Daily Maverick

13th June 2016

To the casual observer, nothing much seems to have happened in Zimbabwe in recent years: Robert Mugabe, the world’s oldest head of state, remains president and Zanu-PF is still the ruling party more than 35 years after it took power.

But there has, in fact, been a tectonic shift. Like Zimbabwean society itself the opposition has become deeply fractured and any meaningful cooperation between the multitude of opposition parties seems unlikely. Moreover, this fragmentation has affected Zanu-PF itself – and that’s a big deal.

Of course, the party has always been riven by factions but much of what has made Mugabe so successful has been his uncanny ability to manage these conflicts and turn them to his advantage.

A sense of balance has been key. Internal opponents and troublemakers were isolated and, where necessary, excommunicated or worse. Others were rewarded for their loyalty. In doing so, Mugabe has for nearly 40 years managed to prevent schisms from becoming wide enough to threaten the party.

That has now changed. Over the past 18 months, an unprecedented purge has effectively demolished this delicately balanced edifice. Most conspicuously, former vice-president Joice Mujuru and many of her allies were expelled from the party in 2015.

Mugabe is 92, and with elections on the horizon, Zimbabwe’s political atmosphere is becoming increasingly turbulent as a miscellany of groups and individuals compete for the right to take over when Mugabe dies, or is no longer capable of running the show.

Inconvenient truths

A driving force behind the new ructions in the party is the first lady, Grace Mugabe. Since the ousting of Mujuru, Grace and her faction have antagonised and provoked ambitious groupings around vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa and various security services chiefs. Many fear that violence will erupt when Mugabe dies.

Meanwhile, Mujuru and other former Zanu-PF members have joined the unfamiliar ranks of the opposition. Many people, both inside and outside the country, see Mujuru’s newly announced party, Zimbabwe People First (ZimPF), as the potential leader of a coalition capable of garnering enough support to win elections, due to be held in 2018. That’s assuming agreement can be reached between opposition groups.

However, Mujuru – like Mnangagwa and others who are trying to reinvent themselves – faces significant problems. Awkward questions have arisen about their involvement in an event that many former Zanu-PF members would prefer everyone forgot.

That event is the Gukurahundi, when thousands of Ndebele speakers were killed by the army’s fifth brigade between 1983 and 1984. The pretext for these massacres was the emergence of a “dissident” or bandit problem in Matabeleland, which the government alleged to be orchestrated by the rival political party, Zapu, under Joshua Nkomo.

Mnangagwa, who is vying for the presidency, recently denied a statement he is said to have made in 1983, quoted in a book by lawyer David Coltart. In it he allegedly threatened to burn down “all villages infested with dissidents” and asserted that the campaign against dissidents could only succeed if the infrastructure that nurtured them was destroyed.

Coltart pointed out that he had done nothing more than cite a contemporary account from 1983 in the state-run Chronicle newspaper.

Such statements were regularly issued by Zanu ministers in that period and enthusiastically reported by the state-owned media. Mugabe, for example, said in April 1983 that “communities which sympathised with dissidents must not be shocked when the government viewed them as enemies of peace as much as the dissidents themselves. Communities which helped dissidents must not be surprised if they were punished as severely as the dissidents.”

Discomfort over the Gukurahundi massacres is not confined to the Mnangagwa faction. A prominent defector to Mujuru’s ZimPF is retired brigadier-general Agrippah Mutambara, who was in 2007 accused by Judith Todd, the daughter of a former Rhodesian prime minister, of rape.

In her memoir, she claimed Mutambara assaulted her after she approached the government with evidence of the fifth brigade atrocities, and was instructed to liaise with him by Solomon Mujuru, then chief of the army and Joice Mujuru’s late husband.

Mutumbara has never responded to these allegations, but the bad news for Mujuru is that such exposure is set to increase rather than decrease with time. This claim, like that involving Mnangagwa, has long been a matter of public knowledge, but a great deal of new information is due to emerge as Mugabe’s end draws nearer.

Archives in Britain, Australia and America, which are a treasure trove of formerly classified information on Zimbabwean events during the 1980s, are also progressively disgorging masses of documents which will make for uncomfortable reading for those who were politically active in that period.

