Part V (April 1 - April 20)

Zimbabwe Talk 4-1

For all the talk of how South African youth were apathetic towards politics, it was a little surprising, even for me, to see people’s awareness on display today as they turned heads to look at me. I took my shirt out for a spin: the one that promotes the Movement for Democratic Change and its headlining candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai. Not everyone had something to say about it, today, the day after the potentially historic election in Zimbabwe, as the results were still being tallied, but most everyone at least turned their head to look.

“He is a Western puppet” I heard three people say today. One was a self declared Marxist who I share a class with, who admitted that Mugabe wasn’t very good himself. We talked briefly before a class. Another just pointed at me and walked away as he shouted those words. The third was more daring.

“Why do you wear this shirt, and make issues out of Zimbabwe, huh?” The guy said. Watch out for the youth, I could hear a voice in the back of my head insisting.

“Because he’s not Mugabe. That seems to be a point enough worth supporting.”

“He is a Western puppet,” he said.

“You’re not the first to tell me that.”

“He is a disgrace to the people of Zimbabwe.”

“He is an opposition leader operating within a democratic system, and for that he has been arrested repeatedly and beaten half to death. If he is such a fraud, why is this necessary just to prove that he is in the wrong?”

“Where are you from?”

“The States.”

“And Hillary, and Obama?”

“What about them?”

“There are rules in the States.”

“Yes.”

“In Zimbabwe we have rules as well. And the rule is that you cannot say bad things about our government. And this man did, and they were in the right to beat him half to death for it.”

So began a twenty minute conversation that should have taken half that time. The same points kept coming up: Western imperialism, Western influence, the right’s of Zimbabwean’s to be self sufficient. There were bizarre contradictions in his tirade, like at one point where he insisted that Zimbabweans were eating well: potatoes, maize and vegetables. When I countered that Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Southern Africa, was getting food aid from South Africa and that people were leaving by the thousands in large part because they were starving their, he countered at first that anyone who left was leaving because they had money, perhaps to add to his general point that the rich powers that be who cooperated with the West had no business in the country in the first place. But under pressure, he moved away from that point to admit that people were starving, but for the right reasons.

“If the people are starving, let them starve. They have been hungry for hundreds of years under Western rule, so why can’t they keep starving?”

The dystopian illusions of an educated but uncompromising youth: the need for food is just a social construction brought on by colonial powers.

We walked together for some time. I was surprised by how candid he was. When I told him to his face early on that he didn’t have a hope of making a point to me if he didn’t let me finish my own, he stopped himself and asked politely for what I had to say. But for all the typical issues I had read about in papers and raised for him, the answers were the same: obscenely high inflation, divestment, and the suppression of free speech: these were all just failures in the sense that they were dysfunctional imperial models not needed in a truly independent African state. But when it came to other, less economistic things, like food, the excuse there was either that my sources for that were Western in origin and therefore incorrect, or that harm to the people were the growing pains of a nation on the verge of achieving true independence.

“It may take 20,000 years, but when we get there, we will know: Mugabe was the one to sow the seeds of change for us.”
“And 20,000 years into the future, you will be still bitter about a period of rule that lasted less than a century, still thinking that this mess the country is in now is the fault of the West, after almost every white person left in the country and every company invested there has left?”
“Our struggle goes on. Your Bush and your Brown, they would like to keep us under their foot longer, but we are not a burger nation; we do not need burgers – your burgers – KFC, McDonalds. Pah! Do you see McDonalds in Zimbabwe?”
“Of course not ….”
“Exactly.”
“… because the economy is so defunct it would be impossible to have a functioning McDonalds anywhere in Zimbabwe. That is why.” But even as I said that I could feel the econ major that I wasn’t screeching in the back of my head. What did I care about inflation rates or divestment? Free speech was one thing, but who gave a shit if McDonalds set up shop in Harare or Bulawayo? Mugabe had long stood against that “incursion,” if you want to call it that. Whatever the reasons, he had kept the West out of Zimbabwe.

