Maurice Nyagumbo
Zimbabwean hero who fell from grace
Maurice Nyagumbo, who was Zimbabwe’s senior political affairs minister until his resignation last week over an illegal car deals racket, has died in hospital after taking poison. He was 64. He resigned after a judicial inquiry set up by President Mugabe implicated him in a scandal which involved helping people to buy new vehicles, to resell them on the black market at inflated prices.
Before his fall from grace, Nyagumbo had been a prominent figure in the struggle for Zimbabwean independence, and spent many years in jail for opposing white minority rule. After independence was granted in 1980 he became a leading figure in the government of Robert Mugabe, rising to be, effectively, number four in the cabinet, and number three in the ruling ZANU-PF party.
Maurice Nyagumbo was born to peasant parents in Rusape, Southern Rhodesia, in 1924. He received some primary education at mission schools before leaving for South Africa in 1940 to seek work. He slept rough, worked at various jobs including waiting on tables, and found a home among black ballroom The Times, Obituary dancers. He then joined the South African communist party until it was banned in 1948.
He was deported from South Africa in 1955 on the grounds that he was in contact with the Mau Mau in Kenya. Back in Rhodesia he helped form the African National Youth League before becoming secretary of his local branch of the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress. In 1959 he was detained for his political activities, and was then restricted to Gokwe district until 1962.
On his release he joined the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), led by Joshua Nkomo, but broke away the following year with others including Robert Mugabe to form the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). When ZANU was proscribed in 1964, he was arrested and spent the next 11 years in various prisons and restriction camps. Released in 1975, he was soon convicted of recruiting young people for guerrilla training and was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.
He was released in 1979 in time to observe the closing stages of the Lancaster House Conference in London which led to Zimbabwean independence. Afterwards he held several government posts including minister for mines and minister of state for political affairs and cooperative development.
In 1980 he published an autobiography whose credo was: ‘Some of us must remain to be with the people, even if it means to be in jail with them.’ Undoubtedly he was a courageous man, prepared to suffer for his beliefs. After Independence, in his cloth cap at President Mugabe’s side, as senior minister for political affairs, he was one of the symbols of the struggle.
He is survived by a wife and six children.
The Times, Obituary
TWO-BOY TEKERE
Edgar Tekere, the maverick, the outsider, is discussed with the relishing, sardonic disbelief we use to salute disreputable but entertaining possibilities.
If you play that private game, of sitting rather outside a conversation and listening to the sound rather than to the sense of it, Tekere Tekere Tekere clicks through the talk like a cricket.
He is mounting a one-man opposition to Mugabe, and has been thrown out of Mugabe’s party Zanu PF because of his criticisms of corruption and Mugabe’s toleration of it. His new political party is called the Zimbabwe Unity Movement. (It is interesting how often the word Unity, or United, is used for political movements that are in fact divisive.) But Zum is making an impact because everyone knows his criticisms are just. What sort of impact? No one knows. He appeals too, to some people–not a few–who would like to see more whites in Parliament, because of their expertise and know-how. (When whites are valued in black countries it is seldom for their charm, their wit, their delightfulness, their kind hearts, but rather because they are equipped to deal with the modern world.) Everywhere campaigning goes on in preparation for the next election, on lines familiar to Zimbabwe–to Kenya–to India–to communist countries–and, of course, to England in the eighteenth century. Every kind of dirty trick is employed to outwit or discredit opponents. Gangs of bully boys break up Tekere’s meetings and threaten possible supporters with violence or actually beat them up, and are never rebuked or punished. This is because they are members of Zanu PF’s youth section. (Why doesn’t Mugabe…?) By-elections are rigged. Tekere himself is publicly vilified and there is a cleverly managed whispering campaign.
It was Tekere who, when drunk, murdered a white farmer just after Liberation. This certainly darkened the shining image of a Soldier of Liberation. The incident is again being discussed, and, too, his willingness to work with Smith. In addition, the authorities leaked Tekere’s medical records, which made him sound like a schizophrenic. That he is an alcoholic does not seem to discredit him: it is this fact that makes some people think that ‘they’ (this time, the Povos) don’t take Tekere seriously.
Tekere has turned criticism to his own advantage, describing himself as a ‘Two-boy’, which is how schizophrenics are known in these parts. On campaign posters he is describing himself as ‘Edgar Tekere Two-boy, the Christian Alcoholic’, and making everyone laugh.
Tekere is in fact playing a familiar political role, or allowing himself to be in a position where other people ascribe the role to him. He is seen as the opposite of everything Mugabe is. Mugabe has never made anybody laugh. Mugabe needs a whole motorcade and darkened bullet-proof windows if he so much as sets a foot out of his home but Tekere is available to everyone, he isn’t a fearful man, ‘he lives dangerously, just like us’. Tekere doesn’t go rushing off to conferences everywhere all the time. Tekere drives a little car and he never wears a three-piece suit.
During this kind of conversation politicians’ tribal origins always come up. Tekere is from Manicaland, which makes him a representative of Eastern Zimbabwe, just as Joshua Nkomo represents Matabeleland.
