Living Zimbabwe

Tag: Politics

Grace without Mugabe?

Once upon a time, Grace Marufu found herself in a position where she was lucky enough to work as a secretary in the President’s office. This then secretary caught President Mugabe’s attention with the encounter progressing into a romantic relationship. The relationship developed even further as the two went on to have children and the couple eventually got married in 1996 and Grace officially became Mrs. Mugabe.

Being the president’s wife, she has not managed to escape the media spotlight. But, over the years she has managed to get herself into the spotlight through actions of her own. As you can imagine, these moments have been somewhat unglamorous as they have included highlighting extravagant shopping, moments of attacking journalists and dodgy business deals being exposed.

Amai Mugabe is back in spotlight as she was recently conferred with a PhD from the University of Zimbabwe and has also immersed herself in frontline politics as she was recently nominated to head the Zanu-PF Women’s League.

Many women around the African continent who have made their way into the upper echelons of politics usually have a story of personal achievement behind them that has propelled them into leadership.

Now, imagine a scenario where we take Amai Dr Grace Mugabe back to the time when she was a secretary in the president’s office. Imagine the President had not noticed her and she continued life as who she was. She would not have been a Mugabe and everything associated with it would not have been part of her life over the last two and bit decades.

So now we have Grace stripped of any close association to President Mugabe and still married to her first husband.

If all the layers are peeled back and you are to look at who she is, and all that she has done, what is it that would define who she is today? Would she be the Grace of today who has a PhD and also the woman heading the Zanu-PF Women’s League?

Have a think about it for a moment…… If her life hadn’t taken the turn it did some twenty plus years ago, where would Grace be without Mugabe?

Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

October 8, 2014
Showing the True Face of Zimbabwe and Africa

I visited the continent of Africa for the first time in 1993, and like most Americans of my generation, I arrived with a mind filled with misconceptions. I’d grown up being bombarded by the distorted cinematic portrayals (most notably the Tarzan movies, which weren’t even filmed in Africa, but in Mexico), popular media focus on the continent’s problems, National Geographic magazine with its exotic animals and people, and a lack of content in the world history courses I’d taken up to that time. Africa, ‘the Dark Continent’, was terra incognita in my mind – a monolithic place of poverty and war. Even the so-called Africa Hands at the State Department where I worked at the time, tended to refer to ‘Africa’ as if it was somehow a single state rather than a diverse collection of cultures and people.

My first African ‘home’ was Sierra Leone, where I lived for three years while I was assigned to the American Embassy in Freetown. The country was in the throes of a violent civil war and ruled by a military dictatorship. Despite these conditions, though, I quickly discovered that it was far from a total lost cause. In the first place, the country, as small as it was, was amazingly diverse. Sure, there was violence, hunger, disease, poverty, and corruption. But, there was also resilience, love, laughter, and a desire to live a better life. The terrain wasn’t the steaming jungles of the Tarzan films. There were mountains, plains, and forests. Driving through some of the villages in the northwest region of Sierra Leone reminded me of some of Georgia or Alabama’s back country roads.

I’ve been an avid photographer since my teens, but I didn’t take my camera with me to Sierra Leone in 1993 – much to my regret. I would love to have been able to document my travels throughout the country. I got that chance decades later. In 2009, the State Department assigned me to Zimbabwe, another country in turmoil. There was no war, but disease, political violence, and economic instability affected most of the country’s population. I’d only been in southern Africa once before – I visited Johannesburg, South Africa in 1994 right after the end of apartheid – and only for a few days. So, I was unprepared for Zimbabwe. The briefings had led me to expect gun-wielding soldiers on every street corner and children with swollen bellies playing in sewage. The country had – and still has – its problems, but nothing like that. I found that you could walk the streets of Harare or Bulawayo and not even be aware of the political or human rights problems. They were still there, but existing alongside positive things as well – things that seldom found their way into the international media coverage of the country.