His points were scattered: articulate but circular, based on delusion and bizarre readings of a national purpose derived from a historical mission. He generalized the greed of the West without making any acknowledgement of the total hypocrisy of his message. But on at least one point, the guy was right: Zimbabwe was not a “burger nation,” and despite any of Thomas Friedman’s claims of the link between world peace and the spread of the fast food industry, it didn’t need to become one. Maybe Zimbabwe was like Cuba, Mugabe its Castro. At the extreme but not unpopular end of the opinion spectrum of the Castro regime are people who insist that Castro is the worst dictator on earth. The more moderate people admit that he suppresses human freedoms but that he provides healthcare to the people, and for the most part, they eat well. Were the things that this guy told me so different? Yes, but only in that his point was that Zimbabwe was on its way to becoming like Cuba. Until then, the people would starve. Though he denied this exact point when I asked him, the result of his logic was made clear: under Mugabe, Zimbabweans would be made martyrs to the 20,000 year anti-colonial project, and, in his mind, rightfully so.

“We will go on, from Zim to Zambia, to Mozambique and throughout all of Africa, and then finally here, to this place, South Africa, and we will rid it of the people who do not belong.”

It may have been radical, but there was a sense in all that he was saying, and the underlying point was one that I had come across before. There was a way to link up the rather common disillusionment with the ANC with this fiery Mugabe rhetoric in a way that made real historical and political sense.

Since taking office, a striking blow against Mbeki since was not on policy but on ideology. Despite campaign promises to uplift the South African people by bolstering the national economy and integrating it with that of the world, economic policy had done more to support the interests of Western corporations and governments than the South African people. While American firms enjoyed better business with South Africa than ever before, unemployment is at its highest in the country than at any time since Apartheid.

In the eyes of Mugabe and his supporters, South Africans were stuck with the real delusions. The wonders of globalization: infinite growth in a world of finite resources, trickle down economics and the benefits of cozying up to the West were their utopian fantasy. Putting economic growth above all else had only made the country the whore of the West. It turned tricks for money: abandoning locally grown industries in favor of foreign owned ones. To promote integration with the world it had opened the floodgates of foreign investment. KFC’s and McDonalds were allowed to be ubiquitous as tax laws were adjusted so that these foreign firms could set up shop in the county while paying up an almost infinitesimal amount of their profits in tax. While the economic benefits may have been evidenced on paper, the means by which they were attained were still being tallied, and in the eyes of some, the less tangible costs on culture and national pride had already been too high. While Zimbabwe refused to become a ‘burger nation’, South Africa had in many ways become exactly that, both literally and figuratively, and willing so.

I was, and am perfectly willing to accept that Mbeki is the stooge of the West. Nonetheless, accepting that a regime the likes of Mugabe’s represetnts the alternative of choice is a harder stretch of the imagination.

Economic conditions in either country may have facilitated their respective development with regard to the ‘burger’ issue, but those conditions were brought on by choices at the top level. While Mugabe’s anti-imperialist wants had made the once harmonious Zimbabwe a blacks-only state, thereby shutting out prospective investors who would otherwise throw themselves into the country, the all-inclusive, free-market notions of the ANC and the Mbeki cabinet had made KFC ubiquitous in South Africa.

So was Zimbabwe’s total economic collapse calculated to keep the West out, as this fellow claimed? Or was the lack of fast-food outlets just one small thing that Mugabe could point out to bolster his credibility in the midst of total economic collapse, itself the unintended result of many a misguided and unfortunate policy carried out to almost no end? Rightly or wrongly, Mugabe and his supporters, like this one in front of me, were saying that as shit as the country was, Mugabe had planned it all along.

It’s sad as I think about it, but either is a possibility. And just the same, one might ask, did Mbeki intend for fast-food to be ever-present when his policies of neo-liberal economic advancement and global integration were introduced, or was all that just an unfortunate side-effect of his own greater project, this time, not cultural in its outlook, but economic, neo-liberal, and Western-oriented? Like his counterpart to the north, Mbeki, too, was driven by a historical mission that he was willing to risk all credibility in attaining.