History of violence

The threat posed by such inconvenient truths is well illustrated by the case of Didymus Mutasa, a long-time confidant of Mugabe who left the party with Mujuru and who is a high-profile founding member of ZimPF.

Mutasa’s latter-day conversion to democracy has come under fire from Jestina Mukoko, an activist who was abducted and tortured by government agents in 2008 when Mutasa was minister of state security.

Mukoko has since taken Mutasa to court, declaring that “it does not change anything that he is no longer with Zanu-PF and he is now with People First; he is still Didymus Mutasa … The message to Zimbabwe is that as Zimbabweans, we need to hold people to account. People need to be responsible for their actions”.

In March, Mutasa responded to Mukoko’s calls for him to expose the men who attacked her, telling the Zimbabwean Daily News site that he was unable to name them due to the Official Secrets Act.

Either way, Mutasa and others like him will have to become more accustomed to the prospect of legal action – and the humiliation it can bring.

Where next?

Where does all this leave Mujuru? In an attempt to present her party as something more than stale broth that’s has been reheated, she has mentioned the need for a national truth-telling exercise, similar to Desmond Tutu’s truth and reconciliation commission. Yet, for many, a yawning credibility gap is likely to widen for as long as she remains silent about the histories of those in her own ranks.

Mujuru herself has been implicated in the Gukurahundi by diplomatic documents. An Australian cable released last year recounts a conversation with Eddison Zvobgo, a member of Zanu’s central committee, at the height of the killings in 1983.

Zvobgo spoke of a “decision of the central committee that there had to be a ‘massacre’ of Ndebeles”. Before the inception of the politburo in 1984, the 20-member central committee was the party’s peak policymaking body – and Mujuru was a member of it, as were Mnangagwa and Mutasa. In other words, the trio – all of whom seek power in a post-Mugabe dispensation – are said to have participated in a formal decision to launch the Gukurahundi.

Mujuru is yet to react to this disclosure. An honest account of what she saw, heard – and did (or failed to do) – during the Gukurahundi and other periods of abuse would win her the support of many Zimbabweans who yearn for real reform. On the other hand, such a move could alienate a large constituency within her fledgling party.

But the risks of inaction are also significant. Sooner rather than later, Mujuru will have to choose whether she will be a leader or a political operator; whether she will lead a movement or just another of Zimbabwe’s opposition parties.

Her dilemma is, in a sense, that of the nation itself. Mugabe’s death will lead to either regression, continued stagnation or some form of genuine change. Given the backdrop – which makes for an “operating system” riddled with malware – options one or two seem most likely.

At the same time, history is about human beings and the choices we make. That is why Zimbabweans, despite the crushing disappointments of the post-independence period, keep hoping against hope that change will come.

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A version of this article first appeared on the Daily Maverick

Dr Stuart Doran is the author of a forthcoming book on the 1980s killings in Zimbabwe – Kingdom, power, glory: Mugabe, Zanu and the quest for supremacy, 1960–87

Daily Maverick

16 May 2016

Times are changing in Zimbabwe as Mugabe’s end nears, but would-be successors are facing uncomfortable questions and equally uneasy choices. The way they react to these dilemmas will shape the country’s future.

Dr Stuart Doran is a historian and the author of a forthcoming book, Kingdom, Power, Glory: Mugabe, Zanu and the quest for supremacy, 1960–87.

To the casual observer, nothing much seems to have happened in Zimbabwe of recent times. Robert Mugabe, the world’s oldest head of state, remains president. And Zanu-PF is still the ruling party, more than 35 years after it took power. But there have, in fact, been tectonic shifts in the nation’s politics. The opposition – like Zimbabwean society itself – has become deeply fractured. The united front presented by Morgan Tsvangirai in the early 2000s now seems light years away, as does any meaningful co-operation between the multitude of parties that have split from the original Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Yet such fragmentation extends now to Zanu-PF itself – and that’s a big deal.

