It's not Zimbabwe, it's called Kampuchea

TANONOKA JOSEPH WHANDE | Friday May 4, 2007 00:00

Zimbabweans continue to be brutalized, as more and more of our number get killed. The more we cry out and pray, the more evil appears to be getting stronger. It's like we are hunting elephants with a fly swatter.

In Zimbabwe, we are in perpetual mourning and, now, we have really started to wonder if God, Himself, has really not turned his back on us.

What excuse does humanity have for this? We keep dying and coming back to life. Anyone who never believed in zombies should visit the killing fields of Zimbabwe.

It was Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre who said hell is other people. Are we?

The three weeks of madness that the world witnessed in Zimbabwe are only a fraction of decades of torture Zimbabweans have endured. However, those three weeks were a defining moment that should help to make the world understand that Hitler left seeds and had disciples.

The pictures of swollen lips, cracked and meaty eye sockets, mangled faces of legislators, parliamentarians and the disfigured face of the leader of the opposition party, which the world saw, came at a price. For you to see that, we, in the media fraternity, had to lose one of our own.

I knew Edward Chikomba, the murdered journalist. I worked with Chikomba for many years at the then Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC). He was technical director on many of my television programmes. Chikomba would always be asked to leave his technical director's desk to take the studio camera and lead the filming crew whenever Mugabe appeared on television. The productions had to be perfect and it was Chikomba they called upon to satisfy the president. I found him at the ZBC when I returned home from school abroad; and I left him there when I was, not surprisingly, forced out of my job at the ZBC, just like he later was.

Chikomba survived at the ZBC because he knew his job and he knew it well.
Amiable and a perfectionist, Chikomba was a custodian of merriment. There was an innate decency about the man. He was not the kind of person anybody would have suspected to be manhandled and die in such a barbaric and horrible manner.

One of our own is down at the hands of a government that is supposed to protect us all. Apart from Chikomba, I recall former colleagues I worked with at the ZBC, notable among whom is Thomas (Tommy) Mandigora, now Mugabe's ambassador to Botswana. Tommy, my brother, is it okay? Advise me, please. What do we do? We can't just keep quiet.
I find it just about impossible to believe and accept that Robert Mugabe, a father, a brother, and a husband, a man born of a woman, can be so casual about the lives of fellow citizens.

Mugabe uses state funds and apparatus to sharpen the fangs of our youth and then turns them into political cannibals and extreme social misfits. The result being that, today, we witness the aging egos of irrelevant manipulators calling upon our children to die and to kill on their behalf as we, the grieving parents, are shoved haphazardly into a corner like discarded shopping carts in a supermarket parking lot.

We grieve, oh God, for both our murdering sons and for those they murder.

Our youths can clearly see that their tomorrows are barren; they are jobless and hungry. They are equipped not only with inferior but also with insufficient education. They are misguided, desperate and without leadership. Now they have been successfully turned into connoisseurs of murder and mayhem. Ruled by the lack of alternatives, our children have been programmed to prey on fellow citizens, and, indeed, on their own kith and kin to avenge perceived wrongs committed against the dictatorship in our country.

These same despairing youths killed Edward Chikomba, just because some washed-up, weather-beaten old scallywag had to hide his sadistic political poo. Chikomba was killed for carrying out his professional duties, for informing his own people and the world about the brutality of the murderous government that we have.

The scariest thing, though, is the lack of remorse in the youth who were contracted to assassinate Chikomba. Is this how to fight imperialists or whoever it is the old geezer sees in his now ever recurrent daydreams?

What did Mugabe say to his family about Edward Chikomba as they sat at the dinNer table? The 'First Family' must have smiled to see one perceived 'enemy of the state' having been annihilated and, thus, their welfare, once again, assured.

But you do know, don't you, that someone is going to pay for all these heinous crimes? Whether Mugabe dies in office or not these atrocities will be avenged. What Mugabe is doing everyday is to ensure that his family will never live in peace wherever they will end up, long after the dictator haS been shoved six feet under.

Every time I look in the mirror, I smile and applaud myself for something I consider nice that I might have done. But I have caught myself shying away from the mirror when I recall some not-so-decent deeds that I might have perpetrated. A mirror reflects a reality and when one looks into their own eyes, something stirs inside.

Does Mugabe have a mirror in his many residences? What goes on in his mind when he stares at himself? What romantic fantasies flow through Grace Mugabe's mind when she looks first at the seasoned murderer lying next to her and then at the battered body of a dead parent being recovered from a bush? How does it feel to her, as 'First Lady', to know that in order for her to continue enjoying undeserved extravagance, someone's son, father or husband must die?

Grace and Gabriel. Such dignified names from God's lexicon of decency but yet the twin centres of greed, murder, intolerance and viciousness in Zimbabwe. How come a mother to the nation does not feel compelled to count her chicks only all the time?

And to Edward, my dear fellow, I say: 'Rest well, my friend. You will never be forgotten. Not even by Mugabe himself. Mugabe's archives are full of documentaries and news items that you, yourself, filmed. You will not be forgotten. Rest well, my friend. Some cowards made a hero out of you and we are damn proud of that. You didn't lose anything, Eddie, but we lost a history maker. Mugabe should remember your camera-laden, overburdened shoulders as you captured his arrival from Mozambique when he fooled everybody, including you, about his intentions about Zimbabwe. Like the rest of us, you believed him. Now he has caused your death for doing your job so well.

Edward, from your demise, dear friend, I have learned never to wrestle with a pig because, you see, if you do, you both get dirty. And the pig likes it.

You did your part, Eddie. Rest well, dear brother.'

The Heart of the Matter is that, because of Mugabe and his shameless popinjays, Zimbabwe has become a funeral parlour. We are killing each other on his behalf.

Today, we are passing condolences amongst ourselves as if there has been an outbreak of a disease. There are no flash floods washing away our homes and loved ones. There is only Robert Gabriel Mugabe, ironically named after one of God's more famous and favourite angels, causing death and destruction and 'doing the devil's evil.'

But we, humans, have a terrible curse for we alone in the animal kingdom believe in the possibility of change.
Stand by, please.

*Tanonoka Joseph Whande is a Zimbabwean journalist.