I traveled the length and breadth of Zimbabwe during my three-year stay; always with my camera handy. I was determined to document the many faces of the country. Since other media were doing a good job of documenting the negative, though, I emphasized the other side of the coin. Smiling faces, fantastic landscapes, diverse wildlife – all showing Zimbabwe’s potential, if only its leadership would focus more on developing true economic security for the population. I’ve been a freelance writer and photographer for decades, and while I lived there, I did a number of articles on Zimbabwe’s tourism potential, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to show the world that Africa is not a ‘single’ place, but like the world’s other continents, a place of immense diversity. A place that has both good and bad, beauty and ugliness. I’ve done two photo-journals focusing on Zimbabwe: African Places: A Photographic Journey Through Zimbabwe and southern Africa, which I published in June 2012, a few months before I returned to the United States to retire from government service. My most recent, A Portrait of Africa, was published in January 2014, and while it includes photos from other areas (Senegal, Cameroon, South Africa, and Tanzania), as with the first book, the bulk of the photos were taken during my travels throughout Zimbabwe.

It is my wish that those reading A Portrait of Africa, whether African or non-African, will come away with an enhanced appreciation of the diversity and potential of the continent that is the birthplace of humanity – that they will be able to see beyond the popular images to the reality that lies just beneath the skin. What I hope everyone reading this book will see is that there is still hope – hope for the African continent, hope for Zimbabwe, and hope for us all.

This has been a submission by Charles Ray.
You can connect with Charles via the following: http://charlesaray.blogspot.com, http://twitter.com/charlieray45, http://www.facebook.com/CharlieRay45.
You too can become a Citizen Journalist by submitting your story here: Citizen Journalism by Living Zimbabwe
The views expressed in the article are those of the author and not necessarily Living Zimbabwe.

February 17, 2014
10 Years After Henry Olonga & Andy Flower’s Black Armband Protest, Zimbabwe Is Still Mourning The Death of Democracy

The world on Thursday commemorated former Zimbabwe cricket captain Andrew Flower and the first black cricketer to play for Zimbabwe, Henry Olonga’s Black armband protest against the death of democracy in Zimbabwe. On the 10th of February 2003, when Zimbabwe, co-hosting the cricket world cup with South Africa and Kenya were preparing for their match with Namibia on an overcast day at Harare Sports Club, two of their influential players, wicket-keeper Andy Flower and fast bowler Olonga took to the field wearing black armbands in a show of no confidence against Mugabe’s ZANU-PF regime.

At the time, Zimbabwe was going through a bad patch both economically and politically, a patch that would last for the entire first decade of the new millennium. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, led by weapon-totting war veterans were terrorizing white farmers, or the few that were left, invading all the white owned farms across the country. The chaotic and highly racist land-redistribution program, meant to address the injustices of the past when the British settlers took over the land belonging to the indigenous people, was highly condemned and deemed unconstitutional by the courts. The land reform triggered an economic melt-down for the once prosperous bread basket of the region. The program in itself was a gross violation of human rights and to this day, the perpetrators of that dark period are still to be brought to book.

White farmers were given ultimatums to leave their properties within days. Some did not even get the chance to pack before the ZANU-PF youths invaded their land, burning some alive, some shot in front of their children and wives whilst some who resisted were arrested and tortured in the police cells. Property rights of these farmers were violated and these invasions were only targeted against white farmers, making the whole program wholly racist. White farmers were accused of supporting the new opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and to drum up support for the black majority who owned barely a quarter of the total agricultural land in their country, Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF went on a massive farm invasion spree that brought the country to its knees.

Zimbabwe, a once stable and industrial power-house second only to South Africa in the region started falling dismally. The West condemned events that were happening in Zimbabwe. In the elections that were held in 2001 and 2002 for parliament and the presidential election respectively, there were massive irregularities and vote rigging that cost Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC victory in the elections. Political activists were arrested and killed whilst the rule of law was ignored making Zimbabwe’s elections a farce and thus triggering the death of democracy, or the lack thereof.