But someone gives me a lesson on ethnology. All this talk of the Matabele and the Mashona and the Manicas! There is no such thing as the Mashona. There are four main Mashona groups, the Karanga, the Manyika, the Zezuru, the Kore Kore. The main group is Zezuru from around Harare. Mugabe was Karanga by origin, and brought up as a Zezuru. The battles that go on inside the Party can often only be understood by the balances of power between these groups. At the moment the Karanga are losing out: it is the Karanga versus the rest. But Terence Ranger (Zimbabwe’s prestigious historian) says that before the whites came these divisions were not important: the missionaries exacerbated them. Then each group insisted it was the most important: ‘We are the real people.’
‘Tekere’, says someone, ‘is just as much a Mashona as Mugabe is. They’ll say anything to discredit Tekere.’
During an evening of informal talk with a high official, he insisted Tekere was ‘a Nazi’. Protests at this silliness from everybody. ‘Oh yes, it’s just the same. At first Hitler was just right wing: it was only later that people discovered he was a Nazi.’ (The word ‘objectively’ is implicit.) ‘And so that makes the students who support Tekere Nazis.’ (The university students have again demonstrated–‘rioted’, according to the government press–against corruption. Some carried Tekere party cards and shouted ‘Tiananmen Square!’) The official went on insisting that the students were Nazis. Not once did he admit that the students’ complaints were just. There was an unreasoning hysterical insistence in his talk about the students. Given the law that the same kinds of people say the same things at the same time, then it is likely this students-are-Nazis talk goes on at high levels.
AIDS, AIDS, AIDS
Only eight months before, the atmosphere had reminded me of Brazil in 1986. There were people saying, but privately, ‘AIDS is a time-bomb, ticking away, but our government doesn’t want to know. Brazil might have been invented to please the AIDS virus. It is a ‘permissive hedonistic society, male and female homosexuality–anything–goes. A blood transfusion is a death sentence. Drugs are everywhere.’ A few months later the Brazilian government understood AIDS would not just take itself off, and limited information campaigns began on radio, on tele
vision, in the newspapers. Poor countries cannot afford the money for serious propaganda. Compared with Brazil Zimbabwe is well-off with its infrastructure of hospitals and clinics. The point is, no one knows how much AIDS there is. Doctors say there is far more than the government admits to. Politicians let slip damaging figures, but they are not likely to be accurate. Everyone knows that up north, in Zambia, Kenya, Zaire, Uganda, other countries, a whole generation may die of AIDS before the end of the century. Already in Uganda and in Kenya there are empty villages where so many people died of AIDS the survivors fled, from what they see as witchcraft, the evil eye. Zimbabwe believes itself to be fortunate, compared with these countries. But is it? When a subject is almost in everybody’s consciousness, is still a question of ‘I met a doctor who says…’ or ‘They say that in the Communal Areas…’, but is not a matter of accurate facts and figures as is the case in Europe or the United States, then it hovers on the edge of conversations, makes an appearance and takes itself off–people look embarrassed or uncomfortable, as if afraid of an accusation of scare-mongering. And AIDS is still monstrously distorted in political left-wing mythology. Thus, in a group of ideologues, the mention of AIDS will at once inspire denouncements of the CIA who deliberately created the AIDS virus to weaken the Third World. The suggestion that the disease may have evolved from monkeys in Central Africa is a malignant invention of Western scientists who allowed the virus to escape from their test tubes by mistake, and who are now covering up their carelessness by lies, putting the blame on Africa…‘as usual!’ These people are at the same stage as the Soviet Union was until very recently, saying that AIDS was impossible in a communist country, only possible in capitalist societies: evil is the attribute of The Other; demons and dangers and threats can only come as the result of ill-will. Or of the Evil Eye.
Meanwhile blood transfusions inspire terror–and many stories. Zimbabwe soldiers guarding installations in Mozambique were given blood transfusions. All became infected and brought the disease home to their wives and children. Mozambique is full of AIDS. (This is true.) ‘Not only do we, Zimbabweans, have to spend our wealth guarding Mozambique and defending it, and feeding hundreds of thousands of refugees, but then they poison our boys with their AIDS. We have an efficient medical infrastructure, our blood transfusions are safe. But the Mozambicans are hopeless. We have to look after them all the time.’
Meanwhile some of the ngangas have not been helpful, saying that if men sleep with a virgin this will cure or prevent AIDS. Most have understood that AIDS is something outside their competence and are allying themselves with science.
HEALERS, SPIRITS AND CONDOMS
from the Observer
It comes as a surprise to see the elongated white cardboard boxes amid the rest of the paraphernalia–the spears, the dried animal skins and the tin trunk packed with potions inside the musty hut. Each box contains 100 condoms, and in the past three weeks, Stephen Njekeya has distributed about 25 to his clients. ‘I am a doctor,’ he says, dreadlocks flapping as he nods his head.
