Brown/Bush: Mounting Amos, and Condy trots!
As you read this column, drums will start beating in Lisboa (Lisbon), Portugal,
marking the first ever convocation of Europeans and Africans, after a long and
troubled seven-year hiatus. To some, these will be drums, tom-toms of joy. To
others, these will be bells that toll the end to come. It all depends on where
you stand, or who you stand with. Lisboa might be very far for Africa's tardy
and cracked barefoot, very far for Africa's meandering path, but Lisboa will
influence Africa's futures in a very significant way. I am there, spirited from
home by the great iron bird that walks straight, to a tuneful, airy hum.
As I ride this enchanted aluminium broomstick, ride this wonder of the
white-man which, unlike God's birds, flies without flapping its wings, so too
flies and unfurls my mind, uninhibited, welcomed and melding with the vast blue
that bear no milestones. As if to affirm the greatness of the earth, I soon
discover no matter how high, you still need to peer down below, past the
fleeting clouds, to reach the craggy earth for milestones. You look far down,
vulnerable and overawed, hazily hoping for a helpful landmark to locate
yourself in this great vastness, unremittingly azure. None comes. In
desperation, you hope that beneath the melancholic hum and drone of the iron
bird's great and throbbing heartbeat, a croaky voice might just break out,
deployed from the sealed cockpit to help the passengers with some bearings.
Nothing comes to break the eerie purr of this great iron bird.
My whirring mind surmises what the captain might be up to. Maybe he is busily
thinking of unpaid bills back home. Or some sumptuous girlfriend left behind,
all the time quite oblivious of my little unshared anxieties about time and
place. Or something more inane and stupid, this unfeeling pilot who pays no
regard to I, the captive wonderer and navigator reversing and paying a good
turn to Vasco da Gama's voyages.
The West's great black legion
To quieten my turbulent insides, I choose to reflect on this small cosmos
called Zimbabwe: its land, its people, its leadership, its friends, its
enemies, its victories, its defeats, its warts and all. I have nine long hours
between home and Lisboa, nine hours of contemplation. From that airy vantage, I
boisterously feel like some little god, able and placed to see the past, the
present, the future as one short, thrifty continuum. After all, I am above, am
I not?
Above the vast condition of mortal man and woman, too above to be impeded by
this knoll, that hill, this mountain, that forest, this human throng, that
cacophonous yell. I see, hear everything, whole and complete. I, the vain
omniscient who can't know where I am! Surprisingly, I soon discover that
vastness gives no joy. Far from being invited to greater, celestial muses, my
godly mind gravitates towards the mundane, even puny, towards the little
failings of humankind. I think a lot about Condoleeza Rice; think a lot about
Jendayi Fraser. Think quite a lot about Baronness Amos. Yes, think a great deal
about McGee: white America's new black man in Harare. I think also about Wole
Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who gave us "The Man Died". I think about Bishop
Sentamu, Bishop Tutu.
I think too about Kofi Annan; think about Collin Powell: that great African
general which rapacious America deployed to quell and subdue small Arab
peoples, before discarding him like a spent, flappy condom. Olonga too: that
Kenyan who could not be a Zimbabwean, whose ambition was to be larger than the
cricket butt and ball which brought him fame, all for the sake of embittered
white Rhodesia. I think about Chiwoniso; I think about John Makumbe: a whole
African Phd, now commanded and deployed by sisi Jenni Williams and her motley
women from WOZA, to harm Zimbabwe and African interests. I think also about the
so-called "Zimbabwe Vigil" and the planned marches of Lisboa, all to prove that
Mugabe did mortally wrong to give the black Zimbabwean his due! I
self-censoriously wonder why I, the god, still chooses to be man. Surely the
conduct of mere mortals can never baffle gods, lest gods become mere men and
women?
Bush's mounts, Brown's trots
As I reflect on this vast pantheon of black surfaces, I recall the wires
reported that Condy this week was headed for Africa, an emissary of George
W.Bush, America's war-mongering President. The same wires - today's sentinels
and foremost mongers of global village rumours - also reported Brown -
Britain's utterly un-telegenic, unconvincing Prime Minister - has despatched
Baronness Amos to Lisboa, to represent him. He himself won't come, for fear of
a handshake with Mugabe's "coarse" hand! I reflect more. Both Bush and Brown
are white Anglo-Saxons. That is a foolish point to make, especially when made
by a god! How else can they be, they being Anglo-Saxons?
Neither the Union Jack nor the Stars and Stripes, bears the colour black. Ain't
no black on the Union Jack, some Carribean scholar (Baronnes Amos' compatriot)
once wrote. Is that not so? Yes, both are white, indeed as ashen as the deadly
systems they run - or more aptly - they mind. The two women, on the other hand,
are black, blacker than two nights put together. It does not matter where you
inspect: kinky black hair, nubile, black pendulous breasts, black rotund
formations that transfix male gaze - all these and much more, are all black,
black like the remnant burnt-out stump from last season's chitemene or mavivi.
