Who gets to tell the Zimbabwe story?
I have kept a hard copy of the complete series- “How race is lived in America” for the past 20 years.
The 15-part series was published by the New York Times in 2000. The copy has changed colour a little but I treasure it for two reasons:
· I got the copy in September 2000 from Gerald Boyd, one of the editors of the series who was one of the most respected back journalists and was the first black managing editor of the New York Times. Sadly he was betrayed by another black journalist Jason Blair three years later when Blair wrote a series of fabricated stories. Boyd was forced to resign and died three years later.
· The series reminded me of one of the most misreported stories on Zimbabwe at the time- the land reform programme. Unfortunately, like race in America, it continues to be misreported up to this day.
I was one of five fellows from southern Africa selected to attend a newsroom leadership course at the Poynter Institute in St Petersburg, Florida in September 2000.
The programme was for South Africans but Hugh Lewin, who was one of the directors of Africa Information Afrique (AIA), a regional news organisation that I worked for as the training editor, and was also a director at the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in Johannesburg, persuaded Poynter to take me because I trained working journalists across the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
While my colleagues had an opportunity to travel and to be attached to a media organisation, I was confined to Poynter for the three-week programme, working with Poynter faculty and attending workshops with American journalists.
I was quite happy with the arrangement because this was my third time to visit the United States and I had seen the country a bit.
My first trip was in 1983 when I went there as a World Press Institute fellow, the first Zimbabwean to join the seven-month programme hosted at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota.
Fellow Zimbabwean Farai Munyuki had been there before me but he had attended as a Zambian.
The fellowship involved a lot of travelling and enabled me to visit 43 of the 52 States. I had two newspaper attachments, one at the Des Moines Register in Iowa and the other at the Miami Herald in Miami, Florida, both rated among the best newspapers in the country at the time.
I had even driven one of the two vans that transported us across the country, alone, in snow for the first time, from New Orleans to St Paul, a journey of about 1 200 miles, but made longer because I wanted to see some of the states that we had not visited as a group.
My second trip was in 1989 when I was sponsored by Air Zimbabwe and Boeing to travel to Seattle to see the first Boeing 767 bought by Zimbabwe being assembled. I had a small tiff with my benefactor David Mwenga of Air Zimbabwe when I wrote a story that the plane would not be finished on time. Passengers back home had already been booked on the first Harare-London trip on the new plane but the plane was not going to be ready by that date.
I, therefore, viewed my third trip as career enhancing because I had branched into full-time training and wanted to learn new techniques from the training gurus at Poynter- all seasoned journalists who had worked for media outlets before turning to training. I too had worked as a journalist for 20 years before turning to training.
The piece in the series that I liked most was the one entitled: Who gets to tell the black story. This was a story about a documentary based on the book: The Corner by David Simon. Simon was a white journalist and had written a book about black inner-city drug addicts in Baltimore. Actor Charles Dutton was asked to direct the six-part documentary series but, according to the New York Times, he was suspicious of white writers because every aspect of black life had been distorted by white people.
“As good as some of his material is, I’m wondering where his real heart is in this,” the New York Times quoted Dutton, referring to Simon. “Is this really and truly an effort to do something about this?” Or was he merely “taking someone else’s misery and making a dollar off of it, which can’t be denied, whether he is the most sincere goddam white man in the world”.
He added: “I know that David Simon can visit and sit with as many black folks in this city as he wants to. They can pay the families to get stories. They can listen and walk around with dope friends. They can write about murders, and they still won’t know a damn thing about black people…
“I know the pulse of this. I know what people think the minute they walk out them doors. I know what mothers feel when their sons and daughters walk out of the house to go to school. I know what it feels like to kill somebody. I know what it feels like to get shot. I know what it feels like that people be looking to kill me. I don’t have to show up as some crime journalist after the fact,” Dutton, who grew up in Baltimore and was jailed for manslaughter at 17, said.
I felt the same about fly-by-night journalists who dropped into Harare from London or Washington to report on the land issue in Zimbabwe. They could talk to any Zimbabwean and write stories with good quotes and pictures but they knew nothing about Zimbabwe and how complex the land issue was.
My problem, however, was that even black Zimbabwean journalists, who I thought ought to know better, were mimicking their white colleagues. What really annoyed me was that every white farmer that was killed or beaten up was named with the gruesome pictures splashed all over. But black farmers killed were never identified by name and their pictures were not published, though some reports said more back famers were killed during the land invasions than white farmers.
