(NEWZIMBABWE) Mt Darwin: The wailing bones of Chibondo

Mt Darwin: The wailing bones of Chibondo
by Nathaniel Manheru
10/04/2011 00:00:00

IT IS one of those weeks where you are accosted by more than a dozen issues crying out for your attention. It has been a very dense week, which means a week of plenty for any serious writer.

You have Libya, itself daily topical and a real battleground in the war of ratings for global broadcasters. But beyond organised, mediased meaning deployment, real stirring and portentous occurrences attesting to the fact that old verities upon which our globe was all along founded and structured, are melting down, while what only yesterday were outrageous oddities, are slowly being inaugurated as new standards, new mores for global structures and (mal)practices.

We are on the eve of a new global order, a very bad, cruel and tyrannical order. Who ever thought that armed rebels can actually convene a press conference for purposes of berating imperial airforces for not striking at their people and at their country hard enough? That happened this week in Libya where a four-star rebel general berated the French, the British and the rest of Nato for not battering Libya enough!

Crude business

Who ever thought that invading countries can actually take over oil wells and refineries as spoils of an uneven war; proceed to pump out millions of barrels of crude, refine many more barrels in broad, desert daylight, all for sale to themselves, with Greek tankers playing dutiful couriers, Qatar playing makeshift, extraterritorial exchequer?

That is happening in today's Libya, in today's global order. Russia Today or RT - that must channel for anyone seeking an alternative viewpoint - put it so well. Crude business, it called it! How can it not be? Picture this: you fight a crude war - literally and metaphorically - and you crude-fund an insurrection you have founded!

Fascinating stuff for students of unadorned imperialism! I greet Dmitry Ryurikov, yet another of my surprise readers from so far away. Thanks for your commendation, brother!

UN goes to war

Then you have Cote d'Ivoire. What a bloody mess, what shocking about turns! Until Cote d'Ivoire, I had always thought the United Nations was a peace-broker, was that sacred haven where all the world's war-weary rush to for succour and comfort.

Until that day I saw - alongside equally shocked Ivorians - UN fighter helicopters lobbying missiles - yes missiles, not mercies - into residential compounds of Adbijan, in all that buttressed by, or buttressing Sarkozy's French occupying colonial forces! So the UN can and does go to war? Who calls for a ceasefire when the UN goes to war? Who keeps the peace? Who makes the peace? It's a brave new world indeed, literally!

Read all this against events in the Congo of the sixties, Lumumba's Congo, Lumumba's sixties. The pressure then was to keep the UN forces deployed there out of the conflict, which was re-christianed a civil war. The well-meaning Ghanaian continent was blocked and kept out, all to ensure Lumumba enjoyed the full care of his enemies, whether Congolese or Belgian. He died horribly, that son of Congo, so horribly that actors in that bloody episode - one CIA's Devlin included - have vainly sought exorcism through moving confessionals we now have on our bookshelves.

In Cote d'Ivoire, the UN has gone to war. In Cote d'Ivoire, the UN has propped imperial interests. Indeed in ICote d'Ivoire, the UN has propped a side in a civil war, and then installed as president a man perceived to be an outsider by the governed. A new world order indeed!

All this is so, so, so vital to Zimbabwe at this moment in its life. We will go for elections shortly. The UNDP has been accosting Chinamasa to fund that election. It has not been invited to fund it, yet it is so solicitous. It wants to be a player, the same way the UN was a player in Cote d'Ivoire. An over-mandated player if you ask me.

When an electoral dispute arose, the UN responded, not as a world arbiter, but as a questioned and questionable electoral agent. It acted defensively; it acted partisan, which is why it emerged a foremost disputant, but one with powers to cleanse a preferred side in the civil war, indeed one with the capacity to kill in so holy a fashion that no one ever thinks of ICC.

As a matter of fact, while the UN was killing Ivorians, its other organ on human rights and humanitarian concerns, was in the other part of the country, busy convicting Ivorians for killing civilians. Baroness Amos was at the helm of this cleansing exercise. We remember her for her infamous role of Zimbabwe, that black girl parading Africa's mayhem.

Zimbabwe, Beware!

One side, that of Ouattara, enjoyed UN cover. The mantra was "Ouattara, the UN-recognised winner of the elections". As if the UN was an outsider coming in for the first time, and with a fresh mind to judge a process it could objectify, it could hold at arms length, for dispassionate assessment. No, the UN had been involved in Ivorian politics and was thus a player.

