Going home – reversing the Zimbabwe Narrative

Reversing the narrative  - source https://www.sajr.co.za/going-home-reversing-the-zimbabwean-narrative/

Going home – reversing the Zimbabwe NarrativePublished 7 months ago on Jul 20, 2023By Tali Feinberg

The story of the Zimbabwean Jewish community in recent decades has largely been one of exodus. However, 35-year-old entrepreneur Yaron Wiesenbacher is reversing that narrative. Last month, he packed up his life in Cape Town, closed his business, boarded a plane with his dog, and headed back to his homeland.

“My life in Cape Town was good, but I think moving back has been on my mind for about five years,” says Wiesenbacher. “There’s a lot of economic opportunity here. For me personally, I think there’s a lot more growth opportunity here in Zim.”

His sister has emigrated to London, his brother lives in Johannesburg [while running his businesses in Zimbabwe], and his parents live half the year in London and the other half between Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Bulawayo. “So, most of the time it was just me left in Cape Town. I kind of thought, well, now it’s my time to live where I want to live. I was ready for a new challenge.”

Wiesenbacher was born in Bulawayo in 1988. “I went to school at Carmel, which is an amazing Jewish primary school that is still going. It doesn’t have many Jews in it, but it’s still being run as a Jewish primary school. I finished school there at 12, and then went to Christian Brothers College. We left in 2002 because of the economic situation and moved to Cape Town. I lived there for 21 years, and was in restaurants for the past 10 years. I had a coffee shop in Cape Town called Hard Pressed Café, and then opened Merle’s Schnitz. I am now back in Bulawayo, commuting between Bulawayo, Harare, and Victoria Falls, working for my brother who has a few different restaurants in all those three cities.”

Like many Jews, his family’s story is one of wandering and finding refuge.

“My grandparents on my father’s side left Germany in the 1930s. So I have the German surname and the German passport. They settled in Northern Rhodesia, which later became Rhodesia. My mom was born in Bulawayo, my dad was born in Harare. My mother’s father was born in South Africa, but my mother’s mother was born in Bulawayo. Both sides are quite well known in the Zimbabwe Jewish community.” His grandfather, the late Freddy Wiesenbacher, was president of the Harare Hebrew Congregation for many years.

Now, Wiesenbacher is back in his family’s heartland and literally in the home he grew up in, which was never sold.

“Emotionally, leaving Cape Town was difficult, but now that I’ve done it, I’m happy with my decision. Being back here has been amazing. Friends always ask, ‘Is there loadshedding in Zim?’’ I laugh because, like, we invented loadshedding. We really did. It’s been going on for 20 years and there’s very often no power. But everyone’s kitted out with a generator or solar power, or knows what to do when the power is off. Kind of a ‘let’s get on with it’ attitude.

“I feel like in Cape Town, when the power is off, everything stops. Here, when the power is off, you just keep on going.

“I’m a Zimbabwean and for me, this country has the best people in the world. Time moves slower here and there are more hours in the day for me. I really just love being here. The air, the weather, the lifestyle.”

The rescue dog Wiesenbacher took with him to Zimbabwe has “adjusted very well, and is living her best life!”, and he has adopted another dog.

Being warmly welcomed by people has eased the transition. “Already knowing a lot of people here made a difference, but people do go out of their way to help and make you feel welcome.”

Slotting back into the Jewish community that he knew and loved growing up has been comforting. Nothing demonstrated this more than when he sat down to a communal seder with “the last 30 Jews in Bulawayo”.

“This tiny community that was once so strong, having the ability to tell the story of Pesach together – it feels like one big family. Everyone chipped in and made the meal, and there was one long table. It was very special to be part of it.”

There are about 100 Jews left in Zimbabwe, with about 30 in Bulawayo and 70 in Harare, including some Israelis. “Every now and again, we get a minyan. If someone’s got yahrzeit, we message each other and people turn up.” They also mark all the chaggim.

Wiesenbacher says many Zimbabweans are returning, especially young people. “There’s a lot of opportunity here for work and for things to happen. It also feels like there’s more equality between people. It’s definitely something I’ve noticed. For example, there’s no one begging at traffic lights.” The thing he misses from South Africa is a food delivery service like Uber Eats.

The full Jewish life that the South African community provides is also something he’ll miss.

“I want to say thank you as my family and I always felt so welcomed. I feel privileged to have been part of it. I went to Herzlia to finish school, and I felt very lucky to be able to do that. And all the little things, like having CSO’s number in my pocket. We shouldn’t take for granted what an amazing community we have in South Africa. Even though it’s a small community, just know that there’s an even smaller community a little bit up north! So, I’m grateful to the South African Jewish community.”

Wiesenbacher encourages other young people to move back to or emigrate to Zimbabwe. “I think there are incredible economic opportunities, an amazing climate, amazing people, and it’s safer than most countries I’ve been to. Having lived in South Africa and now having lived here, I feel 10 times safer here. It’s not to say I’m completely safe and that nothing bad happens here, but if you can get a job here and you can find your feet, I think it’s a great place to live.”

Source : http://www.morningmirror.africanherd.com/articles/life-of-quiet-desperation.htm

See other letters from Margaret Kriel's website at   http://www.morningmirror.africanherd.com/articles/articles_all.htm

'A Life of Quiet Desperation'          - 23/9/2014 

'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation' said Henry Thoreau and this is indeed true of Africa. We were in Johannesburg recently where on a Thursday the trash trucks visit our area, and my heart breaks for my countrymen.

There are many different levels of desperation.... starting with the faceless shadows who search the weekly trash bins. Men in 

rags, women with wee babes wrapped in tattered towels, dragging their pitiful treasures behind them in pathetic plastic bags.
The luckier ones manage to obtain a giant one-ton polypropylene sack, affixed to a makeshift trolley. Herein are carefully stored and scavenged, plastic bottles, bags and baubles worthy of recycling, a few cents here, a few rands there and also the possibility of finding a tasty snack discarded by a wealthy suburban Johannesburger.

I spoke at length with some of them, and nine out of ten were Zimbabwean, refugees from their own country and driven to this desperate state, the lowest of the low in a life too awful to even contemplate. They were not thieves or gangsters, just wretched starving men who had lost all hope of finding decent employment in an unfriendly land where unemployment is rampant, accommodation is at a premium and xenophobia is a way of life. 

All of them eking out a hopeless existence, tramping the suburbs daily in their deplorably inadequate sandals manufactured from old rubber tyres and bits of wire.

Moving up a notch in the desperation stakes, I encounter the roadside vendors - that faceless plethora of folk who distribute pamphlets and sell beaded articles, mobile phone chargers, newspapers and license disc holders. Gutsy, indefatigable, brazen and annoying, they swarm like bees at each intersection, abjectly, despairingly flogging their miserable wares. Here too - the majority are Zimbabweans, attuned to every nuance and mood of the thousands of motorists who toss them off in utter disgust and loathing. 'Don't make eye contact' is the general rule of thumb, 'or you will never get rid of them'. 'Don't even open your window ' they say, 'they will rob you, rape you, murder you'

But I make a point of greeting them in the vernacular and they are always grateful for even the smallest kindness from their precious 'home'.

I then passed Ninth Avenue and Wilson Street, where it is well known that Zimbabwean workers wait patiently for odd jobs as builders, painters, garden workers, welders and plumbers. With the word that spreads quickly via the garden grapevine, the more affluent folk have come to learn that honest and willing Zimbabweans, wait on these corners for lowly paid odd jobs.

Here the mood is more upbeat, the workers are better dressed, the wait is still agonizing and interminable, but they are a patient people and willing to at least work at whatever transpires, rather than turn to a life of crime.

A thumbs up from a makiwa in a car with a Zimbo registration is small comfort but always brings a multitude of enthusiastic greetings and waves!!

One day....one day.... I pray to God, that things will be different for all those benighted wonderful folk living out their lives so far from home in 'Quiet Desperation.'

check out the para in this article below starting Menachem Begin was “both a proud nationalist and an unwavering guardian of liberal principles,” ....

