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I thought they were thick-skinned. I thought they were courageous. Last week my instalment made a passing reference to the health status of those in the MDC-T aspiring for presidency. No name was mentioned, not a single one. Boy, what a panicky response! I had touched a raw nerve, in the process exposing deep-seated health-anxieties within the MDC-T hierarchy. I liked a jibe from a contributor on one of the websites: atya chatikwatara ndeane chiturikwa. Translated it means he who fears a thud is one with a poorly hung secret!
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Why is the Prime Minister sounding irritable these days, hardly a fortnight into his latest engagement? One would have thought with a coolant right in the home, our foremost minister would approach life sedately, approach it with coolness, calmness. Not this week. He used the World Press Freedom Day to detonate fresh farts of anger and frustration, wholly aiming it at Webster Shamu, the Minister of Media, Information and Publicity. He did much more. He doled out threats, empty threats against a minister towards whose appointment he has zero say. He admitted to as much, in the process revealing his own effeteness in the inclusive Government. He did much worse. He divided the inclusive Government, thereby abjuring the little symbolic authority he could have invoked for some modicum of control, for some modicum of empathy.
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One stubborn day in April, the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twelve, President Mugabe stolidly walked back to Harare, clearly defying Press and prophecy.
The week before had been abuzz with rumours. He was seriously ill, the Press, in big bright banner had joyfully proclaimed.He was going through his last gasps, read the same proud Press on the morrow. No, in fact he had just passed on, wildly wailed the same suitably sad Press. The ailing Air Zimbabwe had already dispatched a plane to bring home his remains, continued editorials.
The dire reports came in quick succession. All these dire reports were set against words from a prophet, one TB Joshua, a -
I have just been reading C G Tracey’s “All for Nothing?”, itself a weeping autobiography by one of Rhodesia’s leading farmers and, especially after UDI, one of Rhodesia’s leading sanctions-busters. The book is tearful about the loss of Tracey’s Mount Shannon, aka Mount Lothian farm, apparently in the course of our land reforms. But the book gives one the sense that this land loss triggers a long introspection in Tracey, much of it coinciding with major turns and shifts in the life of Southern Rhodesia both before and after UDI.
But that is a story for another day. My interest is one forthright sentence Tracey uses to introduce a chapter of the book. The forthright sentence -
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Today is April 14, a mere four days away from yet another 18th April, the day we commemorate our birthday as an independent, sovereign nation.
The year for that momentous event was of course 1980, a year that, read against the pain of a long war of liberation, seemed ungraspable, seemed unreal, quite unattainable. There is something so enveloping about a war, something so abridging about the life you live under conditions of war, that a day is long enough time, long enough planning horizon. Life gets that basic, that practical, that immediate, that circumscribed, that you hardly vision beyond your little life grinding tragically on, towards an uncharted, uncertain end. -
This column has in the past highlighted US and other western manoeuvres in central and the horn of Africa, all under the guise of fighting Joseph Kony and that will-of-the-wisp called Al Qaeda. It has also emphasised that Al Qaeda does not need to be real, a monster of specific shape or time. Al Qaeda is anything, anyone defending or asserting own rights, a posture which America and the West interpret as threats to their own global interests.
Naturally the form such self-assertion takes over space and time is bound to evolve and change, which dialectically translates into ever transforming challenges to western interests globally. So the effective tactic for America and the West is not to name and not to distinguish -
Before the 1789 revolution which gave a bloody full-stop to the Frankish Monarchical line, France was an unliked, war-mongering polity. That dubious status continued during the “reign” of Robspierre, consolidating itself under France’s first Emperor Napoleon, that diminutive Italian who ruled France for more than a decade and half, a diminutive who almost ruled Europe.
And of course France’s arch-enemy was England whose main fortress were the waters of the oceancradling it, cutting it from mainland Europe, by then martial France’s parade ground. These waters made England naturally impregnable, while providing it with enough “ground” on which to build a formidable navy.
England thus grew up a water-borne power, something that enabled it to build and defend an overseas empire. Yes, something that made it foremost in inventing piracy and buccaneering. Alongside the Dutch, the French and sometimes the Spaniards, piracy is England’s dubious fame in history, a fame it is just beginning to lose to Somalis who actually have better cause to be thus. Their fishes have been abused, severely depleted by foreigners trawling deeper and deeper into that country’s troubled politics, something England could not -
Russia’s Putin has won a new term into Presidential Office. With that victory comes a new ogre for Europe and America, both of which are already talking of discovering Putin’s vulnerabilities for a counter-attack. With Putin’s victory comes the hope for a global safe and just order for the Third World, especially for independent-minded nations like Zimbabwe.
Throughout his campaign, Putin’s messages had all the right inflections: stiff opposition to external -
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This week I propose to build my case through information vignettes. But first, let me pay my bills. I am grateful to one of my readers from Masembura who wrote to The Herald from the United Kingdom. If I am not mistaken, his letter was published in the Monday edition of The Herald. His submission was to illustrate and validate my thesis in last week’s instalment by exposing the grab, grab outlook of companies like Bindura Nickel Corporation which have been scooping our resources without exercising any modicum of community responsibility.
The piece in The Herald was figurative, poignant and mordant. Mordant against those Zimbabweans in possession of knowledge, in positions of leadership, but who are unable to -
The one thing I have always rued about being Zimbabwean is this our propensity to ensure our total compliance with the Sabbath, total compliance with the ten commandments. Zimbabweans would rather they are not born at all than offend against the holy Sabbath. It is that commonsensical: being unborn or dead is the easiest and completest way of total obedience and compliance with the Sabbath. So religiously we oppose our coming into being. So religiously we oppose those things that
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Two weeks ago I penned a piece which used an esoteric term - zeitgeist - to make my point. I got a few calls from angry readers who wanted to know what kind of English that was, and why I thought it was their bother to know such a difficult-to-pronounce-let-alone-to-comprehend term.
Among these angry callers was one Killian, himself a bosom friend. He offloaded a few friendly invectives on me hoping I would be stung into explaining the meaning of this word. I stood firm and stubborn, furiously silent as indeed I am always wont to, when stuck in such sticky situations. His daughter, an avid reader of the column by his own recommendation, had phoned him from some university in South Africa demanding to know what the terrible word -
My instalment last week generated quite some response warranting a second take on the same subject. Of course a good many of my readers struggled with the word "zeitgeist", wondering whether this was English English or German English. Well, I shall have occasion to revisit this same matter in future. I need to hurry to another matter which is just as crucial, but even
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Each time I am low, I have this vivifying habit of raking and harassing the cradle of my credo, Marxism. It must give me answers. Or at the very least give me questions the search for answers of which must lead to new insights.
After a very disheartening week at the African Union Summit, I found myself in one such hideous mood whose nourishing -
I am very clear about what works and what does not work, clear about what edifies and what damages. There is nothing to be gained by seeking to interfere with the circulation of Morgan Tsvangirai's useless book. I reviewed it a few weeks back. It is a false testimony by a small man - an outsider to events - yet with enormous ambitions to be the centre of the universe. The
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"What a dust thou dost raise! Smallest of mortals, when mounted aloft by circumstances, come to seem great; smallest of phenomena connected with them are treated as important, and must be sedulously scanned, and commented upon with loud emphasis."
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- Nathaniel Manheru