A couple weeks back Kubatana advertised a call for people to participate in a documentary film about sex being made by the International Video Fair (IVF).  This week the cameras are rolling.  Seven women and seven men checked into the Bronte Hotel on Sunday and will be there through the week.  The whole week is devoted to discussing sex.  As well as all the various interconnected emotions and concerns.  And the whole week is being filmed.  It’s a project that fits perfectly into the goals of the IVF, and many organizations for that matter.  To assist the general population by providing information and promoting dialogue.  In the case of IVF, through the medium of film.

I’m involved in the production of this film.  On Sunday just before things got started, among the team there was a collective:  What have we done?  Did we really invite 14 somewhat randomly selected Zimbabweans to spend five days discussing sex?  Is this going to work?

We are now half way through the week and one word is filling my mind:  Taboo.  But not taboo in the way you might think I mean it.  For years and years I’ve heard and read that to talk about sex in African countries is taboo.  People just don’t do it.  Donors tend to approach the subject with caution because it’s supposedly taboo. Instead they dance around the subject.  Policy makers gingerly use the lens of gender because sex is taboo.  And so on.  Everyone seems to say taboo.  But it’s not true.  My ears are getting sore because these 14 people have volumes to say.  The reason the word taboo is filling my mind is because it seems what’s taboo is not discussing sex, rather what’s become taboo is to create spaces for people to come together and speak about sex. We’re told we can’t talk about sex, so nobody takes the time to make the spaces available.  This film project is correcting  the way the taboo around sex has been repositioned.  These 14 people have embraced this space and they’re making the most of it.  The part of my mind that’s not filled with the word taboo is filled with the 842 insightful, thoughtful, engaging, intelligent, open, honest, raw, and most of all, valuable comments that have been made so far.

I spend a fair amount of time walking in and around the city centre and have established routes, largely to avoid getting turned around (more honestly I mean lost).  On a recent excursion, I had to stop by an NGO located deep in the city centre.  I decided the best route was to walk behind Eastgate along Robert Mugabe Road, which is not a road I walk along often because it just seems sketchy and more dangerous.  I was heading east toward the Avenues.  As I navigated the hustle and bustle, I experienced first-hand something I’ve only been told about.  And my gosh it’s true what they say.  That road is packed full of forex dealers.  All right out in the open.  Men, women, and children standing a mere meter apart in a line that felt like it stretched from here to kingdom come.  I didn’t change money, but did think about whether these thousands of forex dealers purposively chose Robert Mugabe Road for their base to signal who has brought their profession into existence.

I also thought about the law and that I was walking amidst a hotbed of criminal activity.  Of course, residents and visitors in Zimbabwe have become accustom to the reality that individual economic sustainability in Zimbabwe requires routinely breaking the law.  I used to have a twinge of naivety and thought it was only foreigners and middle-class and wealthy Zimbabweans who illegally changed forex by the hundreds.  But there on Robert Mugabe Road were Zimbabweans from all walks of life changing forex, mostly in small amounts like $5 or $10.  It’s the reality, nothing can be done.  But still, it’s a crime and it leaves an unsettling feeling in my stomach.

Robert Muponde wrote an interesting article astutely suggesting, “violent crime in Zimbabwe is a manifestation of political manipulation. It is not part of the social fabric.”  He provided historical and cultural reasons, and as common, he made jokes. Pockets have no cash and cars lack fuel leaving pickpockets and carjackers without a crime to commit.  While it’s true, particularly in comparison to South Africa, violent crime rates in Zimbabwe are low.  Admirably low, yet ironic given the amount of state-sponsored crime Muponde points out.  I can’t help but think there’s reason to read with caution Muponde and his “court in the people’s hearts… inherited from the past… about culture and tradition…about conscience.”  Back to Robert Mugabe Road.  With all those forex dealers, it’s full of crime.  You might even say it’s a vibrant culture of crime.  Sure, it’s crime necessary for survival, it’s seemingly not violent, and given the volumes of people involved, it’s been normalized.  It’s also a fine line, particularly when you start incorporating phrases like the social fabric, moral fibre, and culture.  I think there are deeper meanings when the law is routinely broken every single day. It’s the question I often pose in my blogs:  What will be the long term effects with so many otherwise law-abiding people having been brought into the fold of criminal activity?  Somewhat in jest, will the folk tales 50 years from now be about powerful and wise village chiefs who gained their prestige through black market forex dealing in Harare?

I find it challenging in blogging to develop balance between a strictly informative style and a more personal style inclusive of my opinions and experiences. And if leaning one way or the other is of more interest to readers. There’s a similar balance issue when it comes to statistics concerning HIV/AIDS. Just as a more personal blog potentially presents a particular slant on a piece of information, so too are statistics most often about slanting a story in particular directions.