Then again, South Africans were consumers, they made consumer choices. So what if they liked fried chicken that was terrible for them? It was their choice to buy it, wasn’t it? For Mugabe’s loyalists, it seemed, the choice was for South African’s to make, but they only made it because they had been brain-washed into believing that what mattered in their lives was how good their chicken tasted and how cheap it was, not how they paid for it with their health and their cultural livelihoods.

Though I didn’t ask, it was obvious to me that to this man, Mbeki was a Western puppet no different than the one on my tee-shirt. That made South Africans sheep who didn’t know any better. Perhaps that was why the country had been put curiously last on his list for imperial liberation in Africa.

“Some people would rather eat today than suffer today for a cause that will only materialize a thousand years into the future,” I said when he asked why anyone would vote for Tsvangirai.

“That is one thing that we have gotten over in Zimbabwe. We don’t think of today; we only think of the future. If people starve today so that we are free in the future it is alright. It may take 500 decades but by then it won’t matter to us. We will be free of foreign interference.”

His vision knew no temporal limitations. As long as it would take, he said, Zimbabwe would be free of foreign interference. I pushed him repeatedly to explain what this interference was all about. Was it the last whites in the country, the few, so stubborn they wouldn’t even go to Zambia just a few hours north despite their promises of huge tax breaks and a fast track to citizenship? Were they the real problem? Or the foreign corporations, the scarce handful that still had any semblance of a presence in the country? Were they the ones to blame? Surely it would take less than 20,000 years to rid the country of those, especially if Mugabe were to be reelected this time round.

Maybe the guy was getting at something more abstract.

“You study development? And what is development? How can you say something is developed or not? Really?” the guy said. He gestured towards an unattractive cement-block dorm behind us. “Is this development? I told you already, we don’t need your burgers; we don’t need McDonalds. So what is ‘development’?”
I was getting impatient. “I don’t need to defend myself to you, just for wearing a fucking tee-shirt of a guy that you don’t like.”
“It’s not to defend, it’s just to define. So do this: define development. You study it; you should know. Now what is development?” he prodded, provoking my sensibility, challenging it to confess an idea that was unmistakably ‘imperialist’ in its origin.
“Development is when people can feed themselves; people are free to do and say what they want; people are healthy; people are fed; people have clean water; they are happy; they are educated until twelfth grade and can be educated more after that if they would like; they are free to live in their own country as they do not fear that the state will take them away in their sleep for not liking its official opinions. Most of all, it means people are satisfied with their lives, their societies, their communities, which can mean all of those things together and much more. That is what development is.” And by conventional standards, it was why Zimbabwe was rapidly losing its developmental status in the eyes of the world, and its own people.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Well, as you pointed out before, there are many different ways to interpret ‘development.’ So we would disagree there. What we want in Zim is to have our country for its own people, not the others who came here from far away. They will go back to where they came from! And our country will be ruled by a black man. That is all we want.”
“And this is not a black man?” I pointed to the face on my tee shirt. It was proof positive that the leading opposition candidate was himself a black man, an African, in fact, born and raised in Zimbabwe.
“He is a coconut. He is nothing to us. If he were here now, I would kill him myself, with two hundred knives. No! I would cut off his head and send it to Bush or Brown, one of these people, where it belongs.”

The more time I spent looking at him, the more I noticed the scars on the sides of his face. They must have come from shards of glass, as if he had thrust his entire head through a glass cabinet or a window or something some years back – they were too small and two shallow for a knife to have made. He was slightly shorter than me, but his arms and his barreling chest, encased in a tight grey zip-up shirt added to his presence. His head was shaved, which again, added to his presence. As he stood there, talking about how if Tsvangirai were to come to him he would “do it” himself. 240 years in jail, he said. If that were the time he had to do to kill this man in the way that he saw appropriate, he would do it gladly. His references for lengths of time were ridiculous, all over the map without any consistency except in they were huge. It was hard to take his numerical predictions seriously. But looking at him, I wondered quietly if he had killed anyone before.