Source: NyTIMES

MARCH 13, 2013, 6:50 AM

The Life and Soul of the Party

By SHMUEL ROSNER

JERUSALEM — An entire Israeli political species may soon go extinct, now that Reuven Rivlin, its last senior member, has lost the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On Sunday, Netanyahu unceremoniously informed Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset, that he would not back him for another term in the job. This means that Rivlin will not hold any senior position in Netanyahu’s new governing coalition. And it means that Rivlin is less likely to become, as he had hoped, president of Israel when Shimon Peres steps down in a year and a half.

Rivlin’s downfall is more than a personal setback; it marks the final transformation of Likud, Israel’s most powerful party for three decades.

Over the past year, Likud has purged its ranks of what little was left of its aristocracy: its liberal-nationalist wing. Benny Begin, an outgoing minister and the son of Menachem Begin — a former prime minister and Likud’s forefather — and Dan Meridor, another outgoing minister and the son of a longtime confidant of Begin, were dethroned in the last election’s primaries.

Likud is best known as a nationalist right-wing party. But when it was established in 1973, from the merger of Herut, the Liberal Party, the Free Center, the National List and the Labor Movement for Greater Israel, its progressive stances on the rule of law, human rights and the treatment of minorities were an important part of its D.N.A.

Menachem Begin was “both a proud nationalist and an unwavering guardian of liberal principles,” according to the Israel Democracy Institute. In a 1977 letter, Begin expressed his support for appointing an Arab judge to the Israeli Supreme Court. He consistently and demonstrably defended judicial independence and minority rights. “We will not be Rhodesia,” he famously said. And that position, according to Meridor, was “a profound, moral matter.”

Rivlin is of that tradition, too. No doubt he is an ultranationalist: He supports Israeli settlements in the West Bank and opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state there. But he didn’t hesitate to blast a government committee last year for failing to include Arabs among those designated to light a torch during Israel’s Independence Day ceremony. And as speaker of Parliament, he fought against attempts by some of his Likud colleagues to strip the Knesset’s Arab members of their parliamentary immunity.

Likud’s liberals always struggled to live under the same tent as its populists. But for a long time, when the party’s leaders were in charge of selecting candidates for elections, the co-existence seemed mutually beneficial. The populists were expected to secure the votes of the masses, while the liberals gave Likud respectability. But when just before the 2006 elections, a system of primaries was introduced, popularity on the street became all-important. Since then, the liberals have lost ground within the party.

Now Likud no longer cares to listen to them at all. As I once wrote of some party members’ attempts to restrict the Israeli media by amending libel laws, the new Likudniks display “both the eagerness of the newly powerful and the vindictive frustration of the still-marginalized.” Aggressive, tone-deaf and with little patience for tradition, they dismissed Rivlin and Meridor for criticizing a wave of controversial laws. These modern-day Israeli Robespierres have sent the old Likud spirit to the guillotine.

As Dan Margalit argues, by losing Rivlin, Likud is losing “the last prominent representative” of its liberal-nationalist wing. Likud is losing its soul.

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With thanks to Diana Hirsch for her amazing blog on life in Que Que - see http://www.oncecalledhome.com

The following is one of her recent postings

The Little Town That Could 

The Beira and Mashonaland Railway Company completed the rail link south between Salisbury and the Globe and Phoenix Station, later called Que Que, in 1901. The link to Bulawayo was completed a year later. Now coal fired boilers could be introduced on the Globe and Phoenix Mine, meat to the market and women arrived in Que Que.  The daily passenger trains from Bulawayo and Salisbury still passed through Que Que, at the ungodly hours of one and two am respectively a half-century later.

Umniati River in flood with the new bridge under construction

The Little Town That Could

In January of 1953 clouds hung low and heavy like wet blotting paper while thunder rumbled ominously across the sodden land.  The heavens opened and torrential rain for the eighth day bucketed down.

Riverbeds that had been sandy wastes for the past two years were now raging torrents, carrying away precious topsoil, uprooted trees and the bloated carcasses of cattle and goats.  Roads were impassable in many places. The railway bridge over the Umniati River, linking Que Que to Gatooma and the towns to the north, collapsed.

Holidaymakers were returning home in time for the new school term. Behind the hissing Garrett steam engine passengers looked anxiously out of rain-streaked windows.

“What do we do now?”

“How long before the bridge will be repaired?”

“We are pretty low on cash.”

Dad, was mayor.  He reassured the crowd on the platform, “We’ll make things as easy for you as we can.  The railway engineers and their gang are already on the job.”

A rota system was organized.  The large kitchen at the boarding school was opened.  The Red Cross provided food; the Women’s Institute brought hot meals to the elderly on the train as well as magazines and books.  The ladies stayed to chat and give cheer to the worried folk.

The school bus ferried groups of passengers to the school for meals.

The welfare bus took others to the mine shower block for a hot shower.  Soap and towels were provided.

The Globe and Phoenix Mine Compound Manager, pith helmeted A. J. Liebenberg, cranked his car into high gear and arranged housing and food for the third and forth class African passengers at the First Aid Pavilion.

Much to the Hirsch children’s consternation, their home at #1 Silver Oaks Road was opened to families with young children, who had the run of the very large, long verandah.  They had use of our toys!  My Rosebud dolls suffered broken limbs and  torn clothes.  Brian’s Meccano set lost nuts and bolts, levers and gears and David’s golliwog disappeared altogether.   Mom was impervious to our complaints.  How could we be so selfish?

Our commodious kitchen was opened to mothers with babies to feed and bottles to sterilize late into the night.

Stranded motorists occupied all the rooms at Sloman’s Que Que Hotel.  Mattresses were put down in the lounge to accommodate the overflow.  Homeowners opened up their homes as well.  One family had measles.  Dad found a similar family in town.  All were sick together.

Teperson and Malkow’s Midlands Bakery did a roaring trade sending their “boys” down in their plastic capes with trays of hot sausage rolls, meat pies, chips and sticky buns for sale.

Mr. Cloete of Vernon’s Café, not to be outdone, provided enamel jugs of hot coffee and tea, packets of biscuits, sweets and Willards chips, as well as cigarettes and matches.

The Medical Officer of Health did a splendid job with sanitary pails.

Telephone lines were down, but news still came over the wireless at six in the evening.  A daily bulletin was posted on the station notice board chronicling progress on the damaged bridge.  Bets were laid.  The town’s rallying to the stranded passengers plight and the cheerfulness of all was catching.  A festive air developed.  Soccer matches and other games were played on the platform.

Extra food and hot drinks in thermoses were sent to the hard working railway engineers and their gang.  Ribald jokes were shouted across the turbulent river to folk on the far side who had come to watch the river and monitor progress.

After four days the bridge was deemed safe.  The Garrett was unhooked, the fire stoked.  Smoke rose in the soggy air.  With a few optimistic hoots the engine rumbled its way out of sight to test the bridge on its own.

For what seemed like eternity the swelling crowds waited and listened for the returning Garrett.  Youngsters put their ears to the line…then they heard it: the engine’s whistle, a whistle of success.

The whole town turned out to bid farewell to the passengers.  Dad wore his red robe with its ermine collar and mayoral gold chain.  There were tears of happiness and relief.  The most enthusiastic cheers were from the three Hirsch kids.

In response, the spokesman for the passengers concluded “Que Que is the little town with the golden heart, the little town that could.”

A big thank you to Eileen Underwood of New Zealand for this picture of the Umniati River and to Dora Dunkley (Candy) for details.

In face of desperate African poverty, Ruth Feigenbaum provides a beacon of hope

By Suzanne Belling · March 1, 2012

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (JTA) -- Two years after moving to Zimbabwe from South Africa 20 years ago, Ruth Feigenbaum noticed that her gardener, James Phiri, was losing weight and looking ill.

With the help of a physician friend, Phiri was diagnosed: Like nearly one in seven Zimbabweans, he was infected with HIV. Feigenbaum and her husband, Alan, were about to leave for a trip, but they left Phiri with money and food.

Three days later he was dead.

“It upset me beyond belief,” Feigenbaum told JTA. “Who would support his family and so many of the relatives and orphans of those who died from AIDS-related illnesses?”

