An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  I have even started reading your fantastic writings on Refutations.

  You write a lot, my friend – but if you will allow me a comment, your writing is still overly scholarly and suffers from the preponderant postmodern stupidities of much of what my poor comrades would describe as bullshit. Comrade, I am saying this because I care!

  But the interview you published with Guthrie, that X-Party apologist and dog who I remember arguing with, was perfect. This is the way. What ingenuity and guts you showed, to obtain this rare example of a history and an experience unknown to the ignorant socialists I find in this Dark Continent who know nothing of Africa. I have gained the harsh impression that none of the good activists I have met in Europe have any real idea of what exactly is happening in Africa because there is NO serious contact. Together we are changing this. Your contribution could in practice be colossal, my friend. Long may you continue to make such an invaluable contribution. Bolsheviks as solid and serious as Nelson and Biko are a rarity, and you are now with them in the Southern Hemisphere.

  But I still find your ideas and arguments too abstract for the realities of the contemporary struggle. Remember that the most powerful ‘ruling idea’ remains that THEY are born to rule and WE are born to slave, obey, to be subservient and deferential. The vast majority of workers (and all the oppressed too, of course) live still today with a certain degree of being overawed, overwhelmed and overimpressed – partly because of being overworked, overtired and overstressed.

  Early on I was taught that there is in politics, as in nature and maths, nothing less than one, except zero. Individually we remain vulnerable to all the venomous physical, intellectual, ideological and spiritual poison they pay an army of academics, politicians, pundits and other scum to bombard us with daily. This has been going on for 5,000 years. The Greek slave-owners invented the three Fates, who spun the thread of life to tell us we have no control and we must therefore accept our fate. I remember Nelson at the back of a meeting room explaining to a young comrade that Mandela, as the arch-reformist/social-democrat/traitor, was the epitome of ‘fatalistic paralysis’. Like a rabbit in the headlights.

  Imagine Nelson Mandela as the epitome of fatalism. How the world turns on a lie; our job is to expose these myths, reorientate, dislodge such notions. Dethrone.

  You know what the Society taught me? For years in prison I saw comrades, fighters, real agitators, become disillusioned with liberation shortly after the false dawn in 1994. Did we think these revolts and the failed revolution in South Africa could be anything but merely political, without a revolutionary tradition? The Society in Zimbabwe taught me that we had to create the conditions in which we could try to build real, revolutionary movements – for next time. But the key point remains to shatter the self-limiting, immiserising pessimism that our rulers so desperately wish to inculcate in our movements and among our comrades. You, Viktor, if you will allow me, seem to have inculcated much of this defeat and paralysis.

  And can the poor win? Can we overcome the pessimism that you represent? For those who have only experienced defeat, pessimism is epidemic. They haven’t lived through gigantic struggles where the power of the poor and working class is obvious. Like Marx, Nelson’s attitude, Biko’s too – have you met him yet? – is the opposite: the only way to enter a fight is to win. To never compromise. Anything less is to limit oneself at the outset. Of course have exit strategies, but the whole approach to the enemy must be to smash them to pieces, to annihilate the rich TOTALLY.

  I’ve become so full of anger that while in conversation last week with Jason and Wayne, I advocated locking all the rich up indefinitely and making them clean toilets and floors for life (the toilets that Moreblessing has to clean, that brilliant, stoic fighter who practically won our strike single-handed). Then I stopped myself and stated publicly that I’d personally volunteer to machine-gun the whole lot of them dead just to make sure none of them came back. No hesitation at all, despite being brought up a 50 per cent African/Christian pacifist, I know how to handle a gun. You see, com, after Sharpeville I realised we must have guns as good as theirs.

  Finally, did I tell you that I’m in mid-battle trying to avoid being evicted again? I’ve made it clear that I’m barricading myself in and have a full set of tools to take at least two or three of the hired thugs with me if they try to use force. If they kill me I’m taking some of them with me – sorry about the melodrama – but you must fight to the death for everything! Have you learnt that yet in Zimbabwe? These cowards, these thugs from the English suburbs sent to evict me, do not realise that this time they have picked on a fighter from the largest, most violent township of filth and dirt in the Global South. Khayelitsha. This struggle is somewhat preoccupying me at present.