Speaking on BBC5 radio on Thursday, Andy Flower, the current director of the England cricket team, revealed what triggered the events of that fateful day. Back at the time, it was almost a taboo for one to go against the Robert Mugabe regime as you would most likely disappear or rot in jail. After seeing the death of the agricultural sector with former white-owned farms being reduced to nothing but a typical African savanna, Flower was prompted by a former friend who had lost his farm to take a stand. With Zimbabwe hosting the cricket world cup, all eyes were on Zimbabwe and that was more than a platform for him and Olonga to show and reveal to the world the death of democracy in Zimbabwe.

Flower spoke to Henry Olonga, who shared the new ball then with Heath Streak, as he wanted the protest to be led by two people of different races, one white and one black. That brought the balance to the protest, as it brought two men, one black and white, who shared the same views and who were also suffering from the Mugabe regime. One man who was in the thick of things with the plans for the protest was Senator David Coltart, the current minister of Education, Sports and Culture, who was then a human rights lawyer. The plans for the black armband protest were only known to the three and those in the background with the whole of the Zimbabwe cricket team unaware until the day of the match against Namibia.

It was only until moments before the match when the two issued out their statement to the media. The media statement contained, ”We believe that if we remain silent that will be taken as a sign that either we do not care or we condone what is happening in Zimbabwe. We believe that it is important to stand up for what is right. In doing so we are making a silent plea to those responsible to stop the abuse of human rights in Zimbabwe.”

Recalling on those events ten years ago, both Flower and Olonga have no regrets of their actions. What they did ten years ago was a brave and noble thing, facing and exposing the monster when everyone was scared and just looking at events in Zimbabwe from a spectator’s view. Olonga and Flower stood up for the voiceless, the oppressed and for all the people of Zimbabwe. They put everything before them considering that such an act in itself was next to committing high treason. Three weeks after the cricket world cup, Henry Olonga received death threats and relocated to England, where Andy Flower also fled to and continued with his cricketing career.

In Zimbabwe then, as it is now, democracy is still six feet under. Elections are still a farce and human rights violations are still an everyday experience. State-sponsored violence and target based violence are still the biggest cancer in Zimbabwe and something that will continue in this country unless we change and head towards democracy. So many people have died, lost their possessions and fled Zimbabwe because of what they believed in. We have come through a long way since the two led the way on that cricket ground those many years ago.

Whilst some might say that Olonga was used by the whites to get back at the ZANU-PF regime for their lost possessions, the truth is that Olonga represented all the black people in Zimbabwe that were suffering from the chaotic regime of Robert Mugabe. It is not only the whites that lost out when their farms were taken but the whole country. Zimbabwe is an agro based economy that depended on agriculture to support its economy and with the death of that sector of the economy, everyone suffered. The thousands of farm workers lost their jobs, the country lost revenues from the agricultural exports and in return the country’s economy fell.

Politically such a move isolated Zimbabwe. Western nations put Zimbabwe on sanctions and everyone was affected as Zimbabwe was reduced from the bread basket of the region to the begging bowl of the world. As we remember the Black Armband revolt of ten years ago, we acknowledge the efforts of these two who put themselves on the line for the rights of the millions of Zimbabweans. That act was more than a stroll onto the pitch of the Harare Sports Club, it was great courage and bravery considering that the man they were revolting against lived and still do, next door at the State house, a stone’s throw from Zimbabwe’s home of cricket. Was that revolt enough? Zimbabweans only hope that the elections penciled for this year will complete the dream that Henry Olonga, Andy Flower, MDC activists and other democratic activists started.

David Hwangwa is a Human Rights Activist and Polical Commentator

This has been a submission by David Hwangwa .
You can connect with David Hwangwa via the following: http://davidhwangwa.blogspot.com/.
You too can become a Citizen Journalist by submitting your story here: Citizen Journalism by Living Zimbabwe
The views expressed in the article are those of the author and not necessarily Living Zimbabwe.

February 12, 2013