Zanu-PF has always been riven by factions. During the liberation war of the 1970s, it was nearly torn apart by these divisions. Differences between personalities and subethnic groups continued after independence in 1980. But much of what has made Mugabe so successful a politician has been an uncanny ability to manage these conflicts and turn them to his advantage. A strategic sense of balance has been key. Internal opponents and troublemakers were isolated and, where necessary, excommunicated or worse, while their supporters were frequently left only to contemplate the price of dissent or suffered lesser forms of punishment. For the reformed, there was always the hope of rehabilitation. By these and other means, Mugabe managed for nearly 40 years to prevent schisms from becoming wide enough to threaten the structural integrity of the party.

That has now changed. Over the last 18 months, an unprecedented purge has effectively demolished this delicately-balanced edifice. Whether or not the party will survive Mugabe’s departure is moot, but what is certain is that it can never be the same. Most conspicuously, former Vice President Joice Mujuru and many of her allies were expelled from the party en masse in 2015. It is almost impossible to imagine Mugabe endorsing an action of this nature in his heyday; mortality finally appears to be having its way not only with his body but with his mind and influence. A driving force behind the ructions in the party is the First Lady, Grace Mugabe, who has neither the standing nor the nous to play the hazardous game played so cunningly for so long by her husband. Since the ousting of Mujuru, Grace and her faction have antagonised and provoked ambitious groupings around Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa and security services chiefs. Many now fear that violence will erupt when Mugabe dies.

Meanwhile, Mujuru and other Zanu-PF rejects have joined the unfamiliar ranks of the opposition. Many inside and outside Zimbabwe see in her and Zimbabwe People First (ZimPF) – the political party she recently established – as the potential leader of a coalition capable of garnering enough of the traditional Zanu and MDC constituencies to win elections due in 2018.

However, Mujuru – like Mnangagwa and others who are trying to reinvent themselves as Mugabe’s death looms – have significant problems ahead of them because of what lies behind them. Coming from a party which has perennially traded on its liberation credentials – and with equal enthusiasm used a selective narrative of the liberation to assault and insult Tsvangirai and others – Mujuru et alare now finding that the past is not simply a useful stick but a two-edged sword. The problem is this: for most of Zimbabwe’s voters, the abuses wrought by Zanu-PF since independence are far fresher than the events that preceded it.

Predictably, awkward questions have already arisen – and the unconvincing attempts made to deal with them have merely served to increase scrutiny on the personal histories of Zanu politicians who seek Mugabe’s throne. Indeed, the Zanu-PF post-independence narrative is not so much one of selective memory but total amnesia. For a group so preoccupied with the past, it is remarkable how little they appear to remember of the years after the war.

The period that current and former Zanu stalwarts would most like Zimbabweans to forget is the Gukurahundi, when thousands of Ndebele-speakers were slaughtered by the army’s 5th Brigade in 1983-4. The pretext for these massacres was the emergence of a “dissident” or bandit problem in Matabeleland, which the government disingenuously alleged to be orchestrated by Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu party and its supporters. Mnangagwa recently denied a statement from 1983, quoted in a book by lawyer David Coltart, in which he threatened to burn down “all villages infested with dissidents” and asserted that the campaign against dissidents could only succeed if the “infrastructure” which nurtured them was “destroyed”. Coltart pointed out that he had done nothing more than cite a contemporary account in the government-controlled Chronicle newspaper.

Mnangagwa might have been better advised to point at his colleagues rather than deny the obvious. Such statements were regularly issued by Zanu ministers in that period and enthusiastically reported by the state-owned media. Mugabe, for example, said in April 1983 that “communities which sympathised with dissidents must not be shocked when the government viewed them as enemies of peace as much as the dissidents themselves. Communities which helped dissidents must not be surprised if they were punished as severely as the dissidents.”

Amnesia over the Gukurahundi is not confined to the Mnangagwa faction. A prominent defector to Mujuru’s ZimPF is retired brigadier-general Agrippah Mutambara, who said he was not forced out of the ruling party but had left as a matter of principle: “Conscience forbids me from remaining in Zanu-PF given its track record of intimidation and violence”. Naturally, he has said nothing of his own record in this regard. During the Gukurahundi, he did not shoot the messenger – he raped her instead. Judith Todd, the daughter of a former Rhodesian Prime Minister who was forced into exile in the 1970s for her support of the nationalist cause, was the first person to approach the government with documented evidence of 5th Brigade atrocities. The material in her possession had been compiled by the Catholic church, which was seeking to transmit it to Mugabe. As Todd described in her 2007 autobiography, she was raped by Mutambara after being instructed to liaise with him. The officer who directed her to Mutambara, and who presumably issued an order for her to be taught a lesson for her audacity, was Solomon Mujuru, the then chief of the army and Joice Mujuru’s late husband.