When Tendai becomes Jendayi
Jendayi Fraser. Another surface: pitchy black, kinky haired, very flat nose
that confidently spread across the face like a squatting African bullfrog. Just
beginning of this week, she was on the wires announcing another raft of useless
sanctions against Zimbabwe, black African Zimbabwe. The measures purport to add
more black Africans to America's list of banned persons; purports to deport
children of Zimbabwean officials studying in America; promise worse sanctions,
"unless political violence" stops! Such "dire" measures dropping from fleshy
black pendulous lips of mother Africa's abducted, still enslaved daughter. Good
gracious God! Except through books and political rumours, this misbegotten
daughter of Africa has not been here at all, knows nothing about Zimbabwe. The
Zimbabwe she knows is a construct of angry white America identifying with
embittered Albion. Zimbabwe is very peaceful, and McGee will vouch that. The
remotest it got by way of political violence came from MDC, America and
Britain's MDC! And foe her, the recompense is to add more Zanu (PF) people on
the sanctions list, citing March 11 disturbances which again the MDC caused.
Imperialism has no shame, I tell you!
Three black women and one man
Faced with an indelibly disastrous diplomatic defeat over Portugal, Brown has
turned to Bush for some modicum of mitigation. Both have agreed to deploy three
black women and one man (McGee) against a black President who is a hero of the
African liberation struggle and contemporary African self-assertion. It is a
cynical decision, but one quite revealing in terms of the menial place and role
of blacks in the white world. And all four relish it. First Jendayi. She spoke
of the additional measures with such gusto and lusto, that no one was left in
any doubt that she relished wielding the dagger for the white assassin.
"Jendayi" was this lady's vain attempt at spelling "Tendayi", a Shona name
which means "Be Thankful". She mis-spelt it to something narrowly vulgar,
something bordering the monstrous. Prophetically, "Jendayi", the resultant
linguistic mangle, is not something you readily yell in the presence of elders,
still less in the presence of your in-laws, without inviting deep shame and
revilement.
You have to be slow and deliberate to make sure you do not transpose an "e" for
an "a", to end up with something decidedly vulgar and unmentionable in polite
society. This is the ironic consequence of Miss Fraser's maiden attempt at
being African. A clear tragedy of good intentions. Miss Fraser's original
mistake will forever cause unending blushes on black surfaces. Most probably
she does not know this, and may even be determined to keep this near-vulgar
identity.
In Shona we say: "When Fate gives you a weeping wound, Fate wants you to die
from flies". For her, this has turned out to be a very unhappy preordination.
In dabbling in Zimbabwe's shifty politics, she is probably seeking an escape
from Somalia, her unmitigated disaster soon after leaving South Africa. She
will soon find out that Zimbabwe is a worse slough which will drown her and her
shameful career.
Condy's African trot
With a despairing backdrop of Iraq, Condoleeza Rice has been sent to Africa in
the hope of finalising plans for AFRICOM, a new African military command base
for imperial America. It is a base which most Africans reject, but which
America wants to set up willy-nilly. The Middle East has become too much of a
hazardous unknown for rapacious America's energy needs. America seeks to up
Africa's contribution to her energy needs, which stand at about 26 percent.
Nervous America also sees Africa as a dangerous nexus for Al Qaeda resistance,
what with the gory images to come from Somalia in the days of Clinton. It is a
spectre America sees re-enacted in the present see-saw in that same country,
clearly showing America and its askaris are far from pacifying or winning that
great horn of Africa whose sharp end seem pointed at America's interests. But
at another level, mounted Condy trots for Bush to checkmate Lisboa. Remember US
is Europe's ally and competitor at the same time.
McGee's striped insides.
As for McGee, well, he has made matters much easier for us. He made it quite
clear in a recent interview that his black colour should not be misread by
black Zimbabwe. It is only a colour which belie the red stripes and white stars
which bind and lead him respectively. He is white America's black agent, he
confessed. We welcome his sincerity which we shall constantly play up to make
sure no Zimbabwean thinks McGee comes from Zvimba! Interestingly, McGee told
the weekly which interviewed him that America was not deporting children of
officials studying in the US. His sister in servitude, Jendayi, has since
contradicted that, again bringing out the timeless dilemma of those whose role
is not to make voices, but to make echoes.
The lesson Andrew Young would not leave
Far from damning Mugabe, these three white black beings stand damned by their
predecessors, most notably people like Andrew Young. In his small painful way,
Andrew showed what a black man lucky enough to gaze at the white pinnacle could
do with that new and briefly found fame and power. It would be fulsome to
credit him with significant contribution to our struggle for Independence. But
it would be mean not to state that he never contradicted it. The lot whose
names I give above, are a happy antithesis of Africa's search for fullness.
