This moving statement from ZINASU for International Women’s Day shares some of the challenges facing women in tertiary institutions in Zimbabwe:

It is now common knowledge that in Zimbabwe there is an upsurge in enrolment. Which is not bad in itself but the problem comes when the welfare of the students is forsaken, to be particular the female students who are the most vulnerable as compared to their male counter parts. When I say the welfare of students I refer to issues relating to accommodation, availability of food, a conducive learning environment, access to sanitary wear etc

Since 2007 the halls of residence at the University of Zimbabwe have been closed despite the high court ruling to open. Accommodation therefore is a nightmare for all students at the oldest University. The undergraduates have been reduced to live like rats in off campus residence where they pay full rentals per head.

As a female you will never escape paying with sex, the lecturers will be waiting for you. Abusive lecturers demand sexual favors for you to pass your courses. As you move to industrial attachment the bosses will be waiting for you no attachment without sex, no report without sex, no assessment without sex. If only we can go back to the era where industries would bid to get a student on attachment the incidences of sexual abuse will be reduced. How do we get there when only a few people own the means of production and we have a corrupt government.

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It’s that husky voice that I will always remember first.

That and the love story that I saw playing out between Shingie Chimuriwo and Fungai Tichawangana over the years.

The last time I saw Shingie and Fungai was late last year before I left Zimbabwe for the UK where I am currently studying. Shingie and I hadn’t seen in each other in a long time and we chirped on and on for a while about life and some of the controversial articles I had been writing (and there are always many!). She was, as always, amazingly forthright and self-assured; never one to back down from a hard argument and so fully supportive of free expression.

Fungai, my namesake or ‘sazita’ as we call each other, kept hovering about her asking her if she needed something – more food, a jacket, a seat – anything to make her more comfortable. Their love was like watching the characters of an epic romance movie peeling off the silver screen and taking human form. They loved so easily and naturally; so beautifully that you could see the vivid shades of their emotions light up when they were together. They were and still are soulmates.

Ever since I have known Fungai, there has always been Shingie.  I remember how she would come to many of our poetry workshop sessions held on cold and unfriendly winter evenings back in 2005. I remember how in 2009, Fungai went on a hunger strike after the Norwegian embassy denied him a visa to go and visit Shingie as she studied in the European country. His brave and unshakeable love for his woman saw ordinary citizens as far afield as the Americas taking the time to lobby their own Norwegian embassies to take action. It was awe-filling to see a man so committed to the cause of love.  It was even more special to see the happy pictures of the two in Norway when he eventually got his visa.

Something urged me to add Shingie as a Facebook friend last month. And on February 25, we became FB chums. Somehow, we’d managed to keep fairly up to date without relying on status updates and pokes and other things, but I was compelled to add her onto my list of FB Friends. We never did have a conversation in the 19 days that we were ‘Friends’, but on 16 March at 7:57 pm, I saw an FB notice flicker at the bottom left of my page. I had written a status update congratulating a mutual friend for winning a South African journalistic award. The status update I had written read, “I’ve just got to show off that I have got cool trail blazing friends! I am surrounded by GREATNESS!”

At 7:57 pm, Shingie’s finger hit the ‘Like’ tab and a message flickered at the bottom left of my Facebook page conveying her action to me. I am told that she had her car accident at 10pm; the fatal accident that killed a beautiful woman in her prime.

When I learnt of Shingie’s death, I kept looking at that status update wondering how someone who’d liked something could then be involved in a horrible crash just two hours later and be dead within a few more. I wanted to rewind time to the moment that she’d liked the update, wished I could have found her on chat and said, “Ndeipi.” Maybe if I had, we would have had a short conversation and she might have been running five minutes later and perhaps things might have turned out differently.

But who are we to know what life holds?

I will not question or challenge God’s will. He knows His own ways. But I thank Him that I have the honour of a thought, however ephemeral, from Shingie in her last few hours on earth. I am thankful for this potent message, painful as it is for I was having a horrible week of self-doubt and pain. Shingie has reminded me, through that flicker of her fingers that life is still with me, that my lungs drink in air and that I am still here to make a difference to this doubtful and painful world, that I am surrounded by GREATNESS, as I myself observed in writing that status update.