  Please explain these circumstances to Anne-Marie, I haven’t had time to email her. Tell her that our sagas are close to my heart and that when I am alone I think of her, but for now I have sent her this strange Englishman (you) for purposes of head-cracking and re-education. She will know what I mean.

  What I want to say before it crushes me, too, is that sometimes I am overwhelmed by love for my comrades, for all my brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe, for the whole of Africa, for you too. If I could I would like to put my arms around all my comrades, in an embrace as great as the feelings in my heart, as large as the world, as beautiful as life can be. Sometimes I fear what is happening to me, these feelings, these fantasies of love.

  Yours in struggle and absolute ecstatic excitement at life.

  Tendai

  Part Four:

  Bulawayo

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  To write the big story, Viktor realised that he had to do more than sit in front of his laptop at Louis’s café. Nelson was right, he thought, if I want to know what’s going on in Bulawayo, in the south, I have to visit. Even Louis said, in his usual, gruff way over breakfast that morning at the café, ‘You have to go if you’re going. There is no fucking substitute, Vik. If you want to see what’s happening, you have to go. I have a truck leaving next week, I can get you on it.’

  Viktor refused Louis’s TransGlobal transport and took the train. Nelson set up interviews, proposed articles, gave him titles, leads, arguments. Rajeev, from afar, did the same: ‘Inside the Opposition’s City’, ‘Dictatorship from Bulawayo’, ‘Twenty-Five Years Since the Massacres’. In addition, Viktor had been told, so close was he now to the Society of Liberated Minds’ decision-making body that he was ordered to speak at a Bulawayo Central meeting of the Society.

  Lenin, wearing a cream jumper and black jeans, his locks tied tightly back, took him on the cramped minibus taxi to the station, speaking the entire journey, too loudly and confidently even for this working-class transport. Viktor tried to silence him by lifting his hand.

  ‘You know what you have to say, right, comrade? Comrade, do you understand? The comrades are commodified; they are being dragged into all sorts of ridiculous channels by the NGOs. But Biko, Biko – god, Biko, wait until you meet Biko.’ Lenin broke off, sucked the air noisily between his teeth. ‘Biko is the best.’

  ‘I have spoken with him, before I left the UK. He’s impressive,’ Viktor said.

  Ignoring him, Lenin continued, ‘Tapera is reliable but has a family and isn’t always around. Tell them about what is going on in the UK, how it’s connected to us, to Zimbabwe, to Africa.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening in the UK, or how it’s connected,’ Viktor objected.

  ‘Yes you do. Don’t be crazy. Then move on to Mugabe and ZANU’s fake anti-imperialism. They were correct to raise land, impose nationalisation and redistribution, but they are cynical, fakers, opportunists. Fake anti-imperialism. Repeat it. Mugabe is using these issues to hold onto power. We argue for real distribution of the country’s entire resources. Led by the poor. Understand? Now repeat the main points, explain them to me.’

  ‘I’m not repeating anything.’

  When they arrived at the station, the two men pushed their
way through the crowds to the platform. Lenin, shouting now to keep up with the mass of people, their luggage bundled together in plastic bags and boxes, said, ‘Tell me you get it, comrade: no nationalisation without workers’ control, no state capitalism. Zimbabwe’s wealth to the people, to the poor. Do you get it?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ Viktor replied loudly, his voice heavy with irony. ‘Distribution linked to a revolutionary movement. I get it. I get the formula. I will preach for your doomed project.’

  Lenin smiled, shouted something that Viktor couldn’t hear and punched his fist in the air. Then, as Viktor was carried through to the platform on the tidal crowd, he disappeared from view.

  The journey was cold, the first-class carriage and fold-down beds bare. The sheets and blankets that had recently been issued automatically were no longer available even for a fee. The compartment filled with a silent group of men who showed no curiosity at Viktor’s presence, which left him feeling offended, so used to a tourist’s notoriety, a white man’s fame.

  The train shunted its way slowly to Zimbabwe’s second city, travelling through the night in a series of great episodic jolts. No sooner had it gained a reasonable mid-twentieth-century speed than a whistle would sound and the carriages would jerk and shudder and the immense mechanical snake would slow, then shriek to a complete stop. Each time, Viktor’s companions seemed, in their sleep, to utter a collective, resigned sigh. Lethargic, weary, the train meandered reluctantly along the old tracks, arriving hours after schedule to a city already completely awake.