The bad news for Mujuru and company is that such exposure is set to increase rather than decrease with time. This incident, like that involving Mnangagwa, has long been a matter of public knowledge, even if awareness of it has been limited. But there is much that has been hidden which will shortly come to light – with more to come over the next five years. Foreign archives, which are a treasure trove of formerly classified information on events in Zimbabwe during the 1980s, are progressively disgorging masses of documents that will make for uncomfortable reading for those who have suppressed discussion and investigation of the period. There are also many Zimbabweans keenly awaiting the moment when they will be able to testify safely about what they saw and heard. These include members of the civil service and security sector, some of whom are already speaking with greater boldness as Zanu-PF’s disintegration accelerates.

The threat posed by such inconvenient truths is well-illustrated by the case of Didymus Mutasa, a long-time confidant of Mugabe’s who went out the door with Mujuru and who is a high-profile founding member of ZimPF. Mutasa’s latter-day conversion to democracy has come under fire from Jestina Mukoko, an activist who was abducted and tortured by government agents in 2008 when Mutasa was minister of state security. Mutasa subsequently issued a ministerial certificate protecting the identity of the abductors. Mukoko has since taken Mutasa to court, declaring that “it does not change anything that he is no longer with Zanu-PF and he is now with People First; he is still Didymus Mutasa … The message to Zimbabwe is that as Zimbabweans, we need to hold people to account. People need to be responsible for their actions”.

Mutasa, for his part, has come out swinging at his detractors, suing opposition leader Tendai Biti for allegedly stating that he was responsible for the death of a child who was incinerated during an act of politically-motivated violence in 2013. Mutasa’s deposition claimed that he was “internationally well-known” and of “unimpeached character”; Biti had struck at his “professional reputation and good character”, causing injury to his “good name, reputation, social and political standing”.

Mutasa and others like him will have to become more accustomed to such humiliation and the prospect of legal action. To be sure, whether Mutasa will, in the short term, receive a sympathetic hearing from a compromised judiciary seems largely irrelevant. Recently released documents show clearly that Mutasa’s predilection for violence extends back over decades. In 1985, when Zanu-PF was piling massive personal pressure on Joshua Nkomo in order to compel him to dismantle Zapu and fold it into the ruling party, Mutasa boasted to a diplomat that Nkomo had been “very difficult” in the past because he had made “impossible demands”. “This time,” however, “they had tried to ‘beat Nkomo up’ by using strong-arm tactics against him … these tactics seemed to be successful in that Nkomo had come to them very much cap in hand and begged for unity.”

These “strong-arm” methods included the arrest and torture of people close to Nkomo, including his personal assistant, Primrose Ncube, and were the last straw for an old man who had experienced the devastation of his party and his people – and an assassination attempt – during the then recently-ended Gukurahundi. Mutasa was undoubtedly right. Nkomo had received the message loud and clear. He privately told the same diplomat that he had no choice but to surrender: there would be “horrible things” if “unity” talks between the parties broke down, and resistance by the Ndebele “could lead to their race being wiped out”.

Oral testimony is more damning again for Mutasa. In a demonstration of the extent of Mutasa’s involvement in political violence, a former member of 3 Brigade based in Mutare who left the national army and fled to South Africa – nicknamed “Mbokodo” – has recounted how he had once been required to accompany Mutasa to a Zanu-PF “base” during an election campaign, also in the early 2000s. Such makeshift camps were scattered throughout the rural areas, manned by Zanu youth and war veterans, and notorious as places of torture for MDC supporters. On arrival, the company was greeted by the sight of a member of the opposition, trussed up and prone on the ground. Mutasa then delivered to onlookers a lesson none were intended to forget. “This is how we used to deal with sell-outs during the war,” he told the crowd as he poured petrol on the man and set him alight. Tragically, Mbokodo himself became another casualty of this atrocity. He showed increasing signs of mental breakdown during his exile and eventually took his own life. The Mutasa killing and other experiences seem to have played an important part in this process.