I am thankful for Shingie and for that lesson that she has left with me.

We will cry in the days to come. But we will celebrate too for Shingie is a woman who leaves behind a rich legacy of selfless deeds.

Thank you Shingie. And thank you Shingie and Fungai for the amazing story that your lives together tell.

I hold you in my heart filled with love and respect for both of you.

In this important statement below, WOZA makes several good points including the need for Zimbabwe to have a professional and non-partisan police force. And watch their Valentines Day footage on YouTube (see the link at the end of the statement):

Persecution by prosecution of Human Rights Defenders continues: Court appearances; Williams and Mahlangu avoid persecution; Release our comrades

SEVEN members of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) appeared in Tredgold Magistrates Court today 16 March, they will reappear again on 23rd of March 2011. The 3 women and 4 men arrested on 28 February in two separate incidents in Entumbane and Mabutweni. Although reporting conditions were relaxed and they now only report once a week, charges were not dropped as there is resistance from the police officers.

Before they appeared in Court, the Defence lawyer Matshobana Ncube met with the provincial area prosecutor and the Attorney general’s office Mrs Cheda who indicated that they have formally requested a meeting with the District Commanding Police Officer Inspector R. Masina to obtain understanding as to the significance of the Supreme Court ruling to prevent the continued arrest of WOZA members by the police officers in defiance of the ruling. The Supreme Court ruling was obtained by WOZA leaders Jennifer Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu from a 16 October 2008 arrest and 3 week detention at Mlondolozi prison.

An update on the three women, Eneles Dube, Janet Dube and Selina Dube arrested during the 7th March protest were followed home and brought  to court to be formally charged.

On the 10th of March 2011 Lizwe Jamela of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights was advised by Bulawayo Central Police Station from Constable Runesu that District Commanding Police Officer (DISPOL)  Inspector R Masina had demanded that the three Eneles Dube and others  be formally charged. They appeared in court on 11th of March 2011 with Defence lawyer Kossam Ncube. They were charged with criminal nuisance as defined in paragraph 2[v] of the Third schedule to the Criminal Law [ Codification and Reform] Act, Chapter 9:23 as with section 46 of the said Act which basically means ‘blocking the pavement’.

They appeared before Magistrate Gideon Ruvetsa and Public Prosecutor Jeremiah Mutsindikwa, where they were remanded on free bail out of custody to the 21st of March 2011. Lawyer Kossam Ncube indicated to the court than on the 21st he will note an application of refusal of further remand.

WOZA leaders Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu are currently on a speaking tour of the United Kingdom and United States of America. In the last month after the Valentines Day protests, Police officers launched regular visits to their homes and sent messages through members that they tortured to reveal the whereabouts of the leaders. Police officers also contacted a Human Rights lawyer, demanding he bring the leaders to Bulawayo Central Police station indicating that they ‘must prepare themselves for a long detention’. As a result of the supreme Court ruling which police are obviously ignoring, it was determined that they  of this heightened harassment and obvious ignoring of the Supreme Court ruling, Williams and Mahlangu have not voluntarily presented themselves to this persecution.

WOZA call on the all officers Zimbabwe Republic Police to professionalise and shake themselves from the choke of their political masters.  The days of reckoning will come soon and they will be faced with the guilt of their torture alone. They must not blindly follow the dictates of politicians to arrest and detain human rights defenders but should interrogate as decent human beings the letter of the law and the principle of investigate to arrest not arrest to investigate. We call on them to free all human rights defenders in custody including our Comrades Gwisai, Gumbo, Tafadzwa and others.

Please watch this rough footage of the Valentines’ Day protest that has got the state shivering http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2-PrFvmwQs

The war may have happened thirty years ago, but the scars have yet to heal.

Mass graves containing thousands of bodies suspected to have been killed during Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle in the 1960s and 1970s have been discovered at a mine in Gwanda, capital of the province of Matabeleland South.

Mines and Mining Development Minister Obert Mpofu told journalists here Tuesday the bodies were discovered at Blanket Mine.