A veteran of the fight against apartheid in South Africa -- Feigenbaum was an active member of Black Sash, an advocacy organization that Nelson Mandela once called “the conscience of white SA” -- she responded to Phiri’s death by founding a support group for families affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Ruth Feigenbaum with Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft, aka "The Traveling Rabbi," in the library for AIDS orphans in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, July 2011. (Courtesy SGOFOTI)

In the years since, Feigenbaum has become a major player in helping care for Zimbabweans affected by the disease, working her international Jewish connections for financial and other support she uses to alleviate suffering in a country that the United Nations considers the poorest in the world. Life expectancy there is just 47 years, and one in four children are AIDS orphans.

With assistance from World Jewish Relief in London, Feigenbaum launched the Support Group of Families of the Terminally Ill, or SGOFOTI, an apolitical, nongovernmental organization that provides emotional and psychological support to the families of HIV/AIDS victims in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, where Feigenbaum lives.

Along with partner Patricia Tshabalala, a woman Feigenbaum calls Zimbabwe’s Mother Theresa, Feigenbaum has built SGOFOTI into an organization encompassing seven constituent groups serving a cross-generational spectrum, from children orphaned by the disease to grandmothers struggling to support families who have lost their breadwinner -- all this in a country with weak civic institutions and a culture of fear cultivated by the iron fist of strongman President Robert Mugabe.

“I don’t play bridge or go to tea parties, so this gives me something to do in Bulawayo,” said Feigenbaum, who visits each group on a weekly basis. “But I get just as much out of it as the people. It has also taught them that not all whites are racist, and they have learned something about Jews and Judaism from me.”

One of the SGOFOTI’s member groups is Vulindlela Guardians, located in the Bulawayo suburb of Mpopoma. The group provides orphaned children with school fees, clothing and a place of refuge.

In 2009, Feigenbaum helped provide the group with a library through her connections to several Jewish South African expatriates living in Australia. Two women -- one a former student of Feigenbaum’s from Johannesburg -- had been distributing recycled books to African children through the Union of Jewish Women of South Africa. Feigenbaum persuaded them to donate a shipment to establish a library for the children at Vulindlela Guardians.

The books were delivered personally by South Africa’s “Traveling Rabbi,” Moshe Silberhaft, for whom the library was named. At the dedication last year, a South African television crew shot footage for a documentary titled “Shalom the Beloved Country.”

“The library will help inculcate a culture of reading for the children,” Bulawayo Mayor Thaba Moyo said during the ceremony, according to text of the mayor’s remarks provided by Silberhaft. “You have equipped our city with great ammunition, which is education. We note that education is vital in spearheading development in our society.”

Ruth Feigenbaum with Patricia Tshabalala at the facilities of the Support Group of Families of the Terminally Ill. (Courtesy SGOFOTI)

Feigenbaum and her husband are among the last Jews in Bulawayo, a community that once numbered more than 1,000 and is now down to a few dozen. The couple manages to keep a kosher home only with help from Silberhaft, who sends them necessary supplies from abroad.

In her work with local Zimbabweans, Feigenbaum has introduced some Jewish teachings. During the library dedication, she had tears in her eyes watching the orphans sing songs in the two main indigenous Zimbabwean languages, Shona and Ndebele, as well as in English and Hebrew.

“They greet me on every visit with a ‘shalom’ and thank me by saying ‘todah rabah,’ ” Feigenbaum said. “At Pesach time, with the matzah sent to us by Rabbi Moshe, I arrange a third seder so they can learn a little about our customs.”

Feigenbaum’s efforts have helped engender warm feelings toward the Jewish community in a desperate place where few people have any firsthand exposure to Jews or Jewish customs. Following the library dedication, Tshabalala wrote an earnest letter to Silberhaft thanking him for his efforts.

“Please tell the Jewish community I thank them for their love, care and support,” Tshabalala wrote last year to Silberhaft, “and for making me and my people part of their family.”

Ruth Feigenbaum, founder of the Support Group of Families of the Terminally Ill in Zimbabwe. (Courtesy SGOFOTI)

From Greenwich to Zimbabwe, a gift of fire trucks

From Greenwich to Zimbabwe, a gift of fire trucks
Christine Negroni, Special to Greenwich Time
Updated 07:16 p.m., Tuesday, January 10, 2012

HARARE, Zimbabwe -- When the Fire Brigade in Zimbabwe's capital city of Harare took delivery of two new fire trucks just before Christmas, it doubled its number of working fire engines.

The trucks didn't come from the government. It was a gift from an unusual source: an Old Greenwich travel agent who specializes in sending tourists on safari and her Zimbabwean-born husband.

Diane Ebzery Lobel and Peter Lobel decided to make the contribution to the southern African nation after the particularly deadly summer of 2011 when fires destroyed homes and killed people. Among the fatalities was Solomon Mujuru, a national war hero and husband of the country's vice president, who was a longtime friend of the Lobels, who split their time between New York City and Zimbabwe.

"We have a commitment to uplifting the people of Zimbabwe," said Ebzery Lobel, a Riverside native whose parents still live there. "One of the ways is through providing better services, and this happened to be a need that became very apparent in a concentrated period of time."

Ebzery had a business reason as well. Her travel company, African Portfolio, specializes in sending well-heeled Americans on safari vacations. About a quarter of the tours she arranges include a visit to Zimbabwe's Victoria Falls.

As it turned out, making the decision and buying two rebuilt Volvo fire engines was the easy part. Getting them from Kent, England, where they were purchased, to Namibia, where they arrived by boat, and then to Zimbabwe more than 1,300 miles to the east, required many of Lobel's travel-planning skills.

As his wife organized from America, Peter gathered five friends and headed overseas to take the trucks on a movie-worthy road trip across sub-Saharan Africa.

"Shipping is inherently unpredictable, and it was a logistical nightmare," said Peter, reflecting on the trip after the trucks had reached their destination.

Jonathan Marks, an American volunteer driver and long-time friend of Peter, left his home in New York at the end of November, flying via London and Johannesburg to get a connection to the Namibian port city of Walvis Bay. He joined Lobel and other men from America, Zimbabwe and South Africa and they waited for the fire trucks to arrive.

Lobel had been charting the progress of the transport ship Arcadia Highway since October, when he contracted for the fire trucks to be loaded onto the 587-foot carrier. There was an anticipated arrival date, but with many other factors at play, Lobel and his volunteer drivers could only hope that the trucks would arrive on schedule.

Two days after they had assembled in Walvis Bay, the men were eating at an oceanfront restaurant when the Arcadia floated by. Lobel was overjoyed.

"I said, `That's it. There can't be anything larger than that,' " he said.

"We were very excited," Marks said.

The next day, the men and the trucks set out on the eight-day drive, armed with a list of diesel gas stations and repair shops along 1,360-mile route. Ebzerly Lobel had found hotels that could accommodate six men and two large vehicles and Peter rented a GPS transponder so families and Facebook followers could see in real time how the trip was progressing.

The drive was broken into three- to four-hour segments, and the men would stop along the side of the road in the shade to lunch or relax and visit with curious passersby.

Several of the men said their most memorable stop was at Planet Baobab, a guest house in Gweta, Botswana, where the only other guests were 17 American teenagers on a school tour. Along the way, the volunteer drivers also accepted good wishes at a quick gas station ceremony with the mayor of Windhoek, Namibia's capital, and visited fire stations in Francistown, Botswana, and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

But for raw emotion, no part of journey could match the arrival of the group in Harare. With a blare of sirens, the fire engines rolled down the last street and turned into the driveway.

"It was difficult to describe how it felt," the station's fire chief, Servias Mugava, said of the first sight and sound of the new arrivals. "A lot of people say they will do things, but Mr. Lobel really did it. I said to him, `You are a star.' "

A few days later a crowd that included Vice President Joice Mujuru, the widow of Solomon Mujuru, gathered to celebrate. Mujuru held Lobel's hands and both cried as they spoke of the death of the general and what the fire trucks would mean to the community.

"You have shown love to my husband and to City of Harare," she said. "On behalf of the family and children, we have no better words to thank you."

Like much else in this politically troubled African country, the Harare Fire Department is in advanced stages of neglect. Chipped paint hangs from the ceiling of the garage. Firefighters work in threadbare coveralls. Against a fence in the back parking lot, a half-dozen fire trucks need repairs that the department cannot afford. Fire Chief Mugava said he battles an average of four building fires a day in a city with a population of 1.6 million people.

"We have 255 fighters, and they are professionally trained," Mugava said. "But the future is bleak. They have no tools to work with."