White Zimbabwean farmers always have the same story about how they got forced out of the country: “waves of attacks,” as Joan had put it, reflecting on her own experience. Young guys with AK-47s marching onto the land, unafraid to shoot or to be shot at. Outnumbered and without a friend in office to appeal to, there’s really no way to argue with that: either you leave with the promise that you’ll come back and take what’s yours when the time is right or you just leave. By death or by will, you just leave.

We parted ways as he said he had a book for me to read “to open some spaces in my brain.” The whole conversation reeked of my ignorance of the region and his lofty sense of justice, perhaps justified in part by the former. I was sorry to be seen with him. After all of it he had come off as the victor, even if it would take 20,000 years to prove.

Towards the end of our talk another Zimbabwean came out of the woodwork to update us both. “They say Mugabe is ahead now.” She said, looking straight at me.

“You see?” the guy said.

I went back to T. Willy and put on a long sleeve shirt. The final score for this Election Day was seven to two among Zimbabweans. If the election that day were just among the people I had encountered, Mugabe would have one in a landslide. There would have been no need to torture his opposition to death. Results come in tomorrow. After that, Mugabe will either announce his victory or contemplate his next move after losing. I think I’ll keep the tee-shirt; clearly it’s the most worthwhile thing I’ve bought in Africa so far.

The next day, rumors were still circulating as results were still not being released. The threat of a runoff seemed more serious, though the possibility of violence seemed less likely than before. Even if Mugabe was retaining some support, at least the process was working, and to everyone’s relief.

Still thinking about the encounter from the day before, I wandered into the TV lounge and found Tebogo there eating something.

“How was Pretoria?” I asked him plainly.
“Pretoria was good.” He paused. “I broke up with my girlfriend.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, she thought I was cheating on her. This long distance thing, it never works, Mafuto. There’s always something to complain about.” It wasn’t a surprise, and he didn’t treat it like one. There were other, more viable options now, like a Xhosa girl from the province that seemed to be expressing interest. I changed the subject.
“Tell me …”
“Eta?”
“Tell me, what do you think of this Mugabe guy?”
“I hate him with a passion in my heart.”
“You do?”
“Yes. He is greedy. He steals from his people.” It was the same line I had heard before, a slogan, almost, or a variation of one to summarize the Zimbabwean condition in a sentence or two.
“Everyone says that. But a guy yesterday told me that Africans have been starving for thousands of years, and in Zimbabwe, they can afford to starve longer if it frees them from oppression.”
“The government, they got rid of all the whites, took back the land and gave it to black people …” Black people who didn’t know how to farm to save their life. “… but you know, in Zimbabwe, if you get a farm from the government the government owns fifty percent of it. Any money you make, half goes to them. That is greedy, and these guys are rich because of it.” I thought about that. Who was this guy I had encountered? Where did he get the scars on his face? I hadn’t doubted for an instant during our talk that he was telling the truth about everything he said, about his convictions. They weren’t the convictions of just a dedicated party member or an uncompromising and arrogant supporter, the Zimbabwean equivalent of a talk radio listener, bobbing his head to anything and everything the host said, however ridiculous the logic behind it. He must have had some ties to the regime. I wondered if I would see him again. Probably I would. He wasn’t about to pass me in the hall without making a statement, certainly not in these next few days.

“Do you have the time?”
“It’s ten to two,” I said.
“I have to go meet this girl. I’ll see you around here though.” He got up and left. I sat there, and thought some more.

Eskom is fucking us 3-02

Power outages appear to be getting more widespread and more frequent now. Until this week, Howard had been spared because its location was conveniently located between two hospitals. But now Eskom, the corrupt semi-nationalized power company responsible for keeping the lights on in this country has declared that every substation in South Africa will be subject to outages three times a week up to four hours in length, without exception. This is how they make up for their mismanagement and poor planning since the end of Apartheid: by balancing out the darkness.

