“Enemy Number One,” featured a panel comprised of Zimbabwean writer Christopher Mlalaz and USC English professor Michelle Gordon and Wolf Gruner, a USC professor of history who holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies. Speaking of his experiences with media censorship under the government of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, Mlalazi’s experience was skillfully included within the context of Feuchtwanger’s 1940 internment and escape from Nazi-occupied France.

Mlalazi, the recipient of the 2010 Villa Aurora Feuchtwanger Fellowship, gave the audience frightening accounts of Mugabe’s censorship tactics — including a description of the torture that the production manager of his satirical play, The Crocodile of Zambezi, endured after the show’s second night.

Mlalazi himself has received ominous phone calls since announcing his excitement for winning the Feuchtwanger Fellowship on Facebook. Just like Feuchwanger, Mlalazi lives in a constant state of fear.

Fear, however, is a double-edged sword: Although it paralyzes, it also motivates. Despite some apprehension, Mlalazi will return to Zimbabwe in December so that he can be with his friends and family — and to continue helping his people answer questions about themselves and their country.

Mlalazi is careful, however, to mask his social and political critique behind a veil of abstraction and metaphor.

“We will never be silenced,” he said.

More here

From LegalBrief:

Former Constitutional Court Judge Richard Goldstone says that levelling war crimes charges against Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe would not be possible.

According to a report on the iAfrica.com site, Goldstone said while there were serious reports about crimes against minority groups in Zimbabwe during Mugabe’s reign in the late 1980s and most of the 1990s, they fell outside the ambit of the International Crimes Court. ‘Firstly, the court has no jurisdiction on anything that happened prior to 1 July 2002. Secondly, Zimbabwe is not a member of the court and therefore the court has no jurisdiction over any war crimes committed in Zimbabwe,’ said Goldstone.

Full report on the iAfrica.com site

Having a coffee with a friend of mine today she said that not much has changed under the Unity Government in Zimbabwe. We used to have Zimbabwe dollar repression, now its US dollar repression she mused. Sure the shops may be full but the prices are jaw dropping. And if we measure our freedom against packed shelves we’ve got many years of dicktatorship ahead of us.

According to the Herald of the Friday, 1 October 2010, President Mugabe clarified a position that people have for long been struggling to understand. He made it clear that the idea of the National Hero’s Acre has every link to the liberation war and nowhere else.

Quoting the herald, the president said,

“…Nharaunda ino… inharaunda yevanenge vakaone-kwa kuti ava ndivo vakaisvogonesesa pahu-tungamiriri hwavo, pabasa ravo reChimurenga, rekurwira nyika. Saka inharaunda yevarwi veChimurenga….Haisi nharaunda yevanhu vanongonzi vatsvene. Vakawanda vatsvene, vakawandisisa vanobatsira vanhu . . . Asi pano patiri panodiwa veChimurenga saka kana tava kuda vatsvene vamwe vanogona zvakatikuti, tada magamba orudzi urworwo totsvagawo rimwe gomo ndipo potoisawo vatsvene verudzi irworwo. Pano ndepevemutupo weChimurenga ndozvatakaitira nzvimbo ino.”

Translated, the above quotation means,

“This place is a place of those that will have been proved to have done well in their leadership during the liberation struggle, so it is a place for the freedom fighters. This is not a place of any other people, there are so many good people who help others…But on this place we need people of the Liberation struggle, so if we want any other forms of heroes we have to choose another hill to lay such people. This place is for those of the Chimurenga totem.”

Over the past thirty years, this clarification was only enshrined in the closed quarters of the politburo, which deliberates on who to call a hero. This might mean that there are several day-to-day words and questions, at the political front whose definitions and answers are yet to be made public. Such words might include: ·    Who should be the president of the country? ·    Who should contribute to the constitution making process? ·    Who should get the largest share of land or part of the national cake?

Just as has been the case with that term “hero”, people attach some general meanings yet events position these questions in some predictable contexts, and no public clarification has been or will ever be issued.

It is therefore essential for political players and the public to be aware that some meanings that we reluctantly attach to some words and phrases in the political sphere are not necessarily the same as ones held by those in power.