The firefighters were already learning their way around the new pumper trucks as the chief discussed plans to get the new equipment insured so the department could begin using them.

Ebezry Lobel said many of her travel clients have made generous gifts after visiting Africa, and like the gift of fire trucks, these can be attributed to a greater global awareness.

"People are just more conscious of what's going on around them and high-profile programs like those of Bill Gates and Bono and Bill Clinton," she said. "All of those high-profile people who have initiatives on a large scale have made people think about what their own contribution can be. That has been inspirational."

Christine Negroni writes about aviation and travel at www.gohowknowhow.com



Read more: http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/From-Greenwich-to-Zimbabwe-a-gift-of-fire-trucks-2457271.php#ixzz1j9oUPher

Bulawayo artist Marshall Baron

Part of a painting by Bulawayo artist Marshall Baron was used recently for
the cover of TOGETHER, a book of poetry and prose by the late Julius
Chingono & John Eppel, from Bulawayo. Published by UNO Press,
AmaBooks. To view Marshalls paintings, music reviews, bio, messages see www.marshallbaron.com Also Amabooks, on www.amabooksbyo.com

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=241947612509496&set=a.24177566586002

For more on Julius Chingono
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihr9aPejsqI

poetry reading
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWAj0sjOiUU

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY72HZ3nUes

Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft library opens in Bulawayo

LIBRARY IN BULAWAYO NAMED IN HONOUR OF RABBI MOSHE SILBERHAFT – JULY 2011

In addition to the economic plight of the country as a whole, HIV-AIDS and illness in general has greatly added to the daily hardship of life in Zimbabwe. Particularly poignant is the plight of countless children who as a result have no-one to care for them. For several hundred such children, last month’s opening of a small library in Bulawayo provided a much-needed educational and recreational facility. Perhaps even more importantly, however, it demonstrated that there are people, not just across the border but across the ocean as well and of different races and creeds, who still care about them.

The opening of the Rabbi Moshe Library at Bulawayo’s Vulindledla Youth Centre took place on 25 July, in the presence of Bulawayo Mayor Councillor T P Moyo and various other dignitaries. Named after Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft, Spiritual Leader and CEO of the African Jewish Congress (AJC), it brought to fruition a trans-continental partnership involving the AJC, Australian Books for Children in Africa (ABCA) and the Support Group of Families of Terminally Ill (SGOFOTI). The latter was founded and is co-headed by Ruth Bolnick-Feigenbaum, a prominent member of the local Jewish community of many years standing.

The origins of the project go back several years ago, when Sheryl Furman, formerly of Marquard in the Free State and today living in Melbourne, sent Rabbi Silberhaft several hundred books on behalf of ABCA for distribution in Zimbabwe. After discussing the matter with Feigenbaum, it was decided to give half to SGOFOTI and give remainder to various primary schools in Bulawayo. An approach was then made to ABCA donate a larger consignment of books to SGOFOTI with the aim of establishing a library for primary school learners.

In Australia, David Grieves duly undertook to provide this on behalf of ABCA. As part of his fundraising effort, he sold bookmarks made out of original Zimbabwean currency notes from the hyper-inflation years, when a billion Zimbabwe dollars barely paid for a week’s groceries. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee also chipped in by contributing towards the transport of the books, over 3000 of which were ultimately sent, and shelving for the library.

Grieves, Rabbi Silberhaft and AJC executive member Ann Harris travelled to Bulawayo to take part in the opening function. The latter commenced with prayers from representatives of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities, respected delivered by Hylton Solomon, President of the Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation, Father Day and Sheikh Ishmail Jassat. Afterwards, short addresses were given by the mayor, Grieves, Feigenbaum and Rabbi Silberhaft, and the 300 children then sang traditional songs. A film crew from the SABC was also present to record the occasion, with a view to its inclusion in a forthcoming documentary on Rabbi Silberhaft and his first 18 years as the Southern African country communities’ rabbi. The documentary, which is being produced by Gus Silber, is scheduled to be shown in November.

In her closing remarks Patricia Tshabalala, who co-heads the running of SGOFOTI with Feigenbaum, spoke with particular warmth about “her rabbi” Rabbi Silberhaft, whom she described as a kind, loving and caring shepherd of his Master’s sheep. She stressed how much the library meant to the children in her care, since they now had a sanctuary in which to “hide from the evils of this world”, increase their knowledge and no longer be lonely.

“Please tell the Jewish community that I thank them for their love, care and support and for making me and my people part of their family” she said.

James Earl Ray - tried to escape to Rhodesia

[source : http://www.southerntimesafrica.com ]
Harare and Windhoek - The man who killed iconic American civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jnr, in April 1968 - James Earl Ray - tried to escape to Rhodesia after the assassination and was arrested in Britain while finalizing his plans.

The revelation that the assassin wanted to secure safety in white supremacist Rhodesia in the book 'Hellhound on His Trail' by historical novelist Hampton Sides last year, lends credence to long-held suspicions that Ray was not acting alone and was paid to murder MLK Jnr.

The claim that Ray was a lone gunman acting on his own volition has been questioned for decades due to the planning behind the assassination and the large sums of cash that were evidently at the killer's disposal.

A jailhouse note allegedly written by Ray states: 'I got a murder charge instead of (US$) 10 000 for listening to promises.'

Re-examining MLK Jnr's murder in 1977-79, a US Congressional Committee found that Ray's 'predominant motive lay in an expectation of monetary gain'.

While there is no direct evidence that Rhodesia itself was involved in the assassination, the revelations provide a fascinating look at how white supremacists appeared to work together towards a common purposes across several countries.

'Hellhound on his Trail' is an intriguing account of the events leading to MLK Jnr's assassination; the international manhunt for the assassin across America, Canada and Britain; as well as the arrest, trial, imprisonment and death of Ray in jail in 1998 due to liver failure.

The author used hundreds of sources - including other books, newspaper cuttings, interviews, FBI files, memoirs, and official documents - to reconstruct how Ray stalked MLK Jnr, killed him and was arrested in London en route to Rhodesia.

Ray developed an interest in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in Puerto Vallarta where he bought a copy of US News & World Report in which he found an advertisement soliciting immigrants to that country, according to 'Hellhound on His Trail'.

'The idea appealed to him so much that on December 28, 1967, he wrote to the American-Southern Africa Council in Washington, DC to inquire about relocating to Salisbury,' Sides writes.

According to Sides, Ray - using the alias 'Galt' - at the time, wrote: 'My reason for writing is that I am considering immigrating to Rhodesia,' adding that 'representatives from the John Birch Society had referred him to the council.'

Another book by Gerald Posner, 'Killing the Dream', says Ray made a number of contacts with the California Chapter of the Friends of Rhodesia.

He was put in touch with this group by the Los Angeles area John Birch Society, which also helped Ray obtain information on how to get to Rhodesia where he could work with Ian Smith who 'was doing a good job'.

Ray made a number of trips to Orange County where he met the Free Rhodesia Committee.

While in Los Angeles, he wrote to the president of the California chapter of the Friends of Rhodesia raising more questions about immigration and inquiring about how he might subscribe to a pro-Ian Smith journal titled 'Rhodesian Commentary'.

Ray was apparently an occasional reader of 'Thunderbolt', a hate rag published out of Birmingham by the virulently segregationist National States Rights Party.

He was enamored of the party chairman, a flamboyant, outrageous race-baiter named Jesse Benjamin Stoner.

Born at the foot of Tennessee's Lookout Mountain, a Ku Klux Klansman since his teens, JB Stoner believed – literally - that Anglo-Saxons were God's chosen people.

Among his more memorable statements, Stoner called Hitler 'too moderate', referred to blacks as 'an extension of the ape family', and said that 'being a Jew should be a crime punishable by death'.

In 1968 Ray became an active volunteer for George Wallace's bid for the presidency.

The former Governor of Alabama - a die-hard segregationist - appealed to people like Ray for whom racism was a fact of life.

Wallace's running mate was right wing Air Force general, Curtis LeMay.

LeMay was also a member of the notorious Orange County Lincoln Club which played a critical role in getting Richard Nixon elected that year.

Another writer, George McMillan in his book 'The Making of an Assassin: The Life of James Earl Ray,' said of the assassin: 'He came to love German politics. He carried a picture of Hitler, his idol. He would show it to people.