Yesterday we lost power for four hours, today, another four. Either time I went down to Musgrave center with a book and waited it out. ATM’s don’t work, vending machines to buy air time do not work, and the computers do not work. To get out of some dorms, residents have been required to use the emergency release on their gates as the lack of power has rendered card scanners useless. Classes are being cancelled because there are no lights; people are having to reconsider their diets as meat storage has become a potential hazard to health. There’s no telling when it will end. The simple truth is that there’s not enough power to go around. New stations will have to be built and that is taking longer than anyone wants it to.

The girl from UCSC who was raped last semester, causing UCSC to end its program here entirely was assaulted while caught in the shower during a power outage. Eskom neatly calls it “load sharing” when they cut the power to make sure there’s enough for that week to go around. At this stage, we all share the burden of powerlessness, and the risk and inconvenience it brings. South Africa is beginning to look more and more like its cousins to the north as the year goes on. But maybe it’s been there all along.

Still Mugabe 4-4

By the end of today, there were still no official results in on the Zimbabwean presidential election, but by all accounts, Tsvangirai had won, and his Movement for Democratic Change had taken the lion’s share in the country’s legislative bodies. Rumors abounded about what Mugabe was doing, or what his closer allies were plotting. One spokesman had told the Guardian that a Tsvangirai victory would be considered a coup de état. “And we all know how coups are dealt with,” he said. Still there was uncertainty, but in the evening I thought I’d take out my shirt again to see what kind of reaction I got.

I went to Zola’s room to see who was there and to get back a mug that I had left there. To my astonishment, next to KB, an old face was standing, smiley as ever and just as friendly as before.

“You!” he said, pointing a finger straight at my shirt, almost as if he was addressing the picture on it and not me. “You and this one! This traitor!” he smiled. I didn’t feel the same threatening sensation as before, when he and I had walked around campus and he prodded me to doubt or challenge his conviction.

“You know they say he’s won,” I said.
“Sure, and we’ll kill him afterwards.” They were looking through photos of Zola’s party on his desktop. A few of me showed up among the rest, holding a beer or chatting with people. “See, now we can blackmail you,” he said, pointing at the screen. “You wear that shirt and we can blackmail you. We will send an email to the whole campus.”
I thought about that, and dictated what such an email might sound like: “Riots in Pietermaritzburg, four students injured after police open fire into a crowd, but check out these photos of Alex Park!” They shout out a vivacious laugh and continued sorting the images.
“Alex, do you have USB?” KB asked.
“I don’t. You know, we should do this again. Zola, have another birthday, next weekend. I’m doing nothing then.” They laughed again. I looked over to the Zimbabwean who was standing and still looking at the photos, muttering things in the spaces in our conversation about Tsvangirai. He could barely stand to be in the same room as a tee shirt of the man, which was maybe why he was looking away from it.
“This guy is a very big Mugabe supporter,” KB, the Zulu said. He was stating the obvious, like saying he was a student, or had a shaved head. I couldn’t look at him and not think of Mugabe, of the election, of our talk before, so I thought I’d ask him something that had been on my mind from before.
“Were you in a youth gang?” I looked straight at him and for a moment he turned his head from the screen.
“A what?”
“A gang, one of Mugabe’s gangs.”
“Do you know the Green Bombers?” he asked.
“No.” Just like before, I felt ignorant at exactly the wrong time. He looked back at the screen.
“It’s a group. They go to the white farms and make people get off the land with force sometimes.” Mugabe’s land redistribution program began in 2000. The more I get into this decade, the more I realize that the nineties were, historically speaking, such an insignificant period of my life, as the real events that would define my time – 9/11, global warming, the Bush years – only came or were only realized afterwards. Perhaps it was the same for him. For Mugabe, the nineties were a time of failed compromise and stalled efforts at economic equalization. He ushered in the decade and the century that followed by challenging incremental progress, promising to give back land to those it had originally belonged to. The youth, in all their exuberance and fearlessness were enlisted in gangs to go from farm to farm and force the whites off in the lame of Zimbabwe so that it could be redistributed back to veterans of the Zimbabwean Civil War who had fought on the nation’s behalf. Just because one was a war veteran didn’t mean they knew how to farm, of course. But they would learn, somehow. So began Mugabe’s great historical project, like Pol Pot’s going back to Year Zero some thirty years before.
“So were you in this group?”
“Hmm?”
“The Green Bombers, were you one of them?” He muttered something. “What was that?” I asked.
“I was a commander.” His seriousness was evident in the dryness if nothing else. There was a lofty element to everything he said, speaking about a mission that might take “20,000 years” or “500 decades” to realize – absurd numbers. But as I suspected, there was also a bread and butter to it all. The mission was first a job, and he had been part of that job. He held out his hands, holding an imaginary map and a small band of others standing around looking at it. “I worked with some other people, and we said today we will go here, or go there,” he said gesturing. “We will go to this farm or that one, and we went there and we told them to get off, and when they didn’t we made them leave.” As he said that, a subtle change occurred in his gesture, as he dropped his right hand a few inches below his left keeping the distance between the two, raised his shoulder an inch, twisted his wrists just slightly and just held the package there for me to see. For no more than a second, his imaginary map became a gun, and then his hands returned to their sides. He kept looking at the screen.
“This is a good photo, right here,” KB said looking at a panorama of the scene with at least twenty people in the shot, all of them holding drinks. It must have been at the height of the party, after I had left already.
…

