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![The New York Times]()
March 27, 2005
Grass-Roots Effort Aims to Upend Mugabe in Zimbabwe
By MICHAEL WINES
ARARE, Zimbabwe, March 26 - She is in her 40's and the mother of four, though in the dappled sunlight of an outdoor restaurant here, clad in a floppy hat and a thin cardigan, she looks too young to be either. Nobody would see her as a provocateur, much less a revolutionary.
But when Rebecca took one child to the doctor on a recent morning, she left behind a clinic restroom plastered with stickers urging resistance to the 25-year reign of Zimbabwe's president, Robert G. Mugabe. Later, she littered her bus seat with condoms emblazoned with a large Z and a call to "Get up! Stand up!" against the government.
"There are more than 10,000 of us," she said. "And every one is excited, because you know you are playing a part in something you believe in."
The Z stands not for Zimbabwe, but for Zvakwana, an underground movement that aims to resist - and eventually undermine - Mr. Mugabe's authoritarian rule. With a second, closely related group called Sokwanele, Zvakwana's members specialize in anonymous acts of civil disobedience - a meld of guerrilla theater and the philosophies of Gandhi and King.
In ideology, and sometimes even in identity, Zvakwana mirrors grass-roots efforts in any number of authoritarian nations. From Zubr in Belarus to Ukraine's victorious Pora to nascent groups in Egypt and Lebanon (whose names, in English, mean "enough"), such civic movements may be the hottest phenomenon in global democratic politics. Many take their inspiration from Otpor, the movement that played a major role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia.
The groups sprang to life here three years ago, shortly after Mr. Mugabe won a re-election campaign that many international election observers said had been stolen from his democratic opponents. Their rationale is embodied in their names: in Shona and Ndebele, Zimbabwe's two main languages, both names also mean "enough."
That the groups truly number 10,000 seems doubtful. Yet the government is nettled enough to paint over much of their graffiti, and news media reports say the police assembled a team of senior investigators 14 months ago to find and destroy Zvakwana.
The police have failed. In fact, one Zvakwana member in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city, said members of the movement stole into a police station in January to slip antigovernment messages under supervisors' doors.
"We informed them that we are not their enemies, but their liberators," a member, who would be identified only as Magamula, said in an interview. "Even members of the police - the army, the C.I.O. and the C.I.D. are working with us," the member said, referring to Zimbabwe's intelligence apparatus and its criminal investigations division. "That's how we've managed to survive this far."
Michael McFaul, a Stanford University political scientist and student of grass-roots movements, has spent much of this year studying groups in Georgia, Ukraine and Serbia. To a remarkable degree, he said, they and similar groups are driven by the Internet and by the increasingly global nature of television.
Although many speculate that movements like Zvakwana are Western inventions, Mr. McFaul said the opposite appeared to be true, at least for the moment.
In Lebanon, "They're modeling what they're doing on the Ukrainians," he said. "And they're watching the Ukrainians on Al Jazeera, of all places. It's not an American-centric thing that's being channeled through the White House. It's more global."
Some movements do receive foreign money, but no amount of money will sustain a democratic movement, he added, if a nation's dissidents lack the passion and numbers to carry the battle on their own.
In personal conversations and an extensive interview via e-mail, Zvakwana members insisted theirs was a homegrown protest movement, free of foreign control. But not of foreign influence. In a long conversation, Rebecca said she and fellow members had begun their membership in Zvakwana by viewing videotapes on resistance movements in Poland, Chile, India and Serbia, as well as studying civil rights tactics used in Nashville.
Rebecca, who refused to divulge her surname, said she joined the movement in early 2002 out of despair. In the preceding years, she had worked for Zimbabwe's sole political opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, in parliamentary and presidential elections won by Mr. Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front.
"Where I was working, people would come to me to report incidents of political violence," she said. "Women would call in to say they were raped. Men were beaten so badly that they couldn't walk."
She helped start a women's group that prayed for Zimbabwe's future, and through that group met other disaffected advocates for change who told her of a new nonviolent resistance movement.
She joined, she said, "because what struck me most is that I don't want my children to lead this life."
"I don't want Zimbabwe to be like this."
A daisy chain of meetings followed, each visitor inviting a group of like-minded friends, until thousands of followers met to study nonviolent resistance in a southern Zimbabwe town under the guise of a religious convention. Since then, she said, Zvakwana has sunk roots even in small Zimbabwean towns and cities, and devised an array of tactics to spread its message.
In Harare, Zvakwana members largely come from the suburban slums where blacks were corralled when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia and whites were in power. They meet under carefully staged pretenses and seldom know more than a handful of other members, to keep their activities compartmentalized.
Their work, Rebecca said, is to send a message of resistance to ordinary folk through the most basic methods. Some involve acts of derring-do: young men commandeered a traffic circle in Robert Mugabe Way in central Harare and plastered stickers on the street signs, renaming the street Zvakwana Way.