  Bulawayo was a low-rise city with streets of whitewashed shops and tin roofs, wide avenues and parks. The police, present and aggressive in Harare, seemed to be entirely absent. The sun shone, glazing the city with a clear morning lustre, almost turning, Viktor believed, the crisis and the ZANU’s fake anti-imperialism into a wholly benign force, an illusion.

  ‘I could spend a few weeks in this city,’ Viktor said to Biko in a burst of impromptu goodwill when they met outside the station.

  Biko was ten years younger than his guest, with a high forehead. He was a tall, spare, loose-jointed man, tastefully dressed.

  ‘How did you know it was me?’ Viktor asked.

  He hit Viktor’s shoulder. ‘Because, com, you are the only whitey on the moon!’ Biko bellowed, laughing with his head tipped back.

  ‘Of course, I forgot,’ Viktor stuttered.

  *

  ‘Listen, my friend, it doesn’t look good. The UK is not a friend to Zimbabwe. This is not your colony now. My friend, you are disrespecting us, interviewing this man who we know, in public, in our city. It doesn’t look good, my friend.’ There were three policemen in the room.

  The office was evidently a place of activity, empty cups collected on the corner of a desk in the middle of the room, papers stacked high. Chairs, their backs broken, one with three legs, circled the desk. Like so much in Zimbabwe, this hive of human activity and repression looked abandoned. Poverty makes a relic of any country.

  Viktor’s legs were crossed. He uncrossed them, sat up, felt the back of the chair hard against his spine. ‘I am sorry, Constable.’

  ‘I’m not a constable. Call me sir, Mr Englander,’ said the tall, thick-built man who had shoved them into the room.

  ‘Yes, sir, call us all sir, my friend,’ said his colleague, who was leading the arrest. He was small, his shoulders narrow. His glasses slipped down his nose. He pushed them up with his palm and rubbed his nose in a single movement. He had a small moustache – like Mugabe, like Hitler – and one eyelid was permanently half-shut.

  ‘Officer, sir, I am a PhD student. A researcher doing historical work on Zimbabwe. The liberation struggle. I am against the British government. I think they must stop meddling in Africa.’

  Viktor saw Biko put his head in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees.

  Hitler laughed loudly, his mouth open, head back. His colleague sitting on the three-legged chair rocked, tottering on the missing leg. Other policemen came in and paced the room, ignored by the officers conducting the interrogation. They looked at the prisoners, smirked, circled the desk and left.

  *

  Before long the orders and speech-making began. ‘It will be useful for us to have you here. You can show the comrades that not all whites are racists and imperialists – as Mugabe tells us. We’ve got lots of questions for you.’ Like Lenin, Biko spoke loudly, pressing his point by taking Viktor’s shoulder, touching his arm, holding his hand. Each sentence, each word, he exclaimed like a revelation. His face was highly charged, singularly resolute. They crossed two roads, Biko marching and gesticulating all the way. ‘We are meeting in a park. Some comrades, some students, some lumpens, a couple of workers – the African masses, comrade.’ Biko laughed at himself again. ‘You will speak for fifteen minutes.’

  Viktor spoke in the parched grandeur of the city’s central park, ringed by a corroded iron fence. The groups were all supporters or members of the Bulawayo chapter of the Society of Liberated Minds. Most were activists, like Benson, a student and a contributor to the Independent Media Centre. Viktor’s conclusion, after several weeks in Harare, was that his white, authorial voice needed to be dispatched, unloaded. So he had to be removed from his toehold as independent critic of the regime’s violence to allow other voices to penetrate.

  Viktor stood on the second step of the garden gazebo that offered the group broken shade. At one point this oddly misplaced park ornament would have been painted; the municipality would have maintained the facade so that white Rhodesians could have danced and played music on the sprung flooring. Instead the group Viktor addressed was threadbare, wearing jeans torn at the knees, T-shirts with slogans and the faces of their inspiration: Guevara, Sankara, Biko. The students were all gaunt, earnest, hungry to eat and listen, to fill themselves, if they could, on Viktor’s words, his confirmation that the struggle in Zimbabwe would be heard in the UK. They needed, somehow, to allow his words to keep them upright until the tide turned in Zimbabwe.