'Jimmy talked 'Hitler politics'. Jimmy had become an impassioned proponent of the Nazi philosophy. His pledge to Nazism was itself peculiarly satisfying.'

According to McMillan, James Earl Ray was determined to go to Germany and give up his US citizenship, and he signed up to join the Army at age 17.

'By then he was giving the Heil Hitler salute in public, did it when he visited home. His first army assignment was at Nuremberg, where he served as a jeep driver in an MP unit.

'As MP he would beat up black GI's who flirted with Germans. What appealed to Jimmy in the first place about Hitler was that he would make the US an all-white country, no Jews or Negroes.

'Jimmy had really believed he could be in on reviving the Nazi Party.'

Such influences probably left Ray with the firm belief that he was better off getting Rhodesian citizenship.

He was an ardent believer in the cause of white rule and racial apartheid that he planned, as he later put it, to 'serve two or three years in one of them mercenary armies' in Southern Africa.

According to 'Hellhound on His Trail', after shooting MLK Jnr in April 1968 in Memphis, Ray was headed for Georgia, and possibly Mexico, although the larger goal was to reach Southern Africa.

Sides says: 'Rhodesia – the word dangled before him like a banner.'

He knew that under the pariah government of Ian Smith, Rhodesia observed no extradition treaties with the United States.

Ray liked what Smith was doing in Rhodesia, and he had an idea that if he could ever reach Salisbury, the people there would welcome him as a hero, grant him instant citizenship, and harbor him from any attempts at prosecution.

'I thought I was going to get away,' he is quoted as having said after he was arrested. 'I thought I could get to Africa and those folks over there wouldn't send me back.'

And because Rhodesia was an English-speaking country, he thought he would blend with the population.

Sides says he wasn't exactly sure what he would do once he got to Rhodesia and considered the possibilities of becoming a bartender, a locksmith or serve as a mercenary.

The latter option would have been easy for him to do as largely apartheid and CIA-funded mercenary groups were operational virtually across the whole of Southern Africa and Ray had military training.

Another intriguing link with Rhodesia originated in Ray's hometown of St Louis, through a wealthy patent attorney named John Sutherland.

Sutherland had a portfolio of stocks and other securities worth nearly half million US dollars - investments that included sizeable holdings in Rhodesia.

One of St Louis's most ardent segregationists, he was founder of the St Louis White Citizens Council and an active member of the John Birth Society (he was a personal friend of its founder, Robert Welch).

He had become immersed in a right-wing business organization called the Southern States Industrial Council.

Such associations drew Ray closer to Rhodesia.

'…the idea of Rhodesia burned in his imagination, the promise of sanctuary and refuge, the possibility of living in a society where people understood.'

Before he could get there, however Ray was determined to make a brief detour to Atlanta where he intended to pick up his few belongings.

It may have seemed brazenly risky to head straight for the hometown of the man he'd just killed, yet there was also a clever counter-intuition in such a course.

The move also raised suspicion that Ray was not working alone and was confident his powerful co-conspirators could protect him.

As he passed through Holly Springs, New Albany and Tupelo, Ray trolled radio waves for news on the assassination.

Somewhere along the way, he heard a bulletin that the police were looking for a white Mustang driven by a 'well-dressed white man'.

Hearing this bit of news changed everything and he knew he immediately had to ditch the Mustang and he would have to abandon the thought of going through Mexico.

Instead, he would head for Canada and then try to get to Rhodesia from there.

Ray was also sure that the state of Alabama – from where George Wallace hailed - would praise him for killing MLK Jnr and shield him from his pursuers.

'Hellhound on His Trail' then chronicles Ray's escape into Canada, assuming a new name and passport under the name Ramon Sneyd, before flying to London, then to Portugal, and back to London with the hope of proceeding to Rhodesia.

Ray's brother, John, who was interrogated by the FBI during the manhunt, recalls visiting his young brother in prison during an earlier incarceration in an American jail from where he later escaped.

The FBI agent recalls getting an earful from the young Ray about Ian Smith and the good job he was doing down in Rhodesia.

John Ray characterized himself as 'a mild segregationist' and soon he confided his frustration to the FBI agents.

'What's all the excitement about?' he wondered aloud. 'He only killed a nigger. If he'd killed a white man, you wouldn't be here.'

According to 'Hellhound on His Trail', Ray - using the name Ramon Sneyd - on May 7 touched down at Heathrow Airport in London in preparation for the trip to Rhodesia.

He stayed in London for ten days; holed up in his room, reading newspapers and magazines – and desperately trying to find a way to Rhodesia.

When he was finally arrested he was trying to board a flight from London to Brussels to get more information on how to get to Rhodesia and join a mercenary outfit.

He was also found in possession of a Liberty Chief pistol.

Asked why he was carrying a gun, Ray stammered. 'Uh, well. I'm really thinking of going on to Rhodesia and things aren't too good there just now.'

The contents of his suitcase were quickly inventoried, and - in the words of one Scotland Yard official - 'proved most enlightening'.

Among other items, investigators found a map of Portugal, a guide to Rhodesia, two books on hypnotism, and a well-marked paperback titled 'Psycho-Cybernetics'.

None of the newspapers or newsmagazines later mentioned how close Ray had come to getting away with his crime - or that if he'd made it to Rhodesia, extraditing him would have been nearly impossible.

Ray was never reconciled to his capture at Heathrow and his failure to make it to Rhodesia and kept reliving it in his mind.

If he'd only made it onto that plane to Brussels, he was confident that he could have found a cheap way to reach Rhodesia, or Angola.

He came within a hairbreadth of making it.

'He just hated black people,' one officer recalled. 'He said so on many occasions. He called them 'niggers'.

'In fact, he said he was going to Africa to shoot some more. He mentioned the (French) Foreign Legion.

'He seemed to have some sort of wild fantasy that he was going to do something of this nature.'

• Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr and the International Hunt for His Assassin, by Hampton Sides. Published by Doubleday.Comments
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Art Exhibit Stirs Up the Ghosts of Zimbabwe’s Past

January 23, 2011 (Source : www.nytimes.com )
Art Exhibit Stirs Up the Ghosts of Zimbabwe’s Past
By CELIA W. DUGGER
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe — The exhibit at the National Gallery is now a crime scene, the artwork banned and the artist charged with insulting President Robert Mugabe. The picture windows that showcased graphic depictions of atrocities committed in the early years of Mr. Mugabe’s 30-year-long rule are now papered over with the yellowing pages of a state-controlled newspaper.

But the government’s efforts to bury history have instead provoked slumbering memories of the Gukurahundi, Zimbabwe’s name for the slaying and torture of thousands of civilians here in the Matabeleland region a quarter century ago.

“You can suppress art exhibits, plays and books, but you cannot remove the Gukurahundi from people’s hearts,” said Pathisa Nyathi, a historian here. “It is indelible.”

As Zimbabwe heads anxiously toward another election season, a recent survey by Afrobarometer has found that 70 percent of Zimbabweans are afraid they will be victims of political violence or intimidation, as thousands were in the 2008 elections. But an equal proportion want the voting to go forward this year nonetheless, evidence of their deep desire for democracy and the willingness of many to vote against Mr. Mugabe at great personal risk, analysts say.

In few places do such sentiments about violence in public life run as deep as here, and in recent months the government — whether through missteps or deliberate provocation — has rubbed them ever more raw.

Before the World Cup in South Africa in June, a minister in Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, invited the North Korean soccer team, on behalf of Zimbabwe’s tourism authority, to base itself in Bulawayo before the games began, a gesture that roused a ferocious outcry. After all, it was North Korea that trained and equipped the infamous Fifth Brigade, which historians estimate killed at least 10,000 civilians in the Ndebele minority between 1983 and 1987.

“To us it opened very old wounds,” Thabitha Khumalo, a member of Parliament, said of the attempt to bring the North Korean team to the Ndebele heartland. “We’re being reminded of the most horrible pain. How dare they? Our loved ones are still buried in pit latrines, mine shafts and shallow graves.”

Ms. Khumalo, interviewed while the invitation was still pending last year, wept as she summoned memories of the day that destroyed her family — Feb. 12, 1983.