That means from now on, electoral contestants do not need manifestos; they only need the UN and its maxim gun, enabled of course by rag-tag rebels who can be relied upon to cloud the assault on the unwanted side, an assault sure to follow.

Zimbabwe beware! Keep the UN out, very out. Keep the British out, quite out. If we cannot keep the British out, at least let us impose on them the inconvenience of running to the United Nations Security Council for a resolution!

I thought I wrote at the onset of the assault on Libya to say resolution 1973 is an open cheque not just for Libya, but also for Cote d'Ivoire? I thought I wrote that France would sneak through the fog of the UN-sponsored Libyan war to deal with Gbagbo, its impunity guaranteed by the world's distraction?

That is exactly what happened. With politics of UN-sanctified intrusions as the new global zeitgeist, very few noticed Sarkozy smuggling in a contraband war into a far-away country called Cote d'Ivoire, all in the din of western sorties against Libya.

On Tuesday, the British indicated they want a financially backed role in shaping Zimbabwe's electoral roadmap, a role sanctioned by Sadc. Spurred by the French example?

Inserting the British

A pregnant week, I say. What else? Pakistan of course. David Cameron, the conservative side and leader in Britain's coalition government, was in Pakistan peppering over the cracks.

Remember, the embattled and stressed alliance of invading countries in Afghanistan had charged that Pakistan was in cahoots with rebels. Or that Pakistan had no strategy for defeating these rebels operating from its soil or around it. The former charge makes Pakistan a terrorist state; the latter wounds Pakistani pride. Neither makes for good relations with the West, something mainstream Pakistanis actually prefer.

But for me, the significance of Cameron's trip was no so much Pakistan or Afghanistan. It became Kashmir, a place so incidental to Cameron's overall trip as originally planned.

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Some student asks Cameron how, if at all, Britain could play a useful role in resolving Indo-Pakistan tensions over Kashmir. And again for me, the significant thing was not Cameron's express answer to what to a Zimbabwean is, quite frankly some outlandish question relating to an equally outlandish place further than Mars from Zimbabwe.

Rather, it was the global reach and resonance of Cameron's answer, whether this was intended or unintended. He replied: "I don't want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world's problems, we are responsible for the issues in the first place."

British duplicity

Great reader, does this not deserve to be underlined, what is more, deserve to be pinned on the forehead of British missions and their ambassadors anywhere overseas? Can you imagine how infinitely different - infinitely safer, if you draw me farther - Zimbabwe or any other country would be if Cameron genuinely did not want "to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of (Zimbabwe's) problems, (Britain) is responsible for the issues in the first place"?

But of course, as with many other matters British, Cameron never said this. Or if he did, he never meant it. Or if he did, he was not serious! Was it not on the same day that the British House of Lords was in fact grappling with how best Britain could take maximum advantage of the Livingstone breach in Sadc to insert itself into Zimbabwe's electoral process? And where you have the experiences of Cote d'Ivoire, nowadays elections are a causa belli, a reason for war!

Mau Mau fight

Which takes me to another fascinating story, and one highlighting that the Her Majesty's Government does not have to insert in anything at all, for her tummy to swell many times over. The subalterns, it would appear, now know how to insert (no Oedipus meaning please, I am Reverend Manheru!). Who ever thought that well over half a century later, Dedan Kamathi's freedom fighters would still be marauding the British?

Not even in the Rift Valley, but right on the doorstep of Her Majesty's courts! Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu waNyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara - all in their 70s and 80s - have inserted their cracked feet and lives onto the immaculate Boeing, all to challenge the British Government to compensate them for abuses they suffered between 1952 and 1961 when they were unlawfully detained and abused by a panicky British colonial Government fending off Mau Mau fighters fighting for Kenya's liberation.

Mutua was actually castrated, a lifelong condition which brings with it lifelong shame.

This is how Cameron's Britain inserted itself on this one, triggering the present counter-insertion!

Too late to sin

I hope I do not sound facetious on a matter of immense gravity in itself, and in its symbolism to the rest of post-colonial Africa, which is just about the whole continent. In its own defence, Her Majesty's Government would want the matter struck out by the High Court in London, on grounds that Kenya had its own legal colonial government, which was responsible for the camps - gulags is the word. The British Army only fought the Mau Mau insurgents in the forests, and thus could not be held responsible for what happened during "screening" activities.

