Sir Donnelly: I came, I saw, I sneaked!
While I am aware that the tradition of British knighthood (very much steeped in the feudal ideal) enjoins the knighted to quickly slough off their surnames (as if they are Catholic nuns!), I had to work with a known inaccuracy so I would not be accused of beating a white man who is already down.
To say "Sir Brian", the correct title for Her Majesty the Queen’s latest chivalrous knight, would have implied Cde Donorai nastily dropped and lost his surname in his hurried, undignified departure from his posting.
Granted Sir Brian must have lost many personal effects — apart of course from his dignity, which dropped with such a loud, uneven clangor in the sticky African mud — I am assured the man arrived safely, his superfluous second name intact.
Genuine knights don’t grant truculent enemies the gift of trophies, and the good knight made sure the truculent native was left with nothing to exhibit as a "ca
pture" from the three-year long war! I hear the man is busy catching his breath, a process not quite assisted by his excited disbelief that he has left Zimbabwe, away from the madding natives.
He left a humbled and defeated Briton, his mental person laden with cacophonous irreverence from a people he grew socialised to regard as inferior and obeisant natives uncomplainingly occupying a humble, servile station in the global scheme of human types. The native rebelled against an abiding stereotype, bit his master and proceeded to oust him from the land. Hardly an edifying parting shot for a man leaving a life-long career.
Late road to Damascus.
But of course the flip side of this whole humiliating experience is that his last but epiphanic mission in little Zimbabwe retires him — even buries him — a white-man who has "seen", a white man who is a lot wiser. People are not what you perceive them to be through your racially and colonially jaundiced eyes, he
must be telling the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at long last. They remain what they are intrinsically: a rich and complex compendium of the accretive history and experience they have endured, lived and shaped. A people’s psyche never fits the straitjacket of prejudice; never comports to the images an outsider may hold or believe in, he must be emphasising with catechistic resonance. It remains itself, solid, stubborn and thrustful, much like the horned beast that will not be wrapped. The more so a psyche forged and tested in the crucible of an armed revolution.
Ooh, I can’t know my native
Nations deploy staff to other nations they wish to interact with gainfully in order to narrow this inevitable gap between their view of a foreign people and what that people is intrinsically. Throughout your term of office in a foreign country, you are supposed to enter the psyche of your hosts using various instruments (including spying!) so you reconstruct their decisi
on-making template, indeed their sensibility as it shapes their collective response to inward challenges and outward events. This is why diplomacy is erected on the solid plinth of predictability. Using that standard, it goes without saying that Sir Brian was an unmitigated disaster Blair cherished and thus ended up having. Too late to be prologue, more nasty things await Blair for Sir Brian to be a well-timed epilogue. Having discovered too far and too late into the tussle that Mugabe was, after all, right, Blair then could not be seen to be retreating publicly, even though he did not mind telling the correct position to African leaders in privacy. Blair now cannot retreat either. The same British media — exactly the same foreign policy magnitude that bullied Blair’s Labour predecessors in November 1965 when Ian Smith declared UDI — to manage Blair and his Labour government, diminishing his foreign policy options on Zimbabwe. Thus far and still going farther, Sir Brian coul
d only brief in validation of this line, one so long held and so deeply sold to the chattering class to be recant.
. . . and all the chief’s horses!