She was 12 years old. She said soldiers from the Fifth Brigade, wearing jaunty red berets, came to her village and lined up her family. One soldier slit open her pregnant aunt’s belly with a bayonet and yanked out the baby. She said her grandmother was forced to pound the fetus to a pulp in a mortar and pestle. Her father was made to rape his mother. Her uncles were shot point blank.

Such searing memories stoked protests, and in the end the North Korean team did not come to Zimbabwe. But feelings were further inflamed months later when the government erected a larger-than-life bronze statue of Joshua Nkomo — a liberation hero, an Ndebele and a rival to Mr. Mugabe — that, incredibly, was made in North Korea.

Last September, bowing to public outcry over the statue’s origin (and protests from Mr. Nkomo’s family that its plinth was too small), the statue was removed from a major intersection in Bulawayo. It now stands neglected in a weedy lot behind the Natural History Museum here.

Inside the museum hangs a portrait of a vigorous and dapper Mr. Mugabe in oversize glasses. He turns 87 next month. A massive stuffed crocodile, his family’s clan totem, dominates one gallery, its teeth long and sharp, its mouth agape. The signboard notes the crocodile’s lifespan exceeds 80 years.

Mr. Mugabe signed a pact with North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, to train the infamous army brigade just months after Zimbabwe gained independence from white minority rule in 1980. Mr. Mugabe declared the brigade would be named “Gukurahundi” (pronounced guh-kura-HUN-di), which means “the rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains.” He said it was needed to quell violent internal dissent, but historians say he used it to attack Mr. Nkomo’s political base and to impose one-party rule.

Mr. Mugabe’s press secretary, George Charamba, said the president had called the Gukurahundi “a moment of madness,” but asked whether Mr. Mugabe had apologized for the campaign, Mr. Charamba bristled.

“You can’t call it a moment of madness without critiquing your own past,” he said. “I hope people are not looking to humiliate the president. I hope they’re just looking at allowing him to get by healing this nation. For us, that is uppermost. Our sense of embitterment, our sense of recompense may not be exactly what you saw at Nuremburg.”

Downtown Bulawayo has the sleepy rhythms of a farm town, but the psychic wounds of the Gukurahundi fester beneath its placid surface. At the National Gallery here, the stately staircase leading to the shuttered Gukurahundi exhibit is now blocked by a sign that says “No Entry.” But the paintings, on walls saturated with blood-red paint, can still be glimpsed from the gallery above, through the bars of balconies. The paintings themselves seem to be jailed.

Voti Thebe, who heads the National Gallery, said the artist, Owen Maseko, created the Gukurahundi exhibit to contribute to reconciliation. There was no money, so Mr. Maseko, 35, did it on his own time. He was just a boy at the time of the Gukurahundi, but he recalls the sounds of hovering helicopters and sirens.

“The memories are still there,” he said. “The victims are still alive. It’s not something we can just forget.”

In a large painting, a row of faces are shown with mouths open in wordless screams. In another, women and children weep what seem to be tears of blood. Three papier-mâché corpses, one hanging upside down, fill a picture window. Throughout the galleries are recurrent, menacing images of a man in oversize glasses — Mr. Mugabe.

The day after the exhibit opened last year, it was closed down. Mr. Maseko was detained, then transferred to prison in leg irons before being released on bail. Mr. Maseko’s case awaits the Supreme Court’s attention. He is charged with insulting the president and communicating falsehoods prejudicial to the state, a charge punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

David Coltart, a politician from Bulawayo who is arts minister in the power-sharing government of ZANU-PF and its political rivals, said he warned cabinet ministers that prosecuting Mr. Maseko could turn the case into a cause célèbre and inflame divisions. Mr. Coltart, who has long fought the Mugabe government, said he also appealed directly to Defense Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was security minister during the Gukurahundi.

“It is only when nations grapple with their past, in its reality, not as a biased fiction, that they can start to deal with that past,” Mr. Coltart said in a lecture delivered above Mr. Maseko’s show. He called the Gukurahundi “a politicide, if not a genocide.”

The Bulawayo playwright Cont Mhlanga knows the costs of free expression. His play “The Good President” was shut down on opening night here in 2007 when baton-wielding riot police officers stormed the theater.

The lead character is a grandmother who lies to her two grandsons about the death of their father. He had been buried alive in the Gukurahundi. But the boys, ignorant of the truth, become beneficiaries of the Mugabe government, one of them an abusive policeman, the other a recipient of seized farmland. The play’s title refers, Mr. Mhlanga said, to African leaders who call Mr. Mugabe a good president, “this man who has blood on his hands.”

Mr. Mhlanga says he feels “like someone has put huge pieces of tape over my mouth,” but insists that artists must express what people are terrified of saying.

“We live in a society where we’re so afraid, even of our own shadows,” he said. “To create democratic space in a society like ours, we have to deal with fear.”

A Jewish Education in Zimbabwe

[Source : published in The Yale Globalist, Yale University's Undergraduate
Magazine of International Affairs.]
A Jewish Education in Zimbabwe
in CULTURE — October 22, 2010 at 9:17 am | 3 comments

by Anya van Wagtendonk:

Clement Mpofu looks out at the camera, smiling broadly. He waits patiently as his interviewers decide where to begin, his shirtsleeves rolled up against the heat of a Zimbabwe spring. Atop his head rests a blue kipah, the skullcap that reminds Jews of their humility beneath the Divine. But Mpofu is not Jewish. Moments before the camera was switched on, he paused, fumbled around in his desk, and came up with the blue garment. It is important that he wear a kipah when speaking to the public. He is, after all, the headmaster of the Carmel School, one of the last Jewish schools in Zimbabwe.

A School is Born

Fifty years ago, members of the Jewish community in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, petitioned to form a school for their children. In 1958, eight students came together in a one-room schoolhouse as the first class of the Carmel School. Within two years, 160 young Zimbabwean Jews were studying Hebrew and the Old Testament alongside math, biology, and the indigenous language, Ndebele.


A class photograph of students at the Carmel School. (Courtesy Gabrielle Elkaim, Carmel '95)

At the time, Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia, and a white minority government forcibly ruled over the black majority. After a 14 year civil war, which the white minority lost, the first truly democratic elections were held. Robert Mugabe, who remains the leader of Zimbabwe, was elected in 1979 and sworn into office as President in 1980. At this time, Carmel became integrated and the school committed itself to promoting a diverse student body of all religious backgrounds.

Today, thirty years later, there are hardly any Jewish students left among the 200-person student body. Gabrielle Elkaim, who graduated from Carmel in 1995 and is the daughter of Carmel’s very first student, reported that there is only one Jewish student left. “And by December this year,” said Elkaim, “she will graduate, and there won’t be any Jews there.”

The absence of Jewish students at the school reflects the struggles of the greater Zimbabwean Jewish community, which is but a shadow of what it once was. By the 1970s, the Jews in Zimbabwe numbered 7,500, most of them descendents of the first traders who arrived in the 1890s or of European refugees searching for new homes in the years during and after World War II. Today, the community counts fewer than 300 to their ranks. Most live in either Harare or Bulawayo, cities of a million and a half people. One-eighth live in the Savyon Lodge, Bulawayo’s Jewish retirement home. In 2003, the hundred-yearold Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation burned down; while its walls once sheltered 3000 people, fewer than 120 members now gather for services at Savyon Lodge.

Leaving Zimbabwe

But Zimbabwe is losing not only Jewish residents. A recent BBC survey suggests that, since 1990, millions of Zimbabweans have chosen to start new lives in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and surrounding African countries. Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft, spiritual leader of the African Jewish Congress, an organization that sees to the needs of sub-Saharan Jewish communities, insisted that “it is not a Jewish issue.” Rather, he pointed to the “starving masses and fat cat politicians” that have preoccupied news stories about Zimbabwe since Robert Mugabe declared himself the first executive head of state—effectively, dictator for life—in 1987.

Mugabe entered office in 1980 as a champion of the people, an anti-imperialist who had fought against British rule in the Zimbabwe liberation struggle. But over time, his rule became increasingly authoritarian. Today, reports of human rights violations stream across the border accompanied by stories of censorship, corruption, and oppression, of government-ordered assassinations and torture. Ethnic tensions have also increased under his reign: Mugabe has referred to white Zimbabweans as “British settlers… citizens by colonization,” and, in 2000, ordered a land-grab operation wherein 4,000 white farmers watched their land get forcibly taken from them. Mugabe is also largely blamed for the economic turmoil of recent years, wherein hyperinflation rendered the Zimbabwe dollar nearly valueless.

