COMMENT - It is always rich when the beneficiaries of apartheid and UDI claim 'racial discrimination', when they're the biggest racists on the planet. This is my review of Ben Freeth's works,
the propaganda piece/documentary, and this is
from the book.
Constitution: Biti sacrificing the truth
02/10/2012 00:00:00
by Ben Freeth
WITH all due respect to Finance minister Tendai Biti, I wholly disagree with his interpretation of chapter 16 of the draft constitution. It appears that both he and Constitution Select Committee (COPAC) co-chairperson Douglas Mwonzora have fallen into the trap of selective quotation and do not look at the practical effect of both section 4.29 and chapter 16 of the draft.
Biti waxes eloquent in saying
“the land reform programme is now democratised that all Zimbabweans, irrespective of race, tribe or colour, can be beneficiaries of the same”.
He goes further saying that: “The constitution now allows the restoration of a private property market in Zimbabwe that will transform current agricultural land from a dead into a live asset.”
He takes this from Section 16.2 (b) of the COPAC Draft Constitution which states that: “subject to section 4.29, every citizen of Zimbabwe has a right to acquire, hold, occupy, use, transfer, hypothecate, lease or dispose of agricultural land regardless of his or her race or colour”. This is an excellent provision, if one chooses to ignore the first four words of it.
The provision as read with section 4.29, however, does not make any changes to the land reform programme as it exists today. Nothing in the present constitution or the various enabling acts prevents any person of any race or colour from purchasing, leasing, or even acquiring an offer letter for agricultural land –– although as everyone is aware, this has hardly ever happened in practice due to the racial discrimination still in place.
The reality is that this provision only applies to land that has not been acquired by the state and section 16.3 of the COPAC draft reiterates that:
“(1) All agricultural land which
(a) was itemised in Schedule 7 to the former Constitution; or
(b) before the effective date, was identified in terms of section 16B(2)(a)(ii) or (iii) of the former Constitution;
continues to be vested in the State.”
Section 4.29 (2) of the COPAC draft, allows for the continuing acquisition of land without compensation and with no right to challenge it in a court or raise the argument that it is discriminatory –– notwithstanding the fact that the officially stated purpose of land reform, that of correcting the racial imbalance in ownership of land, was met a number of years ago.
So the reality is that nothing has changed. Chapter 16 does not afford anyone new rights or even provide people with protection of their existing rights. All it does is make a political statement which looks good on paper but has no practical positive effect.
In fact, it polarises Zimbabweans in terms of their race and background in that it affords “indigenous” farmers greater rights to compensation in terms of section 16.8 (1). As has been seen in our Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act [Chapter 14:33], an “indigenous” person is limited to:
“Any person who, before the 18th April, 1980, was disadvantaged by unfair discrimination on the grounds of his or her race, and any descendant of such person, and includes any company, association, syndicate or partnership of which indigenous Zimbabweans form the majority of the members or hold the controlling interest”.
This does not include people who are “white” –– although it may include people who were not born in Zimbabwe but who, if they were, would have been “disadvantaged”. So, for example, someone of Chinese descent may be considered “indigenous” despite not being born in Zimbabwe whereas a “white” Zimbabwean –– born in Zimbabwe –– would not be “indigenous”.
I can only agree with Biti in saying that “the COPAC draft is not the best constitution Zimbabweans could have written”.
I have to go further than that and state that it is not the best constitution that those “who have spent all their life fighting for a new order in Zimbabwe” should support, let alone promote.
I cannot believe that sacrificing fundamental principles and allowing the continuation of theft and racial discrimination against international law, against the SADC Treaty, against international judgments, and against every human rights convention ever signed will help in the feeding and rebuilding of Zimbabwe in any way.
For how long is the truth going to remain a casualty in this process?
Ben Freeth is a British-born white Zimbabwean farmer and human rights activist from the district of Chegutu. His fight to stay on his farm was chronicled in the award-winning 2009 documentary film 'Mugabe and the White African'
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COMMENTS
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Tobias
Mr Ben Freeth, u cannot be British and Zimbabwean at the same time. As black Zimbabweans and sons of the soil we want our land 100% from ur race whether u are now a British born or french born Zimbabwean. If u are to get access to our land it has to be on our terms. Lets not deny that everything has always been racial. All talk about non racial society is rhetoric and part of the project to have a share of what never belonged to you. The stealing of land by Europeans from blacks was racial so the return of that land also has to be racial. You want to teach to be civil when your ancestors from whom you benefited were not civil. That is called cheating. Africa for Africans
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Wasp
Point well-articulated! No matter how one attempts to "legalize" stolen property, it will always remain that: STOLEN PROPERTY...period! Zimbabweans are just RECLAIMING what was initially STOLEN from them; and RIGHTING the wrongs of this man's ancestors. Chete! If he wants land, why not claim one from his thieving ancestors where he is originally from? Leave Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans, please.......
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Pondo Mari
Truth is land reform chaotic as they may call it, will never be reversed by anybody ZANU PF, MDC or Mavambo and all serious politicians in Zim recognise that.
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MweniTafara
Constitution cannot empower whoever has land today to begin trading it when we all know land was given for free and state land is the of our shared farmers, how can a people constitution empower a few new farmer beneficiaries and the settler colonial farmers who took it by brute force?
Are we back to barbaric civilization? This finance Bete minister of yours hardly knows anything.
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BobZim
"Ben Freeth is a British-born white Zimbabwean farmer and human rights activist from the district of Chegutu. His fight to stay on his farm was chronicled in the award-winning 2009 documentary film 'Mugabe and the White African'"
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Lmao! Human rights activists my foot! Where were you when we were fighting to get our land back from you thieving from your thieving kith and kin! You should pay reparations first for illegal occupation and disposition of black Zimbabweans and pay for the evils of apartheid and slavery before we can even THINK of the possibility of paying you a single cent.
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Muzezuru
I thought this Freeth dude was just staying at his father in law's farm? He is British born as well, case closed! He clearly hasn't schooled himself on the history of his adopted country. Please let's stop calling everyone who says something against our country a human rights activist. The real human rights activists in Zimbabwe are those who spearheaded land reform and empowered Zimbabweans for generations, not these self serving racists like Freeth.
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GeorgeBachinche
So this fellow became a human rights activist when his illegal possesion of land was challenged by the indigineous people?
Surelyt New Zimbabwe editors have better sense than this
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Manyepochaiwo
Pn the Rhodesia Herald there was a column Farms for Sale in the classifieds until 2000. So if people buy something you call it stealing.
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BobZim
Are you saying something ceases to be stolen property simply because it was advertised in the herald? Lmao!
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jephy
buying stolen property is stealing
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ProudZimbabwean
you can piss off on the land issue Ben Filth, we will go to war or kick MDC arse so hard if they dared undermine corrections of your kith and kin theft!!/........that is that full stop. I dare anyone bar nobody try to bring back racists in any guise whatsoever. They got their selfish just deserts and we make no excuses at all about that!!
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bassman01
As with a baboon ,barking from the cliff tops,that is proud Zimbabwean.Chema Chema kuphela,fight with what?against whom.There will be a war in Zim,between you and your brothers.You have no money to pay soldiers ,what of your Airforce in Gweru.How,but you are dumb.You have been at war for 32 years and you say you want to go to war now.Hahaha
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BobZim
No matter what happens henceforth the land is now ours and you are f#cked for life! Squirm all you want but thats the reality!
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SaManyika
BobZim une munda here iwewe zvaunongoswere wawata.enda unorima munda wako kana unawo.utondere kuti wakanzi negovt usaise mapermanent structures pamunda wako iwowo uye zvakare hauna matitle deeds kana lease agreement zvayo.i chose not to own such free land.i bought mine in Nyanga,20h and i got title deeds to it.i can do what i want on my land and as for you guys sooner or later minda iyoyo muchaitorerwa mark my words.
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BobZim
Whether ndine munda here or not hazvichinje kufara kwandinoita because a long running injustice was corrected.
For your own information all agricultural land in Zimbabwe belongs to the state and your title seeds are nothing more than a piece of paper! Ask your lawyers if you don't believe me thats constitutional amendment number 13 my friend! All title deeds for agricultural land are not worth the paper they are printed on, their value fall somewhere between toilet paper and sh#t.
So iwe you would rather have varungu owning the farms simply because you don't own one? Uri mutengesi chaiye hantie
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bassman01
To whom are you addressing? Bobozim, the land is only yours of you have title deeds.Clearly you don't .As for me being f-ckd for life,I live at the Great Barrier reef in Australia,am a NZ citizen and have an excellent career .what point are you trying to make,please elaborate ,if you want to try
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BobZim
I am saying given the interest you have in our land affairs (here and also on timeslive if my memory serves me well) either you or your kind obviously lost a lucrative source of income when we took back our land. Something is really hurting inside you its out there for all to see!
We all know how easy it was for you to make money in Africa and pay easy money for almost everything. You obviously miss that! I have been to NZ and I know how most Rhodies live down there. It ain't easy adjusting to life as a commoner after being brought up as a demigod in Africa. Thats where the you are f#cked for life comes in.
You or your close friends have come full circle from prada to nada and that gotta hurt and I know it no matter how much you deny! No more big five game for you just some koalas and kangaroos for you mate.
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bassman01
Bobzim,you are quite correct on only one point.There were rich whites in Zim,however I was not one of them.I left with less than $350US.Congrats on traveling to the countries I now call home,I'm sure you will agree with me they are wonderful places.I have never hunted the big 5,I don't believe in killing just for the sake of it.Never owned land or a farm,never wanted to.Never even owned a car in Zim my whole life there,and have never commented on any other blog if my memory serves me correct.I there a point you are trying to make ?
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BobZim
You and your kind and yes of course those you wish could repossess land they once stole from our forefathers! Where are you losing me here! And again no f#rking compensation for any invader without reparations being paid first for the irreparable damage done by slavery, colonialism and apartheid!
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bassman01
It must be painfull to you when I say land distribution was necessary and long overdue,and that whites have been used as cannon fodder by The brits(as they have with every nationality)I have never said the land must not go to the original owners and repatriation must be addressed,or that whites must get their farms back.Are you not a bit confused?If you are happy about the violence and murder that went along with the farm takeovers,that is something for you to deal with.What now?
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Zuda Madhara
So why are you meddling in Zim affairs, Mr smart a##s Australia?
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bassman01
Well my friend,I'm Zimbabwean,that's why.not Rhodesian ,born in Zim,So if my interest involves my country of birth what of it?
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Gangarahwe Chimutsa
Vana bassman01, shame kusarohwa uku!
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ProudZimbabwean
You are slow but you will eventually get it, its inevitable!
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bassman01
I am a bit slow,definately,what of it?Are you not a bit yourself?
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Solo_Maimbodei
I hope that all those who thought that the white folk in Zimbabwe cared about good governance and human rights can now see clearly what the whole battle was about. Land Ownership. Thats is what Ben Freeth can see in the constitution. Everything else is just hot air to them, as long as they have thier land back----and all along they thought the MDC was going to deliver that (remember the MDC 2000 Election Manifesto that stated that property rights would be returned to what they were pre-1999).
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bassman01
Very good point solo.why was the land issue not addressed in 1980.A fresh new country,new law ,new land owners,why was there a delay?How many people born after 1980?I think these issues had been addressed,things would have been a lot better
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Christian Allard
1974 is when the father in law of Ben Freeth took over the land in Rhodesia. As it was before the 18th April, 1980, we know that when the family of Ben Freeth took the land, many were disadvantaged by unfair discrimination on the grounds of their race while Rhodesia was ruled by a white supremacist regime.
If Ben Freeth was a human rights activist, he would have made sure that the land was redistributed, he did not.
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datbrotherfromthestates
and that is when they EMMIGRATED to zim from APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA!! they came to zim for one reason only....TO STEAL LAND!!
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BobZim
Thank you Christian right on point. Ben Freeth is nothing but liar and he knows it!
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datbrotherfromthestates
HE IS A LIAR AND A LAND THIEF!!
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datbrotherfromthestates
Ben freeth is NOT a zimbabwean born anything! freeth is a relic of APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA! he and campbell EMMIGRATED to zimbabwe simply to steal land from the black people of zimbabwe! shame on you people at this site for posting such lies and propoganda against your own people and race!
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Jukwa
Africa IS for Africans.
African lands ARE for Africans.
The invading white THIEVES can dream all they like and salivate all they like and delude themselves all they like.
The ongoing Nehanda's Chimurenga WILL IN TIME ENSURE that every last cubic centimeter of African Ancestral properties are back in the hands of their rightful African owners.
Africans control no land in Europe!
europeans should control no land in Africa. That is the ultimate goal that Nehanda's Chimurenga will achieve.
Roma & Jews did not even invade the Europe in which they lived for over TWO THOUSAND YEARS!
Yet europeans GASSED & BAKED Roma & Jews BY THE MILLIONS, just because they were not of Europe.
So europeans will ethnically cleansed Europe of non-europeans.
And europeans ALSO want to ethnically cleanse Africa, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, etc, and displace indigenous peoples?
Who died and made these pale devils lord of the planet?
No one! And so it is time for 'Rule of Law' to catch up with the criminal euro invaders in Africa.
Wise whites will know to vacate African Ancestral properties without fuss & delay.
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Wasp
Well said, Cde. These "thieving" aliens might have successfully cleansed and stolen entire lands in North America, Australia and New Zealand, but Africa is a different breed altogether. They failed to destroy us during slavery when they turned us into cash cows and property. And now, thanks to H.E. Bob "The Great," we are initiating FULL RECLAIMATION & REPOSSESSION of our STOLEN ancestral lands and will not give up the fight to any alien invader...not even for their sons who marry our daughters. Kwete!!!!
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Jukwa
Sting the 'aliens' Cde Wasp; sting them! lol
And by the way there is no 'marrying' of daughters. IT IS RAPE!
There was not way that African females was ever going to come in contact with the pale devils had the criminals not invaded African females.
And yes, whatever the case, African Ancestral properties MUST REMAIN WITH AFRICANS!
African properties CANNOT be transferred to non-Africans!
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Wasp
Let me comprehend this, Freeth is "....a British-born white Zimbabwean farmer" which makes him what? I thought previous statements and articles articulated that this opportunisitc man was a "mukwasha", a son-in-law, married to a Zimbabwean murungu, whose family OWNED the farm, kwete iye? If that's the case, what is he yepping about? Does he think that being British will give him enough credence to question the laws of our land? Does he think that being "Brish*t" should scare the govt to the extent of reversing land redistribution to appease his govt? Only in his Brish*t dreams. Mbuya Nehanda vakaramba. And we, too, are saying KWETE!!! Period!
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datbrotherfromthestates
HE IS FROM APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA!! he and the campbells emmigrated to zim simply to steal land!
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Dhakanyu
The commentators on this this story seem to have been born by same mom. I dont know whether it could be taht its same person under different pseudonyms. Such people are nhundira mutsime. I urge people to ignore such misfits. I have leaked my wounds many times ,whites take us to court and loose. We should bring our debates within the context of issues Ben Freeth brings to the table. None of all these bunheards even attempted to quote the Draft,Ben is using to air his views.At this point my ear goes to Ben that all that mass of shit put together just doing gundamusaira. Whites are going to defeat us on a point of law, not on the morality of the previous or intended actions. Lets learn to diagnose and channel our efforts to this. As i write my broke gorvenment lost a case against white farmers in RSA-courts. I think we should start imprisoning this political commissars amongs us. They make most noise leading us into the bush.
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datbrotherfromthestates
I dont believe for one second that you are a black person,even with the bad grammar. freeth is a liar,a bigot and a land thief! and you are a comlete moron if you are black
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Vincent Gwarazimba
No reverse on land reform BUT lets rationalise and take away land from those who have too much. We should have a maximum size for each region and sell it at nominal price to create value and issuance of title to holders. a Land Commission must be established to deal with land issue.
Labels: BEN FREETH, COPAC, LAND REFORM
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Zimbabwe by book: The good, the bad and the dire
11 Nov 2011 00:00 - Percy Zvomuya
On the 46th anniversary of Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence, Percy Zvomuya surveys three books about Zimbabwe.
At the Deep End by Morgan Tsvangirai (Penguin)
Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter by Wilfred Mhanda (Weaver Press)
Mugabe and the White African by Ben Freeth (Zebra Press)
One might take it as a sign of approaching normality in Zimbabwe that activists and politicians are taking a break from fighting President Robert Mugabe to sit down and write autobiographies and memoirs.
Most notable is Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who worked with his spokesperson and ghostwriter T William Bango on a 550-page autobiography, At the Deep End.
It is a text that should have been half its size—the first few hundred pages are forgettable. The book lights up around 1999, the year the MDC was formed, which is about chapter 10.
So, if you are pressed for time, skip the first 200 pages. I assure you, you are not missing much.
All right, what’s covered between pages one and 200? It’s a social history of Zimbabwe, the subregion and the world through Tsvangirai’s eyes. But who really wants to view the world through his eyes? Tsvangirai writes about the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal that resulted in independence in Mozambique and the guerrilla war against Ian Smith’s government gleaned from the “avid” reading of Rhodesian newspapers.
Then there are Robert Mugabe’s early years and he even throws in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The result of this is, at times, unfortunate and unschooled. For instance, writing about the relations between Pretoria and Harare in the 1980s, Tsvangirai says: “He [Mugabe] played into Pretoria’s hands by adopting an aggressive stance and the entire nation paid as a result.”
What was Mugabe supposed to do? Engage in sweet pillow talk with apartheid South Africa so soon after Mugabe, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) had been generously hosted by Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania and Samora Machel’s Mozambique?
Tsvangirai also criticises Mugabe for sending Zimbabwean troops to Mozambique in the early 1980s to help fight the apartheid-sponsored Renamo insurgency. That operation can’t be compared with Zimbabwe’s questionable participation in the late 1990s war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance.
Mugabe, eschewing Durban as a port, had to help secure access to the Indian Ocean via the port of Beira. “The operation in Mozambique cost Zimbabwe an average Z$2-million a day when the economy could hardly sustain it; nor were there any benefits from such extravagance, apart from giving Mugabe the political mileage he needed as a donor and powerful regional leader.
Wooden prose
“I was born a few months before the white settler administration formed the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland,” Tsvangirai writes in the first chapter of a book, which can be read as a social anthropological study of life in Zimbabwe after World War II. By page 24, I was struggling to get into its mostly dense, wooden (apologies to all the trees out there) prose. There is an explanation of sorts on page 24: “Although I was extremely competent with figures, arithmetic and mathematics, I had difficulties with both spoken and written English.”
Then there are the strange sentences and weird thought processes. What, for instance, does the following mean? “People felt their former liberators were now preying on them, riding roughshod over basic graciousness after having fallen hard into the trappings of power, ambition and avarice.”
Or this: “Zimbabweans live in a world dominated by symbols. In fact, symbolism is so deeply embedded in our culture that it can be seen as second nature.” Which people don’t value symbols and symbolism?
“My life was destined to be closely interwoven with political, economic and social changes in Zimbabwe.” I don’t know what this means. I could understand it if Mugabe or one of the nationalists said it, but as Tsvangirai joined Zanu-PF at independence in 1980, its meaning is not immediately clear.
Tsvangirai’s liberation war CV is sparse, involving attending “several secret political meetings at which black people sought to assure themselves that Zimbabwe was destined for freedom”.
Early on in the book he gives us a reason why, unlike some young men of his age, he did not go to the bush to join other guerrillas. “Perhaps I would have become a political activist but my parents needed financial help to support the other children through school.”
To people who are not from the subregion, this might sound like pointless nostalgia, but the liberation war is a big deal in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. It’s not a coincidence that where the liberation movements have been voted out, for instance in Zambia and Malawi, wars were not waged to push for independence.
Flawed arguments
Tsvangirai’s nostalgia for the liberation war recalls what Zimbabwe’s generals told him in 2000—we won’t allow you to take power even if you win the elections. It was a message repeated by Constantine Chiwenga, Zimbabwean military supremo, who said a few years ago: “I would not hesitate to go on record again on behalf of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces to disclose that we would not welcome any change of government that carries the label ‘Made in London’, and whose sole aim is to defeat the gains of the liberation struggle.”
I have no space to point out the holes in Tsvangirai’s argument that “the social agenda that Mugabe had pursued from independence faltered under ESAP [an International Monetary Fund-prescribed neoliberal policy], with devastating results.”
Mugabe was able to expand social services, education and infrastructure originally meant to cater for a few hundred thousand whites. Even after a decade of decline, Zimbabwe was last year listed by the United Nations as the most literate country in Africa. Love him or hate him, that’s part of Mugabe’s legacy.
So what new details does this autobiography put in the open? That former president Thabo Mbeki was “financing the Ncube group to destabilise the MDC”, thus the splitting of the MDC into two factions—Tsvangirai’s and that led by university man Welshman Ncube.
Tsvangirai also traces the roots of the anti-intellectualism in the MDC. “If the political project was to succeed, I told myself, it had to be led by ordinary workers, peasants ... not theorists, but doers”. Being one doesn’t preclude being the other; Mugabe is a classic example. He’s very erudite and is a man of action (some would say too much action).
One of the problems that faced the MDC after a few years in existence was its lack of ideological cohesion. Apart from being opposed to Mugabe, one was sometimes not sure what the MDC’s vision for Zimbabwe entailed. But Tsvangirai writes that the MDC was “even more ideological” than the ruling party. “Zanu-PF was just a nationalist movement whose agenda ended with independence in 1980.” Just a nationalist movement?
Tsvangirai writes about the perception that the MDC is a front for the West. “While trying to rescue the white farmers, London created an impression that the MDC was its vehicle for regime change.” It’s not clear whether this impression has gone away because people who dislike Mugabe and Zanu-PF will still tell you that they find the MDC’s positions wishy-washy. Still, Tsvangirai insists, “for all the Zanu-PF hype, neither Zimbabwean whites nor Britain influenced the MDC and me in any way”.
Savage attacks
If you like to see blood, Tsvangirai uses his lance to get at his rivals. About Ncube, he writes: “I had spent the better part of my tenure babysitting some of my highly unpopular colleagues, including Ncube.” He notes that Ncube is a “superb boardroom idealist but lacks a popular or grassroots insights”. These politicians insisted that “I should never address a meeting alone. They all wanted to be where I was, especially at mass rallies, in order to benefit from my personal political brand.”
About Arthur Mutambara, the man invited from South Africa to head the Ncube faction of the MDC, Tsvangirai says: “After perusing a copy of his inaugural speech I realised that one could pass a university and still come out unfinished as a human being.” He describes Mutambara (holder of an Oxford doctorate in robotics) as a “politically illiterate newcomer” and a “lay intellectual”.
Tsvangirai is, obviously, a brave man, conscious of his abilities and pulling power. He is, perhaps, the most illustrious hero of the democratic cause.
Yet he uses the “I” voice in places you would expect him to speak in the collective “we”. Writing about the delay in the release of election results in 2008, he writes: “I was positive that if I had won control of the legislature, there was no way I could have lost the presidency.” And there are other instances of this arrogant “I” voice, as in “finally I had dismantled the monolith to its last pebble”.
What about the contributions of the hundreds who died for the democratic cause and the thousands who were tortured?
At other times he speaks about himself in the third person: “Given Mugabe’s fiery rhetoric and his deep personal hatred for Morgan Tsvangirai ” (Mutambara also does this quite a lot.) I think that’s part of the problem with Zimbabwe now, how everything revolves around Mugabe.
When I told a close friend who has worked in Zimbabwe’s civil society for decades that I wanted to give her a copy of the biography as a Christmas present, she said I should rather get her Julian Barnes’s Man Booker-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending. When I pressed her further that, as an activist, she should read At the Deep End, she said Tsvangirai shoud have written more than one paragraph on the National Constitutional Assembly and also mentioned Tawandah Mutasa and Deprose Muchena. (Muchena is briefly mentioned; Mutasa is not.)
Strange turns of phrases
My friend asked: “Does he finally come out on his polygamous situation?” No, he doesn’t, instead portraying himself as a single parent following the 2009 death in a motor vehicle accident of his wife, Susan, whom he describes as “my pillar and holistic stabiliser”.
Tsvangirai has such strange turns of phrases. On page 542, he writes: “I wish to acknowledge the lack of space in this memoir for me to go into detail about my new experience in the changed political arena.” I wrote in the margin: “No, Morgan, you had over 500 pages to do this.”
In contrast, Wilfred Mhanda’s 300-page autobiography, Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter, is one of the most important works to come out of Zimbabwe. It has authority because it was written by a senior combatant, a liberation war aristocrat, once a member of the high command of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (Zanla), which was the armed wing of Zanu.
In an arena where war credentials are important Mhanda’s CV is sterling. He went to high school at Dadaya, the institution founded by New Zealand-born missionary and former prime minister of Rhodesia, Sir Garfield Todd. Todd was accorded the title mwana wevhu (son of the soil) and billed as the “rallying cry of African nationalism”.
From early on Mhanda wanted to be a politician. Among the most treasured gifts he got from his parents were Ndabaningi Sithole’s tome African Nationalism and a transistor radio (to younger readers, that was the iPhone of its day).
A bright student, Mhanda was accepted in 1971 at the then University of Rhodesia for a bachelor of science degree, majoring in zoology, botany and chemistry. While there he joined the university’s underground Zanu branch. After taking part in protests, he was arrested. He skipped bail and went to Botswana, before proceeding to Tanzania for military training.
Multifaceted account
Mhanda’s account is part war diary, part scholarly tome, part insider/outsider account of one of the most interesting episodes in Zanu history. The book is so authoritative that, not a few times, he disputes what other nationalists, historians and scholars have put out. He was one of the chief protagonists when nationalists such as Mugabe and Edgar Tekere were locked up in Rhodesian prisons and when Josiah Tongogara, Zanla’s supremo, was in detention in Zambia following the suspicious death of lawyer and Zanu chairman Herbert Chitepo.
Mhanda’s book is a clever critique of the uniform nationalist historiography (“patriotic history”, as British historian Terence Ranger called it) that has become staple since 2000, sometimes known as Mugabeism.
Some of the information might not be of interest to the general reader but would be to scholars of that period. For the general reader, what’s noteworthy is the rise of Mugabe. He wasn’t well known in the training camps in Mgagao, Tanzania. “At the time we knew nothing about Mugabe except for the fact that he was the party’s secretary general.” Rugare Gumbo, one of the few guerrillas who knew him, “spoke highly of him and described him as articulate”.
When Mozambique gained independence in 1975, Zanla moved to the east. When Machel asked them to submit a list of their political leaders, Mugabe topped it. Mhanda writes that “Machel leapt from his chair in disgust. He was clearly not happy that we had included Mugabe, let alone as the leader.” Mugabe was then living in exile in Quelimane, on the Mozambican coast. “He loves the limelight,” Machel said prophetically about Mugabe.
“We lived to regret the day we had put forward Mugabe’s name,” writes the man who later spent three years in a Mozambican prison for his dis-agreements with Mugabe, who was taking control of Zanla at the time.
Selective amnesia
Mhanda is strange bedfellows with Ben Freeth, in whose company he travels to the west of Zimbabwe in a section of Freeth’s Mugabe and the White African.
“Deeply moving” and “fascinating”, writes Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the foreword to the book. As I read Freeth, however, I wondered how much of the memoir the bishop had read. It’s about the struggles of the British-born farmer fighting off war veterans, thugs and politicians who are after his farm.
[At Mount Carmel's 12,000 hectares, you say 'farmers', I say landlord. - MrK]
The most maddening feature of the book is its amnesia about the genesis of the Zimbabwe crisis. “In Zimbabwe none of the white exploiters will be allowed to keep a single acre of their land,” the book declares on page seven. “From 1973 to 1979, 320 white farmers were murdered. This counted for more than the total number of white civilian deaths over that whole period.”
Why the farmers are being killed is never explained. Freeth doesn’t mention the 50 000 blacks who died in the same period. It’s almost as if apropos of nothing black “terrorists” (his word) started killing white farmers.
Ghost of Ian Smith
The book is written in the spirit of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence announced by the late Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, on November 11 1965. When Britain was “granting” independence to its colonies in the 1960s, Smith unilaterally declared independence from Britain.
The ghost of Smith suffuses every page of Freeth’s book—so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if Smith’s brood argued for a share of the royalties.
Early on in the book Freeth tells us about his encounters with “tribesmen” in Ethiopia, “terrorists” killing the whites. The traditional healer is a “witch doctor”. On a visit to a white-run farm, Freeth is impressed by the commercial operation, “an oasis of irrigated crops and productivity”. In contrast the black-populated areas are “dry and barren”, even though both sections receive the same amount of rainfall.
The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, the cornerstone of laws that began the impoverishment of black people, is written of affectionately. The law was meant for the “security of tenure” it provided, argues Freeth.
“Contrary to the repetitious propaganda, every serious farmer knows that land in these communal areas can be made to produce every bit as well as other land in Zimbabwe,” Freeth writes of the rocky, infertile land to which black people were driven by Rhodesian administrations.
Freeth, who is an evangelical Christian, quotes the Bible so liberally that at some point I had to check whether his book was put out by a religious publisher. But his idea of Christianity is one with no empathy for others except his fellow “white Africans”. The Munhumutapa dynasty, whose seat was at Great Zimbabwe, is described as one of “master pillager[s]” and “dictator[s] of the time”. Freeth and his Christian God seems to care only about white people.
The black men’s traditions are “evil practices” and even animals are not spared. The crocodile, Mugabe’s totemic animal, is described as “ugly and evil-looking”. Can’t a crocodile be allowed to be, well, a crocodile? “When I think of African tyrants, I think of the crocodile, because crocodiles are absolute tyrants.” The continent is in a big mess because “the spirit of the crocodile has been roused by many of its leaders”. I will admit that African leaders have messed up but we have to factor in the centuries of colonial rapine and plunder.
[Which continues to this day - every year $1 trillion leaves Africa in raw materials and precious and industrial metals, unpaid for, no taxes levied, and no dividends shared. The processes thatallow this theft are called neocolonialsm, because they continue the colonial economy with frontmen ('dictators' and elected heads of government) instead of governors and viceroys. Instead of the British and other colonial armies, there are the IMF/World Bank and their financial manipulation, and NATO and sometimes conventional former colonial armies as enforcers. - MrK]
Lawless Africa
Before the advent of the white man, the land was a “place of insecurity and hunger and escaping from invading, looting tribes”, Freeth writes. This is another way of saying that before the white man’s arrival Africa was formless and without order, with no history. Freeth also writes about the first Chimurenga, a war that involved “attacks on the white people”. There is no mention of the dispossession that preceded that heroic struggle.
Freeth’s narrative of dispossession and legal fights is, to be sure, touching and heroic. He stoically fights off an assortment of hoodlums and politicians. After being rebuffed by Zimbabwean courts, he took his case to the Southern African Development Community regional court in Windhoek. The court ruled that “white people could be African”.
If they so wish, whites can be black, too. The American liberation theologian James H Cone argued that “to be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind and your body are where the dispossessed are”. It is never about pigmentation.
Labels: BEN FREETH, BOOKS, RHODESIA
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Mugabe And The White African - A Review By MrK
Africa or African people don't owe Ben Freeth an identity. Let alone an identity of lording over hundreds of serfs, while overseeing thousands of hectares of land.
The talk of 'crocodile spirits' is used by the Apostolic and Evangelical sects like the Mountain of Fire And Miracles Ministries.
I quote from their website: " The study of the spiritual aspect of the Marine kingdom is such a vast one that cannot really be exhausted. Other facts include that each sea animal has its own equivalent spirit that seeks to possess man. Thus we have the alligator spirit, the Crocodile spirit, the spirit of the Octopus, the spirit of the Shark and the Sea Monsters spirits etc. "
Ben Freeth claims he received these ideas from a friend, Langton Chuvi, whose mother was a spirit medium, and who 'found the Lord'. Your go-to-guy for what African religion is really all about - a born again Christian.
Ben Freeth now claims that 'African leaders' are not living on a continent massively exploited by transnational corporations and the IMF, none of that stuff, he is convinced they are 'possessed by the Spirit Of The Crocodile'. I like my analysis better.
Which brings me to analysis. Ben Freeth gets his main facts about Zimbabwe's history wrong, and is completely amnesiacal about the effects of colonialism and blind to corporate exploitation. Colonialism in Southern Rhodesia/Rhodesia/Zimbabwe saw 1% of the population violently (Bulawayo for instance means "The Place Of Slaughter") handed 43% of the country - 70% of the high rainfall land. In border areas, many African people were put into 'protected villages' (a concept adopted from the Malay campaign), where many died of exposure and deprivation. In response to this historic background, the ZANU-PF government instituted land reform programmes.
Also, he is playing fast and loose with the numbers. For instance,
" On the 82% of Zimbabwean land that the white farmers do not/did not own, "
Whites owned 43% of the country. Well nearly half of the other 57% (not 82%), Ben, are Game Parks, Wildlife Reserves and National Parks. Local Africans can barely farm in them, and certainly are not allowed to hunt in them, which is what they did when they still owned that land.
See this map.
Freeth writes: " Throughout history there has been a continual struggle between the spiritual forces of good and evil, whether or not we choose to recognize it. Witch doctors, spirit mediums, spells, even human sacrifices, are not uncommon in Zimbabwe, which is (or has been) a relatively civilized country, with a well educated population and a literacy rate that once topped 90 per cent, the highest in Africa. But often in Zimbabwe, an individual who is doing well will suddenly fall sick for no apparent reason, or actually die."
What Ben Freeth neglects to tell, is that the 90% literacy rate was achieved not 'by itself', not 'by luck', and certainly not by the racist government of Ian Smith. It was achieved by the ZANU-PF under President Mugabe, which put an emphasis on education and healthcare during the 1980s. This is not something he inherited from any benign previous goverment. It was only after the World Bank got hold of government policy through ESAP that both education and healthcare were defunded. (Google: imf zimbabwe juhasz, or click here: The Tragic Tale Of The IMF In Zimbabwe, by Antonia Juhasz)
Being a devout white supremacist (if he was actually African, we would all him an insufferable tribalist), Ben Freeth of course identifies 'civilisation' with Christianity and European rule. But he goes beyond that.
The real question is - is Ben Freeth mentally ill? I am not a psychiatrist, however, consider the following. He is the nephew of a member of the House Of Lords, he has dreams of grandure, and is convinced he is destined to rule over hundreds of 'farm workers', who get paid virtually nothing. He is convinced of his own unfailing judgment. He strongly believes in magical thinking and direct Divine Intervention. He is a racial supremacist. Add them all up, and you get severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Of course, among Rhodesians that is a tough one to diagnose, because it is hard to know where their culture ends and personality begins.
P. 84: " Heidi saw a police truck go past with a lot of black people in civilian clothes riding in it, and she suddenly felt the urge to pray, knowing that many people were abducted at night, never to be seen again. As she looked toward Harare Central Police Station, she saw above it a great battle depicted in fierce light and colour and movement in the sky. Within the red and blue and silver and yellow lights Heidi could see two distinct forces clashing against each other. It was clearly a battle between good and evil, she told me. "
Is the great battle between Good and Evil being fought out in the skies over Harare Central Police Station? You decide. And now, for some Direct Divine Intervention.
P. 82: I was worried that Hennie's feet would be beaten. Everyone knew that this was the torture method used by the militia. Hennie had diabetes, and had to wear slippers because if his feet were rubbed or bruised, gangrene could set in. In the middle of all the violence, Hennie later told me, a man came to him and talked quietly into his ear. This man seemed different from the rest of them. He told Hennie, "You'll be OK." Hennie was sure that the man was an angel. His feet were left untouched.
P. 86: " When I think of African dicators, I think of crocodiles, because crocodiles are absolute tyrants. "
P. 92: " Africa is in such a mess today, I believe, because the spirit of the crocodile has been roused by many of its leaders. The result of entering into a covenant with death is that every thing you touch simply dies. One of the clearest illustrations of this is in agriculture. The war veterans who have invaded our farms always maintained that our land was far better than theirs. Their crops, however, look pitiable standing next to our crops, although the same rain falls on theirs as falls on ours and both crops shae the same soil. "
Ben Freeth uses the same analysis to address 'the problems of the continent'. In other words, he is truly clueless. Of the flim-flam scam that is called 'donor aid' (1/4 trillion a year (not to be confused with the 6 billion in charitable giving) which is a substitute for the taxes not paid by transnational corporations), he writes:
"It's not as if nothing is ever done to help. Every year, billions of dollars are poured into the continent to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and cure the sick, but all the time new wars, new famines, and new disasters continue to take their toll."
Well Ben, that is because every year, $1 trillion (1000 billion) is stolen FROM the continent in raw materials - gold, diamonds, oil, coltan, copper, cobalt, uranium, tea, coffee - all without being taxed or profits being shared. $1 trillion goes out, $1/4 trillion of 'donor aid' goes in (paid for by middle and working class western taxpayers and some local companies, because in the West, transnational corporations don't pay much taxes either). Then there is the 6 billion a year misery industry (charitable giving - aunt Milly's 5 pounds to charity on Sunday) that provides cover for this flim-flam scam.
Back to the spirit of the crocodile.
When he was younger and walking through Ethiopia's Omo Valley he states (p. 35): "It was on this trip that the old Africa, the Africa of the "noble savage", presented itself to me. I was young enough to believe in the idea of the "noble savage" back then. "
So his image of Africa has not always been negative. Once, he thought it was populated by noble savages.
Let's be honest, gentle reader. Wouldn't this guy turn YOU to homicidal rage?
Nothing that he says about Africa can be taken at face value. It is usually ignorant, but always self serving and self aggrandizing.
Even in other African countries, his main interaction is with other whites. In Ethiopia, he meets and American called Ben Skaggs. I quote: " The big man gazed at the scene before us, and in his gravelly voice summed it up: "God made all this!" He said it in such a simple, sincere way, wich such plain and truthful sincerity, that it made me want to cry. "
Of Zambia, he states the following: "In the mid-1990s, when Laura and I lived there, Zambia had very little in the way of anything. We used to joke about the Zambian currency, the Kwacha, as I needed a couple of briefcases full of 500-kwacha notes to pay the workers each month. Inflation stood at nearly 200 percent and we couldn't imagine how things could be any worse. "
Great. What he never explains, is why his privileged behind never LEAVES.
Of course, his sanctimonious plea at the end of the book takes the cake. He equates the return of white rule with a 'turning back to God'.
Ben Freeth's Open Letter To Mugabe In 2005
First, when you address a President, you might try to address him by his title, not by his last name? Not very 'humble' for a Christian.
"With the arrival of the colonial white man, and the favourable conditions that this brought to the population, the black population doubled in the first thirty years."
The conditions of colonialism were so 'favourable', that within 5 years of the 'pioneer column' arriving, there was a rebellion in which both the Shona and Matabele joined each other to throw the colonials out.
How ungrateful, aye?
" Over 70% of those that were chased off their land bought their land under your government since 1980. "
This claim of course is completely unsourced. There is no evidence that even the Campbells 're-bought' (?) their land from the post-indepencence government after April 1980. They bought Mount Carmel, all 12,000 hectares of it, off the government of Ian Smith in 1974. And being white, they were given a 20-year mortgage to do so. Mount Carmel is of course in the then whites-only European Areas that made up the center of the country.
Now think of this for a second. The British and US goverments reneged on their obligation to pay the white farmers $2 billion to compensate whites for the value of the land. At what time did the white farmers pay the ZANU-PF government $2 billion when they "bought their land under your government"? How much did they pay to the ZANU-PF government to buy their land after 1980? The claim is a preposterous and outrageous lie. And lying is not very Christian, now is it?
Conclusion
Ben Freeth is a self serving weener. Or some kind of reptile. He was given a massive amount of privilege and opportunity, but never considers that at any time he may have been at fault or made a mistake. He blames everything on Africans, and sees no problem with the literal demonisation of African self-rule. And I don't mean figuratively, but literally. Leaders in Africa are ruled by the 'spirit of the crocodile', with which of course he means the Devil/Satan/etc. And not metaphorically - literally. Therefore, his refusal to leave a foreclosed estate is a battle between Good (he himself/God) and Evil (President Mugabe/Satan). People die and get beaten up in the process - so what? One pregnant woman called Heidi dies of malaria - oh well. (Why is she even out on the farm when pregnant with twins?)
I wonder what would happen to his worldview if he had to consider that Anglo-American, Glencore AG, Equinox Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell and all the corporations which are dragging hundreds of billions of dollars out of Africa, are not on the side of Good? That with their warmongering, exploitation and pollution, they might be working for the Evil One? :)
I doubt he'd ever make that leap, though.
Labels: BEN FREETH, LAND REFORM, RACISM, RHODESIA
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COMMENT - Morgan Tsvangirai: "the social agenda that Mugabe had pursued from independence faltered under ESAP [an International Monetary Fund-prescribed neoliberal policy], with devastating results." See here, what the MDC means with 'mismanagement by Mugabe' - the
World Bank's Enhanced Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), otherwise known as austerity. It is the MDC that wants to return to austerity, without telling the Zimbabwean people, of course.
Zimbabwe by book: the good, the bad and the dire
11/11/2011 00:00:00
by Percy Zvomunya I Mail & Guardian
At the Deep End by Morgan Tsvangirai (Penguin)
Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter by Wilfred Mhanda (Weaver Press)
Mugabe and the White African by Ben Freeth (Zebra Press)
One might take it as a sign of approaching normality in Zimbabwe that activists and politicians are taking a break from fighting President Robert Mugabe to sit down and write autobiographies and memoirs.
Most notable is Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who worked with his spokesperson and
ghostwriter T William Bango on a 550-page autobiography, At the Deep End.
It is a text that should have been half its size -- the first few hundred pages are forgettable. The book lights up around 1999, the year the MDC was formed, which is about chapter 10. So, if you are pressed for time, skip the first 200 pages. I assure you, you are not missing much.
All right, what's covered between pages one and 200? It's a social history of Zimbabwe, the subregion and the world through Tsvangirai's eyes. But who really wants to view the world through his eyes? Tsvangirai writes about the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal that resulted in independence in Mozambique and the guerrilla war against Ian Smith's government gleaned from the "avid" reading of Rhodesian newspapers.
Then there are Robert Mugabe's early years and he even throws in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The result of this is, at times, unfortunate and unschooled. For instance, writing about the relations between Pretoria and Harare in the 1980s, Tsvangirai says:
"He [Mugabe] played into Pretoria's hands by adopting an aggressive stance and the entire nation paid as a result."
What was Mugabe supposed to do? Engage in sweet pillow talk with apartheid South Africa so soon after Mugabe, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu) had been generously hosted by Kenneth Kaunda's Zambia, Julius Nyerere's Tanzania and Samora Machel's Mozambique?
Tsvangirai also criticises Mugabe for sending Zimbabwean troops to Mozambique in the early 1980s to help fight the apartheid-sponsored Renamo insurgency. That operation can't be compared with Zimbabwe's questionable participation in the late 1990s war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance.
Mugabe, eschewing Durban as a port, had to help secure access to the Indian Ocean via the port of Beira. "The operation in Mozambique cost Zimbabwe an average Z$2-million a day when the economy could hardly sustain it; nor were there any benefits from such extravagance, apart from giving Mugabe the political mileage he needed as a donor and powerful regional leader.
Wooden prose
"I was born a few months before the white settler administration formed the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland," Tsvangirai writes in the first chapter of a book, which can be read as a social anthropological study of life in Zimbabwe after World War II. By page 24, I was struggling to get into its mostly dense, wooden (apologies to all the trees out there) prose. There is an explanation of sorts on page 24: "Although I was extremely competent with figures, arithmetic and mathematics, I had difficulties with both spoken and written English."
Then there are the strange sentences and weird thought processes. What, for instance, does the following mean? "People felt their former liberators were now preying on them, riding roughshod over basic graciousness after having fallen hard into the trappings of power, ambition and avarice."
Or this: "Zimbabweans live in a world dominated by symbols. In fact, symbolism is so deeply embedded in our culture that it can be seen as second nature." Which people don't value symbols and symbolism?
"My life was destined to be closely interwoven with political, economic and social changes in Zimbabwe." I don't know what this means. I could understand it if Mugabe or one of the nationalists said it, but as Tsvangirai joined Zanu-PF at independence in 1980, its meaning is not immediately clear.
Tsvangirai's liberation war CV is sparse, involving attending "several secret political meetings at which black people sought to assure themselves that Zimbabwe was destined for freedom".
Early on in the book he gives us a reason why, unlike some young men of his age, he did not go to the bush to join other guerrillas. "Perhaps I would have become a political activist but my parents needed financial help to support the other children through school."
To people who are not from the subregion, this might sound like pointless nostalgia, but the liberation war is a big deal in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. It's not a coincidence that where the liberation movements have been voted out, for instance in Zambia and Malawi, wars were not waged to push for independence.
Flawed arguments
Tsvangirai's nostalgia for the liberation war recalls what Zimbabwe's generals told him in 2000 -- we won't allow you to take power even if you win the elections. It was a message repeated by Constantine Chiwenga, Zimbabwean military supremo, who said a few years ago:
"I would not hesitate to go on record again on behalf of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces to disclose that we would not welcome any change of government that carries the label 'Made in London', and whose sole aim is to defeat the gains of the liberation struggle."
I have no space to point out the holes in Tsvangirai's argument that "the social agenda that Mugabe had pursued from independence faltered under ESAP [an International Monetary Fund-prescribed neoliberal policy], with devastating results." Mugabe was able to expand social services, education and infrastructure originally meant to cater for a few hundred thousand whites. Even after a decade of decline, Zimbabwe was last year listed by the United Nations as the most literate country in Africa. Love him or hate him, that's part of Mugabe's legacy.
So what new details does this autobiography put in the open? That former president Thabo Mbeki was "financing the Ncube group to destabilise the MDC", thus the splitting of the MDC into two factions -- Tsvangirai's and that led by university man Welshman Ncube.
Tsvangirai also traces the roots of the anti-intellectualism in the MDC.
"If the political project was to succeed, I told myself, it had to be led by ordinary workers, peasants ... not theorists, but doers".
Being one doesn't preclude being the other; Mugabe is a classic example. He's very erudite and is a man of action (some would say too much action).
One of the problems that faced the MDC after a few years in existence was its lack of ideological cohesion. Apart from being opposed to Mugabe, one was sometimes not sure what the MDC's vision for Zimbabwe entailed. But Tsvangirai writes that the MDC was "even more ideological" than the ruling party. "Zanu-PF was just a nationalist movement whose agenda ended with independence in 1980." Just a nationalist movement?
Tsvangirai writes about the perception that the MDC is a front for the West.
"While trying to rescue the white farmers, London created an impression that the MDC was its vehicle for regime change."
It's not clear whether this impression has gone away because people who dislike Mugabe and Zanu-PF will still tell you that they find the MDC's positions wishy-washy. Still, Tsvangirai insists, "for all the Zanu-PF hype, neither Zimbabwean whites nor Britain influenced the MDC and me in any way".
Savage attacks
If you like to see blood, Tsvangirai uses his lance to get at his rivals. About Ncube, he writes: "I had spent the better part of my tenure babysitting some of my highly unpopular colleagues, including Ncube." He notes that Ncube is a "superb boardroom idealist but lacks a popular or grassroots insights". These politicians insisted that "I should never address a meeting alone. They all wanted to be where I was, especially at mass rallies, in order to benefit from my personal political brand."
About Arthur Mutambara, the man invited from South Africa to head the Ncube faction of the MDC, Tsvangirai says: "After perusing a copy of his inaugural speech I realised that one could pass a university and still come out unfinished as a human being." He describes Mutambara (holder of an Oxford doctorate in robotics) as a "politically illiterate newcomer" and a "lay intellectual".
Tsvangirai is, obviously, a brave man, conscious of his abilities and pulling power. He is, perhaps, the most illustrious hero of the democratic cause.
Yet he uses the "I" voice in places you would expect him to speak in the collective "we". Writing about the delay in the release of election results in 2008, he writes: "I was positive that if I had won control of the legislature, there was no way I could have lost the presidency." And there are other instances of this arrogant "I" voice, as in "finally I had dismantled the monolith to its last pebble".
What about the contributions of the hundreds who died for the democratic cause and the thousands who were tortured?
At other times he speaks about himself in the third person: "Given Mugabe's fiery rhetoric and his deep personal hatred for Morgan Tsvangirai " (Mutambara also does this quite a lot.) I think that's part of the problem with Zimbabwe now, how everything revolves around Mugabe.
When I told a close friend who has worked in Zimbabwe's civil society for decades that I wanted to give her a copy of the biography as a Christmas present, she said I should rather get her Julian Barnes's Man Booker-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending. When I pressed her further that, as an activist, she should read At the Deep End, she said Tsvangirai shoud have written more than one paragraph on the National Constitutional Assembly and also mentioned Tawandah Mutasa and Deprose Muchena. (Muchena is briefly mentioned; Mutasa is not.)
Strange turns of phrases
My friend asked: "Does he finally come out on his polygamous situation?" No, he doesn't, instead portraying himself as a single parent following the 2009 death in a motor vehicle accident of his wife, Susan, whom he describes as "my pillar and holistic stabiliser".
Tsvangirai has such strange turns of phrases. On page 542, he writes: "I wish to acknowledge the lack of space in this memoir for me to go into detail about my new experience in the changed political arena." I wrote in the margin: "No, Morgan, you had over 500 pages to do this."
In contrast, Wilfred Mhanda's 300-page autobiography, Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter, is one of the most important works to come out of Zimbabwe. It has authority because it was written by a senior combatant, a liberation war aristocrat, once a member of the high command of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (Zanla), which was the armed wing of Zanu.
In an arena where war credentials are important Mhanda's CV is sterling. He went to high school at Dadaya, the institution founded by New Zealand-born missionary and former prime minister of Rhodesia, Sir Garfield Todd. Todd was accorded the title mwana wevhu (son of the soil) and billed as the "rallying cry of African nationalism".
From early on Mhanda wanted to be a politician. Among the most treasured gifts he got from his parents were Ndabaningi Sithole's tome African Nationalism and a transistor radio (to younger readers, that was the iPhone of its day).
A bright student, Mhanda was accepted in 1971 at the then University of Rhodesia for a bachelor of science degree, majoring in zoology, botany and chemistry. While there he joined the university's underground Zanu branch. After taking part in protests, he was arrested. He skipped bail and went to Botswana, before proceeding to Tanzania for military training.
Multifaceted account
Mhanda's account is part war diary, part scholarly tome, part insider/outsider account of one of the most interesting episodes in Zanu history. The book is so authoritative that, not a few times, he disputes what other nationalists, historians and scholars have put out. He was one of the chief protagonists when nationalists such as Mugabe and Edgar Tekere were locked up in Rhodesian prisons and when Josiah Tongogara, Zanla's supremo, was in detention in Zambia following the suspicious death of lawyer and Zanu chairman Herbert Chitepo.
Mhanda's book is a clever critique of the uniform nationalist historiography ("patriotic history", as British historian Terence Ranger called it) that has become staple since 2000, sometimes known as Mugabeism.
Some of the information might not be of interest to the general reader but would be to scholars of that period. For the general reader, what's noteworthy is the rise of Mugabe. He wasn't well known in the training camps in Mgagao, Tanzania. "At the time we knew nothing about Mugabe except for the fact that he was the party's secretary general." Rugare Gumbo, one of the few guerrillas who knew him, "spoke highly of him and described him as articulate".
When Mozambique gained independence in 1975, Zanla moved to the east. When Machel asked them to submit a list of their political leaders, Mugabe topped it. Mhanda writes that "Machel leapt from his chair in disgust. He was clearly not happy that we had included Mugabe, let alone as the leader." Mugabe was then living in exile in Quelimane, on the Mozambican coast. "He loves the limelight," Machel said prophetically about Mugabe.
"We lived to regret the day we had put forward Mugabe's name," writes the man who later spent three years in a Mozambican prison for his dis-agreements with Mugabe, who was taking control of Zanla at the time.
Selective amnesia
Mhanda is strange bedfellows with Ben Freeth, in whose company he travels to the west of Zimbabwe in a section of Freeth's Mugabe and the White African.
"Deeply moving" and "fascinating", writes Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the foreword to the book. As I read Freeth, however, I wondered how much of the memoir the bishop had read. It's about the struggles of the British-born farmer fighting off war veterans, thugs and politicians who are after his farm.
The most maddening feature of the book is its amnesia about the genesis of the Zimbabwe crisis. "In Zimbabwe none of the white exploiters will be allowed to keep a single acre of their land," the book declares on page seven. "From 1973 to 1979, 320 white farmers were murdered. This counted for more than the total number of white civilian deaths over that whole period."
Why the farmers are being killed is never explained. Freeth doesn't mention the 50 000 blacks who died in the same period. It's almost as if apropos of nothing black "terrorists" (his word) started killing white farmers.
Ghost of Ian Smith
The book is written in the spirit of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence announced by the late Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, on November 11 1965. When Britain was "granting" independence to its colonies in the 1960s, Smith unilaterally declared independence from Britain.
The ghost of Smith suffuses every page of Freeth's book -- so much so that I wouldn't be surprised if Smith's brood argued for a share of the royalties.
Early on in the book Freeth tells us about his encounters with "tribesmen" in Ethiopia, "terrorists" killing the whites. The traditional healer is a "witch doctor". On a visit to a white-run farm, Freeth is impressed by the commercial operation, "an oasis of irrigated crops and productivity". In contrast the black-populated areas are "dry and barren", even though both sections receive the same amount of rainfall.
The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, the cornerstone of laws that began the impoverishment of black people, is written of affectionately. The law was meant for the "security of tenure" it provided, argues Freeth. "Contrary to the repetitious propaganda, every serious farmer knows that land in these communal areas can be made to produce every bit as well as other land in Zimbabwe," Freeth writes of the rocky, infertile land to which black people were driven by Rhodesian administrations.
Freeth, who is an evangelical Christian, quotes the Bible so liberally that at some point I had to check whether his book was put out by a religious publisher. But his idea of Christianity is one with no empathy for others except his fellow "white Africans". The Munhumutapa dynasty, whose seat was at Great Zimbabwe, is described as one of "master pillager[s]" and "dictator[s] of the time". Freeth and his Christian God seems to care only about white people.
The black men's traditions are "evil practices" and even animals are not spared. The crocodile, Mugabe's totemic animal, is described as "ugly and evil-looking". Can't a crocodile be allowed to be, well, a crocodile? "When I think of African tyrants, I think of the crocodile, because crocodiles are absolute tyrants." The continent is in a big mess because "the spirit of the crocodile has been roused by many of its leaders". I will admit that African leaders have messed up but we have to factor in the centuries of colonial rapine and plunder.
Lawless Africa
Before the advent of the white man, the land was a "place of insecurity and hunger and escaping from invading, looting tribes", Freeth writes. This is another way of saying that before the white man's arrival Africa was formless and without order, with no history. Freeth also writes about the first Chimurenga, a war that involved "attacks on the white people". There is no mention of the dispossession that preceded that heroic struggle.
Freeth's narrative of dispossession and legal fights is, to be sure, touching and heroic. He stoically fights off an assortment of hoodlums and politicians. After being rebuffed by Zimbabwean courts, he took his case to the Southern African Development Community regional court in Windhoek. The court ruled that "white people could be African".
If they so wish, whites can be black, too. The American liberation theologian James H Cone argued that "to be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind and your body are where the dispossessed are". It is never about pigmentation.
Labels: BEN FREETH, BIOGRAPHY, BOOKS, MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, THABO MBEKI
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Rowan Williams: Between Lambeth and Harare
15/10/2011 00:00:00
by Nathaniel Manheru
"MUGABE and the White African" is in essence a David and Goliath story. Appalled by the state-orchestrated crimes against humanity on a massive scale countrywide, with horrific violence perpetrated against white commercial farmers, their farm workers and the rural population, a farming family takes on President Mugabe's government in a landmark court case heard by the Sadc Tribunal in Windhoek, Namibia. They know the risks, but they believe it is what God requires of them.
Set on Mount Carmel farm in the Chegutu district of Zimbabwe, this deeply moving book is the chronicle of a Christian family's struggle to survive, to protect the land it purchased legally from the government, and to protect the lives and livelihoods of all those working on the farm."
British State in Devotion
The past week has been a significant one for the Anglican Church, itself a schismatic offshoot of the Catholic Church, and the official Church of the State in the United Kingdom.
The last point, including the consequential role of the British Queen as the Head of that Church, is often overlooked in discussions of church, state and unfolding politics in and of Zimbabwe. We need to keep that dimension in mind, in which case we can soundly understand why in spite of the fact that Lambeth is not a State, the way that the Vatican is, its foremost official - the Archbishop - carries the aura of a head of state when on visits abroad, especially in countries with which Britain has had colonial links in the past.
The Anglican Church has evolved as the British State in worship or devotion. A cursory reading of the evolution of the British political and governmental system will clearly show its crucial near-ethereal role as the earthly agent for God's benediction on the British Monarch, the State, its apparatus and its minions.
The past week had seen the head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop Rowan Williams, paying a visit to Southern Africa, including Zimbabwe. The visit, particularly its Zimbabwean leg, was almost engulfed in controversy, something that guaranteed it maximum publicity.
Man who turned 80
A great week for the Anglican Church in another sense. One of its shepherds - now retired - hit 80, to great ululation, joy and fanfare. This was Archbishop Desmond Tutu who, alongside well-wishers, organised a great "bhavhadeyi".
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It still remains to be explained to me how the same age zone that invites deep obloquy for Robert Mugabe, triggers jingle bells for Desmond Tutu.
Tibet and South Africa
But much more than jingle bells. The event also generated lots of bile and brickbats, this time against President Zuma's government. The good archbishop had decided, apparently without any reference to his Government, to invite the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who has been a thorn in the flesh of the Chinese Government, so the spiritual leader could be part of the party. The South African Government would have none of that and they simply played a dilatory game with the protocol of visa granting, creating a situation where the bhavhadeyi passed before the Lama's papers were in place for his travel.
The Archbishop was furious, as was the Western world which has heavily invested in the spiritual leader to keep the sides of the rising dragon needled all the time by uncomfortable questions, uncomfortable situations. The script abroad was the Zuma Government had succumbed to pressure from the Chinese Government which would look dimly at any profile-raising concessions to it's spiritually suffused opponent.
The script went further. South Africa would not risk billions-worth of trade with the giant Chinese economy for the sake of a mere birth-marking ritual involving some old man, albeit spotting a collar on his shirtfront.
This was condemnable in the extreme, went the Western script and its multiple echoes in our subcontinent. Zuma, added these magisterial voices, had yet again fumbled on foreign policy, with Zimbabwe, Libya and many other areas being cited in accusatory illustration.
Expensive Birthday gift
This attack on Zuma, much of it quite gratuitous, should be deposed of with the swiftness it deserves. From flashes of anger which the media recorded from Archbishop Tutu, it is clear the cleric expected an expensive gift from the South African government, all to mark the occasion. He expected the South African government to indulge him, all to the value of billion upon billions of dollars in Chinese trade which South Africa was sure to forego in consequence.
That was going to be the dollar value of the gift Tutu expected from the South African Government. Turn that into jobs, or some other welfare index, and you graphically quantify the sacrifice Tutu hoped from South Africa's poor, never mind that the link between trade with China and benefits to the poor should never be posited as obviously given.
I have not yet mentioned the fact that South Africa and China both belong to Brics, an alliance which we all hope can be nurtured into a meaningful counterpoise to arrogant American and European global dominance.
What was being asked of Zuma was that Tutu's birthday soar above the foreign policy of South Africa, indeed play first fiddle to South Africa's strategic interests in Asia. No one cared to explain how and why a matter between China and the West, a matter between China and her religiously recalcitrant citizen, should excise South Africa. Or why a citizen of South Africa, simply on the strength of worn-out Anglican robes, should found and consecrate friendship outside of, insensitive to, and defiant of the foreign policy concerns of his government and State. Or why he should piously remonstrate with that offended State for not bending low to wipe clean his dirty feet and sandals, so entangled in a worthless of ecumenical friendship.
Bad for the gander
The argument goes deeper. This year alone we saw Western leaders, including American and British leaders beat the road to China, begging bowl beneath the robes of haughty Caucasian pride.
The China they were now visiting was far, far different from the China of servile urchins in the days of the Opium Wars, and the subsequent triple occupation of Shanghai. To this day Shanghai bears its triple disfigurement: a third of it British, another third French and the last third American. They were now paying visits to a new, roaring China with trillions of American dollars in reserves, a mighty China playing donor to virtually all western economies, so buffeted, so much in financial turmoil.
However much their liberal media howled - and howl they did - all the leaders steered clean of any controversies, indeed punctiliously ensured great China was not, would not be, offended by extraneous issues, including human rights and the rights of the Tibetan people as led by their spiritual leader.
Were they leaving this very sensitive matter to South Africa to raise at her own expense in the month of October, towards the end of the year of our Lord two thousand and eleven? They, and only they, have the right to shelve larger matters in deference to their immediate needs and strategic interests. We don't. We do not have that latitude to pass over matters which injure the pursuit of our interests? We are obligated to raise such touchy issues for the sake of Europe, America and the idealisms of western liberalism?
Above all, how come the Queen never invites the Dalai Lama on the occasion of her birthday? Or Robert Mugabe? Or wa Mutharika? Or Ahmadinejad? Or Chavez? Or Castro? Or better still the spiritual leader in Iran?
When will our own people realise the value of harmonising their pursuits with the larger interests of their nation, rather than generating valueless dilemmas and controversies for their Governments, all for personal fame and glory?
Divided Anglicans
I want to go back to the visit to Zimbabwe by Rowan Williams, the head of the Anglican Church. Until on the eve of his departure from Malawi, itself the headquarters of the Anglican Province of Central Africa, the man of God was content to call his trip a pastoral one, with the prime purpose of sharing the worship with his brethren in Zimbabwe.
Appropriately, the Archbishop could not peg enormous cosmic goals to his mission. Unlike the Catholic Church whose spiritual epicentre is the Vatican, whose spiritual head is the Pope, the Anglican church pretends a diffused, non-hierarchical order whose hub is the "province" in a given geographical region which must give direction to parishes under it. As is now well known, the province of Central Africa to which the Zimbabwean Anglican Church is, or was, affiliated, depending of course on where you stand vis-à-vis the current controversy, was torn apart a few years back on account of the gay question. It is a divided church, bitterly divided.
Divided by Caesar's things
And because the Zimbabwean church wields the financial wherewithal, this controversy has become a dispute over church assets and resources. It pays to remember that throughout the colonial days, the Anglican Church in Rhodesia stood by successive colonial governments, which is how it was able to accumulate fabulous wealth by way of real estate, orphanage and educational business.
It was a church of settler and racist conformity, by and large, which is why conscience-led bishops like Knight Bruce soon lost to Bishop Burrough who openly endorsed UDI and consecrated soldiers before their deployment for wanton, genocidal "kills" of natives. The sheer financial muscle of the Zimbabwean Anglican Church explains why its schism has sucked in the whole of Southern Africa.
The rich simmer
Much worse, unable to marshal a common position on the land issue, the Zimbabwean church soon found its bishopric badly divided in a way that mirrored the larger political divide in the country. It is simply dishonest to call Kunonga a "Mugabe" or a "Zanu-PF" bishop without acknowledging the MDC-T politics so explicitly "embedded" in Gandiya, Bakare, etc, etc.
The matter gets even more entangled when you bring in Julius Makoni, that faction's latest catch through a nexus of relationships.
The Anglican pulpit has been heavily politicised and I challenge any of its bishops to swear by the holy book that they have not pledged their allegiance to competing political parties, to the princes of power! That situation has created quite an explosive concoction for the church: gays, land, property and politics.
You add the issue of relations with Britain, and the pot simply gets thicker than poor porridge after a very long simmer. I am not even bringing in the juridical dimension. Such is the church the archbishop came to, and it is not a surprise he needed a large entourage from the whole Province to fortify his own courage.
Gathering interest
Until the Archbishop made a suggestive if not incriminating comment on the eve of his departure for Harare, no one in position of authority in Zimbabwe took much notice of his mission. The interest had remained strictly journalistic: had the Archbishop sought audience with the President; was the President going to meet with the Archbishop, etc, etc. Beyond that, the sun rose from the east, set in the west, both to no cloud cover or rumbling thunder.
In fact the sending church in the UK was more excited about the trip than the host society, never mind the jostling and jockeying that visibly picked pitch within the Zimbabwean Anglican church itself. That was hardly new to this quarrelsome church. But the moment the Archbishop spoke of raising the issue of division and persecution in the Anglican Church with President Mugabe, aggressive interest gathered within the country. The Archbishop's homily inside the country reinforced this eagerness to engage him.
Matters of morality
In a well-calculated pre-emptive denunciation of colonialism, he raised issues of post-independence governance, hoping his fawned anti-colonial tirade had secured him all-time insurance against instant retort founded on the historical culpability of the Anglican Church as a partner in genocidal colonialism.
And of course the well-attended church service in Harare gave him and his Gandiya faction an illusion of carrying the bigger moiety of the deeply divided church. Here and ahead of his arrival, the church had distanced itself from homosexuality, stressing the Church did not condone such a moral monstrosity. The announcement was a calculated pre-emption, meant to leave Kunonga and his group with no cause, no grievance.
