The axes in our heads
Author and playwright Steven Chifunyise never fails to tickle the funny bone in me. Last night I was at Theatre in the Park, excited at the thought of getting a dose of political satire from his new play, Heal the Wounds and equally excited about the opportunity to unwind in the cool breeze of the evening while breathing in the garden’s fresh soil and grass. While we waited for the play to start, the breeze was indeed cool, but it also transported the stinks of urine and other forms or human waste thanks to the vagrants who often use the park for ablution facilities. Thankfully the play was not as disappointing. It featured two brothers who, because of their different political orientations, could never be imagined as friends but at some point find themselves working and sitting together in a committee of national healing and reconciliation.
Sophisticated terminology, concepts and all, they are seen trying to sell the idea to their elderly rural parents who seem skeptical of the Global National Unity and the process of healing. Forgiveness is the gospel they both vociferously preach and believe to be the only ‘practical’ way forward to achieving healing and forming the basis of national development.
The parents believe that it is so simple for the people in Harare to just forgive and move on because they didn’t lose any cattle and their houses weren’t razed for perceived differing political orientation. The parents use an old metaphor to ask their sons how any healing is possible if lots of people in the village were still walking around with axes stuck in their heads. Of course the ‘masalad’ sons took the literal meaning, discarded it as ludicrous and soon started to argue between themselves about which party did what, in the violence of 2008.
Their short display of ‘disunity’ invites the mockery of, and convinces the old men that nothing reasonable was being done in the ‘committee healing national’ as one of them kept confusing it. The long and short of it all was that this process is out of touch with the people and is not being done in as inclusive a way as it should be, that is by involving all stakeholders. The gospel of forgiveness that is being preached by politicians, some of who were themselves responsible for the atrocities surrounding the June 2008 elections, (abductions, rape, torture and murder), is just not enough for ordinary Zimbabweans.
The old men towards the end of the play prescribed 10 panaceas that they felt needed to be presented to the committee in order to allow real discussions about national healing to begin. In short, they described a number of transitional justice mechanisms, some of which are not practical, and seem very silly to the sons, but actually do lie buried deep in the hearts of many.
The emotional weight carried by most Zimbabweans from the many violent episodes since independence are the axes Chifunyise refers to. They are a constant reminder, which cannot be wished away, and they lie so deep they cannot just die a natural death at the prompt of forgiveness, especially coming from the highest offenders. Known offenders need to apologize in public; property-grabbers have to return the cattle, chickens, wives and whatever else they stole, to their rightful owners. In the rural areas, some people live with the reality of seeing their livestock in the stock pens of their neighbors.
People want to freely bury and mourn their dead, have a chance to be heard, to tell their story and to create a record so that there is a certain measure of closure. They want a commission of inquiry; but nothing like the joke that was the Chihambakwe commission of the 1980s. Insulted chiefs want to be apologized to. So do parents whose sons and daughters insulted them because of differing political views.
This all sounds petty, but could it be that the real journey towards true healing begins at the grassroots level and that the answer lies in each one of us finding a way of shedding the axes that we each carry in our heads?