I will come back to that point. For now Baronness Amos, the good lady from
Jamaica. In case she had any illusions, now she now knows why she hit fame by
being Britain's first ever black minister at a time of a vicious stand-off
between UK and Zimbabwe. It all revolved around her pigmentation. Brown hoped
to foist her on Europe as EU's envoy to Africa (read Zimbabwe!). Europe
rejected her.
She has since been dusted from the lair of hoary lords, to be pitted against
waspish Mugabe whom Albion dares not confront. We are back to the black woman's
burden for the empire, indeed back to Susi and Chuma burdened with the decaying
body of D. Livingstone. And of course if she chooses to misbehave in Lisboa,
she will soon discover that the continent does not hesitate to impale a
daughter who marries the enemy. Zimbabwe is not the country to pull back
punches merely because the cornered but marauding baboon clasps its face in
shame and helplessness. After all, so much is at stake.
The shame of artists
I also read from the wires that Wole Soyinka has joined with a cabal of
writers, among them Haclav Havel who worked with America to destroy the
socialist system in the old Czechoslovakia before dividing it, to urge EU to
put Zimbabwe on the spot. This is not the first time a Nigerian has betrayed
Zimbabwe's cause, indeed not the first time Soyinka has struck a blow against
Zimbabwe for the British. History is loud and clear on official Nigeria's
stance on Zimbabwe's standoff with Britain. It is also clear on popular
Nigeria's deep solidarity with Zimbabwe in her struggles. Suffice it to say,
indeed the man we assumed was Africa's seer, has again died. As has indeed our
own Chiwoniso Maraire who seems keener to hear ancient Nordic voices, in place
of that of her own dear departed father who gave us the militant protest song
"Takaramba", "We Said No!" in English. Why would Chiwoniso whose dated debut
song still wails on our airwaves pretend she is muzzled? Because she needs a
dry Nordic bone between her jaws? It is most unfortunate. Today she joins the
likes of Conte in betraying her people's cause. This is what pieces of silver
do to weak souls.
Dressing up a lost cause
Which takes me to my main point. Zimbabwe's struggle against imperialism has
entered a critical penultimate stage. Imperial West is fumbling for cause and
legitimacy, as Zimbabwe's case sinks deeper and firmer in the minds of Africa
and the progressive world. There is an attempt to dress up the West's cause,
the same way there was a similar effort in 1979 when the Internal Settlement
was launched. The whole gallery of blacks I listed above is part of the
dress-up, but one destined to fail and negatively play harbinger to a real
resolution of this conflict. Both Bush and Brown have assembled a legion of
blacks in the hope of confusing Africa. Hence the present flurry of black-led
initiatives meant to undercut genuine African initiatives and solutions. It is
important that Zimbabwe and Africa stand steadfast as we run the last lap.
Cahora Bassa!
Equally, Lisboa is significant. Portugal is the oldest imperial country, never
to be equated with amateurish England which only begins to feature much later
in relations with Africa. In the case of Zimbabwe, Portugal's relations with us
trace back to the early 17th Century, while the British only feature at the
turn of the 19th Century. Portugal has a longer interaction with Africa than
any other power in Europe and the West. Just a few weeks ago, she showed the
way by letting go of Cahora Bassa, her last imperial link with Mozambique. On
that beautiful day when Mozambique completed her sovereignty, we all leapt in
joy and sang Cahora Bassa! The Job is Done! This is what Britain cannot do
readily do regarding our Land. Clearly, it is not fortuitous that Lisboa is the
turning point in the resolution of the stand-off between Zimbabwe and Britain.
After Lisbon, Britain will beat a lonely sanctions path, innocuously supported
by America and a few Nordic countries. The rest of Europe will none of it,
which is how the sanctions will crumble. But none in Zimbabwe should ever
impute purity to the motives of Europe. Europe remains an imperial bloc whose
wish is to ring-fence Africa from "marauding" China. It is Europe's fear of
prowling China, not her conscience, which has seen the resumption of
continental dialogue and the accommodation of Zimbabwe. The motive remains as
ignoble as ever, and care must be taken to ensure Africa is not indentured to
this torment. Already, this is coming through in the three documents proposed
as outcomes for the great indaba. Far from being hostile to Britain, the three
documents suggest a greater encirclement of the continent for a better British
kill, using a slightly different argument and pretext. But this will not
succeed if Africa stands firm. And united. Only then will Africa escape the
fate of a mounted continent, galloping to self-ruin. Caveat Emptor. Icho!
l [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is under anarchy"
Groupe de Communication Mulindwas
"Avec Yoweri Museveni, L'Ouganda East Dans L'anarchie"_______________________________________________
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