Back to Index

Medals for conquering the people
Chenjerai Hove
July 01, 2005

http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/1-july-2005/presidential-medals.html

I am sitting in a safe foreign country, having left my cruel, beloved homeland many years ago. I could not stand the cruelty at that time, so I decided to leave. Now I sit here, watching President Robert Gabriel Mugabe, sitting with Grace Mugabe, his wife, in an open Rolls Royce, made in England, the country Mr Mugabe hates most. And he
is opening a parliament, and going to make a crucial speech. The officials of parliament, including the judges, are paraded, looking more English than the English judges themselves in wigs whose origin no one knows. And ministers of government are dressed in immaculate suits as police mount an armed guard of honour.

Outside, just kilometres outside, children sleep in the open, with tears on their faces, and hunger in their bodies, forsaken by the political leaders who are in this sham parade. Leaders who specialize in impeccable English to describe their own power minus the will of the poor and homeless.

All so British. And Mr Mugabe himself, with so many medals on his chest I cannot figure out how he got them and for what achievements. When I seriously think of it, I last saw the same parade of military medals on one Idi Amin of Uganda many years ago. I could not hesitate to think that the medals were well-deserved. The reason for awarding himself so many of them: conquering his own people. Mr Mugabe has indeed, done that, and he is prepared to do more and appear more like a British general than an African President.

Outside Parliament, I saw eyes looking at it all in disbelief. They could not believe that this is the man who had come into their aspirations as a liberator, and now has employed all the dictatorial rules and techniques in the technology of torturing people and ideas. The people were over-awed by it all. I am also over-awed by the whole spectacle.

A little further on in the pictures racing through my mind, I hear the voices of children who cannot go to school anymore because what they called home has been demolished under the orders of this man who calls himself an African liberator. I can see the many pictures in the world's newspapers describing the sorrow on the faces and in the hearts of stunned children who have been left to die in the cold winter nights of the cities of Zimbabwe.

And as a poet, I cannot avoid hearing the sounds of the bulldozers as the President justifies the cruelty of his government, the sad tears which wear so heavily on the hearts of those who have, for the first time, been called 'filth'. Under Mr Mugabe's government, the people struggling to make ends meet are now 'filth', 'Operation Murambatsvina' (Operation Reject the Filth).

For the first time in Zimbabwe, the people have become 'filth'. But if there is any filth to talk about, it should be the filth of the ideas and economic policies Mr Mugabe has stood for all these years. The homeless have been increasing so rapidly in the past 10 years that any sensitive and humane political leader would have asked himself a few serious questions in self-evaluation. Apparently, Mr Mugabe is not in the habit of self-examination. He is a demi-god who has never, in 25 years of misrule, admitted making a mistake.

Chilean poet, Publo Neruda once wrote:
'come and see
come and see, the blood
come and see the blood in the streets.'

Neruda was talking of the deaths in the cities of Chile. And we thought it was far out there, in South America. But how wrong we were and how wrong those who thought our oppressive political regime had ended with the demise of Ian Smith. Come and see the bulldozers in our streets. Come and see the armed police demolish houses and shacks where people live. Come and see the tears in the streets. Come and see the police smiling, demolishing their mothers' homes, their sisters' homes.

The cruelty of it all. In the sixties when I was a young boy, I saw bulldozers push houses to rubble as Ian Smith claimed to be bringing a road through the village. At that time we knew that Mr Smith was not one of us. We did not expect any better. He could not inflict that kind of pain on his 'white' compatriots. For us, we were happy to remain alive. He had no obligation at all to us.

In the end, we have all been declared rubble, filth, by a government which does not want to be given lessons on democracy and human rights by anyone in the world. That is African democracy, the Mugabe way. That is what powerlessness means in a 'free' country which was 'liberated' by one so cruel.

The cruelty of choosing winter to demolish houses where people live is amazing, inflicting so much pain and despair on a people already shattered by their betrayed dreams. The sadism is incomprehensible. Punishing the people when it hurts most.

Our country experienced this kind of tyranny during Ian Smith's time. But Mr Smith never lied to us that he loved us. Mr Mugabe lied to us that he was giving us dignity and love. We praised his ascent to power because we thought our dignity had arrived. But no, we discover now that we are on our own, with police knocking on our doors at midnight, teargassing us for trying to survive the harsh economic conditions imposed on us by Mr Mugabe's rule. All we are supposed to do is to sit home and wait to die.

Zimbabweans are blamed all over the world for being too subdued, too well-mannered, just accepting anything without protest. Maybe those who say that about us are right. We are too tolerant, and we only burst at the extreme moment. And Mr Mugabe is making every effort to create that extreme moment. Mr Smith too, was like that, claiming all the time: 'My Africans are the happiest in the world.' He had lost a sense of reality and I have no doubt that President Mugabe has followed suit.

Does the government of Mr Mugabe go to sleep comfortably when children are facing death in the open? And if they do, as Leslie Gwindi, of the imposed Harare City Commission says, then where is the rule of conscience? The rule of conscience creates justice. But if power makes leaders' consciences decay so fast, 25 years, then Zimbabweans are now in hell.

I urge all people of dignity and conscience, writers, journalists, police officers, to refuse to have our dignity taken away so easily. We need to fight to get our dignity back. We have no guns. Our guns are the voices and public forums, which we should all use in order to reclaim our dignity back. I believe we can no longer take our dignity for granted. Our hearts and souls have bled enough under a government which has totally forgotten its moral and spiritual responsibility.

*Chenjerai Hove is a Zimbabwean writer living in Europe

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP