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Chofamba

November 28, 2007

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Ian Smith denied our African humanity

BORN at the height of the national liberation struggle in the late 1970s, I grew up in post-independence Zimbabwe. Save for hazy memories, I cannot claim to possess a concrete self-consciousness of life under Ian Douglas Smith’s white supremacist Rhodesian Front government. However, having been born to young and unemployed school-leavers of peasant background, my life as a toddler was to be circumscribed in a brutally physical way by the paranoid security policies of Smith’s government.

I spent my early childhood in one of Smith’s concentration camps in a small village called Chibuwe in Chipinge district, on the country’s eastern border with Mozambique. This was a major operational zone for the nationalist guerillas fighting for black self-determination. In order to cut off the guerillas from accessing logistical and political support from the masses, Smith’s government herded African villagers living within such areas into concentration camps, which they euphemistically called ‘protec…

Tsvangirai’s Prime Ministerial baby mamas

There's something incongruous about how Zimbabwean independent media journalists at home and in the Diaspora are reporting the debacle surrounding Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's marriage-that-allegedly-never-was. Whilst the state-controlled Herald has, predictably, gleefully reported on the 'union' and its attendant soap operatic saga, the independent press has bizarrely preoccupied itself with efforts to ‘uncover’ the ‘truth’ about the origins of claims that Tsvangirai had married his lover, Locadia Tembo, a wealthy businesswoman hailing from a traditionally ZANU PF family and whose sister is an MP in President Mugabe’s party.
Newzimbabwe.com published a story entitled The curious case of Tsvangirai’s marriage on Thursday which sought to reconcile the gaps between the Tembo family’s claims of a marriage between their daughter and the Prime Minister on the one hand, and denials of such a union by Tsvangirai’s spokesman Luke Tamborinyoka on the other. The story qu…

MDC must be more forthright about its values in this govt

Mugabe swears in Tsvangirai as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.
I'm not sure that Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC have a clear strategy to counter the infidelity of Mugabe and Zanu PF in this marriage. Why does the MDC think this arrangement can work only if they are willing to prostrate themselves before Zanu PF in supplication?

I think they're seriously undermining themselves by giving Mugabe and Zanu the semblance of power and authority. I say 'semblance' because even though Mugabe's authority is still constitutionally enshrined, we all know it is worth no more than hot air since his position is really underpinned by nothing other than the GPA and the MDC's willingness to subscribe to it.

On 'doing God' in Zimbabwean politics

On the matter of how political community must be organised and run, I believe in a secular rational-legal order. I do not want to live in a theocracy such as we have in some Muslim countries where religion is the organising factor of society and subsumes all life, with religious edicts and commandments forming the basis of law.

In many such countries we see clashes between fundamentalists and moderates over the interpretation of religious dogma, with claims and counter-claims of each group being closer to the mind of God than the other, and a massive denial of freedom to certain groups, such as women, on the basis of scriptural interpretation.

I want to live in a liberal democratic order where civil rights must be allowed that, among other things, enable members to pursue their religious freedoms. I want politics to be a rational exercise where decisions and choices are based on reason and policy making responds to the rule of cause and effect.

That is why I am very uncomfortable - e…

The Great Kony con

CUE thousands of 13 to 21 year old Americans clad in t-shirts emblazoned with the image of notorious Ugandan terrorist Joseph Kony, modelled on Barack Obama’s ‘Hope’ poster from his 2008 election campaign. But Kony’s has two other figures in the background: Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, clearly suggesting that Kony is the latest spawn on evil’s evolutionary plane. Their mission? To make the egregious Lord’s Resistance Army leader ‘famous’ and thus sustain public support of the US military’s deployment in central Africa ostensibly to help capture Kony and bring him to justice.
This is the footage from a newly released controversial 30-minute documentary produced by the American charity Invisible Children. It has since gone viral, accounting for more than 85 million views on the video sharing site Youtube. Unsurprisingly, many reviewers have roundly condemned it as a psychological operations piece for US military intervention in central Africa. Invisible Children is fronted by 33 y…

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