How many more must be beaten?
I’ve been sifting through photographs of Zimbabweans beaten in the weeks following the 29 March Harmonised Election, and I’m feeling sick. What do I do with the outrage that boils up as I look at image after image of horrific brutality. And how do I stomach myself asking the question “which one portrays this horror ‘best’?” I’m angry with myself for even asking the question, and I’m angry with the “crisis what crisis” mentality that means I have to ask the question in the first place.
As James Hall wrote, is an African life so cheap, that 1,000 must die before there is a “crisis?”
I heard a bit of the BBC’s Hard Talk with Allan Little and Morgan Tsvangirai the other day. Little was asking Tsvangirai what the MDC was going to do about this latest election theft, and whether it was planning some sort of People Power solution like what was undertaken in Serbia or the Ukraine. Tsvangirai said no, he didn’t think that sort of approach was appropriate in Zimbabwe. Why not, asked Little. Because, Tsvangirai said, the regime in Zimbabwe is so violent, any sort of popular uprising like that would be brutally and violently crushed.
But isn’t this violent enough already? We are not already in a state of war, as MDC Secretary General Tendai Biti himself said recently. In which case, it’s about time we started fighting back.