Grass-Roots Effort Aims to Upend Mugabe in Zimbabwe
By MICHAEL WINES
New York Times | March 27, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/international/27zimbabwe.html?th&emc=th
HARARE, Zimbabwe, March 26 - She is in her 40's and
the mother of four, though in the dappled sunlight of
an outdoor restaurant here, clad in a floppy hat and a
thin cardigan, she looks too young to be either.
Nobody would see her as a provocateur, much less a
revolutionary.
But when Rebecca took one child to the doctor on a
recent morning, she left behind a clinic restroom
plastered with stickers urging resistance to the
25-year reign of Zimbabwe's president, Robert G.
Mugabe. Later, she littered her bus seat with condoms
emblazoned with a large Z and a call to "Get up! Stand
up!" against the government.
"There are more than 10,000 of us," she said. "And
every one is excited, because you know you are playing
a part in something you believe in."
The Z stands not for Zimbabwe, but for Zvakwana, an
underground movement that aims to resist - and
eventually undermine - Mr. Mugabe's authoritarian
rule. With a second, closely related group called
Sokwanele, Zvakwana's members specialize in anonymous
acts of civil disobedience - a meld of guerrilla
theater and the philosophies of Gandhi and King.
In ideology, and sometimes even in identity, Zvakwana
mirrors grass-roots efforts in any number of
authoritarian nations. From Zubr in Belarus to
Ukraine's victorious Pora to nascent groups in Egypt
and Lebanon (whose names, in English, mean "enough"),
such civic movements may be the hottest phenomenon in
global democratic politics. Many take their
inspiration from Otpor, the movement that played a
major role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia.
The groups sprang to life here three years ago,
shortly after Mr. Mugabe won a re-election campaign
that many international election observers said had
been stolen from his democratic opponents. Their
rationale is embodied in their names: in Shona and
Ndebele, Zimbabwe's two main languages, both names
also mean "enough."
That the groups truly number 10,000 seems doubtful.
Yet the government is nettled enough to paint over
much of their graffiti, and news media reports say the
police assembled a team of senior investigators 14
months ago to find and destroy Zvakwana.
The police have failed. In fact, one Zvakwana member
in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city, said
members of the movement stole into a police station in
January to slip antigovernment messages under
supervisors' doors.
"We informed them that we are not their enemies, but
their liberators," a member, who would be identified
only as Magamula, said in an interview. "Even members
of the police - the army, the C.I.O. and the C.I.D.
are working with us," the member said, referring to
Zimbabwe's intelligence apparatus and its criminal
investigations division. "That's how we've managed to
survive this far."
Michael McFaul, a Stanford University political
scientist and student of grass-roots movements, has
spent much of this year studying groups in Georgia,
Ukraine and Serbia. To a remarkable degree, he said,
they and similar groups are driven by the Internet and
by the increasingly global nature of television.
Although many speculate that movements like Zvakwana
are Western inventions, Mr. McFaul said the opposite
appeared to be true, at least for the moment.
In Lebanon, "They're modeling what they're doing on
the Ukrainians," he said. "And they're watching the
Ukrainians on Al Jazeera, of all places. It's not an
American-centric thing that's being channeled through
the White House. It's more global."
Some movements do receive foreign money, but no amount
of money will sustain a democratic movement, he added,
if a nation's dissidents lack the passion and numbers
to carry the battle on their own.
In personal conversations and an extensive interview
via e-mail, Zvakwana members insisted theirs was a
homegrown protest movement, free of foreign control.
But not of foreign influence. In a long conversation,
Rebecca said she and fellow members had begun their
membership in Zvakwana by viewing videotapes on
resistance movements in Poland, Chile, India and
Serbia, as well as studying civil rights tactics used
in Nashville.
Rebecca, who refused to divulge her surname, said she
joined the movement in early 2002 out of despair. In
the preceding years, she had worked for Zimbabwe's
sole political opposition party, the Movement for
Democratic Change, in parliamentary and presidential
elections won by Mr. Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe
African National Union-Patriotic Front.
"Where I was working, people would come to me to
report incidents of political violence," she said.
"Women would call in to say they were raped. Men were
beaten so badly that they couldn't walk."
She helped start a women's group that prayed for
Zimbabwe's future, and through that group met other
disaffected advocates for change who told her of a new
nonviolent resistance movement.
She joined, she said, "because what struck me most is
that I don't want my children to lead this life."
"I don't want Zimbabwe to be like this."
A daisy chain of meetings followed, each visitor
inviting a group of like-minded friends, until
thousands of followers met to study nonviolent
resistance in a southern Zimbabwe town under the guise
of a religious convention. Since then, she said,
Zvakwana has sunk roots even in small Zimbabwean towns
and cities, and devised an array of tactics to spread
its message.
In Harare, Zvakwana members largely come from the
suburban slums where blacks were corralled when
Zimbabwe was Rhodesia and whites were in power. They
meet under carefully staged pretenses and seldom know
more than a handful of other members, to keep their
activities compartmentalized.
Their work, Rebecca said, is to send a message of
resistance to ordinary folk through the most basic
methods. Some involve acts of derring-do: young men
commandeered a traffic circle in Robert Mugabe Way in
central Harare and plastered stickers on the street
signs, renaming the street Zvakwana Way.
More commonly, however, the resistance is mundane.
Members slice bars of soap into slivers - "everybody
needs soap," she said - and wrap the bars in a printed
message that states, "Let's wash the debt out of this
country." They stuff antigovernment messages into
matchboxes that are sold at kiosks. They give away
tapes of popular resistance songs; packets of seeds
pasted with resistance messages.
In Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, similar groups have
spurred popular uprisings and toppled governments, Mr.
McFaul notes, in part because their members were
young, tech-savvy and living in nations that were
authoritarian, but unwilling or unable to crush
popular protests.
"There is a lot of debate about Zimbabwe," Mr. McFaul
said, "about, if thousands of people were in the
street, how much violence there would be."
But Zvakwana's message is not one of upheaval. It is,
rather, a soft sell on resisting oppression.
"It is your right to think, read, hear and think what
you like," reads a yellow slip stapled to a phone
card. "Here in Zimbabwe, this right has been taken
away by the government. We thought that we would give
out these recharge cards so that people could be more
able to speak with one another as they choose."
It may be the message Zimbabweans need right now, said
Tawanda Mutasah, the executive director of the Open
Society Initiative for Southern Africa, which
encourages democratic change in Zimbabwe and
elsewhere. "In Zimbabwe, it is easy to give up hope,"
he said. "What a movement of this nature is doing, in
my estimation, is keeping the hope alive."
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