To hundreds of people around the small southern Zimbabwean town of Gutu, he has been just that since the late Fifties when, while working as a waiter, he was seized by a fit that was interpreted as ‘spiritual possession’. This deemed him suitable for apprenticeship as a traditional healer.
His herbs were used by ‘my fore, fore, forefathers and they are still useful’, he says. Njekeya, and the 35,000 other members of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association (Zinatha), a group of spirit mediums, herbalists, traditional midwives and faith healers, have assumed a new importance as Zimbabwe struggles with an AIDS epidemic.
As attention yesterday was focused on World Aids Day, much of the concern centres on Africa. And Zimbabwe’s 5,086 cases reported to the World Health Organisation in September represents the fastest growing rate on the continent. A survey of random blood donations indicate that 4.2 per cent of adult Zimbabweans are infected with the HIV virus, but several experts believe the figure to be much higher.
Some 75 per cent of Zimbabweans live in rural areas, many of them illiterate and too poor to afford a radio. This constitutes a major hurdle for health workers trying to spread an awareness programme. Since February, however, Zinatha has been running a pilot project in the Gutu district, bringing the healers known as nganga together in workshops to teach them about the disease and enlist their help.
About 80 per cent of Zimbabwe’s 10 million people would prefer to consult a traditional healer before a Western doctor. Nganga have their roots deep in popular culture and are widely respected in the community. ‘Given the sheer numbers of traditional healers, they have an enormous value for involvement in Aids awareness,’ said Celine Gilbert, projects officer for the Zimbabwe Trust, an independent aid organisation backing Zinatha’s project.
Njekeya claims that he first detected Aids symptoms in people during 1985 and was troubled because unlike other forms of sexually transmitted diseases, it wouldn’t go away. He says he diagnosed it as runyoka–an illness that is supposed to manifest itself in ants crawling inside a victim’s body and one that is contracted by adulterers.
One of the nganga’s concerns after learning that Aids was contracted through contact with infected blood was the fear they could catch and spread the virus through unhygienic practices. Njekeya says how now he makes his customers pay for a new razor each time he uses one, mostly for small incisions into which the healer rubs mushonga (medicine).
Anna Dondo, another healer, says they have stopped the practice of biting into the flesh of a patient, and sucking out what they have diagnosed as the cause of illness. Instead, she cuts a tennis ball in half and uses the concave side as a ‘mouth’.
They have accepted they cannot cure Aids, but Western medical experts here believe that the healers, with their experience of treating sexually transmitted, diseases, have a knack for identifying the symptoms. In Gutu, they have begun to refer patients to the local clinics, telling them that they have gone as far as traditional lore can help them, and that Western medicine is needed.
THE SCHOOL IN THE BUSH
‘The man without character’, dismissed as headmaster and now a primary school teacher, was ordered to return the money he stole from the school and from the pupils. Everyone knows he cannot do this because of his small salary. Everyone argues about whether it was a good thing he was not put in prison. ‘It would teach him a lesson!’ ‘Yes, but how would his family live if he was in prison?’ ‘But it is already a terrible punishment to be a primary school teacher after being headmaster.’
The new headmaster began well, working furiously, ‘from dawn to dusk, making all us teachers jump’. Then he turned out to be an alcoholic. It is this man who so terribly beats the pupils. Jack tackled him: ‘How can you beat a child for being late when he couldn’t cross the river because of rain? How can you beat the big girls? It isn’t right! Besides, it’s against the law.’
The beatings continued, by the headmaster, and by other teachers. Jack went into the local office and reported the headmaster, who was formally rebuked.
Later Jack had to ask this same headmaster for a report on his work as a teacher. ‘Mr Jack Pettifer’ (this is a made-up name) ‘is a hardworking and conscientious teacher. God forbid he should ever be employed at the same school as myself again. He has no loyalty to his colleagues.’
Jack said to him, full of reproach, ‘Now, this isn’t right. It isn’t just. You were breaking the law and I had to do my duty by reporting you. How can I get another job with this unfair report?’
So the headmaster gave Jack a fair report, but went on beating the children.
Jack wonders if he should stay another year. ‘What’s going to happen to the school library when I go? No one is going to keep the school newspaper going. No one is going to stand up for the kids.’
Three months later Jack left. Within a month most of the books were stolen from the library. The school newspaper ended. Jack asked his successor if he wou
ld like Jack to set up a couple of issues for him, but he said No, it was not necessary. All the machinery for keeping the grounds in order was stolen. But: there were six qualified teachers instead of only one.
On a hot November afternoon Jack, Ayrton R., and myself are again in the classroom that still has a cracked rafter and a broken windowpane, though the dust has been swept away. We are with fifteen strong young men and buxom young women, who are in their penultimate year in school. They look like adults and they are adults. Often on this trip and the last one I have misjudged ages, thinking youngsters years older than they are. This goes for infants too. You see a large and energetic baby strenuously reaching all around itself for new experience, and with alert, observant eyes–you think it is ten months old but no, it is five weeks, or two months.
African Laughter Page 36