Her Majesty's government also denies that sins of the British colonial Government passed on to it at Kenya's independence. It is clear to whom the Queen's government says those sins passed, namely, the Kenyan government that emerged from exactly the same victims who now seek redress!

Much worse, the Queen's government says too much time has elapsed! On their part, the litigants are not pleading for much, simply for an apology by Her Majesty's government! They are pressing for a "we-the-British-are-sorry" utterance. Just that to a set of abuses that are perfectly classifiable by existing statutes, that are remarkably horrible.

Which time expunges a sin?

This British legal stance is probably what Cameron means when he says he does not want "to insert Britain in some leading role" in resolving issues it caused and is thus utterly responsible for. It is a stance of wholesale political abnegation now seeking juridical foundations.

Of course the prologue to this Kenyan saga was here in Zimbabwe in 1997 when Clare Short of Blair's Labour government wrote the infamous letter which repudiated all and any responsibilities stemming from colonial misrule and land deformities. Africa did not quite take notice. Africa is always absent minded, the same way it is sure to be absent-minded on principles underpinning arguments which the British government is deploying on this very matter.

If it is the owner of the colonial project in Kenya (reckoned by the hand that signed and granted the Royal Charter), you mean it is possible to quarantine guilt through fine distinctions between those fighting in the forests and those screening those brought in from the forests and contiguous villages by the same fighting force?

You mean time expunges international crime? Is this the operating ethic in the ICC? Or it is only African time that expunges sin? Or British time on white sins on Africans? Or universal time on sins against Africans? Just which is which?

Why can the same time, whoever is belongs to, not expunge sins of Nazis? You want to recall that this action against the British government is taking place at a time when the ICC seeks to indict some Kenyans for atrocities in the 2007/08 disturbances.

Chibondo bones

Which takes me to the story of the weeping bones of Chibondo, my focus this week. Three weeks ago, I drove to Chibondo, the reviled place in whose deep mining shafts African victims of Zimbabwe's war of liberation were mass shoved and mass sealed by Rhodesians, largely between 1972 and 1979, the year of the Ceasefire.

Chibondo is an eerie place, quite brooding and foreboding. It has a certain heaviness about it. You are struck by its virgin surrounds, something unusual for a mining place whose many shafts would seem to suggest a gold mine of high yields.

Where I come from, the dense vegetation would qualify the place the name of "Ndambakurimwa", the place that refuses to be tilled. Usually, such places are shrines, home to some awesome gods. You let such terrible sleeping gods lie, unruffled by human actions, however trite. Or else you trigger anger on yourself and the community of you turn over the soils of such holy grounds, all for a modest harvest of millet!

Place of carrion

Today Chibondo is a hive of activity, a shrine that attracts thousands who wish to see its bizarre undersides. It all began - I was told by those who know - with itinerant gold panners searching for fortune and plenty. They bored into the ribs of Chibondo, well away from its old laden shafts which remained intact and overgrown, but inaudibly groaning from a horrendous calcified cargo that wept quietly beneath.

They bored, bored and bored, digging into the earth with the spur and lure of the yellow glitter. They sought gold, the gold of Chibondo. Fortuitously, they bored into one of Chibondo's sleeping shafts, all the time making significant pickings along the arduous way.

The going was good, at least this far, with much portending happy, rich days ahead. Until one day they hit into ashen material - all calcified - that soon turned out to be human bones. Then skulls with tufts of black hair turned up. As they made these bizarre finds, so too did their counterparts at all the mills that handled the rich ores of Chibondo. Chibondo, by the way, means small bone, small carrion. That means "Chibondo" translates to "the place of the small carrion". Who named the place? At what point in its vast, eventful history?

The first team to panic was that at the mills. Soon word was despatched to panners that the ore they were delivering, had human remains, many of which had already been crushed. Save for tufts of dark hair which testified that indeed the calcified ore belonged to interred humans. It is said one skull contained bright yellow pieces that shone in replacement of its goaded eyes. A grim, awful sight. Grim riches lodged in the most unseemly of places.

But panners are both a bold and greedy breed. Their underworld is vastly populated, full of vast stories, many quite gory. Often, many of the shafts they venture into have crawling beasts by way of huge subterranean serpents you cannot name. I hear you do not fight such frightful finds, if you have the right constitution for the industry.

Instead you work to make them companionable. Simply, you kneel in holy supplication, in a ceremony punctuated by quiet incantations. That makes the monstrous serpents guardian angels of the underworld. After that ceremony, you then proceed with your quest, completely unmolested. These are the rules and routines of engagement in the underworld.

