The pale cream of my
university’s clocktower glows in surreal smoothness in a slightly chilly
evening sky. The hands of the clock have
been stuck for months now at twenty-to-four. Around the moon-globe lights a
pair of drongos hawk for insects, oblivious to the highly charged human event
happening below them. I have driven into
town to attend, the richest sunset of violent scarlet I have ever seen here
backing the slowly-turning blades of the ridge-top wind-turbines. In a moment of uncharacteristic superstition,
I hoped it did not presage blood.
It did not – or not
directly. The event is one of many
gatherings around the world of the so-called #ThisFlag movement in
Zimbabwe. We are all here to express
support for a peaceable transition to a caring and responsible government in
the country of our birth or domicile or affection. Candles have been lit, endowing our globule
of darkness with a certain sanctity.
Indeed, the whole thing takes on a Christian air – not, the organisers
hasten to assert, to the exclusion of any other beliefs – with opening and
closing prayers to the Almighty to bless the congregation.
The Zimbabwe
national anthem is sung – very tentatively, it seems – and it’s a recent,
ZANU-PF-created one, not the “Ishe Kumborere Afrika” I used to sing with our
school-kids in the halcyon days of the early ‘80s. It evokes ‘Chimurenga’, its ideals now in
tatters; only a line about the probity of ‘our leaders’ is emphasised with
ironic force and answered with cheers.
The lanky organiser
– a co-ordinator, not a leader, he insists; this is a leaderless movement – and
his supporters are draped in Zimbabwe flags.
(There is also, oddly, a Ghanaian flag waving above the moderate crowd,
and even an ANC banner.) With charming
self-deprecation he recalls the role of pastor Evan Mawarire, who seems largely
to have coalesced the #ThisFlag movement in its spin-off of trader- and
taxi-operator shutdowns in Beit Bridge, Bulawayo and Harare. And he reads the movement’s six fundamental
principles – dignity, accountability, democracy, non-violence... – like Mosaic
pronouncements from on high. They are
compact, they seem unarguable – like a distillation of core liberalism, ubuntu,
the Freedom Charter and satyagraha – so unarguable that it seems momentarily
mystifying that any government should respond with brutal oppression and random
terrorisation of the general populace.
But of course, they
– gangster governments everywhere – do exactly that, over and over again.
The intermittently
blaring bullhorn changes hands. An
exegesis of the colours of the Zimbabwe flag is undertaken, interpretations to
suit the new tenor of peaceful resistance to abuse and destitution. Says one student, she had lost all pride in
this flag, it had become so associated with state terror and corruption, but
here we are, renewing its national validity and charge and pride. The association of the red star with
international Communism is quietly omitted, as is the question of how and whether
‘Zimbabwe’ should ever have become a ‘nation’ in the first place. Too intellectual for this occasion: this is
about solidarity and grief and tentative hope.
And tears. After the more formal brief speeches by three
or four organisers, the floor – or step – is opened to spontaneous
contributions. One after another student
comes up, almost all climbing out of depths of shyness or hesitancy, in a
variety of skin-tones and clothing and accents.
They are intensely moving. One
young woman can scarcely deliver her story for weeping – a story of how her mother, herself
and a 3-year-old broke down near a Zimbabwe military barracks and were
unnecessarily terrorised by soldiers.
Another burly young man visibly overcomes his fear, both of the occasion
and the general situation, and asserts the mantra ‘Enough is enough’. He mentions a recent discovery of 60 bodies
beneath a soccer field, legacy of the Gukurahundi
massacres of Ndebele in the 1980s. Another
laments how his family was destroyed by the hyperinflation of 2008. So many wounds. A white lad unselfconsciously describes
himself as African, says how pessimistic he was just a week ago, driving back
to university from Zimbabwe – but now he sees hope again. Again and again, the speakers assert their
peacefulness as well as their impatience, tired of the corruption, the
hypocrisy, the failures. ‘We were always
told,’ says one, ‘that education was the key; now I have the key, but when I go
back home, they have stolen the door!’
And there is a final
sobering and necessary warning, also delivered in a sudden flood of irrepressible
tears, for everyone to be careful, not to tag photographs or say anything
unwise on social media. ZANU-PF agents
are everywhere, poised to harass and even kill.
It’s only too
true. More than a decade ago now I
attended another such gathering in the lee of the cathedral in solidarity with
the disappeared, the displaced, the exiled, and hurt and starved of
Zimbabwe. For a while we fasted in
suitably-labelled black T-shirts in a frail gesture of solidarity with the
destitute. I was asked to speak then,
and did. I began by saying the purpose
was not about party politics, or regime change, and certainly not about
violence. A week or so later I was
‘reported’ in the Zimbabwe Herald
newspaper as being an ex-Selous Scout (wrong) bent on fomenting violent
revolution in order to resurrect British colonialism (wrong again). I
wrote a letter back, couched in heavy irony, pointing out that this was
precisely the opposite of what I’d said.
Surprisingly, they published it.
Still, in subsequent years I have been twice detained by Zimbabwe
officialdom for nothing more than being in possession of a camera. Though ultimately harmless, the arrests were
salutary reminders of the vulnerability and helplessness that so many
experience at the hands of authoritarian governments everywhere.
And as this small
but robust and beautifully polite gathering closes with a minute of silence in
honour of the disappeared, the maimed, the exiled, that is a final impression:
something warm, fragile, and indescribably precious.
The drongos – nhengure,
in Shona, an epithet once given to hypocritical whites, after their forked
tails – go on flitting about like bats, feeding.
*****