11/21/2017 0 Comments He Who Can Be NamedWednesday, November 21, 2017
A week ago, a coup that was not be called a "coup" began. It began with hysterical foreign reports of tanks and armored personnel carriers in the streets of Harare. There were those, but they never fired their weapons. Soldiers replaced police officers at roadblocks, and a change of guard happened over night. For a week, we all watched the news fervently. We shot each other messages on Whatsapp, the 100% pervasive social messaging app. Every vicissitude captured, every rumor circulated. We knew He was going to resign, had resigned. And then came the resignation speech that wasn't a resignation speech, and our spirits dipped lower. Was the Man so stubborn he skipped the paragraph that said he'd resigned? So we resigned ourselves to the possibility of impeachment, carrying two irreconcilables in our heads: rule of law and expediency. Rule of law lost, but so did He. At 5:15pm on November 21st, I drove home from the gym and took an extra spin around the block, listening to Jacob Mudenda read out the Constitution, its section on impeachment, the charges against Him. I showered, braced by the cold water, and heard a mighty honk. A mighty honk followed by another mighty honk. A car accident? Traffic? It was "rush hour," such as it is in Bulawayo. And shouting. I hear shouting a lot: the men offloading crates of bulk groceries in the alley behind my apartment often shout. So, too, do earnest Pentecostals in a church two blocks away every morning, or the touts recruiting passengers at the kombi stand across from my apartment. Honking, and shouting. Unbroken. I turned off the water, frisked the towel over my body and threw on clothes. The honking crescendo'd. I threw on slops and dashed down the stairs. Outside, there were whistles, shouts, beeps, honks, a chorus. 6pm. The news had broken, finally, that He had stepped. He who made political speech a near-impossibility, who had ordered the death of His rival but killed only His rival's wife, who had led the purge of the Ndebele after independence, who had ordered farms be given over to His party not His people, who had driven the economy into, through, and dragged along the bottom of a hyperinflationary crisis that cost Him the most successful of His citizens. He had married an unstable woman with an obsession with luxury. He had commandeered more than $1billion of His people's money in properties mostly abroad. He had fired successive VPs when it emerged that they might be more popular or capable than Him, the last of which outdid Him. While He was in charge, we could not really mention His name; we feared being taken for critics, and critics were dispatched with harshly. Just recently, He had an American woman arrested, charged with attempting to overthrow the government because she posted a picture of Him with a catheter. He had been going to Singaporean doctors for years, seeking treatment for His ailments, which increasingly beset Him as he moved into his nineties. When He was president, all speech critical of Him and His policies earned surveillance and attention at least, gruesome torture and death at the worst. While He was president, all the news channels will tell you wistfully, the "Bread Basket" of Africa became a debtor nation, then a nation in shambles. He was Robert Mugabe. (He still is, for however much longer his nonagenarian body can hold up to the demands of his erratic wife.) He was a complicated man. He was not always Bad with a capital 'B,' but just bad-with-a-lower-case 'b', like any complicated man. But there's no doubt that by the end, he was Bad; rotten; had overstayed his welcome. We will never have to speak of him with a capital 'H' anymore - at least we hope not. But the road ahead is winding, and the champion uncritically welcomed home has a lot to prove. The Zimbabwean people got their first taste of political freedoms last week. And last night's celebrations - the toyi-toying in the streets, the flapping flags, the whistles and horns, the joyrides around the city and the suburbs just honking honking honking -- will burn off. It is my hope that enough hope has been ignited to keep this revolt in motion; it is my hope that not only will the Zimbabwean people hold their leader to higher standards, but that they will be allowed to. It is my hope that this isn't another iteration of the same, bad-old patterns that ruled for thirty-seven years. This isn't the most eloquent reflection on the world-historical events, but it's a start, and I knew I'd be remiss if I didn't record some of my thoughts in the moment. I came here, after all, precisely because this could have happened. Not what actually happened - no one predicted that, or even really understood it while it was happening. But I was hopeful that I might witness a change for the Zimbabwean people that might allow them to breathe better, think better, be better. And so it came to pass.
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AuthorFulbright Core Teaching/Research Fellowship to Zimbabwe, 2017-2018. Will teach at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and conduct research on the city's literary history, its cultural infrastructure, and its outlets for creative writing. Archives
February 2018
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