In another piece of sublime irony and self-delusion, Mutasa has declared Mnangagwa “unelectable”, but where does all this leave Mujuru? In an attempt to present her party as a unifying factor and something more than stale broth, reheated and repackaged in the hope that memories are short, she has made uncertain noises about the need for a national truth-telling exercise akin to Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yet, for many, a yawning credibility gap is likely to grow yet larger for as long as she remains mute about those in her own ranks. Nor is that the end of her trouble. She herself has been implicated in the Gukurahundi by diplomatic documents. An Australian cable released last year recounts a conversation with Edson Zvobgo, a member of Zanu’s Central Committee, at the height of the killings in 1983. Zvobgo spoke of a “decision of the Central Committee that there had to be a ‘massacre’ of Ndebeles”. Before the inception of the politburo in 1984, the 20-member Central Committee was the party’s peak policy-making body – and Joice Mujuru was a member of it, as were Mnangagwa and Mutasa.

Mujuru is yet to react to this disclosure. To be sure, she faces an unenviable dilemma. An honest account of what she saw, heard – and did (or failed to do) – during the Gukurahundi and other periods of abuse would win her the support of many Zimbabweans who yearn for real and deep reform. On the other hand, such a move could alienate a large constituency within her fledgling party and provoke dangerous elements in Zanu-PF. The temptation will be to continue to sit on the fence. But the risks of inaction are also significant. Attacks on ZimPF’s integrity will persist, new information will continue to surface, and that credibility gap could become a yawning chasm. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, sooner rather than later, Joice Mujuru will have to choose whether she will be a leader or a political operator, whether she will head a movement or just another of Zimbabwe’s opposition parties.

Her dilemma is, in a sense, that of the nation itself. Mugabe’s passing will lead to either regression, continued stagnation or some form of genuine change. Given the backdrop – which makes for an “operating system” riddled with malware – options one or two seem most likely. At the same time, human history is not simply about forces beyond our control, but about human beings and the choices we make. That is why Zimbabweans, despite the crushing disappointments and griefs of the post-independence period, keep hoping against hope that change will come.

The Herald

14 May 2016

I am conflicted. I would have wanted to deal with David Coltart’s book or, better still, deal with the whole debate around bond notes, both of them quite urgent and substantive. But I find myself having to deal with a matter that by now should have been taken for granted, a matter that comes so late in our evolution as a people, as a Nation. We are paying the price of deferring key yet obvious things in nation building, paying the price of not doing first things first, by taking full advantage of early consensual politics of the 1980s. I am talking about the issue of the National Pledge which is being furiously debated nowadays, a good thirty-eleventeen years after our Independence, being debated, in my view, for want of real, purposeful national mental direction and application.

With so many problems vakomana? And here I am, giving decency to such a misapplied, time-burning inanity through this instalment. Yet I must do so, for the sake of history, and of course for the sake of helping those who might find themselves in the vortex of a whirlpool recklessly created by serial, anti-establishment confusionists. And there are many such in our midst, some with holy collars.

The trouble with Zimbabwe

What makes this issue such a “needful” waste of time is that the National Pledge is being recited in most schools already, in any case in Government schools, including in those schools where my own brood go for instruction. Nobody can stop it now, what with such abounding fair-mindedness all around us. There is really no sensible argument raised against the National Pledge.

Only empty emotionalism. A Government that has been trusted to teach so many of our children — generation after generation — to such outstanding levels since Independence, cannot suddenly wake up with a devilish plan meant to ruin our children, surely? I am very happy, nay satisfied about the recitation on the National Pledge, wondering why the living God I pray to endured our tardy and desultory adoption of this needful, otherwise taken-for-granted human practice, in the process suffering us to lose so many generations of students, including some who have since become questioning grown-ups requiring convincing on the same matter now.

Maybe that is part of the trouble with Zimbabwe: failure to deploy a full ensemble of instruments for nation-building and in time.