The dead revolt

Other encounters are worse, stirring even. You meet sitting skeletons, their battening, sapped and shrivelled skin supporting their bony frame. Unreported and unaccounted victims of snake bites or some such mishaps. Or simply strangled panners whose rich pickings made them targets of jealousy counterparts. Vazhinji vanosaramo, I am told. Or others who are blasted by dynamite, together with rich ores, whether by accident or deliberately by rivals. So meeting skeletons in various poises in deep shafts is not such an unsettling thing for initiated panners.

The subterranean world in which these panners live has many "citizens" who have now been naturalised by the sheer frequency of encounters. So the warning from gangs at the mill, I was told, did not immediately stop the search for gold at Chibondo, with its overpopulated dead.

The more the panners dug, the more humans they met, and the richer the seams became. At some stage though, the dead revolted. The panners began to meet blocking humanoids all the way down the usual shaft, humans who complained bitterly. "By your own judgement, do you think we are happy in this crowded grave," they would often ask the ravenous living. "Do you for once think we have no relative who also want to know where we perished and were flung?"

So many question and growing aggressiveness from the wailing bones of Chibondo. At that stage the underworld became an unfamiliar, frightful proposition for the panners who deserted the shafts, resolving to take these hounding messages to the surface, specifically to Chief Kandeya, under whose chiefdom Chibondo lies. What followed is now all history.

Great danger

When I got to Chibondo, the Trust of these fallen heroes at Chibondo had exhumed well over a thousand seven hundred remains. Today, I hear the harvest is well over six thousand, all from one shaft. There are five more shafts still to be opened, with the one they were working honeycombed by this rich calcite deposit from our war of liberation.

Mind you the panners had broken into the shaft at the 52-metre depth, leaving above them a whole overhang of human remains mortared by dark, sodden soils of Chibondo. And my greatest fear was that this heavy overhang would give in, burying determined human excavators from the Trust.

It gave one aggravated visions of a piling, manifold tragedy about to be replenished by fresher, contemporary skeletons. I tried to reason the cadres out of this dangerous work, while someone looked for appropriate equipment by aid of which they would resume the work, safer. Or at least getting the underground map of the maze of tunnels of Chibondo.

I could not prevail over them, in fact generated spurts of emotions which I clearly saw would take us irretrievably very far, certainly deeper than the tunnels which endangered all of us. To this day I still pray I will not wake up to a horror headline.

Sickening smell of death

Above the ground, one saw real horror. Generally, we Africans fear and revere death and the dead. One body is a body too many. For all centuries of death and dying, we are very far from getting used to life extinct - whether fresh or decayed. It is a severe paradox: a continent of so many deaths, yet a continent of so much awe and fear of the dead.

Why are we not inured, habituated, to the fact of dying and to the face of the dead? Or is this our way of according life its sanctity, in which case this innately felt fear should and must be the emotion upon which to erect human rights discourse on our continent?

The surface of Chibondo was strewn with skeletons, unaccounted for bones, tufts of hair, sodden and tattered garments, and all manner of deathly paraphernalia enough to make one look away in lasting horror. And a stench of death which you cannot quite classify, but decidedly sickening, a stench strangely sumptuous enough to attract ribbed village curs looking for protein. The excavators had to enlist the services of village youths to protect this grim find from marauding dogs.

The leader of the excavating team came to join me in this grim odyssey. He had just been woken by the announcement of my arrival. He looked sleepy and fatigued, possibly both from digging, possibly from the grisly find he met underground and hauled to the surface, all through sheer naked ardour.

But he looked quite at home in this stirring makeshift home of skeletons. And he seemed to know them all the same way one knows cadres in a camp under one's charge. Himself a war veteran and thus a colleague of the fallen comrades who stood out in the vast collection of skeletons, he barked orders to his juniors as they took us through the horrid spectacle. "Ko komuredhi vaya vane maChinese boots akasungwa necopper waya manga mavataridza here," he would ask as we shifted ground towards the said fallen comrade. "Vurai makumbo avo vaone kutorture kwavakaitwa vasati vakandwa mukati umo."

Dutifully, the juniors would open the folded legs of the dead comrade, all in a dark fatigue jean, and with Chinese tenderfoot wear, laced by improvised electric copper wire. He had an ugly grin on his shattered face, possibly written by acute agony. And the electric copper strings?

