By Adrian L. Jenkins, Special to Fog City Journal
June 26, 2008
The last sleeps of martyrs, exiles and prophets are perhaps always starless. This fate, as ultimately told despite the wailing and weeping objections of God’s and Destiny’s ever trailing empires of beggars, is possibly owed to the essayed mortal inability to somehow intuitively lament those things that we do not know we shall never see again.
Last looks, then, are sweetest of all whenever the beforehand graces of knowing intimately the shocking sums of all that will soon enough be lost to you are permitted. A rush to desperately cherish every atom of all conceivable beloveds is the stark antecedent to knowing that the end of everything looms. You will perversely cast your irises devotedly into the sun unto Indian summer vertigoes of blindness were you to know intimately, alas, that it was as your last. Martyrs, exiles and prophets, though, seldom know that thieves neither good nor bad have blotted out the dunes of all the stars that lamplight the landscape the nights of their last dreams. They never know that they have already seen their last sun. They never know that they are dreaming – starlessly – of the end of everything.
Tonderai Ndira was deeply asleep when his killers came hunting through the oceanic dark for his life. His blood was unknowingly wreathed thickly within the waters of the midnight’s thin wind and had led them to him as if sharks angered with blinding famine. As a key activist and township organizer of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA), the 33 year-old Ndira (alternatively described by some accounts as 32) was tirelessly beset by an operatically vengeful huddle of Cains.
Affectionately known by his contemporaries and myriad admirers as ‘Tonde’, the young man described with an exceptionally tender unanimity as possessed of a soft-spoken, humble and truthful character was indeed the damnable familiar of Zimbabwe’s untoward constellation of wolves who unblinkingly stalk all agents of activism and democratic change with bleak, dry hearts that race darkly with schoolboy cruelties.
The current sociopolitical climate of Zimbabwe is indeed one of gods and monsters. Within astonishingly impoverished constituencies such as the Harare-based Mabvuku and Tafara township in which Ndira dwelled, precincts where cholera and dysentery are at times unabatedly rampant and water, as well as electricity, are typically in short supply, a profusion of remarkably desperate calls upon the intercession of the firmament and other such ionospheric stations is simply not nearly palliative enough.
Where heaven has either seemingly failed or proven far too distanced, slow and hesitant as to its attendant thunderclap replies, the burdens of pursuing model governance and advocacy have fallen squarely upon the bright young things of Zimbabwe and the multiples of leonine hearts with which they must be amply – and quite stoically – possessed. The cadres of socioeconomic and political revisionists who fill the ranks of Zimbabwe’s increasingly vital MDC and CHRA, in addition to the equally critical Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), and the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ), are comprised largely of emboldened thirtysomethings who are striving to wreak the domestic municipal and economic miracles that a somnolent heaven above will apparently not readily allow.
It is through the collective of their tireless vision that a perfected and economically-just Zimbabwe is being striven for. These beautiful dreamers of the ennobled, relentless pursuit of a socioeconomic and political belle époque, are truly the personification of Argentinean great Julio Cortázar’s affirmation that “[the] eternal takes form through man’s actions.”
Visionaries, though, are all too often hunted darkly. It is their constructs, theories and calculus of a more just and ordered landscape of future days and events that are pressed in the middle of the night – or potentially in the brightness of day – as the cold and coldest edges of blades unto the softest undersides of their throats.
Nearly seventy MDC activists have reportedly been murdered by the organization’s own accounting since the March 29 general election that initially pitted Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe against MDC president and opposition candidate Marvin Tsvangirai. Furthermore MDC officials have reported that more than 500 women and girls have been raped and sexually abused in the torrent of politically-infused violence that has indeed eclipsed the very heaven and earth of Zimbabwe since just before the general election.
