More on Zimbabwe

Here is an excellent 2 part article on Zimbawe from
ZNet, November 04, 2005,

"Can Zimbabwe Become Africa’s Cuba?"
By Mukoma Ngugi

Ngugi has been to Zimbabwe. In his introduction he writes:

“On stage, there are two young men discussing the merits and de-merits of Zimbabwe’s Look East Policy. “These Chinese products, it is all in the packaging otherwise they are the same things we have always had” one says. And the discussion goes on to Chinese beauty products, wigs and cosmetics petrol queues, inflation, foreign currency etc. The two comedians in a downtown club in Harare were satirizing the influx of Chinese goods in Zimbabwean stores since ZANU-PF’s Look East Policy, an attempt to minimize dependence on the West, took effect. This was in July of 2005, when I was in Zimbabwe for the Zimbabwe International Book Fair where I had been invited to present a paper on Pan-Africanism and Nationalism.
A few weeks after I returned from Zimbabwe, I was invited by Allen Ruff of Madison’s WORT for a radio interview on my first book, an Africa Awareness Rally that I was helping organize, and my trip to Zimbabwe. In spite of it being made abundantly clear several times by Ruff that I am a Kenyan, one caller hoped “that it was safe for me to speak”. She was under the impression that Mugabe has secret agents in Madison, Wisconsin who are willing to assassinate a Kenyan national for speaking about Zimbabwe or at the very least monitoring the radio waves and would face the music if I was ever back in Zimbabwe. She was worried for my ability to speak freely thousands of miles from Zimbabwe. Most of the other callers asked questions that were along this vein and the other things that I had talked about such as the need for thinking about Africa not as a humanitarian case but as a continent whose resources are plundered were overshadowed by Zimbabwe.
I begin this article by giving the above seemingly inconsequential details to hint at a discrepancy between a Zimbabwe that is not doing too well, has its own share of fatal and even tragic flaws and the Zimbabwe of the Western imagination of pure murder and mayhem arbitrated by black skin. There is the Zimbabwe of land redistribution, Look East, petrol queues, Operation Clean Up, the Congo War, of ZANU-PF, the MDC, Third Way etc. Depending on race, nationality, class, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, ideology etc, this Zimbabwe will have different meanings. This is the Zimbabwe with its own sets of contradictions that I would like to term the Zimbabwe on the Ground.”

Click here for the rest of Part 1 and Part 2.