Yee-hah!
At last someone has taken notice; and it’s none other than Mr Robert Kiyosaki, he of the ultimate capitalist bible, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The property tycoon and real estate mogul has sent an invitation in my name. Count me in!
This particular missive is addressed with my very own website (apparently they can do that!) and a very personal method; David, it reads, “no matter what happens….your financial crisis could come to an end”
Hallelujah!
I have become fascinated in past two years by what I can only term capitalist literature. I am currently reading Warren Buffett’s biography. And Mr Buffett makes money like he is picking leaves. He makes money as a full-time pastime – a maths genius who has constructed the ultimate money-making machine – find a company that is struggling, buy it, and build it up.
I am also reading Trump’s money making ideas and philosophies. Rambuctious and loud, bordering on the obnoxious, Donald Trump is one of my favourite guys. On a recent trip to New York I made sure to glimpse his various towers, like a pilgrim to the temple of the god Mormon, even if it was from a tour bus. It turns out that everyone in New York hates him; or maybe they are just envious of his success and can’t bring themselves to love him.
I am sure my grade 7 teacher, one Mr LT Zungunde must be shaking his head in disbelief and consternation. It was he who indoctrinated our pre-teen minds with communist nonsense. In those days we would walk to Queensway, the road leading from Harare International Airport into the city and line up to wave “revolutionary and warm greetings” to visiting heads of states – KK (Kenneth Kaunda), Mwalimu Nyerere and, Mr Zungunde’s favourite, Comrade Samora Machel. In all fairness we also went to greet Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and she sat there in her cavalcade under Zimbabwe sun, her radiating royalty in the open topped vintage Rolls Royce (the very one that takes Robert Mugabe to the official opening of parliament where he invariably rails against all things British, except the royal family).
So, the morning after Samora Machel’s death in a suspicious plane crash, Mr LT Zungunde came to class very angry and aggrieved. After a whole morning of hearing him harangue and condemn the apparent “perptrators” of this “heinous and cowardly act” which had “prematurely and tragically” ended the life of “one of Africa’s greatest revolutionary sons” we were ready to take up arms against the “apartheid regime”, South Africa. I sometimes remember those times when I see the ingratitude that South Africans show to Zimbabweans. Yes, we also fought for their freedom, even if it was in the classroom (but that is another story for another time).
Mr Sharples was Scottish and he kind of just appeared at the school one time – almost from nowhere – a gangly silver-haired white man with an easy smile. Later on we understood that he was Nasho’s “father”. He had adopted Nasho and his brothers after their father, Mr Sharples’ gardener died, and he lived with them in his own house like his own children. Mr Sharples had had his own children but he was estranged from his wife. Mt Sharples, tall and slender and with an easy toothy grin was also a keen golfer who mentored and coached Nasho Kamungeremu to the Zimbabwe Junior Open championship and beyond. In time, and for about four years, he was to be “father’ too, paying my way through secondary school in my father’s absence.
He must be chuckling in his grave, Peter Sharples, at my apparent conversion to his capitalist way of thinking. He once asked me that if everyone is equal and paid the same (like in the communist state that I was a disciple of), what would be the incentive for people to work. I didn’t understand that question but I blurted out an answer that convinced me…
Mr Sharples was a counter-poise to Mr LT Zungunde’s revolutionary zeal, and thank God for that. He probably thinks that it was all that counter-revolutionary propaganda that saved me and has me bowing at Rich Dad’s knees, but actually it’s just reality that has bitten me, and the poverty that has me beaten! A little more money never hurt anyone.
And a lot of money will probably save the world. Warren Buffett, the wealthiest self-made millionaire (nay, billionaire) in the world teamed up with Bill Gates to launch the Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince fellow billionaires to give half of their wealth away. In the US there are 403 of those super-rich persons. Already Buffett, a key funder in the Bill and Melinda Gates (BMG) Foundation, has previously said that his is to give away 99% of his wealth before he dies; he is making a difference in many ways. The Gates Foundation gives money to education, health, the arts and every aspect of life you can think of both in the US and across the developing world. The recently announced breakthrough in the anti-HIV microbicide owes it’s success in part due to funding from these philanthropists.
And this is my new ideology – no more of that comrade stuff – I now believe in philanthropic capitalism. It seems to be that the fallacy that it takes a village to the change the world, an African truism we are told, is perhaps incomplete. Rather, it takes one man, or one woman, one individual with a singular vision (and bagful of money) to save the village first before it can save the world.
So…Mr Kiyosaki, sir how can I can I be a rich papa..?
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Zimbabwe at the end of 2010
Zimbabwe’s so-called recovery is now visible on the streets of Harare. Plastic bottles and all manner of discarded packages – evidence of increased consumption, perhaps, and reduced desperation.
There was a time when there was so little that even rubbish was scarce. Also in the growing behinds of Harare’s women, jeans being the newly found fashion and the sagging bellies of the city’s gentlemen, is a tale of improved conditions. The women on the streets are mostly young, some made up, all with fashioned hair – a boon to the Korean fake hair / horse hair / human hair traders. In America, they have made their millions from the African-American women who never thought to take over that trade and keep the money in their communities (but that’s another story, and it will probably get me in trouble anyway).
The men on Harare’s streets are also dressed better than last December, when I was here last. There is a newfound bounce in their step. All in all, despite the internecine wars raging in this wildebeest (GNU) of a government, there is a quiet confidence pervading Harare and the country. We the armchair critics would have preferred not the GNU but a big bang, a tsunami to sweep away the old and usher in a new republic. But things seldom happen that way….
Seeing Zimbabweans walking with increasing levels of self-assurance (we have generally never been arrogant people), you thank God for where we are as a country; and pray for more peace; more power. Perhaps, I am tempted to think if the parties in this marriage could co-exist like all normal human beings in matrimony (holy or otherwise), coalition is not a bad thing. Look at Britain and how there is much less arguing and much more doing since David Cameron got ‘married’ to that Clegg fellow. Contrast that to Obama’s America where the partisanship is hurting the country and holding it back in many ways.