  Biko nodded effusively through the long, distraught minutes of Viktor’s presentation, as though his head operated a mechanism which kept Viktor’s tongue moving and enunciating clearly to the right pitch and volume. Viktor kept his gaze solidly fixed on Biko’s shaking head. If only he could speak like Moreblessing, Nelson, even Lenin – each of them so terse in their explanations, so clear, always so much to say, so much to do, always listening, analysing, synthesising.

  The sun shone through the bandstand’s torn roof and burnt Viktor’s freckled arm. After the talk the group crowded round him. Viktor came off the step to meet them. One student who was almost Viktor’s height, his arms pressed tightly inside a checked shirt, let out a rush of questions and assertions, smiling as he spoke. ‘You are the sort of man who must know the answers! I have been asking my comrades’ – he gave a shrug of his shoulders, indicating the group – ‘but none of them can answer. What do you think about Cuba? I support Cuba. Cuba’s a model for socialism in a country like Zimbabwe. Yes? Would you agree that the type of pragmatism that Castro showed shortly after the 1959 revolution is appropriate for us today? What would you say to that?’

  The effect of this short outpouring was to break the reticence of the others. Fresh questions and declarations burst from the crowd that packed closer to Viktor. ‘What about Guevara? What do you have to say about him? Sankara, Lumumba, the others – Hani, Biko, Fanon? What do you say about them? Comrade, comrade, what do you say?’ shouted voices from thick inside the scrum.

  Once the statements and questions were out, the bandstand fell silent and for a moment no other noise rose in its place. The whole city was quiet. Then the park, with its dried brown grass and lost racist majesty, began to click with the sound of distant cicadas, and over the cracked earth small lizards stirred.

  *

  Hitler was in charge. He poked his glasses up his nose again and stood. ‘This won’t do, Mr Englander.’ He hit play on the heavy old recorder that Viktor carried with him
, purchased from a street seller hawking retro nineties technology with a stack of cheap cassettes. The machine slurred into life and two faint voices were heard. ‘Where’s the volume control, Mr Englander?’ Hitler asked, fumbling around with the machine. Viktor leant forward, brushing the hard skin of the officer’s hand, and turned the small dial. His own voice jumped into the room.

  ‘Looking back at the protests in 2003,’ he was asking Biko, ‘why did the movement, the Final Push, fail?’

  Biko groaned and slid his head further into his hands.

  ‘Comrade, we failed because we weren’t prepared.’ Biko’s voice was loud, strident. ‘The MDC were happy to sacrifice the students, to forfeit a few cadre. They stirred up the colleges and universities and did nothing to build the Final Push in the industrial areas or townships. We were beaten by the dictatorship, by Mugabe and his cronies, by the dogs, but set up by our own party. They wanted a Sharpeville – a few dead students, international uproar – but instead we were just beaten.’ There was a pause as Biko adjusted his position and finished his coffee. ‘But we will break the regime by relying on our own forces. The regime is a hollowed-out gerontocracy, hated by the people of Bulawayo. The police thugs don’t even dare to step onto the campus any more. They have been beaten.’

  Biko let out another groan.

  Hitler laughed again. His two colleagues moved to the door. Viktor turned to them. Do they think we will try to escape?

  Now Hitler spoke to Biko, hitting the heavy stop button on the recorder before the next incriminating question could be asked, the next declaration of one-man regime change uttered in Biko’s glittering, imprudent tongue. The thickset policeman by the door moved to the back of Biko’s chair.

  *

  The group waited for Viktor to respond. A student held his pen over his notebook and looked up. At that moment Viktor had two almost simultaneous thoughts. To start with, he wondered if even these enlightened activists were infected by a belief in the wizardry and wisdom of white men. And then he pondered for an instance how this country’s militants could still call themselves ‘comrade’. How had they managed to seize the language of socialism against a dictatorship that used the same prefix: ‘Right Honourable Comrade, President Robert Mugabe. In the interest of our struggle against Western imperialism ... our Third Chimurenga, we celebrate the sacrifice of an oppressed people.’ The language of social transformation had been put to the service of the lying, murderous state and still these groups, these pavement speakers, these paupers, spoke of revolution and comrades. Viktor did not know if it was courageous or stupid. He made a mental note to ask Biko, to speak to Nelson and Anne-Marie.