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The agenda was to recolonise Africa through a more sinister and subtle way which was based on false intellectual generosity. The liberation struggle was discarded as a true avenue that had brought about the rights of the oppressed Africans. Instead human rights groups led by lawyers and bogus human rights activists were preferred as the genuine liberators of the people. A plethora of human rights groups which purported to stand for the downtrodden in society emerged in most African states.

These included groups calling for women’s rights, girls’ rights, gay and lesbian rights and also groups and individuals who were calling for all sorts of weird and incomprehensible rights. Time really flies but facts always remain stubborn.

The neo-liberal human rights movements aimed to replace the liberation movements and nationalist parties with their false claims of being the true liberators and defenders of people’s freedoms. The part played by the liberation movements and nationalist parties in waging protracted wars and in some cases carrying out violent demonstrations to dislodge the oppressive, suppressive and repressive white colonisers was quickly buried to be replaced by a new group of whitewashed idiots calling themselves human rights activists.

It is a mockery to us to say human rights are universal as implied by Beatrice Mtetwa and her white sympathisers. All rights and values are defined and limited by cultural perceptions. If there is no universal culture, then there can be no universal human rights.

The neo-liberal concept of human rights is founded on a human-centred view of the world based on an individualistic view of man as an autonomous being whose greatest need is to be free from interference by the state (as evidenced by Beatrice’s indecorous behaviour towards the police) and a freedom to enjoy the right to private property, the right to shout unprintable obscenities at those you dislike and the right to be left alone enjoying the evils of homosexuality.

Human rights are not a universal self evident truth, but are instead a socially constructed collection of norms that have been formed in a particular context for a specific purpose especially the protection of the liberal conception of the self.

This has seen a false notion premised on faulty neo-liberal perceptions that an individual can be singled out as a champion and defender of a whole people’s rights. No people can ever be liberated or defended by an individual. It is only God, Who being Omni-potent can achieve such a mammoth task.

History has taught us that it is the masses and not an individual who through collective effort can rise up against an oppressive system as to liberate or free themselves. No one can single handedly defend a whole people’s rights unless the people in that state are mere imbeciles or are devoid of any thinking. To single out Beatrice Tele Khalalempi Mnzebele as a champion of human rights in Zimbabwe is not only to belittle what the revolutionaries did in bringing genuine human rights to the masses but also to mock all progressive Zimbabweans as a people who are so stupid that they only need a foreign human rights ‘saviour’ from Swaziland to defend their rights.
What stinking nonsense!

Our liberation struggle which gave every oppressed Zimbabwean citizen genuine human rights was a collectivity of nationalists, freedom fighters, peasants, proletariats, spirit mediums, urbanites, mujibhas and chimbwidos. Each group contributed in a small or significant way to the total emancipation of the oppressed masses. No awards were ever given by the white world to those Africans who bravely stood against the evil colonial system that deprived the indigenous people of basic human rights. Beatrice is not our human rights defender nor can she ever be equated to true revolutionaries who took up arms to fight against an unrepentant and evil hearted white oppressor. She is millions of miles apart from revolutionaries like Herbert Chitepo and Edison Sithole among others.

She is a shameless white apologist who has been given various dubious human rights awards all in defence of white interests and those of their puppets in our midst. How can one claim that he or she is a voice of the voiceless as if we don’t have voices of our own?

Beatrice and her white friends want to erase Zimbabwe’s rich history of a determined people who bravely fought against naked white oppression for genuine African rights. Her kind wants to take credit for what thousands of Africans had to go to war for, in order for this ungrateful lot of charlatans to enjoy the very freedom that they now defecate on. Zimbabwe’s human rights history has totally nothing to do with human rights activists like Mnzebele.

These rights came into being after a protracted and bloody armed struggle. The likes of Beatrice should never lecture us on human rights nor claim that she is defending our rights. She is very good at defending the rights of thugs and all sorts of assorted MDC-T delinquents. It is not a secret that Beatrice and her human rights gang mostly give legal help to MDC-T supporters and their sympathisers.

The discourse on human rights has become very selective in Zimbabwe in that the so called activists select political parties and individuals they see as worthy of legal assistance. This politicisation of human rights on political party grounds is very questionable because it assumes that there are people whose rights are more important than those of the others. In most cases, the implementation of political rights is made to prevail over the rights to land, food or water.