The self-assurance and confidence seem to also show up in the congestion of traffic – a metaphor perhaps to show that this country is on the move but is maybe caught up in traffic jam. The price of fuel has stabilized, the chronic shortages of 2 years ago seem distant memories. Where bicycles and pedestrians used to outnumber cars (an environmentalist’s utopia, no doubt) now cars, buses and mini-buses snake their way for miles on end during peak periods. A journey from the North to the Eastern suburbs took me an hour and half; previously it would have been half an hour. Not that it snarls up a la Chinese highway to Tibet, but with non-functional traffic lights and limited lanes, it’s bumper to bumper. But surprisingly good-natured.
The commuter taxi drivers dive in and out of traffic like heron into a sardine run, making their own rules as they go along. They make double lanes out of singles. One morning we were suddenly driving down a cycle track on the opposite side of the main road and none of the passengers was surprised or complained. Normalizing the abnormal, I thought, Masipula Sithole’s prophecy coming to mind.
You have to feel sorry for the pedestrian in all this. There are few pedestrian crossings at traffic lights, cars turn with no regard to the pedestrian’s supreme and universal legal rights over cars. Even at the few ‘Zebra Crossings’ where pedestrians should have supreme right of way, cars zoom past with no regard to the poor-destrain. It’s as if drivers will stop only if they saw a Zebra! This is Zimbabwe, you get out of the way or you get hurt!
So, Zimbabwe is on it’s way to recovery, in it’s own clumsy, unpredictable way. Really. Perhaps. For now.
Harare will probably never be New York, or London or Cape Town. It will certainly not be the city we knew growing up in the 1980s and which we all hoped and dreamt would grow up into a Geneva or an Amsterdam. It is Harare, and will always be. A vibrant African city, capital of a mediocre to average African country, post-colonial, post-conflict, struggling to go from bad to average and then perhaps, to good. (No “good to great” here Mr Collins).
And as long as political rivalries remain out of sight, all will be OK. For now. Maybe. It could all go up in flames with the heated talk of an election. And in the greater scheme of things, the world wouldn’t care a hoot.
null
nullnull
There was a time when there was so little that even rubbish was scarce. Also in the growing behinds of Harare’s women, jeans being the newly found fashion and the sagging bellies of the city’s gentlemen, is a tale of improved conditions. The women on the streets are mostly young, some made up, all with fashioned hair – a boon to the Korean fake hair / horse hair / human hair traders. In America, they have made their millions from the African-American women who never thought to take over that trade and keep the money in their communities (but that’s another story, and it will probably get me in trouble anyway).
The men on Harare’s streets are also dressed better than last December, when I was here last. There is a newfound bounce in their step. All in all, despite the internecine wars raging in this wildebeest (GNU) of a government, there is a quiet confidence pervading Harare and the country. We the armchair critics would have preferred not the GNU but a big bang, a tsunami to sweep away the old and usher in a new republic. But things seldom happen that way….
Seeing Zimbabweans walking with increasing levels of self-assurance (we have generally never been arrogant people), you thank God for where we are as a country; and pray for more peace; more power. Perhaps, I am tempted to think if the parties in this marriage could co-exist like all normal human beings in matrimony (holy or otherwise), coalition is not a bad thing. Look at Britain and how there is much less arguing and much more doing since David Cameron got ‘married’ to that Clegg fellow. Contrast that to Obama’s America where the partisanship is hurting the country and holding it back in many ways.
The self-assurance and confidence seem to also show up in the congestion of traffic – a metaphor perhaps to show that this country is on the move but is maybe caught up in traffic jam. The price of fuel has stabilized, the chronic shortages of 2 years ago seem distant memories. Where bicycles and pedestrians used to outnumber cars (an environmentalist’s utopia, no doubt) now cars, buses and mini-buses snake their way for miles on end during peak periods. A journey from the North to the Eastern suburbs took me an hour and half; previously it would have been half an hour. Not that it snarls up a la Chinese highway to Tibet, but with non-functional traffic lights and limited lanes, it’s bumper to bumper. But surprisingly good-natured.
The commuter taxi drivers dive in and out of traffic like heron into a sardine run, making their own rules as they go along. They make double lanes out of singles. One morning we were suddenly driving down a cycle track on the opposite side of the main road and none of the passengers was surprised or complained. Normalizing the abnormal, I thought, Masipula Sithole’s prophecy coming to mind.
You have to feel sorry for the pedestrian in all this. There are few pedestrian crossings at traffic lights, cars turn with no regard to the pedestrian’s supreme and universal legal rights over cars. Even at the few ‘Zebra Crossings’ where pedestrians should have supreme right of way, cars zoom past with no regard to the poor-destrain. It’s as if drivers will stop only if they saw a Zebra! This is Zimbabwe, you get out of the way or you get hurt!
So, Zimbabwe is on it’s way to recovery, in it’s own clumsy, unpredictable way. Really. Perhaps. For now.
Harare will probably never be New York, or London or Cape Town. It will certainly not be the city we knew growing up in the 1980s and which we all hoped and dreamt would grow up into a Geneva or an Amsterdam. It is Harare, and will always be. A vibrant African city, capital of a mediocre to average African country, post-colonial, post-conflict, struggling to go from bad to average and then perhaps, to good. (No “good to great” here Mr Collins).
And as long as political rivalries remain out of sight, all will be OK. For now. Maybe. It could all go up in flames with the heated talk of an election. And in the greater scheme of things, the world wouldn’t care a hoot.
null
nullnull
Monday, November 1, 2010
Of longing….written in 2005
Deep down in him, when all that acquired sophistry and urbanity is taken away, my father is a peasant. Like his father before him.
I spoke to him to-day. He was visiting Nyanga town to refill his medical prescription and he sounded happy as a boy let lose in a sweet shop. I could imagine the crystal clear air after the rains yesterday (the beginning of the rainy season) and the wispy clouds cascading up the mountains as they gather for another storm, the red loamy soils bursting with nutrition and waiting anxiously to receive seed.
And there he was, liberated in every sense as I asked him how his new life was going. In my mind it must be boring, albeit relaxing to be in the village waiting for the rains to fall and to start the job of preparing the fields, planting, weeding, harvesting and coming full circle to waiting again – all the time praying to the gods that the rains will fall starting at the right time, for the right amount of time and in just the right amounts. A peasant’s life hangs so much on the natural elements, on the many facets outside one’s controls it is no wonder that they have so many gods and ancestors to appease and pacify.