Lessons from the great Caucasian state

Secondly, googling “National Pledge” on the net spews mountains and mountains of definitions and examples of such pledges across nations on the globe: superpowers and underpowers; subcontinents and island states; old and new; Asian, Western and African, African states with which Zimbabwe enjoys multiple affinities. What is a rarity on the net are countries like Zimbabwe which have not been reciting such pledges.

If this rampancy does not make the debate on the matter superfluous, one wonders what does. If it is so bad, so godless, so unconstitutional, so conscienceless, why have good, godly nations adopted it, one after another? And why now differ with the rest, we who are daily fed on the staple argument that little nations like Zimbabwe should benchmark themselves on ‘international best practices”, a disguised reference to Caucasian practices?

Well, America, that Caucasian leader and our universal model, does insist that it’s young ones recite its National Pledge every morning on school assembly. The pledge is there for anyone who cares to see or read. Why should we now not follow the leader, one daily thrust upon us by our enlightened democrats as the shibboleth? She has taught us human rights, rule of law, democracy and transparency. Why not National Oath? Chaipa chii nhasi and paneiyiyi nyaya? Hinga zvimwe zvose tinongonzi tikope wani?

Thrown out by the courts

Thirdly, the urgent action by our indefatigable, idle human rights centurions has been thrown out by our courts, themselves the only arbiters as far as human rights observance and enforcement is concerned. So what is the issue? Or if our centurions want to take the matter further, why don’t they do so when they are ready?

In the meantime allowing our children to recite this most poetic piece of earthly prose ever to come out of our usually staid bureaucrats? I mean, I am always challenged not to debate a matter which is before the courts by the same constituency. Why were they shouting shrill about it before determination by our courts? And anyway, do courts arbitrate matters divine? Please!

God made a latecomer

A few light-hearted but instructive anecdotes. The consensually recited American pledge was composed by one Francis Bellamy, and please take note, a Baptist minister’s son from upstate New York back in 1892, to, again note, coincide with Columbus Day! Christopher Columbus the explorer, not a saint. Since then, that pledge has been revised to enjoy nine variations, making it one of the significantly revised ritualistic document ever to remain on the lips of pale men.

And hey, until 1943, this much-recited composition was oblivious of God our Almighty, never mind the religious parentage of the hand that composed it. Or godly protestations of Americans. It took a successful court challenge by a Jehovah’s Witness religious sect of the same to convince that much-revered document to find room for our God the Almighty.

God was thus a latecomer, He who starts everything! Does this eventful American experience not put paid to arguments from some spouting religious charlatans that pledges need to meet a holy measure; or that they are inherently averse to holiness, hard to adapt to Christian messages? Or that constitutional challenges to them need necessarily spell doom for their eventual adoption or retention, albeit in revised form? It should not be viewed as sacrilegious that some churches or church leaders stand opposed to the National Pledge. It happened in great, mighty America, stupid! What the fuss?

Give it a God

I recall a big debate which church leaders in this country were wont to raise with President Mugabe, then as Prime Minister, in the early 1980s, the argument that these church leaders found Zanu-PF’s socialist ideology offensive because socialism was godless. To which the then Prime Minister retorted: Give it a God then! Of course our clergymen, inured to the provincial Rhodesian exegetical ethos, had not realised that the Rhodesian Church to which they found themselves at the helm at Independence, had missed a Damascene hour that had visited and transformed the Church in Latin America in the late 1960s, and more especially in the 1970s, by way of Liberation Theology.

Through Liberation Theology, the Latino church had long given socialism a God, throwing a major challenge to the hitherto conservative Vatican which responded through numerous, self-defeating ex-communications given the rise to key figures like Father Manuel de Escoto who was both a Catholic priest and a Sandinista fighting for Nicaragua’s freedom initially, and later, fighting Yankee imperialism disguised as the Contras after 1980. No, here, the Church has remained stuck in time, smelling the moss and stench of ages.

Bible as a book of struggle

Let’s grant it, within the Zimbabwean Church are some very uneducated clergymen and women who don’t seem to know the difference between Christianity and Churchianity, to repeat the late Reverend Canaan Banana’s terminology.

