July 30: Six songs I have on repeat

There are many ways we deal with anxiety and many people know I am a politics addict. The upcoming Zimbabwean elections have gotten me all worked up. As we draw closer to the Zimbabwe elections there is amazing playlist I have had on repeat all month. As you know, with most Zimbabweans, our default is prayer. We look to God so my playlist for the past month has been extremely religious. I thought to share my top Christian songs which have been helping me cope with the anxieties which come with this time but also give me hope that maybe one day soon something will give.

These songs show some desperation and yearning among Zimbabweans for a better life. They are not in any particular order but as we wait, my message is lets wait in hope!! May what is best for every Zimbabwean - wherever they may be - prevail!

1. Nyika Zimbabwe - Charles Charamba

2. Ngaticheme - Vabati VeVhangeri

3. This Flag - Shingisai Suluma

4. Worship Addict - Takesure Zama Ncube

5. Ishe Komborerai Zimbabwe

6. Sangani Nesu - Israel Dick

Two sides of the same coin

They call one Africa, the other Europe,

For many, its worlds apart

And yet our history and past makes us

Just two sides of the same coin

For a season, Europeans migrated in numbers from Europe to Africa,

They sort to discover, live and engage – they called it colonisation,

The drivers were the need for resources and opportunities

Now many Africans are moving in their numbers to Europe,

They seek to discover, live and engage

Their drivers too are the need for resources and opportunities

You see, in as much as we are different, we are the same

We are two coins of the same coin

Since our paths keep crossing,

Our problems affect each other,

Isnt it time that we worked together,

And like two sides of the same coin,

Compliment each other’s existence

Rhodes has fallen, so must Mandela??!

So, one of my weaknesses is that when I seat around idling, my ears have a strange way of listening to other people's conversations... bad habit I know... but I have discovered a lot about human beings through these listening in sessions. The highlight for me this week is a conversation I over head between two young men. One was arguing, "Since the University of Cape Town (UCT) has ceded to taking down the Cecil John Rhodes (CJR) statue, then other countries, like Britain which have erected a statue of the great Nelson Mandela must also follow suit.

I nearly jumped out of my skin at this stream of thought because to me, Rhodes and Mandela do not represent the same thing at all!! This young man was arguing that what happened at Cape Town was diplomatic suicide for South Africa. I began to ask myself a few questions: does this young passionate fella actually understand the difference between the two men he was so easily equating.

To the British during the colonial era, maybe CJR was a great man because he had a vision, you know the whole Cape to Cairo stuff we were taught during our early years in primary school. I dare say he did his country proud with all the mines, land and acquisitions he obtained in Africa. He was also, a visionary because he provided the seed money which led to the birth of the University of Cape Town (UCT). Surely a man who did all this deserves the greatest honour at the university he helped to build!

This is however not true for a continent such as Africa and South Africa in particular where the effects of apartheid are still a reality because of the inequality which exists. It could be possible that whilst the people who erected the statue put it there in honour of the gift CJR had given to South Africa, to the young South African who has lived through, read, and heard about the downside of colonialism, CJR's statue was a representation of the past he would rather forget.

So from where I am sitting, CJR fell yesterday because of people like Mandela who stood against inequality and demanded that every human being living in South Africa be allowed to enter the UCT gates regardless of their race. That Britain and other countries have chosen to honour Mandela by erecting his statue is actually the greatest victory in the fight against inequality and imperialism the world has seen in a while and should be commended!

The other side of the coin for me however is that I do think Rhodes and colonialism are a part of our history and we should erect monuments and places where we keep this part of our African history. We have seen different countries erect museums for the Rwanda Genocide, the Holocaust, the Slave Trade, and other such painful elements which make up the world's history and which have shaped policies and perceptions in the world. So we do not need to destroy the CJR statue and all other statues associated with the African colonial past, let's preserve them because they will help us in answering a lot of questions the future generations will have.

In my view, the falling of the CJR statue yesterday was very symbolic! It said let's decolonise the way we do things not only at UCT but across South Africa and the rest of the African continent. It told me that we potentially have a new breed of African leaders being born in Africa who will do things differently.... whether their approach is good or bad is a debate for another day... The erecting of the Mandela statue in different parts of the world is also a symbol of the importance of standing up for what is right (to the extent of spending 27 years in prison) and most importantly it reminds us that when the battle has been won,  we need to be the better man and choose forgiveness and reconciliation rather than bitterness and revenge......

Watch out, I might be writing about your conversation next :)

The sins of the fathers catching up with the children

I have had the privilege of living in the 20th and 21st century,  in an era where my people have migrated extensively. I have heard people remark that my people are like the Chinese, they are everywhere. I have had the opportunity to live through an era where xenophobia raised its ugly head on not only my people but many other people living in this South Africa where I live.

I have heard others saying to my face that women who come from my country are ugly and dirty. It surprised me because until then I hadn't noticed that I was any different from them.

I have listened to tall tales of how all witches and sorcerers came from my country and how my brothers were cheaters who used local women to get documentation.  I have been there, that annoying remark when people tell you that they know a Zimbabwean, ... their hardworking poor maid is a teacher from Zimbabwe.

