WHO says time is linear? Who says mothers are born before their children? Or that mothers are older than their children? Look at what is happening to our "mother" Britain! They might take long to answer but, hey, the gods are just, finally. Let us replay events to March 2008.
That fateful year Zimbabwe — the colonial child — held polls whose results were inconclusive and therefore disharmonious in ways that baffled and buffeted her body-politic. MDC-T dominated the Lower House; Zanu (PF) dominated the Upper House. Overall, Zanu (PF) had a commanding lead in Parliament. Morgan Tsvangirai enjoyed an early lead in March.
Robert Mugabe trailed in this early phase of a drawn out story. None won the presidential vote, setting the stage for a bruising run-off, founded on the 50 percent + 1 formulae which our legal brains had so cleverly inserted, arguably without the premonition that one day, one year soon, this numeral "1" would both settle and scuttle the presidency of this country.
Indeed, without the premonition that this one numeral would create a structure sui generis, a structure called the Inclusive Government so rich in numberless headaches. I am not interested with these headaches though. These we have suffered already, curing some of them, thinking with them.
I am interested in how this quandary was received abroad, especially by our "mother", Britain, apparently without a foreboding that one day the mother would suffer a similar fate, two short years later.
Hung referendum?
The result was decried and called names. The President was execrated for authoring a political nonesuch. The word run-off appeared to come from a Shona dictionary to describe the political shenanigans of a tin-pot dictator. But where are we today? We have the same result in the land of haughty Albion! Unbelievable!
You mean to tell me that the impeccable electoral system of smart Britain can also yield a result comparable to the electoral deformities of "autocratic" and "rigging" infantile Zimbabwe? No, no, no! The sun never sets in Britain — that precious atom that gave a lasting spark to a benighted world, as Ian Douglas Smith would care to say repeatedly, face beaming with Scottish pride!
How can Britain’s celestial standards yield so grossly imperfect an outcome comparable if not worse than that from lowly brutes we all are in the white of their eyes? Far worse because in the case of Zimbabwe, our law provided a way out of the quandary, namely through something we called a run-off.
For Albion, poor Albion, the only way out, in the absence of an inclusive Government — yes, Inclusive Government we started here well before she knew how to spell it — is to propose reforms to the electoral law which will then be put to the British people by way of a referendum. And the British being the same weird, weird British, could very well give you another hung referendum to bolster the hung parliament and the no-government situation that exists presently.
Don’t forget this oldest monarchy still hugs a draft constitution that has been hanging for centuries: across kings and queens, between and beyond wars and revolutions, between and beyond faiths.
The Pot and the kettle
Brown finds himself meriting the very harsh judgement he so easily and generously gave Robert Mugabe, his bete noire. He is still found in No.10 Downing Street, the morning and much after the vote he lost, the legitimacy he so fondly foists on other nations which he himself cannot now uphold.
He has been beaten, but without a constitutional recourse to a run-off, which is what makes his position remarkably parlous. He demands "a part" in Government, in the process making nonsense of the British Will that has wrenched him from that Government.
Britain is losing a war. Britain is losing an economy. Britain has long lost its vaunted glory abroad. Above all, it still cannot find a leader, even in peacetime. Brown cannot be that leader, this man, this poor politician who never won premiership, preferring the comfort of borrowed robes, or robbing the electorate as he now seeks to do so clumsily.
It recalls a rather naughty point made by one Richard Dowden of the Royal African Society, itself a colonial relic. Commenting on strained relations between the Labour Government and Zimbabwe, Dowden suggested the Labour Government messed up Britain’s overseas interests precisely because it is a party of workers who have never owned anything whether at home or abroad.
Democracy’s headaches
So let Britain know today that democracy can create real governance headaches. Not because it is being implemented by Robert Mugabe or some such Third World leader, but because it itself expresses human imperfections. Voters can be fickle; democracy, which simplifies political decisions to paper, boxes and numerals, can create real imbroglios for democracy-eager societies.
And when that happens, both societies and leaders have the same set of questions to answer. Today Britain has puzzled itself, vexed its own mind, with un-telegenic Blair as the trigger and pretext. Instead of that haughty, self-righteous step Britain is so wont to as it steps roughshod over we the small nations, let her move with appropriate hesitancy, crying out for assistance in breaking the present impasse.
Sadc is on stand-by, ready to deploy former President Mbeki, for an appropriate package, the same way Sadc deployed Ramaphosa in resolving the IRA issue. But we, the children of a lesser god, have heard Britain very loudly and clearly as she proclaims her credo for Government: she deserves "a strong and decisive" Government, able to get her out of her present economic mess. Do we deserve any less, we Zimbabweans? Maybe we do, we the blest children of the mother country now on slippery banana rind. Oh Albion, vast Albion!