For my mother, newly arrived from the city, it must be even tougher. Because the great amount of work falls on her shoulders. Women and children are the driving engine of the peasant economy, while the men are away drinking or, my father’s case a teetotal for life, “organising” one thing or another. He is the great organiser with an endless list of tasks to be performed while he watches over. He is very busy, he tells me in response to my enquiries. He has had to “organise” the building of the outhouse to serve as a granary and the cattle kraal (for which purpose I am not quite clear because as far as I am aware, they do not own any cattle). But then maybe he has or is organising a herd.
And his truck (which was a retirement gift from us his children), is it on the road? Apparently not. And not for lack of money. It would appear that the fuel stations do not think they will have supplies for the next three months. More probably 6 months or 9 or 18, or however long it is going to take to get some sanity back on the sinking ship of sovereign Zimbabwe. But that is another story, the sinking ship with Captain Bob shouting, “Ahoy! Full steam ahead”!
My father is not alone in trying to go back to a romantic past of the peasant life of his youth. My mother is his willing partner and accomplice. Men and women who were professionals in the narrow and limited sense that colonial Rhodesia allowed them – teachers, nurses, police officers – who became the new urbanites in 1980 and bought houses in the former white areas (the low density suburbs as they became known; but how population density gradually increased as the economy started sliding and owners were forced to let out spare rooms and garden cottages) and brought us up going to former white schools and speaking with clipped BBC accents or pseudo-American drawl. They achieved much more than their fathers had done in the leap from peasants to professionals, and sadly, much more than their children after them. We now languish in foreign countries driven out by Captain Bob shouting “Ahoy! Land is the Economy, to hell with anybody else who thinks differently!”
So our parent’s generation in the early years of Independence had access to jobs that paid living wages, good health care and they could dream of a better future with their children looking after them in their old age. They didn’t reckon with the revolution becoming sour and driving many out of the country nor with the grim reaper of HIV/ AIDS which has reversed all these gains and turned them into carers.
Despite being urbanised they maintained rural homes which they visited regularly as a link with their past; others bought farms they would retreat to for working holidays in the rainy season and at Christmas and Easter.
But now the boom times are over. My father and his generation have realised that the urban life is too stressful, and decided to go back to the village. For my father, it is also to live out his last days among the familiar and to be buried, when he dies, among his people – not in the lonely and crowded anonymity of Harare’s fast-dwindling cemeteries.
In all this reminiscence about my father and Zimbabwe and that generation that has opened opportunities for us, I realise that perhaps deep down in me, strip away the acquired sophistry, urbanity and the white man’s ways, is really a peasant awaiting my time to go back to the land of my father and get my hands dirty “organizing” things on the village plot.
Post-script – Nov 2010.
I too am a peasant at heart and will live out my days in the village, and the red earth beneath my feet will become my resting place…
I spoke to him to-day. He was visiting Nyanga town to refill his medical prescription and he sounded happy as a boy let lose in a sweet shop. I could imagine the crystal clear air after the rains yesterday (the beginning of the rainy season) and the wispy clouds cascading up the mountains as they gather for another storm, the red loamy soils bursting with nutrition and waiting anxiously to receive seed.
And there he was, liberated in every sense as I asked him how his new life was going. In my mind it must be boring, albeit relaxing to be in the village waiting for the rains to fall and to start the job of preparing the fields, planting, weeding, harvesting and coming full circle to waiting again – all the time praying to the gods that the rains will fall starting at the right time, for the right amount of time and in just the right amounts. A peasant’s life hangs so much on the natural elements, on the many facets outside one’s controls it is no wonder that they have so many gods and ancestors to appease and pacify.
For my mother, newly arrived from the city, it must be even tougher. Because the great amount of work falls on her shoulders. Women and children are the driving engine of the peasant economy, while the men are away drinking or, my father’s case a teetotal for life, “organising” one thing or another. He is the great organiser with an endless list of tasks to be performed while he watches over. He is very busy, he tells me in response to my enquiries. He has had to “organise” the building of the outhouse to serve as a granary and the cattle kraal (for which purpose I am not quite clear because as far as I am aware, they do not own any cattle). But then maybe he has or is organising a herd.
And his truck (which was a retirement gift from us his children), is it on the road? Apparently not. And not for lack of money. It would appear that the fuel stations do not think they will have supplies for the next three months. More probably 6 months or 9 or 18, or however long it is going to take to get some sanity back on the sinking ship of sovereign Zimbabwe. But that is another story, the sinking ship with Captain Bob shouting, “Ahoy! Full steam ahead”!
My father is not alone in trying to go back to a romantic past of the peasant life of his youth. My mother is his willing partner and accomplice. Men and women who were professionals in the narrow and limited sense that colonial Rhodesia allowed them – teachers, nurses, police officers – who became the new urbanites in 1980 and bought houses in the former white areas (the low density suburbs as they became known; but how population density gradually increased as the economy started sliding and owners were forced to let out spare rooms and garden cottages) and brought us up going to former white schools and speaking with clipped BBC accents or pseudo-American drawl. They achieved much more than their fathers had done in the leap from peasants to professionals, and sadly, much more than their children after them. We now languish in foreign countries driven out by Captain Bob shouting “Ahoy! Land is the Economy, to hell with anybody else who thinks differently!”
So our parent’s generation in the early years of Independence had access to jobs that paid living wages, good health care and they could dream of a better future with their children looking after them in their old age. They didn’t reckon with the revolution becoming sour and driving many out of the country nor with the grim reaper of HIV/ AIDS which has reversed all these gains and turned them into carers.
Despite being urbanised they maintained rural homes which they visited regularly as a link with their past; others bought farms they would retreat to for working holidays in the rainy season and at Christmas and Easter.
But now the boom times are over. My father and his generation have realised that the urban life is too stressful, and decided to go back to the village. For my father, it is also to live out his last days among the familiar and to be buried, when he dies, among his people – not in the lonely and crowded anonymity of Harare’s fast-dwindling cemeteries.
In all this reminiscence about my father and Zimbabwe and that generation that has opened opportunities for us, I realise that perhaps deep down in me, strip away the acquired sophistry, urbanity and the white man’s ways, is really a peasant awaiting my time to go back to the land of my father and get my hands dirty “organizing” things on the village plot.