I have sat through conversations with very respectable people who knowing I was a Zimbabwean still went on to remark with a straight face that the crime rate in Gaborone has sky rocketed since "amaZimbabwe" started migrating. I have jokingly laughed these off and told them that they had better hold on to their wallets because I am a Zimbabwean.

I have facilitated discussions on xenophobia where I have been asked to talk to my brothers and sisters who have messed up border towns like Musina because of crime and prostitution.

  

I have also seen a woman from Limpopo, a province of South Africa, breakdown when a Zimbabwean colleague made a joke about how Limpopo is a province of Zimbabwe. Until then, I actually hadn't realised how bad it was to be associated with Zimbabwe. The poor lady cried...

All this however seems trivial when you think of the many people who lost their lives due to xenophobic violence in the country. I remember being afraid to even go to the shopping mall after seeing the images of "the burning man", Enersto, whose crime was purely that he was a Mozambican at the wrong place at the wrong time. He is just one of the many who also fell victim to this injustice....

But you know what, i have never felt anger towards these beings. All these things happening around me got me thinking. Could this be some form of karma? I mean I am one of those "born frees" and I am not too sure how my fathers treated the foreigner when the sun was shining on my country. My earliest memory of the treatment of a "foreigner" was during the land reform in my country. (I am arguing here that this could be part of the reason  why those people lost their land because it was easy to identify them as non-native because of their skin colour so although they might have been citizens of my country, something about them stood out and made them appear foreign).

I am hoping there is someone out there with better memories of how we treated people from other countries.

So i ask my brothers and sisters to please take me back to the 80s when my Zimbabwe was young and her people were excited about independence. I want to know how my black government initially related with non-natives...

Take me back to my motherland then but put me in the shoes of a Mozambican refugee who had come to my country because of the civil strife in his country. You know those days when Matsanga and Alfonso Dlakama were always making regional news.... Put me in the shoes of that young boy who had walked many kms on an empty stomach and remind me what we used to call him, what kind of work he did and if we paid him a fare wage. Did we provide psycho social support to him, were we in any way kind to me?

Take me back to the Zimbabwe of the 80s, remind me of what we said about Zambia, Malawi, South Africa. What did we say of Zambia when they had hyperinflation and how did we accommodate them? How did we treat the South Africans in exile? Did we accommodate them with kindness? What did we call the migrant workers, were we kind to them?

I am hoping by answering these questions I will be able to appreciate why my people face so much stigma. A part of me tells me it could be the sins of the father catching up with the children....

If this is true, then this might be a good time to warn our current hosts all over the world of this thing called karma and how one day one of their children will find themselves in the shoes I am today and ask them how they treated the Zimbabwean :)

just some thoughts...

It has been almost a year since I last posted on this blog. I have been so busy with life and, well, everything. But in the past year since my last post, I have learnt one very crucial lesson, whoever said "ignorance is bliss" must have come from some utopia where what you do not know can not harm you...

 Six months ago, I was sitting in a queue in an immigration office. Beside me was a woman in her late 50s who was waiting to find out if her permit had been approved. Because we had to sit for a while, we ended up chatting. She told me a rather sad story of how she had lived in this country for more than 15 years but there was no record that she had been here because she was undocumented. She told me of how her husband had informed her at a time when there was some documentation process almost similar to the one she had now applied for in the 1990s that she could not go and apply, because the documentation was meant for men only.

Shocked, i asked her why he had allowed her to come along this time around and she said, he was dead now. She told me that she had come to the Home Affairs Office with her dead husband's passport in the hope that she could be incorporated on his status (he was a permanent resident at the time of his death). The Home Affairs had told her that it was no longer possible for her to apply for such documentation in view of the fact that this person she was claiming to be her spouse was dead and there was no evidence that he was actually married her (she was married traditionally to him). The good news had however been that since  she was a Zimbabwean, there was some documentation process underway and then they referred her to the queue at the back of the office. And so she found herself in that office at the time.

Her story is just one of many people who have just fallen through the cracks in the system of migration, either knowing or unknowingly. I just  started thinking of the struggles this woman went through trying to run away from the police and how much she was vulnerable. I was also quite saddened by the level of ignorance she had, as to not question her husband's position that the earlier documentation would only apply to men... also wondered why the husband abused her ignorance and kept her undocumented for so long... maybe it was a way of ensuring that he could control her better.

Whatever your answers maybe to this issue, what I learnt from this woman's story is just that, Ignorance is not bliss after all. The fact that she did not know that she could actually be documented in the 1990s, did not change the law, it did not change the fact that if she had been caught without documentation (and its a miracle that she was not caught) she would have been deported...

My advice, ask questions. You will be surprised at how asking a question in the most broken form of English or French or Swahili can be what differentiates your destiny from that of the next person. I am just thinking, if this woman had not gathered the guts to go to Home Affairs to establish how she could benefit from her husband's permanent residency, she could have found herself missing yet another opportunity to be documented.

This is me, trying to find my voice again after a whole year in the shell of life, I hope this shot piece helps someone out there :)

Let's talk about it!

