attack each other - or something like that. I cannot agree that tribalism is a fiction, or a convenient and simplistic, white man's way to explain the black-on-black bloodletting that goes on in so many parts of Africa. In Zimbabwe's case the differences between the people of Matabeleland and those of Mashonaland go very deep and well beyond the era of white settlement. Mugabe, in his arrogance is tempting fate, forgetting that the Unity Accord, however fragile, has kept internal `tribal' peace as a vital part of his country's sovereignty. Pleasing Jabulani, rather than Joseph and Dumisa et all may eventually prove to be yet another nail in his coffin.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell




Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

At a book launch, London 2007

This blog awaits a description of the launch of Peter Godwin's book "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. Picador (2007).
The pic is of my daughter and Peter Godwin at the launch in London, 2007.

 


Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

Ian Douglas Smith 1919 - 2007

Last month I penned an obituary which was published in The Zimbabwean. Because so many of my (former)Rhodesian and (current)Zimbabwean friends and acquaintances as well as old political adversaries are scattered over the face of the earth, I forwarded copies per email to a couple of dozen email addresses. Naturally, the people with whom I remain in contact are almost uniformly political think-alikes and/or fellow opposition activists who doubted the wisdom of UDI and all that followed. I know only too well the mindset of my white contemporaries, the majority of whom so keenly placed their trust in Smith's leadership. There was no happy ending for any of us.
The responses to the obit are flowing in and for history's sake I welcome them, the many bouquets as well as a few brickbats. However, I am fully aware of how irrelevant all this seems now that Zimbabwe has been so long in the grip of the tyrant Robert Mugabe. But here, for the record, is the testimony of one Zimbabwe-born, `consistent' and unrepentant opponent of the policies of a former frontiersman, the recently departed Ian Smith:

P 15 – The Zimbabwean 29 November -5 December
IAN DOUGLAS SMITH: OBITUARY

Smith’s intransigence was Mugabe’s opportunity

IF IT HAD NOT BEEN FOR THE REPRESSIVE POLICIES OF SMITH AND THE RF, WHICH LED TO THE VICIOUS BUSH WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE, THERE IS NO WAY PEOPLE WOULD HAVE WELCOMED SOMEBODY LIKE MUGABE WITH OPEN ARMS IN 1980.



Ian Douglas Smith, the last white Prime Minister of Rhodesia, aroused passionate debate in his heyday - and this is being replayed after his death on November 20, 2007. The “Western Christian civilization” which he purported to defend requires that we should not speak ill of the dead, but it seems dishonest to pretend that his legacy of a lost, un-winnable, war against his own indigenous population, has been wiped out by his final exit.

In the first days following the news of the peaceful ending of his long life, far from the country he undoubtedly loved, it is hard to forget the effect of his iron-willed, white supremacist policies on the lives of a largely un-enfranchised black majority.
Today, a great leap of selective memory has come crashing down on to the name of his successor, the black man’s liberator turned evil oppressor, Robert Gabriel Mugabe. It is as if Mugabe’s disastrous rule is the inevitable consequence of not allowing Smith’s Rhodesian Front party to rule for the “thousand years” that he promised. That is not right. Ian Smith’s intransigence was Mugabe’s opportunity.

In media flashbacks, Ian Smith is repeatedly shown uttering his vow: “No majority rule – ever”. He stuck to it until early in 1978 when a brutal and bloody war, forced him to change his tune. On March 3 he made a belated attempt to get an “internal settlement”, giving limited power to moderate blacks led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa.
Then within months, after his erstwhile supporters in apartheid South Africa “betrayed” (his word) and abandoned him he had no choice but to renege on his UDI promises and, at Lancaster House, get the best deal he and Muzorewa could with the militant nationalist leaders (Mugabe and Nkomo).

Ironically, the midwife of the rebel Smith’s “final settlement” of its constitutional dispute with Britain turned out to be his enemy, the British government itself. Further, the changeling “babe” Mugabe was to become the personification of the RF’s self-fulfilling prophecy that a black government would yield “One man, one vote – once”.
If Smith, unlike the tyrant Mugabe, really agreed to go to the negotiating table to save the country, he could have saved it well before the guerilla war got under way in 1972. His worshipping, white electorate might have mandated him to share power with the leaders of “the happiest Africans in the world” before the masses were made unhappy by being assured that they would never be allowed to own their African soil.
In the context of the Cold War era, Smith’s overplayed anti-Communist propaganda yielded another self-fulfilling prophecy: Rhodesia fell into the hands of an avowed Marxist Leninist autocrat.