Post-script – Nov 2010.
I too am a peasant at heart and will live out my days in the village, and the red earth beneath my feet will become my resting place…
Friday, October 29, 2010
I am just outside Washington, and to-morrow, discounting any mishaps, I will be reunited with the wife and Paida and The Boy. I didn’t think I would miss them this much but I have been half the man I am without them, uncertain and emotional sometimes, lonely and angry even, bewildered and lost at other times.
The drive up from North Carolina was uneventful, almost five hours but it was smooth , no traffic congestion; a stretch of torrential rain with reduced visibility was the biggest challenge. That plus the constant fear of passing these huge articulated trucks, they are called semis here. In Zimbabwe the moniker “gonyet” is much more suited to these behemoths of metal which are more like caterpillars in length and manoevrability. And in Zimbabwe they account for high fatalities on the road. Here too apparently. I have seem nay of them barrel down the highway at 120 km / h (70 miles / h), the legal speed limit of a normal car. They seem to have no restriction of maximum speed here and so they overtake at will, compete with little cars, tailgating sometimes like caterpillars on steroids.
The road is wide but bumpy, pock-marked, corrugated. I have travelled better roads in South Africa and Botswana. But again it is the road infrastructure, the different place names one encounters on this trip which points to two things – America is no longer Newfoundland; it is now an old country and with the insatiable love of the motor vehicle it is easy to see why the roads are in such a state. A million cars and more move up and down these roads everyday – big trucks carrying small cars, goods etc, smaller trucks moving furniture, mini-vans (what we call commuter buses / taxis) carrying families, big buses, small cars, motorcycles….any road carrying such tones of weight would buckle too.
From the names and monuments, the history of this country is laid bare. For it was here in Virginia that the northern Federal armies and the breakaway Southern confederates fought fierce battles in defence of their beliefs and ideologies. The South was defending it’s independent statehood and with that the right to maintain slavery.
The Potomac River on which the modern city of Washington is built and which winds through Fredericksburg flowed with the blood of young men sent to battle for matters that could have been best negotiated over a cup of tea. As I once again reflected on the tragedy of those times, I think of the continuing tragedies of this time…300 years later. And the words of Wilfred Owen come to me….
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
--- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
The drive up from North Carolina was uneventful, almost five hours but it was smooth , no traffic congestion; a stretch of torrential rain with reduced visibility was the biggest challenge. That plus the constant fear of passing these huge articulated trucks, they are called semis here. In Zimbabwe the moniker “gonyet” is much more suited to these behemoths of metal which are more like caterpillars in length and manoevrability. And in Zimbabwe they account for high fatalities on the road. Here too apparently. I have seem nay of them barrel down the highway at 120 km / h (70 miles / h), the legal speed limit of a normal car. They seem to have no restriction of maximum speed here and so they overtake at will, compete with little cars, tailgating sometimes like caterpillars on steroids.
The road is wide but bumpy, pock-marked, corrugated. I have travelled better roads in South Africa and Botswana. But again it is the road infrastructure, the different place names one encounters on this trip which points to two things – America is no longer Newfoundland; it is now an old country and with the insatiable love of the motor vehicle it is easy to see why the roads are in such a state. A million cars and more move up and down these roads everyday – big trucks carrying small cars, goods etc, smaller trucks moving furniture, mini-vans (what we call commuter buses / taxis) carrying families, big buses, small cars, motorcycles….any road carrying such tones of weight would buckle too.
From the names and monuments, the history of this country is laid bare. For it was here in Virginia that the northern Federal armies and the breakaway Southern confederates fought fierce battles in defence of their beliefs and ideologies. The South was defending it’s independent statehood and with that the right to maintain slavery.
The Potomac River on which the modern city of Washington is built and which winds through Fredericksburg flowed with the blood of young men sent to battle for matters that could have been best negotiated over a cup of tea. As I once again reflected on the tragedy of those times, I think of the continuing tragedies of this time…300 years later. And the words of Wilfred Owen come to me….
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
--- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Midnight Plane to Georgia
I have Georgia on my mind…
I am to report to Emory, Atlanta and then I will be on my way. Georgia invokes songstress Glady’s Knight’s ode to a lover gone back South in a midnight train. That song was played to death on Radio 3’s vintage afternoons back in the 1980’s, and I was captivated by it, a boy of 13 and knowing nothing at all about love. In more recent times, I hear Ray Charles crooning…
Georgia, Georgia,
The whole day through
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind
But whether what’s on Ray’s mind is the deep south State of the United States which has seen it’s fair share of human (or perhaps inhuman) suffering, or maybe another lover gone away, I am not sure. But I am headed out there.
I board the flight from Washington Dulles, having arrived that morning from Cape Town. I sit next to a gentleman from Florida and soon we are engaged in pleasantries and a conversation. He tells me that he is in the military and has served with Africom in Kenya and the Congo. Africom is the US African Command Centre which Robert Mugabe has railed against in the past because it was to relocate to Botswana and was seen as part of the regime change moves by the Americans back in 2007. Then we talk about Africa and other things of no consequence.
The flight is going well enough when we are told that there is a storm coming in from Atlanta and that there will be a delay. A few minutes later the captain informs we will have to land at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina and wait for the seemingly vicious storm to pass. Raleigh ironically will be my final destination but I have to report to my hosts first. We disembark and it soon becomes apparent that we may be there indefinitely. I am exhausted, now clocking over 24 hours since departing South Africa. I pace up and down, restless to get to my destination and a warm meal, a bath and a bed.
I sit down in the departure lounge and strike up a conversation. He is a young man, a boy actually, chubby and his skin is more orange than black. His eyes are a strange blue-green, a testimony to the diversity in his cultural gene pool. In America, black is less a racial hegemony and more a state of mind, perhaps. Obama has recently called the black race in America, a “mongrel race”, all shades of chocolate if you like – from shiny ebony black (count me there!) to dark all the way to light brown, caramel and almost white. Here be more colours to black than black!
The young man tells me that he is in the army, and I am taken aback. He has done the rotation to Afghanistan and will be back there later on in the year. I look at him, there tapping on his laptop and fiddling with is iphone, a normal young man not much unlike others ambling around pants drooping here in this airport. His gentle mien belies the things he has seen and done out there in the war fields. He is but a boy, 22 years of age with a girlfriend waiting at the airport for him to drive him home to his mother.