This morning, I read a very shocking news article which talked about how pornographic movies were being sold in the streets of Harare and anyone, regardless of age could buy them as they were clearly labelled and being sold openly and with no age restrictions.

What was sad however was the comments which followed that article. One particular comment caught my eye. It stated that the reporter was wrong in putting this information out in the papers because they had actually informed more minors where they could access this explicit material. The comment further read: "Stop promoting immorality by pretending to be exposing it" (http://www.newsday.co.zw/article/2011-08-22-pornographic-discs-hit-harare-streets).

To me, this reaction was unfortunate as it continues to show that many people still believe that by not talking about sex and sexuality with our children we will be actually protecting them. Whilst it is true that this article could have brought awareness to those young people in Harare who did not yet know where to find the pornographic material, I believe that this journalist should have been applauded for being a whistle blower to parents in and around Harare as well.

Statistics in sub-Saharan Africa have shown that our failure to talk more openly about sex with our parents and our children played a major role in the spread of Aids. Even after preventative methods  such as condoms had been discovered, parents still found sex a touchy topic and preferred not to discuss it with their children. I will not go into the impact this has had on our society as I am sure we all know very well.

Instead of us trying to run away from the reality, which has been presented by the journalist, which is that explicit content is being sold freely on the streets, shouldn't we instead be focusing on how we can protect our children from this content as well as teaching them why it is wrong for them to expose themselves to such content? If we want to be honest about this issue, our children are probably more aware of where such things can be found, even if they are not on the streets! Is this not the role the media is supposed to play in our society, to educate, inform and raise awareness? Will this article not lead to the relevant authorities taking stricter measures to ensure that this content is removed from the streets? I believe that it is immoral for parents  to try and hide behind silence when it comes to issues related to sex! The more these issues are raised and more parents are aware of where their children access to some of these potentially unsafe things, the better our society's chances in the many struggles it faces with the future generation!

This is once again me, thinking aloud...

Who are you raising: The sequel

Thank you for the insightful comments on my last article, "Who are you raising?". I felt that it was necessary for me to do a follow-up to some key issues which some of you raised. I must confess you presented a number of very interesting points which I will try and address from my point of view. Before I delve into that however, let me re-emphasize that I am not advocating for us to try and pull ourselves into the dark ages. I am very happy with how the world is unfolding and hope that we continue to progress! My only concern is that our children should have an understanding of who they are and where they come from. Let us celebrate our heritage as we progress into modernity! Allow your children to have an understanding of their heritage as well instead of making them somewhat excluded from it because as much as we might try to run from it, it is still a part of who we are!

One key issue which was raised was that we as young parents living in the diaspora or in bigger cities from the ones we grew up in are raising our children in an environment which is different from the environment which we were raised and we ourselves are still on the path of self discovery because we, like our children, are still growing. Young parents out there fear that they might not have learnt enough from their parents to be in a position to then transmit that knowledge to their children.

My answers will start by drawing a contrast between ourselves and our parents. I am sure this might not apply to everyone, but I am sure that a greater percentage of our Zimbabwean parents grew up in what we refer to as rural areas. This  can be attributed to the colonial legacy which placed people in reserves and these people would only be allowed to move to urban areas if they had passes or when they got jobs. With independence more people began to move into urban areas and that is how some of us came to be raised in urban areas through rural to urban migration. My reason for bringing up this background information is just to show that some of our parents, just like us, did not raise their children in the environment in which they grew up. You may argue that theirs wasn't a huge difference seeing as the migration was internal and the cultural differences were minimal. I however think that if you put yourselves in their context you will appreciate how much of an impact this could have had on an individual. Imagine moving from a communal environment, where you lived with your extended family and close relations and any form of help was a stone throw away, then suddenly finding yourself in a huge city with all it's lights and splendour, and women wearing trousers and lipstick! One could have had a culture shock! Already by this brief illustration we can see that even though they were in the same country, they like us were at some point young parents trying to raise children in an environment foreign to them and they like us also felt they hadn't learnt enough of their culture to impart much to their children.

You are probably asking yourselves how on earth they managed! Well in my view, it is so true that it takes a whole village to raise a child! We really do not have to go it alone guys. We have so many institutions at our disposal. In today's world, that quotation should be changed to it takes a "global village" to raise a child. I must acknowledge that the internet has become a hub of knowledge about our different cultures and heritage. There are people out there who are busy ensuring that we never perish because we lack wisdom! Just this morning I wanted to get a better understanding of why black African people had totems and I found a very good article explaining how totems were used as a tool of unifying families, amongst other things! Having read it, I said to myself, one more question I will have an answer for when the time comes!

The second tool which I believe our parents used effectively was to allow us to interact with the gurus of wisdom and culture, our grandparents! Why do you think they sent us "kumusha/ekhaya" for the holidays? Why do you think our grandparents would sit down with us and tell us ngano when they visited us. I believe I learnt a lot about my background from those times I interacted with my grandparents and funny enough, I din't even realise it until now! Let us never underestimate the importance and the role which our parents, aunts and uncles can plan in the process of raising our own children. Use your social networks, they are free!

Once again, good luck!