BY KENNETH MUFUKA
Please reader, before you start reading this, you are advised to take a secure seat, not because there is anything hilarious, but because the truth hurts. I want to carry on a discussion and bring out some differences in perspective, with love.
The operation Dudula, in South Africa, is led by a brother by the name of Nhlanhla Lux, who is alleged to have the support of President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC hierarchy in that country. In brief, Lux says that every South African has a right to make a citizen arrest of a foreigner if he believes that foreigner has entered the country illegally. If my memory is correct, the Boer nationalists tried to enroll the support of South African boy scouts to identify black South Africans living in the urban areas without a “situpa” (ID or permit to remain) in 1961.
I was young, but I remember the church fathers explaining to me that the World Council of Churches had objected to that law (or regulation). It assumed that boy scouts were whites. It was demeaning for a white youth to stop an elderly black man and say: “Wena Baba, lo situpa ungapi?” This is exactly what happened to Zimbabwean Elvis Nyathi. Married, with a family, an economic refugee from Zimbabwe, a posse of blacks, seeking for a criminal, entered his home, and having failed to satisfy them as to his legal status beat him and burned his body.
Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has expressed this brilliantly, but the brilliance hides the simplicity of the matter, the intense self-hatred of our brothers. “The paradoxes and see-saw(s) in our Black and African consciousness, from Rhodes must fall to Operation Dudula, rom Afrophilia to Afrophobia…including the remorseless killing and burning of Elvis Nyathi in South Africa.”
Please do not miss my point. Brother Lux has no intention of driving away the Boers who occupy 78% of all arable land in South Africa. South Africa is advertising for registered nurses in the United Kingdom. It can easily get 1 000 of the best trained nurses from across the Limpopo River in Zimbabwe. Perhaps I am missing something.
“Kenny musoro wako wakazara mvura.” (Your head is full of water). I can hear Fabian Mabaya, my friend reminding me. They are looking for white registered nurses.
I do not know when my people will learn. The lesson of Russia-Ukraine conflict is that white people are comfortable with their own. They will go out of their way to help Ukrainians. You sluggard, listen well and listen good. They are saying it every day. “Oh, Ukrainians are blue eyed folks like us. Oh, Ukrainians are civilised like us. Oh, how can the Russians do this to white babies?”
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These sentiments are as they should. Here, I have a different perspective from my black brothers. They tend to blame the white man for teaching blacks to hate themselves. Malcolm X has a chapter on that.
I have a “deeper” explanation. Human nature is evil. The oppressed does not hate the oppressor because of oppression in generic terms. He hates the oppressor because he misses out on the privileges of oppression, which he sees his oppressor enjoying every day.
Given the chance, the victim, when he becomes the master, is just as bad as his former oppressor. There are many examples where Irishmen, fleeing from hunger and oppression in 1840-1845 in their homeland, could not wait to enter the US where they would have the freedom to own a couple of slaves. My Jewish friends tell me that their greatest nightmare is to wake up and find themselves acting in a similar way towards Palestinians that Adolf Hitler did to them. I remember Joshua Nkomo’s last days. Even the colonialist Ian Smith did not treat him with the contempt, which he received from Robert Mugabe.
Piers Pigou wrote that way back in the 1997 when he was doing surveys on human rights in South Africa, “xenophobic attitudes were significant amongst a sizeable number of respondents (25-30%) …but this was across most of the demographic spread.”
There is something else. Wherever great evils are committed, the church is silent. The Council of Churches in South Africa has been silent. It would be unusual for me to miss anything from that angle, because I hang out among the saints. The fact that they are missing is not unusual. The prophetic tradition is unique to Israel. When the prophet Elijah challenged Queen Jezebel for stealing a poor man’s vineyard, there were 400 men of God, responded in their heavenly gowns saying big words about everything. They were on the evil Queen’s side.
Watch the protestant churches in Zimbabwe. Their prayers are long and tall, but they pray in vain when they ignore the oppression of the widow and the waifs, they plug their ears when Jestina Mukoko goes missing.
This brings me to the present situation in Zimbabwe. This evil brother Lux has obliterated the idea that no son of Afrika should be a stranger in any part of Africa. But that does not exonerate us from fixing our problems in Zimbabwe. Even an evil man speaks truth, for the devil is not stupid.
Brother Lux says that the problem in Zimbabwe is that millions of its educated people have left their homeland, fleeing from the rot caused by corruption, outright inefficiency, and stupidity. “It is well known that when there are two currencies, the stronger one will drive away the weaker one.” Professor Mthuli Ncube. How stupid can one be? After saying that, the brother introduces the US currency, pays himself and his cronies in US currency, then sets up a bourse in Victoria Falls in US currency.
Oh, I give up.
I was very upset when I found out that US State Department officials who assessed the Second Republic and its big words about fighting corruption concluded that it was all a “charade.” Here I am, I have spent 30 years studying the southern Africa politics and I had been conned to believe that they were genuine in desiring change. Here is an example of their duplicity. The Zimbabwe social security administration is prejudiced of $93 million. The police and the judiciary fail to trace it and in whose pocket it landed.
- Ken Mufuka is a Zimbabwean patriot. His book on Life and Times of Robert Mugabe: Dream Betrayed, and other books can be found at Innov Bookshops in Zimbabwe and at kenmufuabooks.com in the wider world.