The son of an immigrant Scottish butcher, Smith was born in 1919 in Shurugwe, a small, Southern Rhodesian mining town. He began his political career by joining (in 1948), the inappropriately named, Liberal Party which was opposed to Prime Minister Huggins policies of gradual racial integration.
His commerce degree studies at Rhodes University were interrupted by WW2 service in 237 (Rhodesia) Squadron of the RAF. His reputation as a war hero, shot down over Italy and joining the partisans before escaping to Britain, was widely acclaimed. He certainly had charismatic appeal for the large majority of Rhodesian whites. Tragically, many sacrificed their sons to the lost cause of the “bush” war.
Smith’s political career had moved from early conservatism to a more enlightened period during the Federal experiment (1953 – 63) when he was Chief Whip of the UFP (United Federal Party). A ranching farmer, he moved again to the Right and eventually helped to found the RF. In the 15 years that he ruled Rhodesia there was no deflecting his stubborn refusal to face the facts of de-colonization in Africa.
He was egged on by an 80% majority of a deluded, tiny white electorate and by his preferred clutch of ultra-conservative civil servants (Hostes Nicolle, the notorious secretary for Internal Affairs being the most influential), his domineering party Chairman, “Des” Frost and the iron-fisted, legal luminary (another Desmond) Lardner-Burke.

When, as Prime Minister in 1965, he declared his UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) wiser heads were ignored or ignominiously sacked or chose to resign or to depart the country.
His policies were racially discriminatory towards the aspirations of blacks although, by his own admission, they were among the best educated on the African continent. More than three quarters of the rural, black population wanted, nay, needed, more and better land but he ignored wise counsel.
The will of his most powerful backers among white land-owners and businesses with vested interests in maintaining the status quo, always prevailed. The rural poor, however blessed with full bellies, a functioning health system and other the trickle-down benefits of a flourishing agro-based economy, were unwilling to be denied equal access to the good life of the average white citizen. Progress towards racial integration, made during Federation with Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) was arrested or turned back Like his successor, Mugabe, he was determined to hold on to power.
A veteran black journalist puts the run up to the double catastrophe of Rhodesian Ian Smith and Zimbabwean Robert Mugabe further back in time: “If gradualism had happened back in the 50s there is NO WAY people would have welcomed somebody like Mugabe with open arms in 1980; all they wanted was an end to the war.”
Smith’s autobiography, “The Great Betrayal” said little of the perspectives of black Zimbabweans and, as Mugabe is currently doing, he blamed everybody but himself for the eventual collapse of a potentially great country. - Diana Mitchell

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

On the road to creating warlords

Exactly ten years ago, an upstanding (and outstanding) Zimbabwean businessman, Nigel Chanakira, predicted that if Zimbabwe's hopes for democracy continued to decline, we would end up with warlord-ism.
The report of military personnel ignoring vice-President Joseph Msika's appeal to them to spare the remaining (white) farms and stop shoving out some (black) settler farmers who had staked their claims (legitimately or otherwise)to the best farms - comes as a forewarning of worse things to come. It confirms Chanakira's prediction. Added to the ultra-racist Didymus Mutasa's promise to remove every last vestige of white business ownership in Zimbabwe, the outlook for the future of a beloved country is very bleak. Will the Generals turn against each other next? Will they and their little battalions fight each other for the best businesses and loveliest farms? If this should happen, warlords will pillage what little is left of Zimbabwe's resources. Democrats within the country and those watching it anxiously from abroad will devoutly pray that this does not happen.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

"A political decision"

Paul Mangwana says the decision to `indigenize' the Zimbabwe economy (i.e. give 51% shareholding to locals) under the Indigenization and Empowerment law which passed through Parliament on Wednesday, cannot be reversed. He thinks the revolution will not be complete until the last white-owned business is despatched to the pages of history. Curiously this thinking is premised on the country having been colonized by force. I wonder how many countries in today's world have, at some time been colonized by force. It beggars belief that the rampant racism of the ruling regime has out-done the racisim of the former colonizers - in spite of claims made even by Mugabe himself (read his reconciliation speech of 1980) - that racism would not be tolerated in free Zimbabwe. He doesn't care if Standard Chartered bank, for example, pulls out of the country, regardless of the effect this may have on an already near-destroyed economy.

"Mangwana labelled local managers in the financial institutions "neo-liberals" who take instructions from London. He said they would never be given space to reverse.." what he termed a political decision(my emphasis). The last time I heard those words, "a political decision" they came from the lips of a Rhodesian Front Minister who, in 1966, said that keeping black children's schools out of white areas was a political decision.