Of late, I’ve been reading the report The World Bank’s Commitment to HIV and AIDS in Africa: Our Agenda for Action, 2007-201. More I should say I’ve been analyzing the report to uncover what statistics the report left out. This undertaking led me to develop my own chart concerning trends in HIV/AIDS funding among the big name and big bucks donors. The information I think is very telling. Also, I really love making pretty charts and I think this is one of my best charts ever.

By reorganizing data provided in the report, I was able to cast additional light on something that’s missing from the report. That being: It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to make an argument that funding is highly political and falls short with regard to providing money for the countries that have the most need. The multi-colored columns are amounts of funding for individual countries and the connected dots plot adult HIV prevalence rates in those same countries from lowest to highest. Looking left to right, what’s telling is the first really tall column. Ethiopia has received the most donor funding (US$1.1B) and has an adult prevalence rate of 2.2%. Then if you look to the far right, the countries with highest prevalence rates have short columns. Zimbabwe has an adult prevalence rate of 20.1%, but has received only US$50M of funding. Of course, one has to factor in that the population of Ethiopia is about five times greater than the population of Zimbabwe. And several of the countries with tall columns are some of Africa’s most populous nations. But still. The columns on the far right don’t even come close to the line with the connected dots. And with its US$50M of funding Zimbabwe falls well short of the per country average total amount of funding (US$227M).

As much as I like my chart, it made me angry. Thick donor reports tend to garner a lot of fan fare, but ascertaining the most relevant information generally requires reading between the lines and reformulating the content of the report. I’m sick of the slanted donors (the politics and the system, not necessarily the individuals). For years, the world has noted the resilience, patience, and courage Zimbabweans exhibit given their ingenuity to adapt to difficult circumstances which have largely grown to be beyond the control of individual citizens. Jokes are made to help cope and people take solace that things could be worse. But with talk of more sanctions, things would become worse. I see no problem with bloggers being slanted. But for donors it’s inexcusable. Stop slanting, skewing, eschewing, politicking, etc. and instead, put sufficient amounts of money where it’s needed.

Download the JPEG, PDF or MS Excel version of this chart.

Note: If you download this chart, it will open in a MS Excel spreadsheet. When it opens, it will say: “The workbook you opened contains automatic links to information in another workbook. Do you want to update this workbook with changes made to the other workbook?” Click No to view the chart.

In the city centre the other day I saw a truck full of ZANU-PF youth militia.  I didn’t want to look because the sight of them made me scared.  I feared (irrationally) that if I locked eyes with one of the young boys he would pull out a gun and shoot me. Yet, I wanted to see these young boys individually and collectively so I could get a sense of what they look like, even what they feel.  I didn’t lock eyes.  Perhaps my fear won out, but more I think failure to lock eyes was because these young boys don’t have eyes.  Of course, I don’t mean that literally. They have eyes.  Eagle eyes in fact, which seek out innocent citizens.  Just that their eyes seemed hollow.  Vacant.  Almost as if their eyes signaled the ways brainwashing has stripped them of their own self.  As I walked away, my entire body felt sick thinking about a governmental spin which would claim these young boys as graduates of a successful youth empowerment programme.

The above is a reaction to a particular (twisted) approach to empowerment.  That disclaimer stated, I’m not a fan of the broader directions empowerment has been going.  Things seem out of balance.  The prevailing focus is towards empowering youth with less thought and action put into empowering adults. But of course, how can there be adult empowerment when nearly every adult is busy with youth empowerment.  To me this is giving rise to empowerment overload.  Perhaps being an adult empowerer of the youth is empowering.  But still, a conundrum seems present in Zimbabwe:  An adult generation that tends to look outward, and perhaps even an adult generation that tends to see the youth as the only individuals worthy of empowerment.  Further complicating empowerment overload is expectation that one becomes an adult empowerer of the youth at an early age.  I’m struck by the great many Zimbabweans in their early 20s involved in empowering the youth.  These kids are in their early 20s.  Why have they so quickly graduated to being the empowerers?

I’m thinking out-of-balance empowerment overload got going in synch with statistical geniuses emerging in full force from the HIV/AIDS industry. There’s no doubt analyses concerning declining life expectancies and shifting population age demographics are valuable in understanding the impacts of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.  This data speaks effectively to loss of human capacity and the ensuing ripple effects on economic sectors, governance, and sociocultural dynamics.  But there was danger with the resulting label:  Lost Generation.  I cannot help but wonder what emotional and psychosocial effects these analyses have had on members of the “lost generation” who have remained alive.  Possibly, the label has numbed adults into giving up on themselves in favour of channeling all energies towards empowering the youth.