The curse of long apartheid
As I write this piece, Julius Malema has been hauled before a disciplinary committee of the African National Congress (ANC). He has also been booked for a lynching before the Human Rights Commission of South Africa. While the first action is internal to the ANC, the second one is being pushed for by an Afrikaner Brotherhood, itself a throwback to the apartheid days. Both actions are pregnant, even though one does not see much by way of focused debate in the media.
On balance, the debate has either been irrational and hate-filled, or overflowing with maudlin sentimentality. For the former part, Malema is a buffoon; for the later part, he is a second Jesus on the crucifix. I doubt that he is either of those two things. In any case, to focus on Malema is to miss what is at stake.
Afrikaner Forum?
Little has been said about the judge who presided over the case. Little, too, has been said about AfriForum as if to suggest this organisation is a god from the machine.
Yet the complainant, the plaintiff, the judge and the judgement are all rooted in South Africa’s history and contemporary struggles.
Who is AfriForum and why have the media been most reluctant to perforate the veil that shrouds it? How is it an African Forum? Which Africans? How does Zimbabwe come into this whole equation? Or is this a matter down South, too down South, to bother those of us living up the river?
Staging a play without Hamlet
Just a little probing tells us AfriForum is an all-white rights focused group, which first shoots to prominence over the land question in Zimbabwe. This is the organisation that sought and succeeded in registering with the South Africa legal system some strange judgement passed in Namibia a year or two ago, which pretended to settle a land dispute in Zimbabwe, and claimed to do so in the name of Sadc.
A group of embittered white settlers, historically privileged by racist settler Rhodesia, launched a class action with the so-called Sadc Tribunal, which sought to have Zimbabwe’s land reform programme set aside on grounds of a racist contravention of the Sadc Treaty. This phoney tribunal, which came into being ahead of the mating and wedding season, apparently granted the relief sought by the white farmers who hoped such a judgement would open the floodgates and drown the whole land reform programme.
Expectedly the Zimbabwe Government ignored the decision, which vainly sought sanctity from juridical aura while attacking the very soul of our struggle. It dawned on both the Tribunal and the farmers that they had vainly sought to stage Hamlet without the main character. Who would bell the cat?
Who would enforce such a silly judgement whose locale is a whole sovereign state inhabited by a people who had gone to war for the recovery and delivery of that same asset which this tribunal sought to restore to an occupying race?
The long apartheid
AfriForum then arises to seek the registration of this judgement in all Sadc countries, starting with South Africa, so that Sadc governments are then forced to enforce this wrong-headed judgement, principally by seizing Zimbabwe’s assets abroad as compensation to the settlers who never bought the land from the natives at the start of it all.
The idea is to send a clear message to African governments — principally those of South Africa and Namibia — that you dare tamper with settler-derived white "rights" and privileges, you are in for a long, frenetic haul, at home and abroad. The idea is to confront the liberation ethos through a broad regional front. Indeed, the idea is to harness post-struggle African governments for the enforcement of settler rights, against impoverished African masses.
The great divide and the small song
Now the same white interests have employed exactly the same vehicle to attack a facet of the resistance culture of a liberation movement. The contestation has thus been broadened beyond the real economy, beyond the control of real assets to the cultural economy of our resistance.
We are likely to see efforts to domesticate into many other Sadc jurisdictions this apartheid judgement on a liberation song. But why would the all-powerful whites of South Africa fear a mere song? Just read their Press to find a clue. Here is the askari-driven, white-owned Sunday Times of South Africa:
‘There is evidence across our society that the spirit of reconciliation that characterised the transfer of power is wearing thin in a country still divided by one of the world’s widest wealth gaps.
" Leaders as senior as Jacob Zuma, and as junior as ANC Youth League leader, Julius Malema, need to acknowledge that the unity of this nation is critical to its democratic success and should not be negligently put at risk . . . In as much as we celebrate the centrality of freedom of expression in our constitution, we do need to exercise our freedoms with due care and responsibility. If we fail to do this, we can only undo that which we have worked so hard to build — a young nation which is committed to protecting and celebrating the diversity of its people’s cultures."
This editorial comment of April 4, 2010 brings out the real reason behind the court action. Against the ever widening gulf between races and classes, South Africa’s social balance is so tenuous that even some little song will upset it. And the solution is not to address the race and class divide; it is to ban songs, which may recall past struggles, which in reality are present struggles.
A long apartheid is matched by a long liberation struggle, yes, struggle far longer than Mandela, the rainbow or 2010. Icho!
nathaniel.manheru *** zimpapers.co.zw
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