Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Robert Gabriel Mugabe surrenders

At 17:52 hours this 21 November 2017 BBC interrupted its Hard Talk interview with my friend Dr Ibbotson Mandaza to flash the news of the resignation of Robert Gabriel Mugabe as President of Zimbabwe, the country of my birth and upbringing.
Thereafter all the news channels provided wall-to-wall video and audio footage of our people euphorically celebrating Mugabe’s demise in the streets of Harare, our capital city. 
I was not moved to share in this euphoria, as welcoming as the news was. I have been overwhelmed by feelings and thoughts steeped in memories … really, really bad memories.
The first is that of my school friend, a boy genius and brilliant guitarist, Stanford Abrahams, who disappeared in the hands of then Prime Minister Mugabe’s CIO. So did a wonderful member of our community, Yousf Carim, and a bright young lad named Rodman.
I remember being solicited by a really beautiful Zimbabwean lady at a Botswana hotel who had to leave and talk to a man who had just arrived with that look of hopelessness that we have become accustomed to. The Hotel manager then approached me and explained, with tears in his eyes, that the lady and the man were husband and wife. Both were graduates but had resorted to the wife having to prostitute herself in order to ensure the survival of their family back home.
I think of how my wife and I had to uproot our family in 1992 and thereafter work in three different countries, as second-class citizens, because our homeland had degraded to a hell hole.
I think of how our community has been decimated by the necessity of most of its members having had to leave and seek refuge, sanctuary and hope in countries across this planet.
I think of my son in Auckland, Zealand, my Daughter in Canada and friends all so far, far away.
I think of my 6 goats, the progeny of 6 goats that were given to me by a great spiritualist, named Fuyane, who had subjected me to the lungisa ritual after my birth. They were bayoneted to death together with my extended Ndebele family at Lupane during Mugabe’s Gukurahundi genocide.
I think of my sham interview at the Judicial Services Commission of South Africa where I was denied basics of procedural fairness and made the victim of outrageous lies on account of the ever present xenophobic undercurrent that insidiously infuses interactions in foreign lands that we find ourselves in.
I think of how Pam and I have suffered pernicious discrimination and xenophobia despite being at the very top of our professions.
I think of how we lost all our savings and investments.
In my mind's eye, I see that little dog lying on the body of its owner during the brutalization of farmers as victims of ethnic land cleansing.
I think of all those of our people who were cremated alive and thrown off trains in the so called xenophobic violence of free South Africa.
Most of all I think of how we have been stripped of our innate dignity as human beings even though we are born of one of the most richly endowed countries on this planet. Despite being human beings of exceptional talent our people have been reduced to apologists, refugees, beggars … international migrants … ever grateful for just being treated as human. 
My mind just continues to play out like a horror movie …. 
The greatest crime that Robert Mugabe committed, apart from genocide, was stripping our people of their dignity. 
As I watch our people, delirious with joy, I wonder if they will lose that tinge of hopelessness in their eyes that has been with them for too long. 
Like me. Robert Mugabe, was schooled in the loving way of Jesus Christ ... and yet chose the way of Satan.
I am smothered in the darkness of the past, struggling to see the light.
God forgive me but I really cannot help hoping that his demise as President is the first step to him soon burning in Hell.

Sunday, November 19, 2017

The Mugabe Dynamic … in summary

As much as our people detested racism in Rhodesia very few were interested in an armed struggle and there was a huge appreciation of what White folk had to offer. That is why our people became by far the most skilled in Africa and for a good chunk of the planet. In addition our people had a nervous scepticism about the Communist/Socialist ideology.
That is why most did not join the armed struggle even though this is now an inconvenient truth.
What Ian Douglas Smith did was to recklessly squander the deep-seated respect
 their goodwill that our people had for Whites. Time and time again he was warned that his ideological commitment to White supremacy would guarantee an eventual takeover by a Mugabe type leader.
Bishop Abel Muzorerwa was essentially a man of peace desperately trying to reconcile all or people to a road map of peace, goodwill and brotherly love. Our people did respond en masse to his culture and, for a while, the UANC was a vehicle for delivery to freedom.
However our people did an overnight switch in 1980 from Muzorewa’s UANC to Mugabe’s ZANU-PF because psychologically Mugabe presented as the counterpoint to Ian Smith’s racist ideology of White dominance. As said, Smith and his racist supporters had recklessly squandered the incredible good will of our people.
Mugabe made a good start and was genuinely committed to reconciliation as regards the bad past. Eloquent proof of this was the appointment of none other than Ian Smith’s General Peter Walls as our first Army Commander.
However, when his army committed the Gukurahundi genocide in 1983 Mugabe was hopelessly compromised once he found that he could do nothing about the perpetrators.
From that moment Zimbabwe was a de facto military State and its operational mode and culture proved this with increasing intensity.
Things deteriorated for Mugabe until 2008 when he and his Party lost the election.
As Zimbabwe had been a de facto military State from 1983 the military leaders declined allegiance to Morgan Tsvangirai and his winning MDC Party as this would have meant a change to a democratic State.
Tsvangirai's problem was that he was from a labour background. This was a BIG problem for African leaders, as they had not forgotten how another labour nobody, Frederick Jacob Titus Chiluba, came from nowhere to unseat the elder statesman of African leaders, Dr Kenneth David Buchizya Kaunda.
Right there constitutionalism and democracy in Zimbabwe were comprehensively challenged.
Right there SADC and the African Union were also comprehensively challenged.
Right there, led by Thabo Mbeki, the SADC and the AU comprehensively failed our people.
Instead of standing up for our people the SADC and the AU, led by President "no crisis" Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, implemented something called “quiet diplomacy” and forced a diabolical “GNU solution” that guaranteed that Mugabe and ZANU-PF retained power.
That solution was as much a "packaged military coup" as is what is occurring right now. Both apparently place the military above the Constitution.
Today the military have not so much staged a coup as simply exercised its status as our de facto government as endorsed by the SADC and the AU in 2008.
So it was crass hypocrisy for President Jacob Zuma to turn on the military and preach “constitutionalism”.
South Africa, the SADC, and the AU, tore up “constitutionalism” in 2008.
Ironically, we have Grace Mugabe to thank for having triggered this situation with her diabolical machinations to hijack our country into the lap of a Mugabe dynasty.
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