Later, the Archbishop would seal the argument through a highly intellectualised argument to the effect that the Church, while scornful of homosexuality, respected homosexuals as human beings entitled to dignity and respect in their deviance. After all, American churches which had sanctified homosexuality belonged to another province which had no lordship over the rest. That way, the matter was deposed. Or so the Archbishop thought.
Dossier for publicity
Sanctions? Well, the Archbishop insisted he had not been favoured with evidence of hurtful sanctions in the country and thus could not react to the matter. As far as he had heard and read, sanctions in Zimbabwe were targeted. And to overwrite this touchy subject, he presented the President with a dossier on the persecution of the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe, urging the President to intervene to end it.
The dossier was soon published on the internet for wider reading. It thus became a public document, never privileged communication between a Church anxious for some resolution and a Head of State whose intervention it implored. And like most Western officials, the Archbishop had also been asked to assess the health and mental acuity of the President. To the disappointment of those interested in that side of the President, the Archbishop gave the man a clean bill of health, at least as confirmed by the faith stethoscope!
Flying British Kite
Now let's deal with the hard balls of this narrative, without fear, without favour. The decision by the Archbishop to visit Harare generated lots of controversies within Britain itself. Would he be well received? Would he not present Mugabe with a propaganda coup? Would he not legitimise Mugabe, thereby redeeming him from splendid isolation?
Such worries, so acutely and fervently put, attested to the fact that in the visit, the British State was in fact breaking with its self-imposed protocol, to initiate contacts with President Mugabe and his Government. It had invested heavily in the visit which played deep stick to bilateral relations. Indeed, the Archbishop received the courtesies of a foreign official, including State security.
Alongside that visit was an opinion filtered through a think-tank linked to the British establishment. This Commonwealth think-tank suggested the impending Chogm be used to make overtures to Zimbabwe.
Expectedly, a British Minister moved in to shoot down the suggestion, seemingly making tougher demands on Zimbabwe. But the purpose had been served: the balloon had been flown, the idea of re-engaging Zimbabwe had been placed in the public domain without binding the British Government, indeed with all the safeguards against a public fallout well in place.
Indeed, opinion leaders in quality British papers proceeded to hail Lambeth for having a better foreign policy than Whitehall, urging the British Government to do better! One perfectly understands the game in town. It would be quite naive, if not foolish, for the divided Anglican church to visualise itself as the subject matter of the week. Simply, it was not. Much worse, it would be downright silly and idealistic for its bishops to imagine their differences can find resolution outside of the abiding question pitting Zimbabwe against Britain, indeed finding play in sanctions.
Questions for Gandiya
Which takes me to my first charge against Bishop Gandiya and all those he leads. Why did he not prepare a dossier against sanctions for presentation to the Archbishop? Does he think this country is not under sanctions? Does he think that his Anglican laity, Elijah-like, enjoy a sanctions-free universe that hovers above all of us, flying well beyond and above sanctions and the travails they spawn?
Or is his denial of sanctions secular, in which case he needs to tell us in what way it differs from that of MDC-T? Could this provide a clue to the politics of his faction in the church, as well as its appeal to the mother church in Britain which is at one with the British Government both historically and in terms of contemporary politics? That the issue of gays is but the icing on the cake to this untoward dalliance?
Clearly the effort in compiling a dossier on alleged persecution is just about what was required in compiling a dossier on sanctions which have affected church schools, hospitals, orphanages, followers, etc, etc. Or is the church unconcerned, the same way it was under Ian Smith except where white interests are concerned? I hope the good bishop noticed that among the worshipers who came to meet the Archbishop were Zanu-PF office holders who cannot be indifferent to sanctions, and whose presence cannot be interpreted as endorsement of his politics with their attendant blind sports.
Ecclesiastical colonialism
My second question to the bishop gets me agitated. At no time did the bishop seek audience with the President. Why? Was he waiting for the Archbishop's intercession? To achieve what? Personal profile? Greater damnation for the President? A strong image of a persecuted Church later to translate to greater gifts to that church? Clearly there are real moral and political issues which are at stake and which will not go away.
While the local church thinks it has ducked the issue of gays and their so-called rights, hardly had the Archbishop's footmarks evaporated on our land than had the British Government announced a policy tying its own overseas aid support to gay rights. The British State is clearly enforcing an eleventh commandment through its alleged financial power over the Third World.
The idea of a local bishop by-passing the State President and the Committee set up to resolve that matter, to reach a British Archbishop reeks of ecclesiastical colonialism of the worst order. Such a disposition does not build a national church; rather, it builds some church in Zimbabwe appended to Lambeth. Needless to say such power relations in an institution so steeped in history and governmental politics implies not just a political outlook, but also a disturbing answer to the current stand-off between Britain and Zimbabwe.
However holy this holy man of Lambeth may be, he cannot be our father who art in Britain, and Bishop Gandiya should know that. He is a mere believer whose efforts heavenwards trigger numerous questions in all of us, whether religious or cultural.
National institutions
Bishop Gandiya did more to entangle his own skein. He went to the courts. Later, he abandoned the same courts, followed by a not so holy scent of a bad loser. He turned to Lambeth, denouncing a national institution of the Bench which he had freely accosted, before which he had placed holy matters he and his brethren should have resolved anyway, well away from secular institutions.
As I write, he is back in the courts, and has just been awarded a favourable judgement. What attitude does he now adopt with regards to the Bench? That it is good and competent only when he wins? It is a very poor showing by a holy man, but also a showing passing as a reminiscent echo from a political party we know from some electoral past.
Could we be looking at the same strategy and tactic? Looking at the same brains behind the same campaign whose objective is ultimately to trash the Bench? I have a problem with politics which seek to overrun national institutions and discourse, while apotheosising the outsider as the answer we are looking for.
Sin in Anglican robes
I opened this piece with a quote. I am sure the gentle reader is wondering whose statement that is, and what relevance it has to this article. Well, the quote is from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The words are part of his foreword to Ben Freeth's book titled "Mugabe and the White African".
In fact, the book has two Anglican voices, one from Tutu and another from Archbishop Sentamu. Curiously Sentamu is Ugandan-born Anglican cleric now ministering in York, in Britain. More curiously, the endnote to his preface to the same book reads: "We, the people of Britain and the United Nations, need to hear the voices of our own consciences and heed the cries of the suffering people of Zimbabwe."
The cause which Archbishop Tutu biblically dismisses as comparable to that of Goliath is that of our Land. Put differently, the cause which the holy man beatifies as Davidian, is that of Rhodesia's settlers whom he thinks should not have lost the land. Sentamu sees himself as part of Britain; Tutu as an arbiter of the interests of Britain's kith and kin here.
The South African Archbishop mistakenly thinks Freeth and his ilk lost land they had bought from the Zimbabwe Government. Freeth himself does not feel burdened to say so in his narrative, which clearly related to a settler community whose land rights preceded Zimbabwe. Was the archbishop misled? Did he write the foreword? Archbishop Tutu thinks he is defending a Christian "white African".
Freeth does not feel constrained to prove his African parentage, real or vicarious. He clearly visualises himself as a superior white man from Scotland, subsequently adopted by settler Rhodesia, and seeking to exorcise the powerful evil demon afflicting the otherwise "noble African savage". And I am not quoting Joseph Conrad. I am quoting Tutu's Christian Freeth.
As I write, the Sadc Tribunal which Tutu worshipfully regards as that which sets right the sins of this world, has been disbanded by a full Summit of Sadc. Again Tutu has wrong-footed his Governments, all for personal fame. To all that add his demand soon after South Africa's independence, demand that Zimbabwe releases white terrorists who had bombed ANC cadres here, and a worrisome picture emerges, fully dressed in Anglican robes. What has become of the Anglican Church? Can someone tell me? Icho!
Labels: ANGLICAN CHURCH, BEN FREETH, NATHANIEL MANHERU, RACISM, RHODESIA
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Of insulting black people who lost their land
By: Frank Banda
Posted: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 8:12 pm
MR Ben Freeth has spoken on SW Radio saying that "justice has eventually been made after 10 years" when news of the seizure of Zimbabwe Government properties in South Africa broke. We hope that Mr Freeth will extend the same right to many Zimbabweans who for over 120 years have lost their property to his kith and kin.
The Chegutu farmer should also know that the properties attached in South Africa do not belong to Zanu-PF, but to the government of Zimbabwe, regardless of what party is in power.
Surely, when Mr Freeth speaks about property rights, I hope he realises that the Liberation Struggle in Zimbabwe is about property rights, specifically black property rights.
The same arrogant tone was also sounded by Roy Bennett, MDC-T treasurer facing terrorism charges.
Speaking on the same station on the same day, he laughed off the fact that he was being charged, albeit after nine years, for hoarding maize in 2001. Mr Bennett always talks about the rule of law in Zimbabwe, he should be the first to submit himself to the rule of law.
If he had more grain than he was supposed to have, then he has to be charged. Many other people have been charged under the same law, why should Bennett be spared? It does not matter whether he was facing other charges or not. He possessed 92,289 tonnes of maize that he did not declare, and that is a crime.
Who is he trying to fool saying he was keeping that much maize for his staff?
Rightly so, Bennett was charged for contravening Section 40(a) of the Grain Marketing Board Act Chapter 18:14 as read with Statutory Instrument 240(a) of 2001.
Ben Freeth should know that his move is an insult to all black people who have lost property, life and limb fighting for their rights and their land; some of which was spiritual land grazed to open up farming for the white commercial farmer.
Using the same logic, I would like to think that Freeth will not complain when his farm is taken by those who claim it's their sacred land.
Labels: BEN FREETH, LAND REFORM, ROY BENNETT, SANCTIONS, WHITE FARMERS
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