And because such ignorant leaders at the helm of the church have never been able to read the Bible well, they remain fastened to time-worn, age-smelling liturgical malpractices of the colonial Church in Africa. Hinga kana maDutch amai vangu vava kuridza magitare nemabhosvo wani? God’s Word grows within ever-changing human circumstances, cultures and experiences, but without changing or compromising its foundational precepts.

It is not meaning of the Word which is immutable; it is the informing, underlying precept The Latinos liberated the message to suit a Latin America in fermentation. That did not make the Church any less holy, which is why it has now hit its apogee by giving the world a Pope! But is it not the same church which encouraged the guerrilla to shoot at structures of oppression?

Through a holier reading of the Bible, the Latinos realized that in fact the Bible was not just a book of faith; that it was not just a great book of worship. Rather, they realized it was the greatest book of struggle, the most subversive vis-a-vis an oppressive and an unjust status quo. Even Coltart, with all his chequered Rhodesian history, confesses to that now.

I am still to read a more enlightened interpretation of the Bible than Castro’s “Fidel on Religion”, itself an eloquent harmonisation of Christian precepts and egalitarian pursuits of a secular social revolution. That what happens in a living church: Christian faith grows. Not here.

Pastor or piety, Church or Christ?

Let’s grant it, there are churchgoers who cannot distinguish a priest or a pastor and Christian piety. Their devotion and loyalty is to a priest or pastor, which is why they end up being asked to do unseemly things – eating grass as if God’s children are herbivores! The greatest culprits of idolatry are churchgoers who put their pastors – mere men and women of untold frailties – on undeserved plinths of holiness.

Today, these are the same characters who are (mis)leading the debate on the National Pledge and, herd-like, their whole laity follows, mostly against common sense and own better judgment. Need we wonder that the guys at Education have met with unthinking churchianity?

Now when you have confusion between Christianity and churchianity, confusion between priest/pastor and piety, Word and world, need we wonder there is confusion between pledge and prayer, between God and gold? Pastors have become symbols of lucre, not personifications of trying, frugality as exemplified by many a men of biblical yore. Tipeiwo maserious vanababa vezvemweya, tinokuremekedzayi mhani.

No Jehovah’s Witness challenge

I was looking at National Oaths of other Nations. Many do not concern themselves with our Father. Some do, in the very opening lines or so. Yet others — like the Nigerian one — cleverly keep the body secular, only to end by the all-time, all occasion phrase: “So Help Me God”. Again to bear out my main point, namely that God speaks to us in our various cultures, times and temperaments.

Where there is absolute unanimity across nations is over definitions. It is as if the human mind knows no colour, culture or place. A National Oath or Pledge, I am unanimously told, is a pledge by a citizen to his country. Finish. Where is our confusion? At the very outset, the belated Zimbabwean National Pledge found its God, giving Him a pride of place in its opening lines, recognising His omnipotence. What is the problem?

Or is it that such recognition has not come from, or through the Church, has come from a secular institution? Frankly, this Nation should put Christ above the Church, which is why a mistaken clergyman’s flawed prejudice or jealousy should not bother, let alone detain us. We have a long way to go, much catching to do, we the latecomer.

But we beat the Americans in knowing and placing our God much earlier and from the beginning, respectively. We did not need the Jehovah’s Witness class action, and one coming after so long a period of unchallenged recitation. Is that not worth celebrating?

If gold rusts . . .

Why does the pledge sound like a prayer, I hear some churchmen quibbling. Really? Why do their prayers sound like pledges? Where does today’s church — Pentecostal especially — stand next to Godliness? Of truth be told, very secular in the majority of sects, which is why its quarrels are routinely with princes of earthly power.

It no longer seeks the Kingdom of Heaven, no longer leave the coin to Caesar. Rather, it chases the coin, harder than Caesar, which is why it cannot answer Jesus’ question: To whom does this coin belong? The old church would say to Caesar without contradiction. The new church mumbles a little, to fight back by hypnotising the questioner! Today’s prayers mug the poor widow of her mite.

I mean rather than picking a fight with Dokora and his pledge, why not preach against horrendous, ungodly things happening in churches nowadays, and what is worse, in the name of God? Havazvione here? If the church cannot correct itself, how does it hope to redeem wayward Man? To use Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous aphorism: if gold rusts, what will iron do?