A minute later Zola was kicking us out since he had to do a couple of things outside the room. We stepped outside and with nothing to distract him, the guy stared at my shirt intently, coming back to his original point, perhaps the only thought in his head worth holding throughout.

He put a finger square on my chest and drew a line down the middle of Morgan Tsvangirai’s smiling face. “We will cut his head off, then split it down the middle, like this,” he said. “Half to Blair,” he flicked to the left, “half to Bush, to put on his White House desk, where it belongs. The body we will burn and the ashes we’ll throw in the ocean.”
“There’s no ocean in Zimbabwe,” I said, trying not to be smart but just to match his half-joking demeanor. He balked, looking up for the first time, maintaining his grin. Of course he knew that. “Then we’ll dump it in the Limpopo River.”

A day later, I found myself in Zola’s room once more. After my ID card had been stolen, the replacement hadn’t been configured for my Res, T. Willy, and trying to get the problem fixed had led me threw bureaucratic whirlwind that ended exactly when the load sharing began, making it impossible to get it fixed at all. I needed someone to let me out.

“Alextino!” KB said. He seemed to be perpetually in Zola’s room, using his computer more than its owner. At the moment, he, Zola and one other were in the kitchen, making chicken. “Do you want a piece?” he asked. After they insisted, I accepted. We talked for a little bit and I forgot where I was trying to get to. The mood was light. It was a Friday night. Things were looking up, if only for that reason. I turned to Zola, the calmest, most collected of the three: an electrical engineering major, working on a masters degree and considering going for a Ph. D in Sweden.

“Zola,” I said. “This guy, this guy from Zimbabwe. The Mugabe guy.”
“Who? Dumzala?” he asked. I wrestled with the name until I could cut past his accent and say it right for myself. It sounded fierce, though comical as well, unsure of itself – a fitting name for a teenage militia commander.
“What do you know about him?” I asked. He dipped his piece of chicken in some sweet and sour sauce and finished chewing.
“You know he’s from here.”
“From here?”
“Born in Durban. He’s not from Zimbabwe.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “He said he was in gang, that he went back there to vote.”
“He’s pulling your leg. But it is true, he does really believe in Mugabe.” I recalled seeing him talk with KB in some indigenous language, though none to my knowledge bridged the two countries. I asked him about that.
“I didn’t think you spoke Shona,” I said, referring to the language of Mugabe’s constituent ethnic group.
“I don’t, but most Zimbabwe’s speak Zulu anyway,” he said. Now I was even more confused, but there wasn’t much else to talk about. Was the guy just completely full of shit? I couldn’t know, and he wasn’t there to ask. Truthfully, I didn’t want to ask him. Either option could have been believable. I knew for a fact that there were Zimbabwean’s on this campus, and Mugabe supporters at that, a fact made glaringly clear to me walking around campus the first day back with my shirt espousing support for “the People’s President,” Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s arch nemesis.