Strange things, these political decisions. I am writing right now about how it was that very phrase "a political decision" which galvanized me into fighting, first for the rights of black children to an education equal to that of whites and then for the removal of all forms of racial discrimination in Rhodesia.

Mangwana, so proudly revolutionary has let the cat out of the bag. He and his cronies fought not so much for Zimbabwe's liberation as for the power to introduce reverse racism.

I once believed that they were better than that.


Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

Hello again

Hello again. I have been absent from this blogging business for weeks, mainly because I have experienced one of those recurring periods of doubt as to whether I have anything to say that is worth the reader's time. I hope it is not age related and is merely attributable to the severe disruption of the normal pace of my life. I seem to have been born with an obsessive need to hurry through whatever I am doing in order to get down to other thing that I ought to be doing - like writing. Then there are the interruptions, the unavoidable ones like the need to take care of a precious, seriously ill husband. Writing almost always goes on the back burner.



For the time being I shall publish items already published, starting with my latest contribution to The Zimbabwean which was placed somewhat invisibly at the sports end (there is a huge crush of more worthy items of a serious nature taking up most of the paper's space). The following is one of my rarer departures from my usual style (I leave it to my readers to give a name to that style) and reproduce here a short piece of satire. I am not alone in being sick of Mugabe's blame game. He has to be demented if he really believes that horses go before carts i.e he refuses to acknowledge that he is to blame for the destruction of Zimbabwe's vibrant agricultural sector and must take responsibility for the inevitable collapse of the country's economy.

I introduced my skit with a remark which was not published but which I repeat here: I know full well that Zimbabwe's situation as extremely serious while Robert Mugabe, who is generally regarded as mad with power, can no longer be taken seriously. I headed my piece `Imagine`- the word most recently associated with John Lennon's popular song. Unfortunately the sub-editor in his/her wisdom changed it to `Just imagine', putting an entirely different flavour to the piece.

Here it is:


IMAGINE

It is early July, 2007. Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and Nicolas Sarkozy and the lesser known Jose Luis Zapatero, (Spain) Giorgio Napolitano (Italy), Jan Peter Balkenende (Netherlands) and Guy Verhofstadt (Belgium) are sitting around a table debating ways of destroying Mugabe (Zimbabwe's adored leader) by deliberately raising inflation in his country to hitherto unimaginable rates and thus making food for ordinary Zimbabweans unaffordable.

Gordon: (Zimbabwe’s former Colonial Oppressor): My friends, I must report that Tony used to get all the blame for Mugabe's troubles and was only half hearted about solving this most important of the world’s current problems. He should have known that Iraq was a mere pinprick. Money talks my friends. My long experience talking money gives me the edge here and I have a brand new idea: lets lean on our close acquaintances in the Zimbabwe supermarkets. I don’t know if a fellow called Sam Levy, who is big in supermarkets still has any influence there, but somebody might persuade him to start a movement doubling food prices every hour. That should get quick political results.
Angela: Great idea. It was very effective in our country at one time. I will put this matter at the top of our agenda at the next meeting of our Bundesrat.
Nicolas: We used to welcome his wife’s shopping trips to Paris. She was an important contributor to our economy, but I will not stand in your way this time. I am new in the Presidential job but I want to remain among the world’s top leaders. My foreign policy regarding Mugabe’s country will ensure this.
Jose Luis: Very important to get this policy right. A pity we have to be so tough because I have always been impressed with Mugabe allowing a building in his capital to be named KARIGAMOMBE. I believe this means Kill the Bull?
Giorgio: Don’t forget that I will be making a great sacrifice in making an enemy of Mugabe. Italian shoe imports are much prized amongst the wives of his cronies and we cannot do without this huge contribution to our industry.
Jan Peter: The matter is of such high priority that we can lean on some distant relatives in South Africa to co-operate. They won’t mind losing touch with cross border traders…
Guy: (interrupts) Since this issue is even more important than climate change, shouldn’t we ask Gordon to make it a priority concern at the forthcoming EU/AU meeting?
Gordon: I’m not going. Can’t sit at the same table with Mugabe.
Chorus: Oh No! (they all know that Mugabe is the most important man in the world, especially Giorgio, recently elected to office and who insists on him being referred to as `Numero Uno’

NIGERIA looks down on Zimbabwe

"I would be poor if things were like Zimbabwe" says Nigeria's richest businessman
Listening to BBC World News this morning I heard a man described as Nigeria's richest business man give a `rare' interview. In haste I must write down why I find a single phrase, uttered by this man, so shattering. No time to check the spelling: Aleko Dangote was explaining his support for President Obasanjo's chosen PDP successor in this week's forthcoming elections. Tackled on the corruption, endemic in his country, Dangote said that no country was free of corruption (at national level) but that this should not be allowed to go too far because "I would be poor if things were like Zimbabwe".

