After your hard work
Carry your condoms
And place them in a bin

Sign writing on a wall in Harare, Zimbabwe where street level litter includes broken beer bottles, beer cans and condoms. Men just wanna have fun.

There is lingering talk about forgiveness, healing, truth and reconciliation, all centred around the violent nature of politics that has defined Zimbabwe’s elections especially in the past decade. This politically-motivated violence has been widely documented with people whose homes were burnt, their families killed during orgies of violence rightly complaining that the perpetrators are still walking the length and breadth of the scorched as free men.

As the country approaches another election within the next two years, the violence that has come to characterise political campaigns is already being reported, this time inspired by the constitution outreach programme, and this without any efforts having made to “make peace” with aggrieved victims of past political violence. It is within that scope that this country has placed itself on the path of cyclical violence with perpetrators rightly knowing that nothing will happen to them. After all it is quite straight forward: if you go unpunished for a perceived crime, what will stop you from repeating it? Talk about literally getting away with murder, Zimbabwe presents scholars with innumerable case examples! And we have seen it since 1980 anyway with the Gukurahundi massacres as known architects and the foot soldiers f the troubles have never been taken to task about their role.

Issues around forgiveness and healing are likely to elude us as long as there is no political commitment on the part the leaders who presided over the killing and torture of innocents, and we are guaranteed that angry emotions will be part of our individual and collective psyche for a long time to come. I listened to a man who all along had been enjoying his beer until someone muttered something about the futility of a truth and reconciliation commission and something about how the dead must be left to bury the dead. The man literally wept, saying he never knew his father as he was killed during Gukurahundi and – while he had been enjoying the beer among them – said how much he hated the Shona. Everyone went silent, for how would anyone pacify a man who has so much anger in him? This is a guy who walks and talks each day as if everything is normal but deep there hidden from the rest of us, he harbours and carries such hate and hurt.

This becomes a strong case for the open discussion of what evil has been spawned by political violence and the need for a truth and reconciliation commission so people can move on with their lives. Yet some people in their wisdom think the past can take care of itself by natural processes of time and have been arrogant to calls for a naming and shaming of people behind the raping and killing of wives and mothers since independence. The question for many is that what really can be expected from the people who are accused of heinous political crime and still control state apparatus that would in essence be in charge of letting the law take its course? So does the nation wait for that epoch when they are no longer in government and then they are tracked and shot down like rapid dogs?

But then some will argue that then this goes against the principles of restorative justice but conform to the dictates of vengeance instead, thus justice must be delivered in the here and now so that victims like the man cited above may know peace in their hearts. African politicians have tended to exhibit traits that seek to place them above the moral barometer of normal beings as they use both illiterates and literati to commit the basest crimes, but turn and say the charges are all conspiracies by political opponents: Charles Taylor, Mobutu, Idi Dada Amin, Baby Doc Duvalier – all their stories read the same and the tragedy is that even as we journey into the 21st century, we find ourselves having to make the same excuses made by these evil black brothers. It is invariably always someone else who is not power who is blamed for the atrocities! But with the nature of Zimbabwe’s politics whose popularity contests have largely been defined by clubs and cudgels as weapons of persuasion, we are no doubt in for another round of calls for national healing after lives have already been lost when all this can be averted by heeding the calls for restorative justice.

SOUTHERN AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY SERIES

Fortnightly Seminars Series on

POLICY DIALOGUE PROGRAMME

Thursday 19 August 2010
5pm – 7pm SAPES Seminar Room
4 Deary Avenue, Belgravia, Harare

NATIONAL INTEREST, NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL HEROES; DEFINITION, STATUS AND FUNCTION?

Presenter: Obert Gutu, MP and Deputy Minister of Justice, Government of Zimbabwe

Discussant: Ibbo Mandaza, SAPES Trust

Chair: Cyril Ndebele, Former Speaker, Parliament of Zimbabwe

ALL WELCOME

SAPES Seminar Club Membership Forms available at seminar.

NB.  $10 entrance fee is charged for non-members.

Here’s more from PlusNews,Global HIV/AIDS news and analysis:

In southern Africa, prevention campaigns highlighting the HIV risks of having more than one partner at the same time have largely targeted heterosexuals and ignored the fact that men who have sex with men also have multiple partners.

“Men who have sex with men” (MSM) describes men who have reported ever having had sex with another man, but who may not necessarily identify themselves as homosexual, or “gay”.

In one of the first studies to investigate multiple concurrent partnerships (MCPs) among African MSM, just over half of the 537 men surveyed in Malawi, Namibia and Botswana reported that they had had sex with both men and women in the last six months, and about a third of these men reported that the relationships had been concurrent. MCPs have been identified as a main driver of the HIV epidemic in southern Africa.

Presented at the annual meeting of the African Network for Strategic Communication in Health and Development (AfriComNet) in Johannesburg, the study also found that about a third of the men surveyed had a wife or long-term girlfriend.

The men in relationships with both men and women were more likely to pay for sex and to use condoms than those who reported only having sex with men, but the study found no difference in HIV prevalence between the two groups, according to researcher Gift Trapence with the Malawi-based Centre for the Development of People (CEDEP).

About 17 percent of all the men surveyed were HIV-positive, and their HIV prevalence rates were almost twice the national average in their respective countries. Trapence said that the findings point to an urgent need to target programming and more research at MSM having multiple concurrent partnerships.

“These issues have never been involved in our HIV prevention work,” he told IRIN/PlusNews. “When we try to design these programmes, we need to look at all the sexual behaviours [of men].”

Trapence said a larger, population-based study was planned to explore the findings and provide evidence crucial to prevention efforts targeting MSM, and to decriminalizing homosexuality in African countries.

CEDEP supported the two Malawian men who were recently prosecuted under laws criminalizing sexual acts between people of the same sex. Activists argue that such laws discourage MSM, who are often at increased risk of HIV, from using HIV testing and treatment services, and have a detrimental effect on prevention efforts in general.

At the meeting, representatives of Togo’s national AIDS commission, and Manya Andrews, former country head of Population Services International Togo, said research into HIV risk behaviours among MSM by Togo’s national university in 2006 had helped influence recent moves in the small West African country towards decriminalising same-sex relationships.

“The breakthrough was getting that [2006] study done, and then the support just snowballed from there,” Andrews told IRIN/PlusNews. “People in Togo were transformed by that research into advocates [for MSM HIV prevention programmes and rights].”

From IFEX:

Rwandan President Paul Kagame won another seven-year term in elections on 9 August, after already being in power for 15 years. He captured 93 percent of the vote by banning opposition parties and eliminating critical domestic news coverage, report Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Committee to Protect Journalists and other IFEX members. In the months leading up to election-day, the government systematically shut down news outlets and terrorised critical journalists into fleeing the country.

The Wall Street Journal shares an article by Farai Mutsaka on life in Harare after the world cup:

Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)” continues to rock this city’s nightclubs more than a month after the final match of the World Cup. But the tournament’s bouncy pop song is about the only sign of soccer fever still lingering in Zimbabwe.

The country’s officials had hoped that World Cup enthusiasm in host South Africa would spill across the borders and help revive a moribund domestic league—and perhaps boost an ailing economy and lift national spirits. It wasn’t meant to be.

Officials lobbied several foreign teams to practice and play in Zimbabwe, hoping their fans would follow (only Brazil accepted). They suspended local games to allow players and fans to watch World Cup matches (attendance at domestic games has since plummeted). Zimbabweans did emblazon vehicles with flags (only for a while).

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