“A lot of people have left the country because of the situation where you know that you cannot, you cannot get any basic food on the shelves… And that’s not fair,” Mpofu explained. The purpose of the video becomes clear: It is a farewell of sorts, filmed weeks before his decision to resign and leave the country in 2007. “It’s a very traumatic situation for me because I never wanted to go. But because of what is happening in the country…” He trails off. “I’m just praying that something is going to happen soon.”

“An Example of True Coexistence”

But something is happening, inside the walls of the very school that Mpofu left. Even in the absence of a sizeable Jewish student body, the Carmel School has remained staunchly Jewish. All students celebrate the Jewish Sabbath, observe Jewish holidays, study the Old Testament, and perform plays from its stories. Among the required school supplies listed in the student handbook is a kipah for the boys. Pork products are banned from school grounds in accordance with the Jewish dietary laws. And although most students come from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or other backgrounds, all students participate fully in this Jewish experience. David W. Rix, who replaced Mpofu and presides over the school today, said the non-Jewish parent body remains “adamant” that the school retain its Jewish ethos.

Consequently, the school serves as a model of multiculturalism. “It’s amazing that the children are all getting along together,” Mpofu observed. “Many parents prefer to bring their children in that type of environment which is more or less a setup of how we want Zimbabwe to be,” Michelle, a non-Jewish student from the mid-1990s who asked that her last name not be used, has put her own children in an international school “to gain the same experiences that I was lucky enough to experience” at Carmel. Elkaim remarked that she has never come across another Jewish school as diverse as Carmel, with students from such varied religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds.

“This is a real reflection of the Bulawayo community,” she asserted, “and as far as I’m concerned, is the most overlooked part of our community which should be an example of true coexistence to the rest of the world.”

Looking Forward

In his departure interview, Mpofu expressed many hopes for the future of the Carmel School. Some, like the continued existence of the school’s Hebrew program, did not come to fruition: although students still learn Hebrew blessings and prayers, the language is no longer taught. But the emphasis on multiculturalism is still very much present, as evidenced in the school charter which holds hateful or discriminatory language or behavior as its highest offense. Mpofu’s biggest concern—that, as the Jewish population continued to dwindle, the school would lose its distinct Jewish character—does not appear to be an issue. The same school charter states its objective to retain “the Jewish traditions and character of the school.” When asked about the current state of Jewish affairs at Carmel, Elkaim echoed Rix’s claim that “the non-Jewish parents have insisted that Carmel stay a Jewish school in nature.”

Ultimately, Mpofu believes that these students, those whose minds and values have been shaped within the confines of a school dedicated to tolerance, harmony, and respect, will be the ones to restore this broken country. As renewed hope promises to turn Zimbabwe around, “we will need them to come back to the country, or even stay here, to actually run the economy in the future. They are the ones who are going to be responsible,” he explained.

The school symbol is the eight-armed menorah lit during Hanukah, the Jewish holiday of light. This candelabra was lit, so the story goes, after Judah Maccabee and his makeshift army led a successful revolt against the Greek Emperor who wanted the Jews—and all other ethnic minorities in the region—to become Hellenized. The Carmel School uses this symbol to represent its commitments to “the characteristics of determination, courage and tenacity associated with the heroic figure of Judah the Maccabee.” With these characteristics Carmel hopes its students will shape the future of their country.

As he gazes out into the camera, it is clear Mpofu doesn’t know when that future will be realized. Until it is, he will not return to Zimbabwe. If conditions do improve, though, he knows what he wants to do. “If I’m going to come back,” he grins, “I want to come back and teach at Carmel.”

Anya van Wagtendonk ’12 is an English major in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at anya.vanwagtendonk@yale.edu.

Fears Growing of Mugabe’s Iron Grip Over Zimbabwe

[source : New York Times]

December 25, 2010
Fears Growing of Mugabe’s Iron Grip Over Zimbabwe
By CELIA W. DUGGER
HARARE, Zimbabwe — The warning signs are proliferating. Journalists have been harassed and jailed. Threats of violence are swirling in the countryside. The president’s supposed partner in the government has been virulently attacked in the state-controlled media as a quisling for the West. And the president himself has likened his party to a fast-moving train that will crush anything in its way.

After nearly two years of tenuous stability under a power-sharing government, fears are mounting here that President Robert Mugabe, the autocrat who presided over a bloody, discredited election in 2008, is planning to seize untrammeled control of Zimbabwe during the elections he wants next year.

“Everything seems to point to a violent election,” said Eldred Masunungure, a political scientist and pollster.

Having ruled alone for 28 of the last 30 years, Mr. Mugabe, 86, has made no secret of his distaste for sharing power with his rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, since regional leaders pressured them to govern together 22 months ago.

In recent months, Mr. Mugabe has been cranking up his party’s election-time machinery of control and repression. He appointed all the provincial governors, who help him dispense patronage and punishment, rather than sharing the picks as promised with Mr. Tsvangirai. And traditional chiefs, longtime recipients of largess from his party, ZANU-PF, have endorsed Mr. Mugabe as president for life.

Political workers and civic activists who lived through the 2008 campaign of intimidation and repression — in which many foot soldiers in Mr. Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change were tortured or murdered — say ZANU-PF will not need to be so violent this time around. Threats may be enough.

In Mashonaland West, Mr. Mugabe’s home province, people said they were already being warned by local traditional leaders loyal to Mr. Mugabe that the next election would be more terrifying than the last one, when their relatives were abducted and attacked after Mr. Tsvangirai won some constituencies.

“They say, ‘We were only playing with you last time,’ ” said one 53-year-old woman, too frightened to be quoted by name, repeating a warning others in the countryside have heard. “ ‘This time we will go door to door beating and killing people if you don’t vote for ZANU-PF.’ ”

But even as many voice a growing conviction that Mr. Mugabe is plotting to oust his rival and reclaim sole power, he has retained his ability to keep everyone guessing. His political opponents and Western diplomats wonder if Mr. Mugabe is bluffing about a push for quick elections, perhaps to force the factions in his own party to declare their allegiance to him and extinguish the internal jockeying to succeed him.

Further complicating the picture, Mr. Mugabe struck a statesmanlike pose on Monday at a news conference where he graciously shared the stage with Mr. Tsvangirai. The next day, the state-controlled newspaper quoted him as boasting that he, Mr. Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara had brought peace to the country after the 2008 elections. But he also said that new elections would be held after the process of crafting a new constitution was completed, and that the power-sharing government should not be extended beyond August.

The contest between Mr. Mugabe, a university-educated Machiavellian, and Mr. Tsvangirai, 58, a former labor leader who never went to college and is often described as a well intentioned but bumbling tactician, lies at the heart of Zimbabwe’s tumultuous political life.

Not long after Mr. Tsvangirai quit the June 2008 runoff in hopes of halting the beating and torture of thousands of his party workers and supporters, the two men suddenly found themselves alone in the same room. Thabo Mbeki, then South Africa’s president and the mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis, vanished during a lunchtime.

In his resonant, cultivated voice, Mr. Mugabe invited Mr. Tsvangirai to join him for a traditional meal of sadza, greens and stew, prepared by Mr. Mugabe’s personal chef, but Mr. Tsvangirai, who had been viciously beaten by Mr. Mugabe’s police force the year before, refused to eat, aides to both men say.

“I can assure you,” Mr. Mugabe said, according to his press secretary, George Charamba, “I’m not about to poison you.”

In 2009, under excruciating pressure from regional leaders, Mr. Tsvangirai agreed to a deal that some in his own party saw as a poisoned chalice. It made him prime minister, but allowed Mr. Mugabe to retain the dominant powers of the state.

Mr. Tsvangirai admits he initially found Mr. Mugabe “very accommodative, very charming.” The men met privately each Monday over tea and scones. When Susan, Mr. Tsvangirai’s wife of more than three decades, died in a car crash just weeks after the government was formed, Mr. Mugabe comforted him. Mr. Mugabe also complained about problems in his own party, and the two men commiserated about how to deal with their hard-liners, Mr. Charamba said.