Wow! I remember so well the jubilation of Nathan Shamuyarira, once an admired fellow Zimbabwean media man when the Nigerians paid his ZANU (PF) some seven millions (real money in Zimbabwe way back in 1980) to buy out South Africa's Argus Africa News which had governed newspapers in former Rhodesia. This enabled the ruling party, to set up the Mass Media Trust. It became one of so many institutions in `liberated' Zimbabwe which ultimately betrayed its high-sounding, founding principles. The MMT aimed to `act as a "buffer" between government and the only national newspaper chain'. (see Richard Saunders booklet Zimbabwe's Growth towards Democracy 1980 - 2000 accompanying Edwina Spicer's film "Never the same again"). Thank God Nathan failed to get me, a friend of nationalists and Willy Musarurwa, his former best friend, appointed to the founding Board of Trustees - now a despicable travesty of a protecter of press freedom in independent Zimbabwe.
I wonder if the Nigerian government could possible understand the irony of the situation that Nathan and his cronies have connived at for 27 years in bringing about today's destroyed Zimbabwe?
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

Unbloodied and bowed

As the hated agents of Robert Mugabe's violence against his political opposition busy themselves cracking skulls, breaking limbs and drawing the blood of non-violent protesters, I bow my head in shame. Not a hair on my Zimbabwean head has been touched. I am far from the scene of these crimes. I feel an acute sense of guilt that I have escaped, physically unhurt from the consequences of political actions in which I took an active part for at least forty years.
When I made a committment to devote my waking hours to the pursuit of equality, liberty and democratic governance for my fellow citizens - having benefited from being born amongst the privileged white settlers of Rhodesia - I never dreamed that the sacrifices that are being demanded of my friends in the Movement for Democratic Change in today's Zimbabwe would be so great. As a founding member of the National Constitutional Assembly, from which the MDC branched in the late nineties, I believed that peaceful, evolutionary, regime change was possible. I had opted out of direct participation in the political fight several years earlier after the Forum for Democratic Reform, an opposition party I had helped to found, failed to make headway against the Mugabe regime; this in spite of, or even because of our gentle and gentlemanly leader, the late Enoch Dumbutshena, former Chief Justice of Zimbabwe. My support for the Young Turks - as well as a few older ones, male and female - who stepped forward into the MDC firing line (quite literally as it has turned out) never wavered and I used my contacts among fellow would-be democrats and their sponsors wherever and whenever they could be helpful. Writing has been my ongoing tool - an adversarial weapon only so long as Zimbabweans were allowed to read the words of encouragement offered to my fellow Zimbabweans in our pursuit of freedom.
Only now in a technological age that forbids shielding wrong-doing is the world beginning to hear the MDC's cries of protest. In Zimbabwe it is a time of deliberate killing and maiming and bludgeoning men and women of great courage by cowardly, armed police and military functionaries of a discredited ruling party and its vain, arrogant and tyrannical leader, the once admired Robert Mugabe. I am unbloodied but bowed by the shame of it all. I rise, however, and bow low in sincere homage to my suffering friends who are putting their lives on the line for the restoration of Zimbabwe to its long-delayed liberation from political oppression.


Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

Ug-Babwe and Zim-Ganda

Question: What's the difference between a duck?
Answer: One of its legs is both the same.

