So zanu is squeeky clean, has been for the past twenty eight years, ha slooted the DRC for its own survival and not the nation’s. The other parties are evil because they are aligned with democracy, contesting elections and winning and by so doing they are pro west.

Bulldog Chiwenga, rabbid Perence, mercenary Gono, and vaseline smearing Chihuri and the rest are comfortably sitting in their palaces while the massses starve and get tortured willy nilly.

Mugabe, the only president to shout obscenities at a gathering of leaders is a pitiful wreck of a statesman.

And they have escaped the punitive measures they deserve. It’s not the end. As for pride they must forget the Chinese are genuinely in their support while Russia will use zimbabwe as a pawn for their international political ends.

[edit]

And some clowns claim this is a victory against racism.

I read an article yesterday in the Zimbabwe Guardian celebrating the BBC’s retraction of a news story which wrongly accused the ZANU-PF of breaking an infant’s legs. The article was titled, “Western media lies exposed.” The author is a patriot, gleefully satisfied that the reports of violence on the part of the ZANU PF are simply the machinations of a hungry Western Empire itching to regain a foothold in Mother Africa. I’m guessing he somehow mananged not to see or hear about what happened to Gift Mutsvungunu.

I am a black woman, Caribbean and African. My father is from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. I live in Los Angeles, California. Two weeks ago, the day before the so-called election in Zimbabwe western newspapers announced that members of the MDC were being beaten and menaced. At least 90 had died. I sent my friend an email asking if he and his family were alright. He wrote back that they were safe ‘for now’. The security police had been sent to follow his every step.

My friend asked me to help him find information on an organization that provides grants to arts organizations. The information was time sensitive and when I wrote back that I needed more information, he answered that ‘things are getting really bad’. That was the last I heard from him.

I can’t say my friend’s name. Suffice it to say he is a black African. Half of his family were slaughtered for not following Mugabe’s party when he was child, yet he believes in non-violence. My friend believes in words and in people. He’s the first true patriot I ever met. He believes in Zimbabwe, even though he has has been arrested for calling for an end to the corruption that robs villages of clean water, an end to the use of violence to prevent people from exercising their right to political participation.

I cannot say his name even though a lot of horrible things have happened to him at the hands of the government the man who wrote that article was defending. I can’t say his name because like all of those who’ve spoken up for change or just plain fairness, I am afraid that even if he is okay, he and his family will be punished. Like Gift Mutsvungunu — and NOT by whites.

I could try to find my friend through another fellow I know, also a friend, but that friend can’t even afford to send email. Mugabe blames the whites for this. I can’t say this friend’s name either. He was placed in a concentration camp when he was 10 by the Fifth Brigade. They raped his mother. He was forced to watch. I suspect the men who did it, like Mugabe and the man who wrote that article, would say that my friend and his mother had it coming.

I started writing about it. Then three months ago, purely by accident I met a young woman here in Los Angeles who at the age of 8 was chased all over Southern Africa, because her father didn’t belong to the party of responsible for the death of Gift Mutsvungunu. Mugabe and the man who wrote that article decrying the injustices done the ZANU PF would contend that the whites made this young woman up as well: a walking, living, breathing fiction.

My father hurt a lot of people. He is a violent man, a rapist, he committed incest, he is a thief, and he abandonned more than one family. My mother was dead for two years before he even knew. I understand that there are reasons. He’s the son of a chief who died when he was two; he’s spent his lifetime on get rich schemes–if he succeeded he never learned to share with anyone who needed his help; the nation that came after the Belgians inherited atrocities as heinous as any visited anywhere on the continent and my father can’t have gone unscathed. Nearly every abuser was someone’s victim once. Or maybe he’s just a bad person.

For centuries Europe raped the continent of Africa and then (with not a little bit of blood and coaxing) simply jumped ship–kept control of the diamonds, and oil, and precious metals with the help of a select few (Revenge, I think in part for their daring to demand independence). But what monsters have taken their place?

My father lay on top of me once. He said he was teaching me how to be with boys. When I was three he pulled me up off the floor by my ears and rang them for crying that he was leaving us (he was still my daddy). He slapped me so hard once when I was 14 that I spun before I hit the floor. He’d moved into my mother’s house after being away seven years and decided that he wanted to watch television but my sister and I were watching something else and we wouldn’t let him change the channel. First I hit the floor, then my sister. “Look what you made me do,” he said, and sent us to our rooms. Watching Mugabe and what he’s doing to my friends and to their country, I’ve come to understand something about my old man.

As a black African living in the United States I can attest that racism is alive and well. I live it every day. And yet when I remember my father, when I look at these pictures of Gift Mutsvungunu, at the blood being shed in Zimbabwe, I don’t see Europe. I see black. Black Africans who can justify murder, rape, terror and destruction of other black Africans.

In 2004, the people of the United States voted for one president; the Supreme Court selected another. Theft is theft. Other than the fact that Mugabe did it with guns, what exactly is the difference? For someone who hates whites and loves to blame them for their country’s ills, Mugabe and those who lay the lives of Gift Mutsvungunu at the feet of the whites do a frighteningly good job of surpassing them.

When you live with someone who is abusive your own shame makes you a traitor. If you stand up to him, he teaches you a lesson. If you name what he’s done, it’s your fault or you simply don’t understand. And anyway who would believe such a thing? If this bad thing really happened, then why didn’t you tell? Where’s the proof? Meanwhile those around you don’t understand why you seem to collapse into yourself, why you can’t just let sadness go. They don’t mean to be insensitive or uncaring. It’s just that sadness hurts and it’s contagious.