Are you not afraid when you are out there, I ask.
He shrugs the question off, and I feel awkward asking him something so personal. But I know he must shake in his boots when he is in Taliban country fighting a war he probably doesn’t understand or care too much about. But it’s the military code and bravado which keep him from answering. It’s a job with a high premium being in the American military.
As the year unfolds and I get more and more immersed in American society, I am hit by the staggering realization that this is in fact a country at war; and it has been at war for every decade since World War Two, having been bombed out of isolationism by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Young men and women, many of then still unable to legally smoke, drink or drive, are sent to war where and given the licence to kill and / or die for America. I think there is a song about that from some anti-war pacifist rocker, but maybe I am wrong; perhaps there ought to be one.
As of July 2010, 4500 Americans have been killed in Iraq and 1200 in Afghanistan. Lest we forget, the number of civilian casualties in both wars is well over 1 million lives. Whatever the justification of the wars, the bloodletting goes on everyday and not one week passes without a reminder to the tragedy of war. On Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) news television (aka American ZBC but without the “Comrade X urged…” or sycophancy) once a week they have a silent memorial to the dead soldiers. Every one of them gets a final 15 seconds of fame with their photos, age and city of origin panned across the TV screen. They are mostly young men touching 20 or 21, white, Hispanic and black, and in their photos they are appear relaxed, clean cut and professionally attired in well-starched uniforms, a flag in the background – a picture of true patriotism.
Sometimes in that sad silence of flashing photographs of the dead, I think about that chubby, polite young man, blue-green eyes and near orange skin tone and I wonder if he is not this one or that one on the nightly newscast. Then I pray for his safety, because he is just a boy in the killing fields – a grist to the mill of war.
I am to report to Emory, Atlanta and then I will be on my way. Georgia invokes songstress Glady’s Knight’s ode to a lover gone back South in a midnight train. That song was played to death on Radio 3’s vintage afternoons back in the 1980’s, and I was captivated by it, a boy of 13 and knowing nothing at all about love. In more recent times, I hear Ray Charles crooning…
Georgia, Georgia,
The whole day through
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind
But whether what’s on Ray’s mind is the deep south State of the United States which has seen it’s fair share of human (or perhaps inhuman) suffering, or maybe another lover gone away, I am not sure. But I am headed out there.
I board the flight from Washington Dulles, having arrived that morning from Cape Town. I sit next to a gentleman from Florida and soon we are engaged in pleasantries and a conversation. He tells me that he is in the military and has served with Africom in Kenya and the Congo. Africom is the US African Command Centre which Robert Mugabe has railed against in the past because it was to relocate to Botswana and was seen as part of the regime change moves by the Americans back in 2007. Then we talk about Africa and other things of no consequence.
The flight is going well enough when we are told that there is a storm coming in from Atlanta and that there will be a delay. A few minutes later the captain informs we will have to land at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina and wait for the seemingly vicious storm to pass. Raleigh ironically will be my final destination but I have to report to my hosts first. We disembark and it soon becomes apparent that we may be there indefinitely. I am exhausted, now clocking over 24 hours since departing South Africa. I pace up and down, restless to get to my destination and a warm meal, a bath and a bed.
I sit down in the departure lounge and strike up a conversation. He is a young man, a boy actually, chubby and his skin is more orange than black. His eyes are a strange blue-green, a testimony to the diversity in his cultural gene pool. In America, black is less a racial hegemony and more a state of mind, perhaps. Obama has recently called the black race in America, a “mongrel race”, all shades of chocolate if you like – from shiny ebony black (count me there!) to dark all the way to light brown, caramel and almost white. Here be more colours to black than black!
The young man tells me that he is in the army, and I am taken aback. He has done the rotation to Afghanistan and will be back there later on in the year. I look at him, there tapping on his laptop and fiddling with is iphone, a normal young man not much unlike others ambling around pants drooping here in this airport. His gentle mien belies the things he has seen and done out there in the war fields. He is but a boy, 22 years of age with a girlfriend waiting at the airport for him to drive him home to his mother.
Are you not afraid when you are out there, I ask.
He shrugs the question off, and I feel awkward asking him something so personal. But I know he must shake in his boots when he is in Taliban country fighting a war he probably doesn’t understand or care too much about. But it’s the military code and bravado which keep him from answering. It’s a job with a high premium being in the American military.
As the year unfolds and I get more and more immersed in American society, I am hit by the staggering realization that this is in fact a country at war; and it has been at war for every decade since World War Two, having been bombed out of isolationism by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Young men and women, many of then still unable to legally smoke, drink or drive, are sent to war where and given the licence to kill and / or die for America. I think there is a song about that from some anti-war pacifist rocker, but maybe I am wrong; perhaps there ought to be one.
As of July 2010, 4500 Americans have been killed in Iraq and 1200 in Afghanistan. Lest we forget, the number of civilian casualties in both wars is well over 1 million lives. Whatever the justification of the wars, the bloodletting goes on everyday and not one week passes without a reminder to the tragedy of war. On Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) news television (aka American ZBC but without the “Comrade X urged…” or sycophancy) once a week they have a silent memorial to the dead soldiers. Every one of them gets a final 15 seconds of fame with their photos, age and city of origin panned across the TV screen. They are mostly young men touching 20 or 21, white, Hispanic and black, and in their photos they are appear relaxed, clean cut and professionally attired in well-starched uniforms, a flag in the background – a picture of true patriotism.
Sometimes in that sad silence of flashing photographs of the dead, I think about that chubby, polite young man, blue-green eyes and near orange skin tone and I wonder if he is not this one or that one on the nightly newscast. Then I pray for his safety, because he is just a boy in the killing fields – a grist to the mill of war.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Coming to America...
We land in Washington on a cool Sunday morning, 6 o’clock. I saunter along to the exit of the plane – there is no real hurry because I am now familiar with what happens up at the clearing gates and I have adjusted my connecting flight schedule accordingly, or so I think.