The ZANU-PF youth I began with are, in my mind, victims of empowerment gone very, very wrong. I can’t emphasize that enough.  I don’t think there could be anything more disturbing than empowering one human being to kill another.  It’s not a perfectly parallel example, yet, I think it’s worth considering the more subtle misdirection potentially embedded in out-of-balance empowerment overload, to ask the question:  Who’s empowering adults in Zimbabwe?

I received an email about an interactive discussion under the theme Feminist Currents. I quite like the concept of currents. That individuals tap into ideas, debate, and formulate expressions around various issues. In these spaces individual and collective thought processes foster intellectual growth and abilities to envision and act on long-term strategies for the redress of injustices. In Zimbabwe there are currents which desire political change – and in my mind, they are feminist currents.

The interactive discussion proposed to examine feminist currents through posing questions, including: Was Elizabeth Edwards right when she claimed her husband (democratic candidate John Edwards) was more of a feminist than Hillary Clinton? Who should Black women support: Obama or Clinton? These two questions got me thinking about what feminism is all about and why it’s often a taboo word in Zimbabwe. Seems to me the taboo-ness is a result of narrowly equating feminism to a singular (Western) line of thought only concerning (white) women. More accurately, feminisms concern men, women, and children regardless of the colour of their skin. They seek to represent a range of voices which outline affinities and differences while also attending to the sundry mixture of divergences and paradoxes to build more pliable understandings of and solutions to complex issues within the human condition. Simply put, feminisms are lines of thinking. They are expansive, inclusive, attentive to diversity, and vibrant currents aiming to advance positive change. A poem by Betty Makoni of the Girl Child Network serves as a useful reminder of what is meant by feminist currents and the ways they are visionary. The poem was published by Pambazuka and is entitled Promises, Choices, Spaces: Voices for Women. The opening stanza is as follows:

Ever seen a four every word punctuated title?
Question mark? comma, full stop. exclamation mark ! in one
Women lives full of thus
Patriarchy domineering , feminism under backlash
Women have negotiated, still negotiate, will ever negotiate
Promises promised, never premised
Spaces shrunk, voices thwarted
Seems this men’s world, makes and breaks laws
Makes and breaks promises
Women lives punctuated, back and forth

Yes, Makoni’s poem focuses on women. However, the stanza above and the piece overall articulates feminist currents which are about change as well as the ideas, hopes, dreams, and intellect pertaining to peace and equality. I made a few word changes in the poem to further emphasis the relevance feminist currents hold in Zimbabwe and the world over.

Promises, Choices, Spaces: Voices for Zimbabweans

Ever seen a four every word punctuated title?
Question mark? comma, full stop. exclamation mark! in one
Zimbabwean lives full of thus
Patronage domineering, equality under backlash
Citizens have negotiated, still negotiate, will ever negotiate
Promises promised, never premised
Spaces shrunk, voices thwarted
Seems this government’s world, makes and breaks laws
Makes and breaks promises
Too many lives punctuated, back and forth

Previously I wrote that I believe HIV/AIDS warrants exceptional status largely because of the complex mix of biomedical, economic, judicial, ideological, political, and socio-cultural factors at work. I’m not changing my stance, but I am annoyed how exceptional status comes to be interpreted and misused.

The Zimbabwean government has directed NGOs to suspend field operations. Seems the directive, like the country, is subject to inflation. At first the order targeted programmes believed to be using food distribution as a way to advocate political change. Next, the order grew to no food aid at all. Next, the word food was inflated to mean humanitarian. Now the directive, unlike the country, is subject to deflation, but not in a good way. The government has indicated that HIV/AIDS organizations are allowed to operate . This is a case of using the exceptional status of HIV/AIDS for political gain. Almost as if the government feels it can deal with bad press associated with letting people starve. However, HIV/AIDS is so exceptional that it would be too much to deal with bad press about people loosing access to HIV/AIDS-related services.

Worse is that the reinstatement is partial and shortsighted. Social and Welfare Minister Nicholas Goche stated the suspension on NGO operations “Does not prohibit those on ARV [antiretroviral] therapy and those benefiting from home-based care programmes to continue accessing drugs and therapeutic feeding from clinics and hospitals.”

It’s a troublesome choice of words – drugs and therapeutic feeding. Is work around HIV/AIDS only about feeding people drugs? Do people get therapeutic feeding only from home-based care, clinics, and hospitals? What about the other ways people need assistance and support to cope, be informed, and heal? The path has emerged such that the government has taken away rights as political citizens. Now the government, given its selective reinstatement of HIV/AIDS work, is largely rendering those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS to be clinical, biomedical, therapeutic citizens only.