In that long war, you had to improvise to extend the life of the apparel you had. This I knew from my own encounters during the war. I quickly related to the dead comrade, whose limbs exuded a dark, dank fluid which I could only imagine to have been blood in his heyday, well before he was mummified in the airless tunnel which preserved him for well over thirty years of Independence, intact. As his comrades turned him over and over in a horrid display, he dutifully complied. The real, disciplined soldier he was! My mind went far, very far. Whose son could he be? Where does his mother think he is? Questions from a bygone war.

We moved on to a sight that will forever remain etched on my mind. This time the skeleton belonged to a slain spirit medium of the Jena clan, I was told. As is well known, the guns of the Second Chimurenga were guns guided by the spirits. They were guns of a holy war - a non-Muslim jihad - led by spirit mediums who became as lethal to British settler colonialism here as actual bullets that shot at it. The Rhodesians either turned these mediums of simply disposed of them violently, if they refused to do their bidding, as indeed was often the case.

Chibondo housed three such mediums, all found fully clad in their dark, ceremonial dress. But there was this one whose upper torso had been blown up by a grenade. The Rhodesians had shoved a grenade between his teeth, and blown him off, alive. Everything about his head had been reduced to smithereens except his front teeth which died stubbornly clenching an end-piece of the exploded grenade. Decidedly a grim bite and testimony to the world on of how he had met a violent end. There was a lot of ceremony around this body, as war veterans paid in walking past the makeshift thatched hut it was kept.

The last from a long list of harrowing sights I will share with you, disturbed reader, is that of two herd-boys, aged possibly between 9 and 12 years. They had been violently killed. They had died with their slings strapped around their still necks and broken oversized shirts, possibly handed down to them by their elder brothers as often happens in the village. They invoked images of my own childhood where the sight of little boys with rekeni muhuro was an abiding one. We all did it as young village boys. Why would any war take such an age, I asked. "Their sin was that they happened to be close by when a massacre was done. It means they had witnessed it, which is why the Rhodesians killed them, to wipe out any evidence."

I quickly remembered the story of Macbeth where killing a king leads to many more killings. "To be thus is nothing but to be safely thus," went Macbeth's reasoning as one murder led to another, to another and then to another, all in sheer diminishing humanity. Beside the two boys lay a mother whose both legs had been cut off around the knees. At her back - well, what remained of her back - was strapped an infant whose backbone bore a bullet hole that had let this same fatal bullet into her mother's body, in what passes for an act infant irresponsibility. Both had been shot from behind, in cold blood.

Beads of grenades

Fatigued by all I had seen, I sat beneath a mupfuti tree to hear what ex-fighters made of the bones, many of them weeping through their tattered clothing. I was told the bones amounted to Rhodesia's cumulative "kill" between 1972 and 1979, with the dragnet covering the whole of Mt Darwin area, including the Valley.

The haul included both combatants and civilians. The bodily waters were now oozing because the tunnels were airless, which is why the bodies could not breath to speed up their disintegration and decomposition. But with exposure to the surface, the exhumers were noticing a phenomenon of accelerated putrefication. That Rhodesians would "bead" the margins of each shaft with grenades after each haul.

These beads of grenades would then be exploded at once, thereby causing circular landfalls that would cover a given layer of corpses and the dying. That some of the victims were actually thrown into the shafts alive, only to be teargassed. Stubborn ones that would not die would be the ones to be "grenaded" or suffocated by landfills.

That the final group of victims were actually men who carted these victims to these shafts, all to make sure these would not one day tell the world this horrific story of Chibondo. One case survived though, and has told the story. Some of his revelations are sensitive and have incriminated a well-known politician from the area. Indeed, the bones of Chibondo do speak.

Courtrooms of Bulawayo

As I write this horror piece, before me is a NewsDay headline screaming "STOP IT: High Court orders halt to exhumations." The story relates to a court decision handed down by Justice Nicholas Mathonsi, delivered on his behalf by Justice Kamocha.

It is a default judgment whose first respondent is the Fallen Heroes Trust and whose second respondent is George Rutanhire, a veteran of the war of liberation who is the leader of the Trust. The third and fourth respondents are the two Ministers of Home Affairs. Also cited is the leadership of the National Healing, Reconciliation and Integration, and Jomic.