It pained me because it seemed that only white lives mattered. Black lives did not. To make matters worse it was black journalists who were trivialising the deaths of their own folk. Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o had summed it all when he said in his book, Decolonising the mind: “It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues”.
I started asking myself: “Who should tell the Zimbabwe story?”
It had to be people that Dutton said had the feel and the pulse of the nation. AIA, where I had worked as training editor, had a unique policy about who wrote stories for the organisation. If the writer was not born and bred in the country, it had to be someone who had spent more than two years in that country- someone who knew the bread and butter issues of that country, someone who knew the day-to-day life of that country, not someone who thought everything was cheap because one had changed a few dollars and got thousands or millions and was comparing prices with those in one’s country of residence.
Zimbabweans, born and bred in the country, therefore had to be given preference to write about their country. But, it seemed, being Zimbabwean was not enough. One had to be patriotic in the true meaning of the world- the feeling of love, devotion, and sense of attachment to one’s own country- not necessarily to the ruling party. One also had to adhere to the professional ethics of journalism, that is, to be guided by the quest for truth, fairness and accuracy.
This was not easy in Zimbabwe given the toxic politics of the country and the polarization in the media. But I think the biggest problem was lack of self-respect. Most Zimbabweans, to me, were not proud of their country. It seemed like a curse to be Zimbabwean, African or black.
I could tolerate this coming from Zimbabweans born in Rhodesia and educated under colonial rule, but I could not understand this from those born after independence. People could say whatever they wanted about Zimbabwe’s first Prime Minister and later its President Robert Mugabe, but he had given me a sense of pride. Pride to be Zimbabwean. Pride to be black. Pride to be African. And I could stand my ground against anyone.
It was only after independence that I had gotten exposure that made me realise how beautiful Zimbabwe was. I had travelled to Britain, Singapore, Australia, Germany, Ukraine, Switzerland, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Ukraine, Senegal, Togo, Uganda, Kenya- the entire SADC except for Angola and Mauritius. Zimbabwe- my home- was always best.
This exposure had made me realise that some of my colleagues, viewed Africa, from a western perspective as another Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina put it succinctly in his essay: How to write about Africa.
“Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the moneygrubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country,” he wrote
“Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering.”
You could not write about Zimbabwe, therefore, unless you described it as a failed state, run by a corrupt regime or junta (not government), with no respect for human rights and always stealing elections. Its people were starving because blacks had “grabbed” land from whites. CNN even reported that poor Zimbabweans had resorted to eating rats to survive, when what they were eating, mice, are considered a delicacy by those who eat them, and they are caught in the fields not in houses.
Sanctions imposed on the country by the United States in 2003 were aimed at the ruling elite and did not harm ordinary Zimbabweans at all, the argument went, yet the very people under sanctions were building mansions bigger and sometimes even better than those you find in Malibu or Hollywood yet the ordinary Zimbabwean, who was supposed to benefit from the sanctions, was living on less than US$2 a day.
And as Wainaina said, animals had more rights than people. Elephants could raze people’s fields but when the villagers killed them, they were condemned. There was more outrage over the killing of Cecil the Lion in the Hwange National Park by an American dentist Walter Palmer than over the killing of more than 20 000 people in Matebeleland and the Midlands during the massacres later dubbed Gukurahundi which only became an issue when Mugabe fell out with the West more than a decade after the incident.
“Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephantor a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil),” Wainaina wrote.
Zimbabweans have always been good conservationists. No one needs to tell me that. I grew up knowing it. It was something that I was taught from a young age through folk tales. But that culture is slowly but surely being eroded, wiped out and so is the pride to be Zimbabwean.
I have, however, made it my mission to write about the real Zimbabwe through my online publication, The Insider, but it’s not easy because you are under constant attack from your own people. As far as they are concerned, there cannot be any two sides. If you are not with the ruling party, you are with the opposition, yet scientific studies have revealed that 60 percent of Zimbabweans do not support any political party. They just vote for the party that offers them what they want when it comes to elections.
Because the country’s economy is on a tailspin you cannot support programmes by the government, no matter how good they are because, according to them, you cannot love your country without loving the ruling party. But I have an obligation to defend my country against the misinformation being peddled against it.
Despite its problems, Zimbabwe is the best country one can ever live in. When I am in Zimbabwe, I am free to write. I am free to talk. I am free in every sense of the word. I have given myself that freedom, and no one, no one, can take that away from me.