The first time I was at Washington Dulles Airport, back in 2008, I was shocked to find that they don’t operate 24 hours a day; so we had to wait outside the gates grumbling. This time when we eventually make it to the arrivals hall, they are open and a rather long line is snaking forward slowly. My connecting flight is at noon or thereabouts so I am in no particular haste, just anxious to gain successful entry. I am anxious because, well I am black, and it’s about a month after that stupid Nigerian boy – now popular known as the Christmas Day Bomber – tried to blow himself out of the sky along with a planeload of innocent civilians. This has, of course, marked everybody with his profile for particular scrutiny. I have dutifully taken my wife’s advice and shaved off all facial hair (aka beard) to look less like a would-be terrorist, perhaps. I remember doing the same thing on a trip to the UK in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings. Growing a beard seems to be a crime in itself, it appears.
Beard or no beard, it didn’t help, I find out later…I am somewhat marked as high risk for whatever reason along with all other swarthy passengers and we are directed to room D for further screening. A case of racial profiling, I think, until I see whole families of apparently white people and women also squeezed in. I am somewhat comforted by that observation. In that room are people of the world, a young Indian couple with a young child running around with no care in the world ( a baby terrorist, perhaps), one black guy who appears to be from East Africa, many many Arab looking people and then Caucasians from God knows where. At least if I am sent back home, I won’t be alone…
Eventually my name is called by a young Japanese officer, a hyphenated American, as I call them – Japanese – American, Latino-American, Irish – American (not so obvious in a crowd perhaps), African – Americans (a rather amorphous hold all, because what do you call a white Zimbabwean who becomes an American citizen, or my friend Samanyika, newly arrived in America but now with a green card. And these people the two Zimbabweans share more together then they do with negro descendants of African slaves. But that’s a story for another time perhaps). The long and short of it is that all Americans are now hyphenated and lately the right-wing conservatives have been bandying around the moniker European-Americans, in opposition to Obama’s cosmopolitanism. This group believes that they are the true Americans (never mind the fact that these lands really belong to the “red” Indians who are now largely confined to the reserves and slowly being wiped out by alcohol and social dislocation. On a previous occasion I met a young Native American who was reading a book about the “journey of tears” which isan account of the driving out of Native Americans from their ancestral homes to the reservations and the disease and conditions which nearly led to their extinction as a people. In fact some of the smaller nations disappeared altogether).
Back to the Japanese-American officer. He represents the beauty of America i.e. you are American even if you are a mafikizolo (Johnny come-lately). Can you imagine being an African – British; nay, on the forms that I used to fill in all my time in the UK I had to tick the race box; a selection from white, Irish (as if that is not white), African Caribbean, African, Indian…or other! Or for that matter, can my son who is a South African citizen call himself a Zimbabwe – South African since he does not fit into any other category. Sadly, he will always be “that foreigner” despite having the same life and possibly cultural narrative as the child who was born in the next bed in Bellville clinic, Cape Town. So in that respect I would want to be American; Zimbabwean-American to be precise knowing fully well that I will be accepted as I am.
But I detract… The Japanese-American officer asks me the questions I was asked in Cape Town and earlier that morning at the gate. I give him the answers without embellishment. My sister Tendo always said that you should just answer such questions without giving unsolicited information and I never been given better advice in my life. I am handed my passport back and led to my bags; he wants to check them.
The officer rifles through the bags and comes across packets of Royco mix (I can’t live without my gravy mix). He double-checks with a colleague if this is an allowable item and he gets the green light. He asks me about my rooibos boxes (the only hot beverage I drink) and then he sees that I have an apple which I had picked up at Johannesburg Airport lounge. An apple it turns out is a very dangerous weapon because it can bring in all manner of plant disease into the country. I am given the option of eating it or throwing it away. I choose the former seeing as I am very hungry; I scoff it down in big bites and hand him the seed to dispose of.
With some satisfaction, he takes the seeds and waves me through, “You’all set then”.
And indeed I am. With a sigh of relief, I push my trolley towards the baggage counter for the connecting flight. It’s about 9.30 am. I am exhausted; I have been on the road since 13.00 of the previous day and I have flown seven hours back into time. Or perhaps, my journey actually has a further starting point back in time, I reflect. This journey started back in the 1970’s from the foothills of the Nyanga Mountains, where my earliest memories lie. The village boy has made good; or at least he is trying…
Feeling disoriented and hungry for something warm I wind my way into America, the land of opportunity and my home for the next 12 months.
The first time I was at Washington Dulles Airport, back in 2008, I was shocked to find that they don’t operate 24 hours a day; so we had to wait outside the gates grumbling. This time when we eventually make it to the arrivals hall, they are open and a rather long line is snaking forward slowly. My connecting flight is at noon or thereabouts so I am in no particular haste, just anxious to gain successful entry. I am anxious because, well I am black, and it’s about a month after that stupid Nigerian boy – now popular known as the Christmas Day Bomber – tried to blow himself out of the sky along with a planeload of innocent civilians. This has, of course, marked everybody with his profile for particular scrutiny. I have dutifully taken my wife’s advice and shaved off all facial hair (aka beard) to look less like a would-be terrorist, perhaps. I remember doing the same thing on a trip to the UK in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings. Growing a beard seems to be a crime in itself, it appears.
Beard or no beard, it didn’t help, I find out later…I am somewhat marked as high risk for whatever reason along with all other swarthy passengers and we are directed to room D for further screening. A case of racial profiling, I think, until I see whole families of apparently white people and women also squeezed in. I am somewhat comforted by that observation. In that room are people of the world, a young Indian couple with a young child running around with no care in the world ( a baby terrorist, perhaps), one black guy who appears to be from East Africa, many many Arab looking people and then Caucasians from God knows where. At least if I am sent back home, I won’t be alone…
Eventually my name is called by a young Japanese officer, a hyphenated American, as I call them – Japanese – American, Latino-American, Irish – American (not so obvious in a crowd perhaps), African – Americans (a rather amorphous hold all, because what do you call a white Zimbabwean who becomes an American citizen, or my friend Samanyika, newly arrived in America but now with a green card. And these people the two Zimbabweans share more together then they do with negro descendants of African slaves. But that’s a story for another time perhaps). The long and short of it is that all Americans are now hyphenated and lately the right-wing conservatives have been bandying around the moniker European-Americans, in opposition to Obama’s cosmopolitanism. This group believes that they are the true Americans (never mind the fact that these lands really belong to the “red” Indians who are now largely confined to the reserves and slowly being wiped out by alcohol and social dislocation. On a previous occasion I met a young Native American who was reading a book about the “journey of tears” which isan account of the driving out of Native Americans from their ancestral homes to the reservations and the disease and conditions which nearly led to their extinction as a people. In fact some of the smaller nations disappeared altogether).