Prior to the first round of March presidential elections the MDC seemed poised – however tenuously – on the verge of affecting real change. Prior to the March vote, the MDC was able to campaign in relative peace, particularly in Zimbabwe’s more rural provinces where in many regards their core membership thrived in the sense of both active and prospective membership. However, a profusion of hearts of darkness began to palpitate as a ravenously hunting parliament of wolves in response to the MDC’s pre-March political victories in the country’s Mashonaland West, the home province of President Robert Mugabe, and as such a pharoahnic jewel of the Zanu-PF’s quite gilded crown of Laertes.
The gradual normalization of the country’s political process seemed not altogether untenable when the MDC secured five parliamentary seats from the ruling party. Needless to say this was an emboldening accomplishment; one with the obvious potential to progressively galvanize a firmer and much broader contingent of faith in Zimbabwe’s potential to ultimately realize something more substantive than a sham democracy. Not one to suffer gladly such an Achillean heel variety of slight, particularly such as one which had occurred in the very locus of their political stronghold, subsequent to this modest yet encouraging MDC victory – and more specificaly the success of the March elections (in which Tsvangirai secured an estimated 120,000 more votes than Mugabe – significant but still not enough to avoid a run-off) – Mugabe’s Zanu-PF initiated the beginnings of a chillingly perverse crusade to not merely hobble but altogether exterminate the first tentative shining stars of a potential new age of true, genuine democracy.
The severe, dryly brutal season of a harsh making of many saints began with the April 13th stabbing death of MDC activist Tapika Mugwandarikwa in Mashonaland West by suspected Zanu-PF party affiliates. Additionally a proliferation of Zanu-PF campaigning outposts began a copious exponentiation across the country’s high-density centers, and with a particularly keen focus upon more rural areas such as those inhabited by Ndira. Purportedly vested with the dubious goal of the “re-education” of opposition party sympathizers, these audaciously overt networks of Mugabe’s loyalists – a large percentage of which are comprised of an inherently brutish amalgam of war ‘veterans’ and armed militias – imprudently implemented a torrential wave of fear and intimidation as achieved through haphazardly systematic rape, torture and murder, a miasma of apocalypse which has fomented all the more insidiously – and odiously – as the June 27 second presidential run-off has approached.
Exact figures of this wave of violence and intimidation have yet to be definitively assessed as the fates and circumstances of untold manifold victims have presently gone unreported. It is a dystopian culture of watchers and the watched, a darkly epic age of hunters, a kingdom of beasts.
Armed with hammers, sticks and assorted other weapons startling for their primacy regiments of cold-eyed young men rove ominously like small and false gods of war from house to house in rural and up-market neighborhoods alike recording the names of all the inhabitants therein, their already frail drifts of man-child reason startlingly dulled all the more by the addling effects of moonshine and smoked ‘mbanje’; as well average Zimbabwe citizens have recently been subject to daylight beatings – or worse – should they fail to know the Zanu-PF campaigning slogan by faithful recitation upon demand at any of the myriad roadblocks that have sprung up throughout the country as the June 27 run-off nears. Towns once dominated by MDC supporters have devolved into emaciated provinces where not even the phantasm of a single opposition supporter might now be found spectrally stirring the dusts of human discontent.
Tellingly, the Zanu-PF party has cited that the MDC is responsible for this profligate wave of brokered violence and intimidation that has with a most grievous assiduity spawned a tribe of widows and widowers, exiles and other altogether broken mortals. Despite the fact that the MDC party has been effectively banned by the Mugabe regime from assembling publicly for political rallies, despite the fact that candidate Marvin Tsvangirai has within recent weeks been detained for untold hours by police for non-descript reasons on his way to campaigning events and appearances, despite the recent arrest of MDC secretary general Tendai Biti upon his return from exile in South Africa and being charged with treason – the sentence for which is potentially execution – in spite of this litany of heresies against true strains of the democratic process, the lines of demarcation between gods and monsters has been proactively blurred.
