Yes I am asking if there is someone on this planet of ours who knows what is to be African. May they please step forward and fix the collapse we are calling Zimbabwe.
Apparently it is plain to Mugabe and his sympathisers both within his boundaries and without that every mortal who dares critique his administration is a puppet of Brown, or Bush. Even academicians on this dear continent of ours are too quick to co-relate critiquing Mugabe with being mentally colonised.
Just today in the demonstration of his ‘African-ness’ Mugabe has refused entry into Zimbabwe, Kofi Annan, Graca Machel, and Jimmy Carter on their mission to have a firsthand appraisal of the humanitarian condition that is increasingly getting out of hand to the indifference of Mugabe.
Is this really how far somebody can suffer in the quest of defending one’s land? It is plain that the land issue in Zimbabwe has deliberately been taken advantage of by Mugabe. Is the killing and brutalization of the opposition right from their leader to the least known opposition member on the pot-holed and sewage flooded streets of Harare, whose impoverished body lies under an unmarked grave, after being silenced by the ‘War Veterans’ that refuse to retire, a way of defending rights for ancestral land? One thing human beings always ensure prevails in every complexity of life is the balance between the means and ends of an action. When no chord can be struck between the two we immediately and reflexively push the moral alarm button. What had violence to do with the re-claiming of the land in the first place? Can a whole government with the police and army at its disposal indeed fail to ‘forcefully’ evict farmers from their lands? Why should in any case redistribution of land, a government policy be undertaken by youthful and militant ‘war veterans’? How different is such uncivil conduct from that of the colonizer who acted similarly? Is the violent re-taking back of the land a correction of the immorality displayed by the coloniser or outdoing him in causing unnecessary pain?
I take pride in the African people except in their leaders who occur to me to be a lot of people who have no distinct values to defend. I pity them. To them telling a fellow leader who is busy killing the people he is supposed to protect is unpatriotic to Africa. Telling someone no matter what his previous honour and heroism that he ought to keep his machete wielding hands off innocent lives whose political ideologies differ from his, is disrespectful.
Mugabe has indeed a heroic past. No one can take it away from him. But it should be emphasized that we are living in the present. The people of Zimbabwe deserve better. Food is what they want over Mugabe’s heroism. Basic security is what they yearn for and not defence of Mugabe’s legacy. These people have a present to confront and a future to shape. Stories and reminders of Mugabe’s patriotism to Africa will be among the irrelevant things they need to help them limp forward.
When people are tortured and killed for being opposition members (for a puppet party or not) for sure it is not about human rights, it is not about the West, it not about puppets, neither is it about the IMF or World Bank. It is neither African nor for Zimbabweans only. It is about that which was there before men came to know civilization, the sanctity of human life. It is sacred.
If there is someone out there African enough, as African as Mugabe, as African as his Southern African Development Community (minus Botswana) leaders, can they come and tell Mugabe what we ‘puppets’ have taken to be a lifetime time truth: no man no matter how great has a license to violate the sacredness of human life no matter how poor they are. All ‘puppets’ knew this before their first lesson on their way to civilization.
