Voice of the voiceless

Who of us has heard of Wilf Mbanga?  Who has heard of Liu Xiaobo? It is all too probable that more of us have heard of Paris Hilton.

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Should we be concerned? Probably. You see, Paris Hilton is, at the very least, a self indulgent and quite irresponsible individual, concerned with self.

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Wilf and Liu Xiaobo are caring human beings, concerned with selflessness.

Wilf is the editor of the Zimbabwean, a newspaper that is dedicated to fulfill a mandate to be the “voice of the voiceless”. It is terribly hard work, with little material reward and exposes him to all kinds of opprobrium and personal risk at the hands of the powerful elite, its camp followers and spin-doctors. When you stand up for truth and justice even your own family may desert you.

Liu Xiaobo is a dissident who has been  awarded  the Nobel Peace Prize for standing up for social justice in China. For his trouble, the Chinese government has rewarded him with an 11 year prison term.

Do we care? Probably. Most human beings abhor injustice and all forms of unfairness. Most feel revulsion at the despotism and cruelty meted out by the tyrants of this world.

Do we do anything about that which we loath and condemn? Probably not. It is bothersome. It is inconvenient. It is draining. It is just too hard. Life is hard enough already. There are just too many other daily challenges that occupy us.

So, by and large, we look the other way … albeit after first muttering angrily in self-righteous tones about “Mad Bob”, “the useless UN”, the horrors of Rwanda and other instances of gross human rights abuse.

That’s it! We have done our share. What else can we do? That is the full extent of our selflessness! WOW!

The world moves on. Despots and tyrants remain secure to plan and continue their evil ways. More human beings are butchered, raped, starved and denied their rights. Nothing changes! Its business as usual.

And that is how it was in my own country of birth … Zimbabwe. For many years we were aware of disturbing trends such as the antics of the Central Intelligence Organization (“CIO”), Mugabe’s version of the German Gestapo. We knew about people disappearing. We heard about human bones in mine shafts. We knew about budding leaders dying in road crashes.

In all this, we simple acquiesced. That acquiescence eventually assumed the character of connivance and collusion when we heard about Gukurahundi, the systemic killing of some 20, 000 members of the Ndebele minority tribe.

Put differently, the reason why the number killed reached genocidal levels had much to do with our shared culture of “looking the other way”, not being bothered, not wanting to “stand up” … because of indifference, preoccupation or fear. It left tyrannical culture and mode unchecked.

What we did not understand was that, remaining dumb in the face of the victimization of others, meant that we too were already victims, i.e., divested of the right to free speech and association.  As Mugabe claimed more power, by our silence we accepted more powerlessness!

This has since been emphatically proved. The day of reckoning came. We have paid the price, and are paying the price, for our indifference; for being the sheep on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Our self-imposed voicelessness has had terrible consequences.

For those still at home it is a daily grind just to survive. By 2007 Zimbabwe had the lowest life expectancy in the world. See –

 http://hdrstats.undp.org/en/indicators/92.html of the Human Development Report.

For the rest of us, who have fled into the Zimbabwean Diaspora, we exist as refugees, divested of our full dignity as human beings, beholden and grateful to those who accord us any degree of equality.

Some of us have economic security. Others have very little. Others have been burnt alive and thrown off trains. Mostly though, we scrounge around just for acceptance of who we are, trying hard not to be treated as a category.

Selflessness is no longer a matter of choice.

So can we please salute Wilf Mbanga and Liu Xiaobo.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)