“I was in a meeting with an official from Blanket Mine who informed me that areas they are mining have mass graves. They found the graves beneath six to 10 feet when they were blasting in a shaft.”

Mpofu said the bodies were believed to be of people massacred by Rhodesian forces during the liberation struggle.

“These bodies should have been as a result of massacres of the 1960′s,” he said.

He said exhumation of the bodies had begun.

As I watched last night’s extensive coverage about the mass grave on ZBC-TV I recalled an argument I had once with a war vet when in frustration he shouted:

“Where was your ‘human rights’ when they were bombing us at Chimoio?”

Honestly, I don’t know, and, I suspect, neither does the Organ on National Healing and Reconciliation. Maybe we never had them to begin with.

The police raided the office of Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition on Tuesday 15 March.

“The police, who were armed with a search warrant signed by Chief Superintendent Peter Magwenzi said they were looking for anything subversive such as T-shirts, documents and fliers or anything incriminating.” (ZLHR press release)

You really have to laugh at them – there’s nothing else left to do. This incident reminded me of something I read recently. Some food for thought for civic organisations in Zimbabwe . . .

Faking it

Slobodan Miloševic, Serbia’s warmongering leader during the 1990s, was a master of manipulation in the former Yugoslavia. But, as the endgame approached, even Miloševic lost his touch.

He and his henchmen had little idea how to cope with the mischievous Otpor (“Resistance”), the student movement that proved more effective in energizing opposition to Miloševic than his political foes had ever been. Even as Otpor’s members were arrested and beaten, they mocked the authorities. As one of Otpor’s leaders pointed out later, the regime found itself in a bind. “I’m full of humour and irony and you are beating me, arresting me,” Srdja Popovic said in an interview for Steve York’s and Peter Ackerman’s documentary Bringing Down a Dictator. “That’s a game you always lose.”

In advance of elections in September 2000, the authorities became increasingly enraged at Otpor’s success. Police raided the group’s offices in the Serb capital, Belgrade, confiscating computers and campaign materials.

Otpor exacted sweet revenge. On phone lines which they knew would be tapped, they discussed how they would receive a large quantity of additional supplies of election stickers and other materials at a certain time and day. They invited news photographers to witness the delivery. Then, at the appointed hour, volunteers began unloading boxes from a truck, staggering toward the Otpor office, apparently weighed down by the weight of all the pamphlets and posters.

The waiting police triumphantly moved in to seize the boxes. As they did so, they realised that the cartons were not heavy at all, but strangely light. They were empty – as empty as the police action itself.

Orders were orders, however. The police could not stop confiscating what they had been ordered to confiscate. Under the mocking eyes of reporters and other onlookers, the police impounded a large quantity of empty cardboard boxes.

Source: Small Acts of Resistance – how courage, tenacity, and ingenuity can change the world
Authors, Steve Crawshaw and John Jackon

Let’s get a Zimbabwean woman to get this!

UN Women’s Project Inspire seeking life-changing idea
Deadline: 30 June 2011

UN Women Singapore and MasterCard have started a joint initiative called “PROJECT INSPIRE: 5 Minutes to Change the World” to help you create a better world of opportunities for women and girls in Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.

The initiative is inviting submissions of life-changing ideas on how to make a difference. If you have an inspirational idea that can empower women, improve their livelihoods and change the world, then you can submit it here. If your idea gets selected, you can win US $25,000 to make it a reality.

The idea should be creative and should make a meaningful impact with the limited resources you have. It should be practical enough and must inspire others to do the same. It should be accessible, doable, measurable and sustainable. The idea should lead to the empowerment of disadvantaged women or girls through education, skills training, financial inclusion and social entrepreneurship.

Ideas should be submitted in form of a video running for a length of five minutes. Applicants sending the submissions should be 18-35 years old.

Besides the winner getting the $25,000 grant, there will be a special recognition to the Best Financial Literacy/ Livelihood proposal which will win a start-up grant of US$10,000. Finalists will get an opportunity to come to Singapore to present their inspiring idea to an expert judging panel. You will also attend a workshop on sustainable social entrepreneurship and presentation skills training.

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