Violence works. The abuser himself knows this better than anything. There is always a reason for what he does, it’s never his fault, and so this ugly thing becomes your little secret because no one would ever understand, or if they find out then they would surely say you made it up. Or they’ll blame you because even you believe that somehow you must have deserved it or even asked for it. And too many times, those you do tell bear this fear out.

When you belong to the family of someone who is abusive, you become part of an unspoken pact that you will all keep up appearances. It isn’t necessarily conscious. It isn’t even malicious. It’s the only way to survive. Because who could face that kind of pain: the place you call home is out of control, isn’t safe? To tell would shame you all, and betray the unspoken agreement that people love each other stick together. If you tell, you’re breaking that pact and worse, you’re betraying the family: the only people who love you, the very core of who you are. The abusive person knows this too. They depend on it.

And so this ugly thing that you alone know somehow taints you all, and you become responsible for protecting everyone, even your abuser. You learn to keep his secret. So well and so much so that for a long time you don’t even know that what’s happened is real, even if you know something is wrong. Even his absence plagues you because long after violation there is memory and memory stays. You survive. And you get on with the business of being strong and burying the thing you survived, even as it rewrites who you are, who you might have been.

And you are ashamed of what you know, that you couldn’t stop it. And so you go on in silence, always afraid– in spite of your rage, in spite of what you know– until you are forced to speak. And that’s when we are betrayed again.

Because in naming what was done, what was done becomes real. We’ve made the unthinkable real. And that unthinkable thing is like a disease passed on by the mere fact that it could happen to someone else. And so no one wants to know. We’ve been erased, murdered by someone ready, willing and able to rob us of our sense of safety, our very sense of permanence and place in the world. And so everyone keeps the abuser’s secret. This is how violence works. And people like Mugabe and my father know it.

The only problem with violence is that though it works, ultimately, it doesn’t win. Because there are those who refuse to keep the secret. These people who stand up to the abuser, who name his evil for what it is he has beaten, murdered, raped. He calls then demons, traitors, tools of some other true evil, of those who would destroy your normal, happy family. People like my friends, like Gift Mutsvungunu. And there are many willing to believe so as not to catch the disease. I can’t even say my friends’ names– and for this there are those who will say it proves they don’t exist– or worse, that they were not good Zimbabweans, good Africans, and that they had it coming.

Mugabe is like the rapist in the house. The rapist prostitutes truth. Mugabe prostitutes history. As a young adult I confronted my father three times about the incest, about hurting my mother, and abandonning us. He told me many different things. He said it didn’t happen. Then he said I simply didn’t understand. Finally, it didn’t matter what he’d done. He’d found God and only God could forgive him.

For twenty seven years violence and silence have reigned– but not won– in Zimbabwe. For twenty-seven years Robert Mugabe has paid his friends with the blood of his own countrymen while the world stands still, refusing to call this what it is–genocide–many loathe to do so simply because he too is a black African. He offers a truce with a gun. He laughingly offers peace with a blade. He believes his own lies and he enforces those lies with the blood of all who dare to disagree.

Yet still more awful than this is that there are those who are willing to keep his secrets, who are willing to pick up guns and machetes to do so. There are those willing to beat the bodies and hack at the limbs of their own people and in this they are complicit in his lies: willingly, willfully, viciously complicit. And there are still others who dedicate pen and ink to perpetuating his lies and his violence by saying that it isn’t happening, parroting his song and dance that the mess is someone else’s fault and that whites whole continents away are simply out to make Mugabe look bad, trying to worm their way back into empire. These others are not just complicit. I think perhaps they do the most violence of all.

How much blood is enough, Mr. Mugabe? How many more like Gift? Like my friends? When will you and your followers, black Africans stop shedding black African blood? When will you stop blaming others else for this present, for what YOU have done?

And to you others so anxious to shed blood for this man, what happens when he goes? For go he must some day. What happens to any family when a tyrant dies and leaves them to contend with the sins he visited on them? My father is now an old man and he is afraid because the ghosts of all he’s done didn’t vanish with his years. They will haunt him to his grave.

I don’t know the answer. Violence can never truly win, but for a time it’s enough. The torture and murder of Gift Mutsvungunu is NOT something to be proud of. You are not better men. You are not liberators. You are not good Africans. Zimbabwe is becoming a grave. Right now the world looks at you and sees nothing more than rabid dogs eating their own young– and there isn’t a single white man in sight.

May we never forget each precious soul and the price they paid.

I am forwarding the pictures of Gift Mutsvungunu to both offices. They had a hand in his death too.

May Gift rest in peace and his family know they are in our prayers.

Democracy, economic sustainability, and basic human rights will never be achieved in Zimbabwe while the country remains entangled in the bitter political struggle of two rival parties, and where one of them is ruthlessly determined to cow the opposition into submission.

Last year Mugabe’s central intelligence operatives already targeted journalists and members of opposition, murdering and maiming them, including Tsvangirai himself, in an attempt to ease their way in the forthcoming elections. Now that the world has seen that they have been rejected by the ballot, they have become even more ruthless. Their aim, which follows a pattern of grim self-preservation, is to use force to systematically eliminate the opposition until they are weakened to the point beyond which they have no more influence.

This must not be allowed to happen. Africa and the world must bring the perpetrators to book, and soon.

So one day soon, all the pro-Mugabe leaders around the world will finally understand, including the blind UN security council of China and Russia.