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What language do we speak?
Chenjerai Hove
May 31, 2007

http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/viewinfo.cfm?linkcategoryid=13&linkid=18&id=4576

'Elections are a time for verbal abuse and excessive profanity by the President'

Many years ago, as I worked for Mambo Press in Gweru, I had the privilege to meet Benson Ndemera, then Governor of the Midlands. That was the time of the 'dissidents', and I was innocently coming from Ascot Stadium where Dynamos had played a draw with Pisa Pisa, Gweru United.

There had been so much violence in Mutapa Township that when I drove into the township with my two children to collect our domestic worker, we were besieged by a massive crowd of youths, threatening to kill us.

I explained that I had come to collect the woman who took care of the children. 'Is she Shona or Ndebele, and if she is Shona, what is she doing staying in a Ndebele township?' they asked, armed with sticks and pangas. 'No, she is Ndebele,' I said, humiliated in front of my children who sat terrified in the back seat of the car.

And I was interrogated, put through a kangaroo court as to why I dared employed a 'dissident' in my house, to take care of Shona children. The youths forced me to drive to where the woman lived with her parents, and then they started interrogating her, beating her with sticks. Me and the children could not take her with us, and she did not ever come home to collect her belongings. Only God knows her fate!

These were the first Green Bombers, led by Benson Ndemera, Governor of the Midlands, who had been a ruthlessly violent Muzorewa man in the Gokwe area, my home district during the late 1970s. The scars which Ndemera left in the Gokwe are still alive in the memories of those who lived through the Dzakutsaku years.

Then on the Monday I decided that I should go to see the Governor to express my concerns bout this reckless violence.

I asked Ndemera about what was happening and the justification for it, and he was very open to me, in his brutal language: 'The only language Africans understand is force. If you try to discuss with them, you will not succeed,' he said. I was saddened. To think that this Muzorewa man had become more Zanu (PF) than some of us who had been in the midst of the ZANLA forces area! Border Gezi was not the inventor of the Zanu (PF) violence and torture.

It was Benson Ndemera who later died in Parirenyatwa Hospital as a born-again Christian, haunted by the corpses he had delivered to the national conscience. But the tradition of Zanu(PF) violence did not start with Ndemera or Border Gezi.

So many tragic stories are told of how Robert Mugabe, little known that time, forcibly ascended to power in Mozambique after escaping through the assistance of Edgar 'Two-Boy' Tekere and the late Rekayi Tangwena. Tragic tales which, if we had had our own Truth and Reconciliation Commission, would have made many relatives of the survivors cry hot tears. In the war zones, villagers labelled 'sell-outs' and 'witches' died sad deaths, and I was there to witness some of the most gruesome atrocities inflicted by the ZANLA forces as well as the Rhodesian army.

Both armies would not want to hear of anything like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. Not at all! They know what they did. And President Mugabe, as Prime Minister from 1980 to 1987, did not bother to dismantle Ian Smith's machinery and technology of torture. Even the inherited hangman, torturers, the CIO Chief, Ken Flower, were asked to stay on, including senior torturers from the Selous Scouts. Some of them even got better paid jobs with companies for clearing landmines which they themselves had planted to kill innocent villagers and ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas!

When President Mugabe talked about his 'degrees in violence' during the student demonstrations in the late 1980s, he meant it. The ruling party has never shifted its language from persuasion to peace. Elections are a time for verbal abuse and excessive profanity by the President.

I can swear that President Robert Mugabe is the only national leader I can remember who exudes with boundless linguistic 'insult' and profanity in the world. There is no 'foul' word he has not used to insult the legitimate opposition. Despite having been educated at a Catholic mission school, Kutama, he has no space in his imagination for the language of decency in political campaigns and discourse.

Until such time that Mugabe realises the need to use the language of peace and persuasion during election campaigns, we will still have these broken bodies, political corpses and a violent police force which arrests the complainant rather than the accused. Young people, the Border Gezi crop, will continue to flood our hospitals with torture victims, cripples and all for the sake of a few shiny coins.

I have come to believe that it is only the politically desperate who use violence for political ends. Otherwise we still have to ask the President what kind of 'a man of the people' he is who uses so much violence against the very same people he claims elected him.

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