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A 'cheeky little devil' leads rights fight in Zimbabwe
Celia W. Dugger, International Herald Tribune
October 18, 2008

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/17/africa/profile.php

Jenni Williams, Zimbabwe's hell-raising practitioner of nonviolent civil disobedience, was hauled from a Bulawayo jail cell during one of her 33 arrests for leading street protests against President Robert Mugabe's rule.

In a tiny office, she accused the baton-wielding police of assaulting her.

When the two officers in the room tauntingly told her she was a liar, she turned around, dropped her pants and showed them the bruises on her backside, recalled her lawyer, Perpetua Dube, who was watching.

"You can't bare your bottom to me!" one of the officers shouted, threatening to charge her with indecent exposure.

Williams - a spitfire rebel with an appreciation of the absurd - subsequently described herself in an e-mail to friends as sitting on the softest cushions she could find and "giggling in between wincing in pain."

As of Thursday, she is back in a Bulawayo jail cell yet again - this time for leading women in a march on government buildings to demand food for the starving and progress on the formation of a power-sharing government with the political opposition.

During years when millions of her compatriots have fled the country - among them her mother, husband and three children, now in their 20s - Williams, 46, a stocky high school dropout, has lived underground in Zimbabwe, moving from safe house to safe house as she and her colleagues built a formidable protest movement among the church women of Harare and Bulawayo.

"Zimbabwe is my home, so why should I go?" she asked defiantly. "We have made a pact as a family. I am supposed to prepare Zimbabwe so everyone can come home."

Dozens of times over the past five years, she has led seamstresses and maids, vegetable sellers and hair dressers onto the streets in Zimbabwe's struggle for democracy. They sing gospel songs, carry brooms to sweep the government clean (a figurative gesture, mostly) and bang on pots empty of food.

On May 28th, Williams and 13 other marchers were arrested in the capital, Harare, as they demanded an end to political violence after a disputed election, in which Mugabe's enforcers beat thousands of opposition supporters before a June presidential runoff that pitted him against the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

The police said Williams and her fellow protesters had promoted public violence when they handed out fliers that accused Mugabe of "unleashing violence on voters."

And Williams, listed as accused number one, faced an additional charge of causing disaffection among security forces. In a newsletter, the organization she leads, Women of Zimbabwe Arise!, known as Woza, told soldiers and police officers to refrain from beating people, a statement the police charged was "likely to induce the members to withhold their services or to commit breaches" of discipline.

"Hear us loud and clear - your leaders may get generous retirement packages, but you will be left to face the justice of the law and the anger of the people," the newsletter warned.

Williams and a fellow leader, Magodonga Mahlangu, 35, were held at Chikurubi prison in Harare for 37 days. In court papers, the police singled out Williams as a leader of great influence.

"She has got many sympathizers all over the country" willing to harbor her, the police said in arguing against bail. "If accused is released, she is likely to go into hiding."

And that, of course, is exactly what she did. Now, she and Mahlangu, an indomitable pair of organizers, have chosen their moment to go back onto the streets and into the jail cells. Each time she marches, Williams said, she handles the fear - and the jackhammer thumping of her heart - with deep breathing.

"Woza's been a huge thorn in the government's side," said John Worswick, a ruddy-faced farmer driven from his land in the country's chaotic land-reform program who now heads Justice for Agriculture, an alliance of displaced commercial farmers and farm workers. "If we force Mugabe out, it will be the women who are his undoing. Jenni's rattled Mugabe more than anyone else."

Williams's trouble-making lineage stretches back to her grandfather, Raymond MacConville, who was active in the Irish Republican Army. He escaped arrest in his homeland and wound up a gold prospector in the British colony of southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. There he took as his common-law wife an Ndebele woman, Bahlezi Moyo, who became the family matriarch and bore him three children, among them Margaret, Jenni's mother.

"A cheeky little devil, she was," Margaret Daunt, 74 and living in London, said of Williams. "When she was younger, if anyone crossed her path, like her sisters or brothers, she had a ferocious Irish temper. I don't know how the police have arrested her without her lashing back. She's vowed this nonviolence thing."

Williams fell into politics with the onset of Zimbabwe's political crisis in 2000. After a referendum to give Mugabe greater executive powers was defeated with the votes of trade unionists and the financial backing of white farmers, he encouraged veterans of Zimbabwe's liberation war to violently invade large white-owned farms, setting off a collapse of the country's agricultural economy.

Williams, doing public relations for the Commercial Farmers Union, began speaking out about the human rights abuses, as well as the fact that many of the choicest farms were being given to Mugabe's cronies.

In 2002, a year that saw Mugabe defeat Tsvangirai in an election many independent observers believe was stolen, Williams and Sheba Dube-Phiri, chairwoman of the League of Women Voters, who has since died, started Woza. The movement was nurtured in the sanctuary of churches - Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist and Apostolic.

"The men had failed us," said Mahlangu. "The crisis in Zimbabwe had been going on and on. The solutions discussed weren't bread and butter issues, just power."

In the years since, Woza's leaders have followed a cardinal rule: they put their own bodies on the line, a risk Williams says the leaders of Zimbabwe's political opposition have too often failed to take.

"We will not tell someone to do what we are not willing to do ourselves," she said.

Some 2,500 of Woza's 60,000 members have braved the country's fetid, overcrowded jails - but Williams said many more must join them.

"Removing a dictator from power is a numbers game," she said.

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