The MDC itself has not been without strife and a meting of controversy since the party split into two divisive factions in 2006, one led by founder Morgan Tsvangirai and the other by Arthur Mutambara. In July 2006 Timothy Mubawa, an MP from the Tsvangirai-sanctioned faction of the MDC, was accused of organizing a brutal machete attack on rival MDC MP Trudy Stevenson, Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga, and three others. Mubawa was arrested along with Abraham Kurimakwaramba and charged with conspiracy to charge violence.
Mercy, brotherhood, nobility, integrity: These are the denominations of mortal currency which are being both fervently vied and opined for by the disparate factions of MDC and Zanu-PF loyalists, a civil war for the mantles of saints and angels that has even tainted the sanctity of the dead. Abducted from his Mabvuku home on the night of May 14 by nine armed men, purported members of the Mugabe administration’s Central Intelligence Organization (CIO), and at least one uniformed police officer, indignantly attired in nothing more than his underwear, known MDC activist Tonderai Ndira was savagely beaten in front of his wife and two young children, Raphael and Linette, before he was dragged into the back of the white 4 x 4 truck in which his executioners had arrived.
Eight days later his body was ‘found’ by police at a farm in Goromonzi and later identified by Ndira’s brother, Barnabas, in the morgue of Parinenyatwa Hospital where it was deposited. Among an impossibly garish litany of other grotesque injuries, his jaw had been shattered, his lips and tongue cut out, and his knuckles broken. The price of a silence was writ large across the broken landscape of his breathless mortal frame.
And yet, despite a deplorably violent death which has drawn international comparisons to that of Steven Biko’s dual martyrdom and canonization, the propagandists shall apparently grant this nigh sainthood no quarter. Ndira has been memorialized as a self-righteous thug by breaths that doggedly pursue those which have eulogized him as a champion of democratic justice and change.
Although arrested a record 35 times in conjunction with his activism and hospitalized in 2003 as a result of a particularly vicious assault by Zanu-PF members, some would argue subsequent to his obscenely violent death that his wings were indeed not quite so white and some seek to bar the ghost of his mauled shell finding refuge amidst the metaphysics of all the firmament’s consoling stars.
A number of Zimbabwe-based blogs have condemned the expeditious canonization of Ndira, several implicating that he was a participant or at least principal architect in the brutal machete attacks that occurred in 2006 against Trudy Stevenson and other rival MDC faction members. Whether this is in fact the propaganda engine of the Mugabe regime at work is unclear, but there are consistencies with that regime’s nominally absurdist assertions that it is the MDC imploding from within and propagating an internecine culture of rape, abduction, torture and murder against its own members unto extinction’s starless brink.
Alas, since time immemorial in the tales of gods and monsters, it is always the lives of mere mortals that suffers the most.
As of this writing, opposition candidate Marvin Tsvangirai has announced that he is bowing out of the June 27 run-off, an action which will in effect unofficially concede the election by default to Mugabe, an opponent who has publicly asserted that only something as specific as a valid Act of God might remove him from power.
While the Zanu-PF party has cited Tsvangirai’s exodus from the election as an outlet by which “humiliation” might be averted at the forthcoming polls, Tsvangirai himself has cited the recent outbreak of rampant violence against his party members en route to a failed rally in the Harare capital. Denouncing the election as a sham and an increasingly combustible forum for unchecked varieties of violence and intimidation against his party members, a number of which have at this point sought out refuge in the mountains and neighboring South Africa, Tsvangirai has stated that ultimately his goal in removing himself from the June 27 election is to avoid a categorical genocide.
The great Spanish poet and political activist Federico GarcÃa Lorca once wrote in his poem Song of the Seven-Hearted Boy “Seven hearts/are the hearts that I have/But mine is not there among them”.
Somewhere in a place so high that the sun has forgotten how to seethe there the eighth heart of Tonderai Ndira, is breaking.
Adrian L. Jenkins is a San Francisco-based writer who hails originally from Chicago. A self-described “Southern gentleman by default”, Adrian has contributed short works of fiction to Paris-based Purple Magazine and is presently at work on his first full-length novel.
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