I beg to differ with anyone who says that the upheavals taking place in Zimbabwe's urban centers are not likely to to reach and affect the peasantry. The peasants may very well be the last demographic group to feel the pain that comes from a government that is insensitive. However, they are not entirely immune to it. That pain will reach them sooner or later. This is a serious contagion. It is highly communicable. No one will be spared from its ravages.
When it does, all Hell will break loose. By that time the current discontentment reaches the remote villages, the situation will have badly, if not inexorably, deteriorated. The government will be practically pinned or boxed into a corner so much so that it will be on the defensive all the time. Caught in that situation, the government will only be acting to stave off its collapse, an inevitability. Faced with such an existential threat, the use of excessive force cannot be ruled out. As soon as force is used, the situation will only get worse because the peasants will be aggrieved. This is precisely what happened in Ian Smith's ill-fated Rhodesian project in the UDI era.
Faced with an ever-growing insurrection, the Rhodesian Government resorted to the use of force and intimidation. In places like Chiweshe and Madziva, the peasants were herded into camps that had perimeter fences. These camps, called keeps at the time, were guarded by heavily armed military personnel. In Europe during the World War II, such keeps established to imprison people based on their ethnicity were called concentration camps. Innocent people were actually incarcerated in these keeps.
In areas where there were no keeps, the government sought to break the will of the peasantry by keeping the people busy. This is when the besieged government introduced the concept of madhunduru, the contour ridges and trenches that were supposed to protect the land against soil erosion. Almost all able-bodied peasants were forced to dig these madhunduru or makandiwa trenches. If the government had aimed at pacifying the peasantry in this manner, the outcome was the diametric opposite of that objective. The peasantry suffered untold hardship and abuse by the government inspectors who had been dispatched to make sure that the rural folk were in compliance with the government order. In the eyes of the peasants, this ordeal crystallized the problem of the colonial oppression thereby ending up sympathetic to the struggle for freedom that had started in the urban centres.
It is instructive to note that at first the first wind of political discontentment were felt in the urban centres. Owing to the compact nature of urban settlement, the government was able to quickly respond in a forceful and effective manner. Police personnel with dogs and water cannons, even live ammunition, were rapidly deployed in the political hotbeds, of which Highfield (Salisbury) was the locus. Although the government asserted firm control of the situation, it had lost the psychological supremacy it once held. The vegetable vendors and factory workers had politically woken up. It meant that they had found out they were in a situation that called for confrontation. Enervated in this manner, they found courage. More significantly than this, they were politicized or ready to be politicized via propaganda. In a addition to this, they suddenly forged bonds of solidarity with each other since they were all under siege. When you have a situation like this, and you are in government, a dramatic shift is in order if you are to regain the initiative. Smith did not realize this, much to his misfortune. We are watching a repetition of the same history unfold before our own eyes.
Factually, this has been unfolding for a long time. I watched this disaster at its very inception when I was at university in the late 1980s. At that time, it was quite clear that we were headed towards a terrible state of affairs. As students, we were like the sensors of what was in the offing. We had the opportunity to take a look and the landscape, so to speak, and analyze the situation. From that vantage point, it was quite clear that issues like corruption, the lack of transparency, a sense of impunity in the high offices, general belligerence and the absence of a serious mechanism to hold our leaders to account were going to lead to a complete disaster. We pointed this out not because we had heads that had been swollen by the big books we were reading at university. Our roots were deeply embedded in the communities of the rural peasantry, the vegetable vendor in the ghetto and the lowly paid factory worker. We saw our fathers, mothers, relatives, family friends and neighbors face tougher and tougher situations as they struggled to survive. The impending struggle was our struggle, too.
As we watched the government, we also observed a concomitant detachment from the this increasingly dire situation. Simply put, we were the canary in the mine. When we sounded the alarm bells, we were demonized. The verbal abuse was awful. For some of us, the most galling aspect of this was that we found ourselves victims of the repressive and vindictive use of physical force by the government. In a case of black-on-black violence, we were assaulted and showered with teargas. I always point out that in 1979, two of my siblings and I, were forces to flee from Ian Smith's thugs. Within a decade, I found myself fleeing from Robert Mugabe's thugs.
It made no sense at all, a fact that President Mugabe just acknowledged a few days ago in Bindura. We did not fight to liberate the people only to end up fighting the people we had liberated, he said. To his credit, however belated as it is, he admitted that beating up the people was not acceptable. This is a mantra some of us have been chanting for years because we saw this kind of injustice in UDI Rhodesia. To see it happen in Zimbabwe is undoubtedly a betrayal of those who perished or were physically and psychologically maimed to bring universal freedom. The president all but said the same thing at Chipadze.
I bring this up as a reminder that these seemingly isolated flares of disgruntlement are not isolated. Far from this, they are actually contagious. Just as the urban centers were the initiation points of the Liberation Struggle, so did the student-led agitation in the 1980s. If we are to look back at the track record of our most prominent social, political and academic leaders, we will find out that they were student activists during the UDI epoch. The point here is that these incidences started of in what others thought were isolated situations.
I do recall being told, and in derision, that university students thought and behaved like they were smarter than everyone else. This was painful to hear. For a long time, I stayed away from Zimbabwean politics for the simple reason that the people for whom we were struggling were themselves not aware of the monsters that were crouched in the tall grass ready to pounce and devour the poor people. For close to two decades, the same tone-deaf people have been waging a scaled-up version of what we did as students. If truth be told, the student activism of the late 1980s set in motion the struggle against this corrupt and detached oligarchy. We were the initiation point or the spark plug for this current struggle.
The activism of the late 1980s and the current struggle are part of a continuum. To this day, some of my colleagues at that time have been the pacemaker in the struggle for peace and social justice in Zimbabwe. If everyone had joined hands in unity and solidarity with the students in the late 1980s, chances are we may have had a good opportunity to arrest and reverse the downward spiral of the situation in Zimbabwe. The key point here is that the previously skeptical and downright hostile people ended up realizing the students were right after all. Unfortunately, the skeptics and the hostile were forced to this conclusion by the harsh conditions that had paid them a permanent visitation.
Just as the student disgruntlement of the 1980s has now touched a storm with the urban communities, this, too, will happen in rural Zimbabwe. It is going to happen, there is no doubt about it. By that time, the government will have lost because it is not capable of repressing each and everyone, including people isolated in remote villages. There is a reason President Mugabe to had to hightail it to Mashonaland Central to give a highly defensive clarion call at night. He knows that as soon as the struggle takes root in the rural area, the game is over. This was a point he implicitly stated when he noted that the armed struggle started in the same rural area.
This struggle for peace and social justice will spread to the rural areas, there is no doubt about it. When it does, we will have chaos and mayhem. We had better hope that it will be cathartic as opposed to what we are witnessing in places Somalia, South Sudan, the Congo and Mozambique. President Mugabe can ill-afford to repeat the mistakes made by Ian Smith in the twilight of the doomed Rhodesian project. Smith fell victim to his hubris.
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