Loco parentis presumption

Anyway, church schools should exercise their right to set rules as they see fit. That is why the Catholics play the drum and other instruments. That is why the SDAs don’t eat meat. There is freedom of religion and worship in this country. It is guaranteed. And there are so many schools that parents who have misgivings about the National Pledge for now, deriving from fear of offending their pastors, can pull out their children to schools they consider holier. But let them not raise false arguments.

It cannot be about one’s conscience, unless they are suggesting they are their children’s conscience. It is about their poor reading of the Bible. Or simply fear of their pastors. It cannot be about adequate consultations. There was some consultations done by the ministry, to levels practicable. But so many other things happen in schools without parents getting consulted at all.

Often including raising fees, to no objection. Not that parents are pliant. But because there is a presumption of loco parentis status imputed on teachers and teaching Departments. Zvaipei nhasi? That some angry teachers’ unions have rejected the Oaths need not matter. There are many good things angry unions reject which still pass. Including the new curriculum. In any case their duty is to members. Not parents and pupils. They have no locus standi on this one. Full stop.

Pitting the Constitution against itself

Then comes the false argument of the constitution. Some section of our hallowed Constitution getting cited to decorate a limping argument. Babanguwee Nhuka! Have those dragging such a reluctant, un-cooperating argument stopped to compare the Preamble of the Constitution with the Pledge? Or they have been told the Preamble is not justiciable?

Well, let the argument be put so we see which competent court strikes off the Preamble for being a danger to protected consciences. I wait for such ruling hoping it comes before my death so I meet my Maker one page wiser. And if you have a point to protect your conscience, deal with the Constitution itself.

Not the Pledge which is a constitutional derivative. The Pledge exhorts the reciter to mind his God, his heroes, his history, his resources, his culture and traditions. Why is it that a few vocal churches and their opposition are quick to draw a revolver when Zimbabweans are made to mind all those key things?

Simply because they want Zimbabweans to remain in the thrall of other values, other races, other Nations. Was it not the same with the land, when the mongers of deadly scare sought to dissuade us through all sorts of arguments? They still do, to this day.

Patriotic history fad

I am told the real fear resides in the reference to culture and traditions, which some churches interpret to mean a ‘readmission” of traditional forms of worship and practices. If that is true, then we have a good fight, and a good time to fight it. Let the issue go to the courts, this time sponsored by parents whose children enrol in oath-hating schools. I will part with all my savings — dollar and bond note — to support such a case.

They did it in the early eighties, led by the Catholics who would not have us re-inscribe our history into the syllabus. The fad nowadays is they want to give children “patriotic history”! So which history, from which country is not patriotic? Cite any single British or American author who does not genuflect to national concerns and sensitivities in reading and writing history.

Why prescribe foolish standards for us? And the history we received from Rhodesia which we continued to teach in our schools after Independence, what was its temperament? Unpatriotic? It takes a mad men to miss a bristling Rhodesian patriotism of LH Gann. Or Tindall. Or Blake. Name them.

Reissuing white history

Even the Rangers. That they hated UDI did not stop them from loving and revering empire history. You will be an out and out fool to believe so. Their radicalism was graduated. The moment Mugabe tackled the land – itself the essence of Rhodesian British imperialism — even erstwhile white radicals like Doris Lessing took a stance for the Empire. In the case of Ranger, he went as far as arguing that when we drafted manifesto for NDP, together with Reid, and later, ZAPU, we never made reference to land, only one-man-one-vote.

Wake up mwana wevhu. Implicit in the myth of patriotic history is a package for the retention of Rhodesian history. Or a prescription of a new, revised history meant to whitewash imperialism and reissue it anew. The Alexanders of their world, all deployed to encourage self-hate. Let’s all know that, much as we pontificate about histories: that post-high school intellectual game only permissible as a conceptual interregnum.

Between high school and responsible citizenry. That is why Germans will publicly castigate Hitler, while quietly upholding the dominance he aimed for, only through peaceful, non-confrontational ways. The more we proclaim histories, the sure we are to find a national or racial history. That is why I don’t begrudge Coltart, only seeking to confront him instead.

Icho!