Back to the Japanese-American officer. He represents the beauty of America i.e. you are American even if you are a mafikizolo (Johnny come-lately). Can you imagine being an African – British; nay, on the forms that I used to fill in all my time in the UK I had to tick the race box; a selection from white, Irish (as if that is not white), African Caribbean, African, Indian…or other! Or for that matter, can my son who is a South African citizen call himself a Zimbabwe – South African since he does not fit into any other category. Sadly, he will always be “that foreigner” despite having the same life and possibly cultural narrative as the child who was born in the next bed in Bellville clinic, Cape Town. So in that respect I would want to be American; Zimbabwean-American to be precise knowing fully well that I will be accepted as I am.
But I detract… The Japanese-American officer asks me the questions I was asked in Cape Town and earlier that morning at the gate. I give him the answers without embellishment. My sister Tendo always said that you should just answer such questions without giving unsolicited information and I never been given better advice in my life. I am handed my passport back and led to my bags; he wants to check them.
The officer rifles through the bags and comes across packets of Royco mix (I can’t live without my gravy mix). He double-checks with a colleague if this is an allowable item and he gets the green light. He asks me about my rooibos boxes (the only hot beverage I drink) and then he sees that I have an apple which I had picked up at Johannesburg Airport lounge. An apple it turns out is a very dangerous weapon because it can bring in all manner of plant disease into the country. I am given the option of eating it or throwing it away. I choose the former seeing as I am very hungry; I scoff it down in big bites and hand him the seed to dispose of.
With some satisfaction, he takes the seeds and waves me through, “You’all set then”.
And indeed I am. With a sigh of relief, I push my trolley towards the baggage counter for the connecting flight. It’s about 9.30 am. I am exhausted; I have been on the road since 13.00 of the previous day and I have flown seven hours back into time. Or perhaps, my journey actually has a further starting point back in time, I reflect. This journey started back in the 1970’s from the foothills of the Nyanga Mountains, where my earliest memories lie. The village boy has made good; or at least he is trying…
Feeling disoriented and hungry for something warm I wind my way into America, the land of opportunity and my home for the next 12 months.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Saving Zimbabwe – beyond politics - Part II
David R. Katerere
Part II – we discuss reconciliation and how national healing can be done differently in Zimbabwe and learn from Rwanda.
Bob Scott (BS) - One of the things I talk about with my Zimbabwean friends here in the US is why are Zimbabweans so communal? One of my friends made an astute observation when I asked about this. He said, “well we have to be communal, we can’t survive without other people”.
In American culture on the other hand we can be independently wealthy, which is why we have become fragmented. Everybody pursues jobs and individual happiness.
Therefore the communal culture is very natural to Zimbabwe which is why the Community of Reconciliation thrived because the locals understood it; it was natural to their way of life.
David Katerere (DK) - Are you going to meet with people involved in the reconciliation process?
BS - I would love to meet them. I have written to Minister Sekai Holland and shared some of my thoughts with her. One of the things I said was that I am not sure that reconciliation is something that can be legislated, it’s not something you can force people to do. Reconciliation is really a heart issue because it deals with things like forgiveness.
From what I have been reading it sounds like the reconciliation process in Zimbabwe is a lot about what are the wronged individuals going to get out of it - you did this bad thing to me, so I want that. It seems to be all about retribution and restitution and that concerns me because it is premature. Rwanda is a great example of how it can be done. One of the things that they realized there was that in order to bring about reconciliation people need to hear the words “I am sorry”. I think that these words “I am sorry” are the most powerful words in the human language.
In Zimbabwe everybody is trying to blame everybody else for what happened and my feeling is that the people in the process need to look at themselves and take personal responsibility – say to themselves, “what did I do wrong”?
I think when that spirit begins to grip people, when that heart attitude takes hold then the country can move forward.
DK – But the country is still stuck in that mode. We can’t move forward until after this transition, can we?
BS - In the book I talk about the great apostle Paul who said, “We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”. All three groups, the British, Shonas and Ndebeles, they have sinned against one another; they have done wrong to one another. They should look at each other and say “we are sorry, we take responsibility for our mistakes”. Then the next step is to say, well, we can only move forward if we forgive each other.
DK - But there has been no acknowledgement of wrong doing on the parts of the Rhodesians, or the for the Matabeleland massacres or the more recent election –related violence. Reports on what happened have been suppressed, so in that atmosphere it becomes difficult to move forward. When people ask for forgiveness, therefore, are they being sensitive or just being politically expedient?
BS - Well, there will be people like that and there is nothing you can do about that. But people who will have the courage to get into a room, look at each other in the eye and say “I am sorry” those people can move forward. Think about Rwanda – getting back to that example again, you have people in Rwanda living next door to people they know killed their family; how can that be possible? From a human dynamic, how is that even possible?
Well, it is because of forgiveness and there is a whole process they have used to get to that point. In the community, in every case, it’s about the perpetrator saying to the victim, “I am sorry, I wronged you, please forgive me” and the victim having to then make a decision about what they are going to do. Once they say, “I forgive you”, then it’s done, and restitution begins. The perpetrator because of the fact that he wants forgiveness then asks how he can make right. He is not being forced to do it, he is doing it out of his heart.
You see, forgiveness brings a brokenness to the human soul and that is what we don’t yet see in Zimbabwe. What you see is arrogance and pride and everyone digging in, something Jesus called “self-righteousness” and that’s what we need to deal with.
DK - Your message is about social justice?
What I am interested in is spiritual justice which plays itself out in the social environment.
DK - Social justice seems to be a dirty world in the US right now, so are you a communist?!!
BS - (Laughs). O God! It’s interesting to me because unfortunately what’s happening in my country (the US) right now is that Christianity is starting to be defined by political ideology. And that saddens me.