Maybe the Green Bombers was just a fantasy for this guy, I thought. But he had said it out loud, in front of KB and Zola, to me, and something in his eyes said to me, at the very least, that I shouldn’t doubt his sincerity, just like when he said that if Tsvangirai were here, in front of us, he would kill the man himself.

“We’re going to DUT,” the Durban University of Technology, Dumie said. “There’s a party there. Come with us.” It sounded like an admirable idea: off campus, with new friends. They had a car, as well, which made things easier. Questions would wait for another day.

A brush with Macalester 4-10

I drifted around the fourth floor of the library today, in the African section. Extensive, but not nearly as much as you would expect for “the premier university of African scholarship.” One should wonder what the collection looked like three years ago before they grouped the five campuses that now make the University together and most of the Westville social science and humanities collections were consolidated into Howard’s, or what those collections look like at Westville now.

I noticed an inch thick black volume – a familiar looking title with a familiar name on it: Socialist Somalia, by one, Ahmed I. Samatar.

But was it our Samatar? Founding dean of the Institute for Global Citizenship and the foremost scholar of the contemporary Somali experience, with his grey hair and wiry glasses, and throated Somali accent tinged with many years of experience in London? That was him now, and if anything, this was him from years before, a reclusive scholar with a bone to pick with the powers of the world. But I assumed it was him anyway. Of three books on the shelf about Somalia his name appeared on two of them.

I picked it up. “The best book on situation in Somalia currently available,” said some Africa correspondent for the BBC. On the back was a small white price tag – 8 pounds, 99 pence, it said. Inside the inscription was the first thing I noticed.

“To my father, who did not live long enough, and to my mother, who waited too long.” There was little doubt now; it was certainly him, starring me from across the page, through decades and across continents, demanding, or just exclaiming justice with every word, and all of it with more than a little tinge of morbidity.

But at that instant I didn’t care much for what he had to say about the Horn of Africa. I flipped to the acknowledgements section and read sparsely. He thanked his dissertation adviser at the University of Denver, some people at Lawrence University where he was teaching at the time, and his “beautiful soul mate,” who made “self-exile as comfortable as could be.”

I thought about the single time that I actually sat down and spoke with him, about his pet project, the 2007 International Roundtable, which I was writing a story about, back when I was a sophomore reporter for the Weekly and events coverage was my area because the editors thought it easy. It was brief, but he was happy to talk, about the “intellectual festival” that was almost all his planning. He was chirpy in that room on the top floor, under the skylights in his high back chair, one of the few times I can recall seeing him genuinely content. After I’d asked the standard regime of questions I wanted to know about how the journal he had founded was going, or about some of his other projects, but as soon as the topic switched to something besides the upcoming “festival” – a series of lectures to address the future of the UN – he politely told me that he didn’t have the time to talk any longer.

“OK, my friend, if there’s nothing else…” I think is how it ended.

I wonder what he was like at this juncture in my life. His peers must’ve always been intimidated by him, always talking in class, challenging the professors and usually getting away with it. I wonder who his mentors were. Surely they were full of praise for him, as he was not just smart but hardworking, not just chatty but a good orator as well. And yet he was from Somalia, had lived through so much. English was not his first language, and the West, not the home of his earliest experience, where childhood had been, where things made sense, if they made sense anywhere. His career must have been completely set out for him and his life … maybe it was in turmoil, wrought with the awareness that his home was a place that he could never go back to and never correct. I wonder, if he had the option, he would have traded one for the other.