But Mr. Tsvangirai said in a recent interview that he had come to believe it was Mr. Mugabe himself, not military commanders or other members of the president’s powerful inner circle, who was the principal manipulator.

“He goes along,” Mr. Tsvangirai said, “pretends to be a gentleman, pretends to be accommodative, pretends to be seriously committed to the law, and turns around, sending people, beating up people, using violence to coerce and to literally defend power for the sake of defending power.”

After a decade resisting Mr. Mugabe’s rule from the outside, Mr. Tsvangirai, other leaders of his party and a small breakaway faction have found themselves at the table with him in Tuesday cabinet meetings. They have studied the qualities that have helped Mr. Mugabe hang on to power for 30 years: stamina, mental acuity, attention to detail, charm and an uncanny instinct for the exercise of power.

“Let me tell you, that man’s brain is still very, very, very sharp, but his body is frail,” Mr. Tsvangirai said.

While polls show that Mr. Tsvangirai remains the country’s most popular politician and the likely victor of a fair election, analysts say Mr. Mugabe has been emboldened by a major development: the recent discovery that diamond fields in eastern Zimbabwe, which fall under a ministry controlled by ZANU-PF, may be among the richest in the world.

The minister of mines, Obert Mpofu, insisted in an interview that “ZANU-PF has not gotten a cent from diamonds, not one cent.” But Mr. Tsvangirai and analysts here say they assume that illicit diamond profits are enriching the party’s coffers and helping buy the loyalty of the security services that enforced ZANU-PF’s violent election strategy in 2008.

Mr. Charamba, the president’s press secretary, rejected the assertions, saying there would be “an all-out deployment to assure there is no violence” by any party.

Since Mr. Tsvangirai joined the government, Mr. Mugabe has openly tested the limits of their deal, unilaterally appointing many senior officials and refusing to swear in one of Mr. Tsvangirai’s closest advisers. Mr. Mugabe, in turn, claims that Mr. Tsvangirai has not held up his end of the bargain: lobbying the West to end travel and financial sanctions on him and his coterie.

Mr. Tsvangirai admitted that after leading the struggle against Mr. Mugabe’s rule since 1999, he had no ready answers for establishing “a democratic struggle without guns, without using violence” in the country.

“There’s no template about the solution to the Zimbabwe crisis,” he said. “We have learned this over the last 10 years. There is no template for how we’re going to deal with Mugabe.”



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Zimbabwe Health Care, Paid With Peanuts

December 18, 2010 [Source : New York Times]
Zimbabwe Health Care, Paid With Peanuts
By CELIA W. DUGGER
CHIDAMOYO, Zimbabwe — People lined up on the veranda of the American mission hospital here from miles around to barter for doctor visits and medicines, clutching scrawny chickens, squirming goats and buckets of maize. But mostly, they arrived with sacks of peanuts on their heads.

The hospital’s cavernous chapel is now filled with what looks like a giant sand dune of unshelled nuts. The hospital makes them into peanut butter that is mixed into patients’ breakfast porridge, spread on teatime snacks and melted into vegetables at dinnertime.

“We literally are providing medical services for peanuts!” exclaimed Kathy McCarty, a nurse from California who has run this rural hospital, 35 miles from the nearest tarred road, since 1981.

The hospital, along with countless Zimbabweans, turned to barter in earnest in 2008 when inflation peaked at what the International Monetary Fund estimates was an astonishing 500 billion percent, wiping out life savings, making even trillion-dollar notes worthless and propelling the health and education systems into a vertiginous collapse.

Since then, a power-sharing government has formed after years of decline under President Robert Mugabe, and the economy has stabilized. Zimbabwe abandoned its currency last year, replacing it with the American dollar, and inflation has fallen to a demure 3.6 percent. Teachers are back in their classrooms and nurses are back on their wards.

But a recent United Nations report suggests how far Zimbabwe has to go. It is still poorer than any of the 183 countries the United Nations has income data for. It is also one of only three countries in the world to be worse off now on combined measures of health, education and income than it was 40 years ago, the United Nations found.

For many rural Zimbabweans, cash remains so scarce that the 85-bed Chidamoyo Christian Hospital has continued to allow its patients to barter. Studies have found that fees are a major barrier to medical care in rural areas, where most Zimbabweans live.

“It’s very difficult to get this famous dollar that people are talking about,” said Esther Chirasasa, 30, who hiked eight miles through the bush to the hospital for treatment of debilitating arthritis. Her son, Cain, 13, walked at her side carrying a sack of peanuts to pay for her care.

Mrs. Chirasasa said her family of seven was nearly out of the food they grew on their small plot, so she needed to get her pain under control to work in other farmers’ fields to feed her children.

Bartering helps plug some of the holes. A May survey of more than 4,000 rural households found that each of them, typically a family of six, spent an average of only $8 for all their needs in April, the cost of a couple of cappuccinos in New York. To help them get by, more than a third of households surveyed in September 2009 had used bartering.

Still, United Nations agencies estimate that 1.7 million of Zimbabwe’s 11 million people will need food aid in the coming months. And Mr. Mugabe’s continued domination of political life, along with persistent violations of the rule of law and human rights, have deterred foreign aid and investment needed to rebuild the nation’s shattered economy, analysts say.

Here in this rustic outpost with no phone service and often no electricity, the Chidamoyo hospital and the people who rely on it have entered an unwritten pact to resist the tide of death that has carried away so many. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe, plagued by AIDS and poverty, has fallen to 47 years from 61 years over the past quarter century.

Patients provide the crops they grow and the animals they raise — food that feeds the thousands of patients who use the hospital — and the hospital tends to their wounds, treats their illnesses and delivers their babies. Its two doctors and 15 nurses see about 6,000 patients a month and have put 2,000 people with AIDS on life-saving antiretroviral medicines.

Even during the hyperinflation of 2008, when government hospitals ceased to function as the salaries of their workers shriveled, the Chidamoyo hospital stayed open by giving its staff members food that patients had bartered.

“People are helped very well and the staff cares about the patients,” said Monica Mbizo, 22, who arrived with stomach pains and traded three skinny, black-feathered chickens for treatment.

The hospital, founded over four decades ago by American missionaries, from the Christian Church and Churches of Christ, receives limited support from a government that is itself hurting for revenue. The hospital also gets up to $10,000 a month from American and British churches, enabling it to charge patients far less in cash or goods than the fees at most government facilities. The hospital charges $1 to see the doctor — or a quarter bucket of peanuts — while a government hospital typically charges $4, in cash only.

Short of cash like the people it serves, the hospital practices a level of thrift unheard of in the United States. Workers and volunteers steam latex gloves to sterilize them for reuse, filling the fingers with water to ensure against leaks. They remove the cotton balls from thousands of pill bottles to swab patients’ arms before injections. And they collect the tissue-thin pages of instructions from the same bottles for use as toilet paper.

But there are limits to what even stringent economies can achieve. For most of the past year, the hospital did not have enough money to stock blood. Ms. McCarty said women who hemorrhaged after giving birth or experiencing ruptured ectopic pregnancies were referred to bigger hospitals, but often they had no blood either. Eight women died, she said. Just recently, the United Nations has begun paying for blood at the hospital to improve women’s odds of surviving.

Standing over an anesthetized woman before a Caesarean section, Dr. Vernon Murenje recalled how frightening it was to operate without blood in stock. “You’re operating,” he said, “but then at the back of your mind, you’ll be thinking, ‘What if we have significant blood loss?’ ”

As he prepared to make the incision, the hospital was in the midst of almost two weeks without power. Its old generator, already used when the hospital bought it 20 years ago, lacked enough juice to run the X-ray machine or to keep the florescent lights from flickering. It was turned on just before the Caesarean section. The air-conditioner coughed weakly to life in the stifling room.

When a boy emerged, Ms. McCarty cried, “Welcome to Zimbabwe!” But the newborn made no sound. She pounded his back and suctioned his nose until he let out a cry like a quavering baby bird.

“Oh, you finally realized you were born in Zimbabwe,” she said. “He thought he was born in South Africa, and he was happy.”

Postscript: The Community Presbyterian Church of Ringwood, N.J., has raised $24,000, and the Rotary Club of Sebastopol, Calif., contributed $7,000 to buy the hospital a generator.