The issue I have with socialism as a political ideology is that I don’t think you can legislate generosity. I see justice as restorative and I write about that in the book. Justice is about balancing the scales. When Jesus healed a sick person, I think in my mind he saw it as justice – sin had come in, nature had come in and robbed somebody of their health. He used the power he had to restore that person to wholeness. That was justice done.
So in the scriptures, Jesus kept saying that those that have wealth must share with others. But in socialism you force people to give away their wealth when it should be a heart thing.
DK – You have set up an organization and called it Compassionate Justice, where does that name come from?
BS - When I first published the book some friends came to me and suggested that the book would create an opportunity to do some practical things and advised that I register a legal entity, an NGO. I didn’t know what to name the NGO and so I started asking myself, “what are the things I value the most in my life, in other words, what makes me me?”
I realized that since I was a child, I have been given a compassionate heart; I have always cared deeply about the plight of the poor; I hate oppression, it makes me angry, I want to see justice done.
So compassion and justice come naturally to me and hence the name was such an obvious choice. And I see that kind of justice as being divine rather than civil justice and that type of justice is about restoring. So whether it’s healing the sick, feeding the poor, empowering women in small businesses, rehabilitating land which has been abused – all that is compassionate justice. And that is the prophetic vision I have for Zimbabwe – restorative justice, compassionate justice.
http://www.savingzimbabwe.com/
http://www.compassionatejustice.com
Part II – we discuss reconciliation and how national healing can be done differently in Zimbabwe and learn from Rwanda.
Bob Scott (BS) - One of the things I talk about with my Zimbabwean friends here in the US is why are Zimbabweans so communal? One of my friends made an astute observation when I asked about this. He said, “well we have to be communal, we can’t survive without other people”.
In American culture on the other hand we can be independently wealthy, which is why we have become fragmented. Everybody pursues jobs and individual happiness.
Therefore the communal culture is very natural to Zimbabwe which is why the Community of Reconciliation thrived because the locals understood it; it was natural to their way of life.
David Katerere (DK) - Are you going to meet with people involved in the reconciliation process?
BS - I would love to meet them. I have written to Minister Sekai Holland and shared some of my thoughts with her. One of the things I said was that I am not sure that reconciliation is something that can be legislated, it’s not something you can force people to do. Reconciliation is really a heart issue because it deals with things like forgiveness.
From what I have been reading it sounds like the reconciliation process in Zimbabwe is a lot about what are the wronged individuals going to get out of it - you did this bad thing to me, so I want that. It seems to be all about retribution and restitution and that concerns me because it is premature. Rwanda is a great example of how it can be done. One of the things that they realized there was that in order to bring about reconciliation people need to hear the words “I am sorry”. I think that these words “I am sorry” are the most powerful words in the human language.
In Zimbabwe everybody is trying to blame everybody else for what happened and my feeling is that the people in the process need to look at themselves and take personal responsibility – say to themselves, “what did I do wrong”?
I think when that spirit begins to grip people, when that heart attitude takes hold then the country can move forward.
DK – But the country is still stuck in that mode. We can’t move forward until after this transition, can we?
BS - In the book I talk about the great apostle Paul who said, “We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”. All three groups, the British, Shonas and Ndebeles, they have sinned against one another; they have done wrong to one another. They should look at each other and say “we are sorry, we take responsibility for our mistakes”. Then the next step is to say, well, we can only move forward if we forgive each other.
DK - But there has been no acknowledgement of wrong doing on the parts of the Rhodesians, or the for the Matabeleland massacres or the more recent election –related violence. Reports on what happened have been suppressed, so in that atmosphere it becomes difficult to move forward. When people ask for forgiveness, therefore, are they being sensitive or just being politically expedient?
BS - Well, there will be people like that and there is nothing you can do about that. But people who will have the courage to get into a room, look at each other in the eye and say “I am sorry” those people can move forward. Think about Rwanda – getting back to that example again, you have people in Rwanda living next door to people they know killed their family; how can that be possible? From a human dynamic, how is that even possible?
Well, it is because of forgiveness and there is a whole process they have used to get to that point. In the community, in every case, it’s about the perpetrator saying to the victim, “I am sorry, I wronged you, please forgive me” and the victim having to then make a decision about what they are going to do. Once they say, “I forgive you”, then it’s done, and restitution begins. The perpetrator because of the fact that he wants forgiveness then asks how he can make right. He is not being forced to do it, he is doing it out of his heart.
You see, forgiveness brings a brokenness to the human soul and that is what we don’t yet see in Zimbabwe. What you see is arrogance and pride and everyone digging in, something Jesus called “self-righteousness” and that’s what we need to deal with.
DK - Your message is about social justice?
What I am interested in is spiritual justice which plays itself out in the social environment.
DK - Social justice seems to be a dirty world in the US right now, so are you a communist?!!
BS - (Laughs). O God! It’s interesting to me because unfortunately what’s happening in my country (the US) right now is that Christianity is starting to be defined by political ideology. And that saddens me.
The issue I have with socialism as a political ideology is that I don’t think you can legislate generosity. I see justice as restorative and I write about that in the book. Justice is about balancing the scales. When Jesus healed a sick person, I think in my mind he saw it as justice – sin had come in, nature had come in and robbed somebody of their health. He used the power he had to restore that person to wholeness. That was justice done.
So in the scriptures, Jesus kept saying that those that have wealth must share with others. But in socialism you force people to give away their wealth when it should be a heart thing.
DK – You have set up an organization and called it Compassionate Justice, where does that name come from?
BS - When I first published the book some friends came to me and suggested that the book would create an opportunity to do some practical things and advised that I register a legal entity, an NGO. I didn’t know what to name the NGO and so I started asking myself, “what are the things I value the most in my life, in other words, what makes me me?”
I realized that since I was a child, I have been given a compassionate heart; I have always cared deeply about the plight of the poor; I hate oppression, it makes me angry, I want to see justice done.
So compassion and justice come naturally to me and hence the name was such an obvious choice. And I see that kind of justice as being divine rather than civil justice and that type of justice is about restoring. So whether it’s healing the sick, feeding the poor, empowering women in small businesses, rehabilitating land which has been abused – all that is compassionate justice. And that is the prophetic vision I have for Zimbabwe – restorative justice, compassionate justice.
http://www.savingzimbabwe.com/
http://www.compassionatejustice.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)