World News Tonight, from two rows behind 4-18

A week ago, Mbeki was called upon by the regional consortium SADC to sort out this mess in Zimbabwe. He flew to Harare, first, the Zimbabwean capital, and then to the much anticipated meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, where I ended my Easter Vacation a few weeks ago. After a few days, meeting with other heads of state and Morgan Tsvangirai, he held a press conference, declared that there was “no crisis,” and went back to South Africa. Last night, at a seminar held in the lecture hall where I normally have my “Food and Global Political Economy” class on Fridays, a whole room full of Zimbabweans – mostly black, a few white – voiced their disagreement. They were not quite up in arms but nearly there, after two hours, as two MDC opposition leaders and one of my own professors spoke about the political, social and economic crisis in Zimbabwe today.

The political liaison to KwaZulu-Natal for the MDC was the first to speak.

“Let me be clear, there is a ruling party in Zimbabwe today, and that is the MDC. Zanu-PF and Mugabe are its largest opposition, but they are the opposition.” The crowd applauded loudly.

Two days after I had left Zimbabwe, the election happened. Despite all their efforts to rig it, Mugabe and Zanu-PF lost decisively by every account but their own. Since then, more than two weeks later, they have illegally withheld the results to the outrage of the MDC and Zimbabweans everywhere. SADC was called in to resolve the dispute and ensure that the situation doesn’t become like Kenya. Two weeks in, there are still worries that it may.

I stayed at the seminar for two and a half hours, one of the last people to remain. I had a question for the speakers that I sincerely wanted answered and that was realistically the only reason why I stayed. I raised my hand but missed the first round of questions, so I slipped myself into the second.

“The issue of Presidential Scholarships from Zimbabwe was raised earlier, but I’m wondering, if there’s no secret that these scholarships are only issued by cronyism and political connections to the regime, why this university continues to accept them without question?” Some people nodded in agreement.

But the most damming thing I heard came a moment later, from a gruff looking man wearing a blue MDC shirt sitting two rows behind me, perhaps an official from the party in South Africa. He said that just last night he had been called to the port to check out a suspicious looking cargo container bound for Zimbabwe. The container had just come from China. Its cargo manifest said it was carrying jeans. But a look inside revealed boxes upon boxes of weapons instead.

“I don’t know what the regime is preparing for,” he said in a voice that filled the massive room, “but they are preparing for something. How can one say this is not a crisis? How can the government of this country allow for such things to pass through its hands?”

They had called the police immediately that night. But this morning, he told us, reading the Daily Mail, it was revealed that the container had been sent to Zimbabwe. Fears of Zimbabwe becoming Kenya suddenly became more real for the two dozen people still left there. This morning, the same story made the front page of the UK Guardian, complete with the South African government’s side of the story.

“If the manifest is in order, there is nothing we can do,” a port official said. This, despite the fact the UN has placed an embargo on Zimbabwe.

The Guardian story also mentioned that the port workers, many, though not all of them probably from Zimbabwe, with family still in Zimbabwe, had refused to process the container. They had been ordered to do it anyway, lest they lose their jobs and be sent back to their home country along with that container.

I thought of that man in the blue shirt, standing among compatriots, Congolese, Mozambicans, and South Africans, all of them politically conscious and working class, working the late shift at the port, between the beach and the Sailing Team’s club house, in plain view of the revolving restaurant where Shanice had her birthday, all of them standing together with their gloves off to show this man what they had found. And the doors opened, and all they saw was racks of rocket launchers and assault rifles. There was no abstraction to any of it. Rumors of the malign effect of China’s influence in Africa and Mugabe’s insane commitment to hold onto power at any cost, along with the fears of the Zimbabwean Diaspora that their homeland would be turned into a crisis zone for the world to see if they didn’t already: all of it was real, and sitting inside a COSCO container like any other. Row upon row – most of them probably had cheap electronics or sandals. But this one had history in it. I couldn’t help but shudder as he told us.