Accountable to each other?
25 November 2016
Dear Family and Friends,
After a fortnight away you return to Zimbabwe and instantly know you are home: you can feel it in your heart, sense it in your soul, breathe it into your lungs, see it with your own eyes. It’s not just the beautiful blue sky, hot sun and stunning landscapes but much more than that, it’s the people: children straggling home from school along the highways, waving as you drive by; women sitting on the roadsides selling veggies and bowls of wild fruits; hundreds of people along all the pavements selling everything they can think of in order to make a living. Yes, there are the negatives too and as ugly as they are, they have also become the face of home, the face of Zimbabwe in 2016 and for many years before today: hundreds of people queuing outside every bank in every town to try and withdraw their own money; endless police stops, many with their intimidation and determination to extract a few dollars from you; derelict, unproductive seized farms; endless kilometers of missing roadside fences leaving cattle, goats and donkeys straying onto the highways; dumped litter everywhere, on the roadsides, around the towns, in the suburbs; closed factories, crumbling industrial areas with rusting fences and weeds growing through concrete.
Before long it is your civic duty as a Zimbabwean to again catch up on the news about what’s been happening while you were away: the incessant political positioning and posturing, finger pointing, accusations and stories of corruption. There has been more brutality at attempted demonstrations, more arrests, and just more, more, more of the same. It’ almost too much to bear, too shocking, embarrassing, disgraceful to follow but then you find the hidden gem, the light in the darkness. This week it came from 28 year old Zimbabwean Nyasha Musandu.
In a superb article after her arrest in Harare for sitting in a park with nine others in peaceful protest against the introduction of Bond notes in Zimbabwe, Nyasha Musundu uses one simple phrase that leaves you unable to sleep at night as you wrestle with your own conscience about your place and your role in the 17th year of Zimbabwe’s crisis. Musandu says: “I am You.” Musandu’s article is posted in full on social media sites but these extracts bear repetition:“Despite earlier reports that activists… had been abducted and tortured during the night, … we decided to be accountable to each other.”