I have not seen the full judgment and thus cannot comment. What I know is that the complainant is the Zipra Veterans Association represented by Lazarus Ncube. What I also know is that the action was not opposed. What I also know is that the judgement freezes any exhumations in any part of the country. The lawsuit was not opposed. Was this an oversight or a menacing protest over what might have been seen as intrusiveness of the courts over such an emotive matter? Only time will tell. Something broods and brews from Chibondo.

Vexing questions

But I am fascinated by the debate that has accompanied this whole action. There has been countless attempts to stop these exhumations, both directly and indirectly by trying to give them a dissuading context. They seem to discomfit some people. Zapu claims that the bodies could belong to its fighters who operated in Mashonaland, itself the basis of the Bulawayo court action.

Interestingly, the claim covers post-independence, which leaves one wondering what is being admitted here about post-independence conflict. A related argument has been one of balancing off this exhumation against the alleged atrocities in western parts of Zimbabwe, in the post-independence conflict.

If it is right to exhume bones of Chibondo, why not the bones of Lupane or some such place in the western part of the country? Except no one has told me how this argument justifies no action on the bones of Chibondo, or of elsewhere in the country. How does such a stance atone for the dead, whether of Chibondo or elsewhere? Or do we dread the bones of our painful history? How do those exhuming them become indictable?

Cut-off point

The MDC-T has tried to suggest the remains belong to their slain members from the 2008 polls. If I recall correctly, the MDC put its death toll at slightly over 100. Much of this figure is actually fictitious. When I left Chibondo, over one thousand seven hundred remains had been brought to the surface. Does the MDC claim still stand? Or is it a pretext for bringing discomfort and thus a stop to an exercise which is dreaded by some interests? Which are those interests and why does MDC-T feel obligated to serve them?

And since white Rhodesians and their British kith and kin stand indicted by these bones, are we seeing how white anxieties organise and shape our politics here, much worse, shape our institutions here?
What is more, I thought the whole political discourse we have been having in this country has been about reconciliation and healing through justice and knowledge. The Americans have been funding such a thrust. Why are they coy on this one? Can they fund the Fallen Heroes Trust so the whole issue of justice is taken historically? Or is there a cut-off point, a cut-off colour to this seemingly broad quest?

Contrasting bones

We have Rhodesians who fought the war here, some in very high places. One of them, a minister, dealt with the issue of Gukurahundi, arguing that knowledge brings about expiation. Why is it right to break silence on post-independence killings and so wrong to break silence on pre-independence killings?

Why is the threat of ICC dangled over the heads of players of post-independence fractious politics, while no such threats hangs over players of pre-independence who in fact are my generation and have mass interred bones that still weep and are numerically bigger? Why is it more difficult to build a case of genocide on the deadly behaviour of an all-white Government confronted by all-black skeletons, than it is to build a case of genocide in respect of black-on-black violence? We know who created Rhodesia here, surely?

The real fear is that this emotive exercise makes for a very uneasy environment for white/black race relations in Zimbabwe. That makes the white world quite uncomfortable. But we also have fears over black/black relations arising from similar bones from post-independence conflict? Why are white fears holier than black fears? Why are black bones from white guns clean and legally neutral, indeed bones which should not be exhumed, while black bones from black guns are dirty, so legally exciting and so physically exhumable?

Then you have the Prime Minister holding a commemoration of what he terms the heroes of his own movement, just a couple of days ago, at Warren Hills. The Prime Minister is trying to create bones for his own politics, for his own movement, by which he hopes to overshadow and overwrite the bones of Chibondo, and the bones at National Heroes Acre. In that effort, his youth end up almost giving him real bones, fresh ones too. At the end of his political ceremony, a burial party yavana Hwindi come to the same cemetery, to bury one of their own.

The prime ministers' goons fall upon this party already in grief, robbing tombs and graves of their stones, all to attack the living so the bones of Warren Hills increase and multiply. It is a bizarre industry, this politics! And all this after the Prime Minister went right round the region, selling a tall story of Zanu (PF) violence? Who is violent? What does the Troika now say?

Mau-ling the British

Whatever answers to these questions, the bones of Chibondo continue to weep and wail. I hope they will not make us all weep yet again. The auguries are not good at all. We know who should weep. We know who seeks to gag the dead of Chibondo. Indeed we know this calcite treasure to be one of the splendid bequests from Her Majesty's Government, Her Majesty's people who cannot be touched apparently. Until that day also we learn to "insert" Britain the same way subaltern Kenya seeks to through the Mau Mau trials. Icho!