Ambassadors from sympathetic countries — USA, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands and to some extent Germany — helped Blair and Donnelly uphold this lie, in the process stretching incidents and occurrences quite normal in any political clime for dire and damning conclusions. In the case of the Swedish lady, the requirements of solidarity with difficult Britain coincided with a deep personal reason that made her irrational and reflexive. She picked a lover from Rhodesia’s light infantry, a relationship that made her identify with an elite, minority and, to be frank, foreign sub-group in a country that is African and hyper-consciously so. She would not interact with the Government of that country, preferring instead to author her falsifying reports from the vantage point of this aggrieved racial sub-group, twice d
efeated by her hosts. She did not have to struggle for believability at her Head Office. The European sentiment — purely shaped by a racist reflex and impulse — was predisposed towards such gross inaccuracies. The same passed for the Dutch who pulled from Mugabe’s anti-gay stance an extra string for strengthening their anti-Zimbabwe bow. Germany did not like the idea of losing its conservancy interests in Zimbabwe and what is more, at a time when she was struggling to buttress her hegemony in Europe through unofficial colonies or posts of influence abroad. So this whole cabal of diplomats conspired to convey a synthetic reality to their head offices which were inclined to hear and use the same falsehoods in defence of white interests in this country. But that could only serve their interests for a short period of time, which is why the period between 2000 and 2002 was replete with "end of road" scenarios for Mugabe and his Zanu-PF.
Perfidious Albion!
As Mugab
e survived sentence and after sentence, year after year, European capitals began counting losses of solidarity with obdurate Britain which after all kept her investments in Zimbabwe intact, for all its claimed hostility of the country. And fear of the Chinese dragon did not help matters. Hence the new thrust led by Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway to re-appraise Zimbabwe, indeed grant Zanu-PF its ageless political longevity. The obverse of that is conceding MDC’s hurried, premature arrival into this political world, to be followed by an equally hurried but over-ripened departure and demise. These are points Donnelly did not hesitate to utter in the presence of, and in some cases to figures of the Zimbabwean establishment. These are points Donnelly will not hesitate to tell his Government and successor, now that he is going into permanent retirement. He can now afford a burst of truth and candour. Well done Zimbabwe. But the battle is still on, albeit nearing its dregs
. Except in terms of degree of foolhardiness, the "new" child-man will not be any different. He bears the Blair imprimatur, carries an albatross that will continue to weigh down British envoys. Until of course Blair’s liberating defeat and ouster from No. 10 Downing Street. True searching for a fitting label may be vexatious, but why begrudge an opposition, which elects to feed on words - your words at that — at no price?
Missing last supper, feeding on words alone
Minding and controlling the politics of a party is bad enough. Stopping its leaders from partaking of their last supper is downright inhumane, worse when instigated by a fleeing puppeteer. Why was Donnelly so cruel as to stop MDC MPs from the reception marking the opening of Parliament, no doubt their last as vanishing political group? Whichever way you look at it, the MDC will not be a factor in the next Parliament. What only is not certain just yet is whether they will "boycott" down or simply go
down fighting electorally speaking. Too ugly to be tragic heroes, too weak-willed and yielding to be archetypal villains, the MDC invents new terminology for the drama of political tragedy, a terminology meant to describe a player villainous enough not to be a tragic hero, but tragic enough to draw some modicum of sympathy, albeit in sparse amounts. Give me a name for that if you can.
I will make love to myself
I hear they are mulling reconstituting themselves into something called Broad Alliance, presumably after the Rainbow Alliance model provided by the Kenyan opposition. Except Kenya had numerous and programmatically disparate and discernible opposition groups, to justify an alliance of many colours. How about our unvarying MDC, the many headed monster whose every limb carries its patenting scales and trait of treachery? Who does it hope to make love with in this "broad alliance"? The whole thing smells masturbatory. How does it ally with itself? The ide
a, we are told, is to gauge public opinion in order to decide whether or not to participate in the next poll. Put aside the fact that parties of real mettle seek to lead and not follow public opinion, this is a crude adaptation of Blair’s phony Commissions of Inquiries: dignify your indecision by dressing it with fake public opinion.
Not to be: that is the answer!
I notice the western world is consoling itself by saying that even Zanu-PF is caught up in a vicious internecine fight that could yield a split. So MDC’s position, they self-mollify, is no more desperate. It is called compensatory argument, one predicated on Joseph Conrad’s saving lie. Apart from the fact of bickering over real issues, Zanu-PF leaves you in no doubt which side prevails or carries the day, let alone in doubt on their desire to govern and remain governing. The MDC has resolved Hamlet’s existential dilemma — not to be or not to be: that is the answer.