The Zimbabwean liberation struggle which gave every oppressed Zimbabwean citizen genuine human rights was a collectivity of nationalists, freedom fighters, peasants, proletariats, spirit mediums, urbanites, mujibhas and chimbwidos. Each group contributed in a small or significant way to the total emancipation of the oppressed masses. No awards were ever given by the white world to those Africans who bravely stood against the evil colonial system that deprived indigenous people of basic human rights.

Beatrice is not our human rights defender nor can she ever be equated to true revolutionaries who took up arms to fight against an unrepentant and evil hearted white oppressor. She is millions of miles apart from revolutionaries like Herbert Chitepo and Edison Sithole among others. She is a shameless white apologist who has been given various dubious human rights awards all in defence of white interests and those of their puppets in our midst. How can one claim that he or she is a voice of the voiceless as if we don’t have voices of our own?

In Beatrice and her white friends’ view, a black man only has rights if he carries within him the false human rights idea of the white man , so that he, in turn, can be treated as a human being by ‘the white world’. Hence, rights in Zimbabwe depend on whether you support the neo-liberal cause. Therefore, any person that fails to recognize or is opposed to these white-centric rights is deemed to be ‘lesser human’ or a dictator at best. Such persons, who often happen to be revolutionaries, are treated as abusers of human rights.

This shows that human rights, while intended to promote the idea that all human beings are the same, excludes those thought by Beatrice and her friends to be different from them. It is therefore our argument that the value of human rights should be re-examined by affirming the differences between human beings, in acknowledging that we are all influenced by a myriad of different factors, such as our social, political, and cultural backgrounds. Human rights should be established based on the uniqueness of each and every human being, rather than on myopic neo-liberal assumptions propounded by Beatrice and her Western friends.

The controversial issue of whether human rights are an essentially Western concept while ignoring the very different cultural, economic, and political realities of the other parts of the world cannot simply be dismissed. Can the values of the white world be applied to all societies in the world?

There is no one size fits all type of human rights. Human rights are actually a result of concrete social struggles. You wage a struggle against your oppressors as did the Mugabes, Chitepos and others in order to enjoy your rights.

Beatrice and her white friends’ myopic view of rights clashes with our Africaness where society is far more than the sum of its individual members. As Africans, we believe that it is the community that protects and nurtures the individual. “I am because we are, and because we are therefore I am.” In most African societies group rights have always taken precedence over individual rights, and political decisions have been made through group consensus, not through individual assertions of rights.

Some human rights are simply not relevant to African societies like the rights accorded to homosexuals and lesbians in western countries. It is not that African societies are unable to provide certain rights to all their citizens, but rather that they see the “universal” conception of human rights as little more than an attempt to impose alien Western values on them.

The anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been celebrated with much pomp and fanfare but many human rights analysts point out that those countries that were still colonies in 1948,  argue that its provisions show an ethnocentric bias of the time.

The concept of human rights is really a cover for Western interventionism in the affairs of the developing world and “human rights” are merely an instrument of Western political neo-colonialism and imperialism. We are witnessing human rights being used in the 21st century as a weapon to dislodge legitimate governments from power and also as a clever way of decimating and destroying other people’s cultures.

The one-sided view on human rights forwarded by Western countries as well as their proxies dotted all over the African continent, is that they out-rightly deny the possibility that not everyone is simply the same underneath, and that ‘human’ refers to a variety of viewpoints and realities, not one underlying universal experience. The western world is focused on the protection of human rights, and sees only one route to do this which is the expansion of liberal democracy. Human rights now legitimate most interventions and peace initiatives giving the excuse of protecting civilians from their own governments/states. This is what Beatrice and her donor funded civil society friends dream should happen in Zimbabwe.

Human rights activists should be more comprehensive, careful and objective in their analysis of the world. We have observed over the years an inability within these human rights defenders to come up with indigenous ways to address human rights issues. There surely is no one size fits all type of human rights as put forward by Beatrice and her neo-liberal friends. Let the world know that Zimbabweans prefer revolutionaries to human rights defenders.

Bowden Mbanje and Darlington Mahuku are lecturers in international relations, and peace and governance with Bindura University of Science Education.