More commonly, however, the resistance is mundane. Members slice bars of soap into slivers - "everybody needs soap," she said - and wrap the bars in a printed message that states, "Let's wash the debt out of this country." They stuff antigovernment messages into matchboxes that are sold at kiosks. They give away tapes of popular resistance songs; packets of seeds pasted with resistance messages.
In Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, similar groups have spurred popular uprisings and toppled governments, Mr. McFaul notes, in part because their members were young, tech-savvy and living in nations that were authoritarian, but unwilling or unable to crush popular protests.
"There is a lot of debate about Zimbabwe," Mr. McFaul said, "about, if thousands of people were in the street, how much violence there would be."
But Zvakwana's message is not one of upheaval. It is, rather, a soft sell on resisting oppression.
"It is your right to think, read, hear and think what you like," reads a yellow slip stapled to a phone card. "Here in Zimbabwe, this right has been taken away by the government. We thought that we would give out these recharge cards so that people could be more able to speak with one another as they choose."
It may be the message Zimbabweans need right now, said Tawanda Mutasah, the executive director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, which encourages democratic change in Zimbabwe and elsewhere. "In Zimbabwe, it is easy to give up hope," he said. "What a movement of this nature is doing, in my estimation, is keeping the hope alive."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company -------
NYT:
March 26, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST Where Faith Thrives
MORE COLUMNS Nicholas D. Kristof WEB JOURNAL
KRISTOF Responds
ETE CROSSING, Zimbabwe � So with Easter approaching, here I am in the heart of Christendom.
That's right - Africa. One of the most important trends reshaping the world is the decline of Christianity in Europe and its rise in Africa and other parts of the developing world, including Asia and Latin America.
I stopped at a village last Sunday morning here in Zimbabwe - and found not a single person to interview, for everyone had hiked off to church a dozen miles away. And then I dropped by a grocery store with a grim selection of the cheapest daily necessities - and huge multicolored chocolate Easter eggs.
On Easter, more Anglicans will attend church in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda - each - than Anglicans and Episcopalians together will attend services in Britain, Canada and the U.S. combined.
More Roman Catholics will celebrate Easter Mass in the Philippines than in any European country. The largest church in the world is in South Korea. And more Christians will probably attend Easter services in China than in all of Europe together.
In short, for the first time since it began two millenniums ago, Christianity is no longer "Western" in any very meaningful sense.
"If on a Sunday you want to attend a lively, jammed full, fervent and life-changing service of Christian worship, you want to be in Nairobi, not in Stockholm," notes Mark Noll, a professor at Wheaton College. He adds, "But if you want to walk home safely late at night, you want to be in Stockholm, not Nairobi."
This shift could be just beginning. David Lyle Jeffrey of Baylor University sees some parallels between China today and the early Roman empire. He wonders aloud whether a Chinese Constantine will come along and convert to Christianity.
Chairman Mao largely destroyed traditional Chinese religions, yet Communism has died as a replacement faith and left a vacuum. "Among those disappointed true-believer Marxists, it may well be that Marxism has served as a kind of John the Baptist to the rapid emergence of Christianity among Chinese intellectuals," Professor Jeffrey said. Indeed, it seems possible to me that in a few decades, China could be a largely Christian nation.
Whether in China or Africa, the commitment of new converts is extraordinary. While I was interviewing villagers along the Zambezi River last Sunday, I met a young man who was setting out for his Pentecostal church at 8:30 a.m. "The service begins at 2 p.m.," he explained - but the journey is a five-hour hike each way.
So where faith is easy, it is fading; where it's a challenge, it thrives.
"When people are in difficulties, they want to cling to something," said the Rev. Johnson Makoti, a Pentecostal minister in Zimbabwe who drives a car plastered with Jesus bumper stickers. "The only solution people here can believe in is Jesus Christ."
People in this New Christendom are so zealous about their faith that I worry about the risk of new religious wars. In Africa, Christianity and Islam are competing furiously for converts, and in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and especially Sudan, the competition has sometimes led to violent clashes.
"Islam is a threat that is coming," the Rev. William Dennis McDonald, a Pentecostal minister in Zambia, warned me. He is organizing "operation checkmate" to boost Christianity and contain Islam in eastern Zambia.
The denominations gaining ground tend to be evangelical and especially Pentecostal; it's the churches with the strictest demands, like giving up drinking, that are flourishing.
All this is changing the character of global Christianity, making it more socially conservative. For example, African churches are often more hostile to gays than mainline American churches. The rise of the Christian right in the U.S. is finding some echoes in other parts of the world.
Yet conservative Christians in the U.S. should take heed. Christianity is thriving where it faces obstacles, like repression in China or suspicion of evangelicals in parts of Latin America and Africa. In those countries where religion enjoys privileges - Britain, Italy, Ireland, Spain or Iran - that establishment support seems to have stifled faith.
That's worth remembering in the debates about school prayers or public displays of the Ten Commandments: faith doesn't need any special leg up. Look at where religion is most vibrant today, talk to those who walk five hours to services, and the obvious conclusion is that what nurtures faith is not special privileges but rather adversity.
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