That little riddle makes about as much sense as what is going on in Zimbabwe today.
I am forever searching for some clues which might help Zimbabweans (and the dwindling numbers of concerned Zimbabwe watchers) arrive at an educated estimate of how the country's current crisis will end. Doing a little revision for yesterday's blog I concentrated on Uganda's late 20th century history. I noted a few remarkable similarities in the performance of two post colonial despots, Amin and Mugabe, both of whom started well and then went irredeemably rotten. They will always be as different as a jackal is from a crocodile in their natures and yet leagues apart if you compare their CVs and their style of leadership. Still, their legacies, a litany of lost opportunities will be the same. Examples of the differences between the two men and their disastrous policies are as unhelpful as they are also significant. You can draw no clear conclusions: Amin was a semi-literate professional soldier, Mugabe a highly educated individual who pitched himself into the head of a guerilla army with absolutely no preparation for the job. Neither seemed to understand modern economics. Both developed a hatred of the British: Amin because of the arrogance of British army officers; Mugabe because the British government condemned his land grab. Amin waded in the blood of his enemies, Mugabe finds less violent yet equally tortuous ways of staying in power. Amin betrayed his sponsor, Milton Obote, Mugabe betrayed his fellow nationalist, Joshua Nkomo at the end of their joint but separated struggle against white rule. Amin depended on the support of the military throughout his rule; Mugabe, coming towards the end of his, has to rely on the loyalty of his military chiefs. Both leaders came into power on a wave of popularity - Amin because of the unpopularity of Obote and Mugabe because Zimbabweans were tired of war. Amin ruled by whim because he could not understand the business of government, Mugabe, after his first decade in office came to rule by whim, perverting and manipulating government for his own ends. One most remarkable similarity betweent the two is encapsulated in this quote by Martin Meredith from a defecting Ugandan Finance Minister: ` The government is a one-man show. Impossible decisions are taken by General Amin which ministers are expected to implement. The decisions bear no relationship to the country's available resources'. Another interesting parallel, `When budgets ran out, Amin routinely ordered the central bank to print more currency to `solve' the problem'. Amin's attempt to regain popularity by turning on his Asian population, the bedrock of the country's economic prosperity can be compared with Mugabe's turning on white farmers for similar reasons and with a similar result. Disaster. As in Zimbabwe today, the hopeful African population benefited little while fat cats grew fatter. Strange that in both countries applause was received from other African countries. Meredith concludes `However cruel, capricious and brutal, many of Amin's actions may have seemed in the West, in much of Africa he was regarded as something of a hero. By expelling the Asian community he was seen to be fearlessly asserting African interests'. Sad. But one great difference here lies not in the nature of the leadership but in the nature of the majority of Zimbabweans. They do not applaud their living tyrant. Even his cronies are surreptitiously working at his removal from power. Blood is unlikely, in this writer's opinion, to flow. And that is the great difference between the two countries: not their leaders' destructive policies, but the nature of their people. That is my only remaining hope for Zimbabwe. Her people seem determined, at whatever the cost, to abjure bloodletting. They know it cannot solve their problems.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

That Scottish Idi Amin

So the the spectre of Idi Amin has been raised yet again. I have just read a report on the making of a feature film in Uganda, presenting this latest reincarnation of Africa's number one dead despot - due for release on Friday, January 12. Titled `The Last King of Scotland' and directed by Kevin MacDonald (there's a good old Scottish name) the report has brought one pretty depressing observation to light: Stephen Robinson was rightly perturbed to discover that `The visitor to Uganda soon finds that those who were not directly targeted by his henchmen speak of Amin with a certain pride...After Nelson Mandela, Amin is the most famous contemporary African, and Ugandans seem rather proud that he made their country known to the rest of the world, albeit for the wrong reasons`. I suppose the estimated 300 000 deaths of his countrymen under Amin's despotic rule, coupled with his shocking treatment of his Indian citizens brands him as possibly the most infamous African of modern times. But what has prompted me to ruminate over his history is that I believe Robert Mugabe is giving Idi Amin some strong competition for the premier position among African despots.
Fellow African leaders whose performance is less than salutary are hanging on to a blind pride in Mugabe's performance. Overlooked is his responsibility for the killing, under his rule, of a mere 20,000 fellow Zimbabweans who were dwellers in Matabeleland and who spoke in that Southern part of the country the only African language other than Mugabe's majority MaShona people. If he lives long enough to stand trial for his crimes against humanity, the details of all this will no doubt fascinate future filmgoers. But for now, he and his cronies are still hanging tenaciously on to power while millions of innocent men, women and children, trapped in once-prospering Zimbabwe, face possible death by attrition. The majority throughout Zimbabwe are threatened with rampant disease and, if nothing changes, the prospect of slow starvation. Only because about a quarter of the population have chosen to flee to places where they can earn sufficient cash to remit to families - who would probably die if left unassisted - is there no film footage of Ethiopian-style skeletal babies and stick figured mothers in today's Zimbabwe. And of course there has been no blood-letting for two decades. That would get the world's attention. Mugabe is no buffoon. At a few weeks off 83 he is still the articulate, even eloquent and cunning politician who came from nowhere to head the guerrillas who caused the collapse of white rule in Rhodesia. Yes I know about his past. I consider myself something of of an authority on the details, having been closely acquainted with many of the most worthy of his contemporaries. He was raised a Catholic but like the despotic Hitler, for one example, he had severe psychological problems arising out of his personal health problems and family tragedies and setbacks. Future film-makers will be free to put whatever spin they choose on the details of all that but I am sure that the story of his destruction of a country he claimed to set free will set a whole lot of hares running to prove that he has outdone Amin in the top-despot stakes.
I have more to say about the Amin story as described in the Telegraph report, but not in this blog.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

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