Pope Pius the ignorant
Looking at Pius Ncube perform on BBC’s Hard Talk left one feeling thrown back to the dark days of the inquisition. The man wore a face filled with hate — not divine hate — but that of a common villager struck with spiteful jealousy. And the white interviewer moved from probing to profound amazement at how the holy collar helplessly failed to constrict hate that was upon the holy man, overfilling into the studio. And when raw hate darts out, it is seasoned with a bit of raw, uncooked saliva. Occasionally the camera would chase a globule of holy saliva hotly issued from the cavernous mouth of the archbishop to be "received" as holy sacrament by the by-now subdued interviewer. Not only was the "holy man" lying between his divine teeth; he made sure each lie was swollen with earthly hyperboles! And lots of unguarded statements bespeaking of a man driven to do desperate things for a sinking party. Why would you defend a party accused of being a stooge by telling the world mo
st prayers for your well-being come from England? Why would you vehemently assert — alongside an unnamed young man reportedly from Darfur — that only the white-man can save the African situation? Why would you insult the Chinese while panegyrizing whites? But what was most appalling and pungent was the archbishop’s out and out ignorance. AIPPA was called "Access to Privacy and Protection Act"! World Food Programme was evidence of white generosity, not an arm of the multiracial and multinational UN. Sadc means "Southern Africa Development Corporation"! Hou bakiti, this is a whole archbishop, a whole brother of a professor of law; what is more, a whole politician wishing to tackle the erudite Mugabe! And the mock bravery implied by his "I told them to leave the old woman alone and face me if you have a born to pick". Picking and poking real bones indeed, long wizened by a giant stroke of incurable tribalism. The best medicine is to ignore the idiot; to leave him to wallow in h
is un-catholic hate. Hosanna: one man, one farm?
So the private media has seen the light and now believe one person, many farms was, and remains, unjust after all. When did this realization visit them? Once the white settlers had been broken from the land and chased back into penurious cities? Was this not one of the many criteria for acquiring land from white settlers for redistribution? How come at the time it was a criterion insuperably hard to comprehend, let alone defend? These criteria are more accessible once the actors are black, isn’t? Both Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi make a fundamental point about the mind of the colonized. He or she internalizes the rules of occupation and colonization to a point where they become immutable, taken-for-granted ways of nature; changeless ways of the world. The white man must have more than his requirements; must have the best; must lead; must kill people of colour; fornicate with women of colour while his women-kind are in
accessible to Mwangi! These are the ways, the natural laws of the world. The converse of that mentality is to see utter monstrosity to any actions meant to challenge that ordained order of things. Or to read absolute monstrosity when the same rules serve one of their kind. After all, we must all be servants of the white man, equal in poverty and indigence! It is called the askari mentality, my dear Vincent Kahiya. Get out of Idden’s kitchen; see the bright black sun beckoning you to hurry back to black.
Why does Manheru spare Mugabe?
Until a read a fake letter from the news desk of Iden’s Independent published last week, I used to wonder why I spare Mugabe. Now, after reading it, I now know that I must not only spare Mugabe; I must defend him. And to the hilt too. The letter suggests I criticize Mugabe for the sake of subliminally defending Bush and Blair in their hegemonic adventures and the vain whitewashing antics that follow . The letter suggests I must h
ail Blair for losing by-elections as this confirms that elections in Britain a free and fair! How many by-elections has Mugabe’s party lost? How many recounts were demanded by the MDC and granted by a Zanu-PF government? Why didn’t this Hudson Taivo who thinks he is UK itself, take such comparable developments as proof enough that elections in Zimbabwe are free and fair? Read the preceding piece for the reason why. As to why I continually criticize the dead MDC, well, it is to make sure its thoroughly dead, this browning, brooding excreta we should never ever allow another white man to shit and deposit on our land. Kwaheri! — [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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