God's Chosen Country

My recent post, That Good, Red Dirt..., received an excellent response from Oju Kemenyi and I quote from it as follows:

Remember that your idyllic existence came at a cost. Whether of course that price was worth paying as long as famine was avoided is a question for another day, another place....and for the Zimbabwean people themselves.

I am glad that Oju has pointed this out. My skimming over certain political and other matters in this and other posts on Zimbabwe has been quite deliberate yet does make it seem that I am not aware of them. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have avoided politics in these posts purely because I did not wish to stir up old animosities and misunderstandings.

Now I find that I can no longer keep silent. Oju's comment has made me realize that a story only partly told is not the whole truth. And an earlier comment by Dillon has brought to mind the tale of a man who paid with his life for the politics of Zimbabwe. It needs to be told and I cannot do so without looking at those politics. I shall attempt this in a later post but, in the meantime, I want to explain why this is so difficult for me.

To my mind and taste, the best writer of the 20th Century was a German fellow by the name of Gunter Grass. An award should also be given to his translator into English because, between the two of them, they produced literature of the highest order. Grass is probably most remembered for his first novel, The Tin Drum, which dealt with his feelings regarding his youth in Nazi Germany. Many of his later works center on the guilt feelings that pervade German literature of his era, understandably so.

To some extent, anything that I write of Zimbabwe must contain an element of a lesser yet still noticeable guilt similar to that felt by Herr Grass. In my youth I lived in a country that was the pariah of the world, hated and reviled by all except the even more detestable South Africa. It would be easy for me to disown all guilt, claiming, with truth, that I was too young to have done anything about it. But that would be to acquiesce in the general consensus on the matter; to accept, along with some of the truths, the many misconceptions and blatant lies that form a part of that consensus. I owe Zimbabwe more than that.

In another post, Louis Trichardt, I made a statement that none of my commenters picked up on: that Zimbabwe was "God's chosen country". That is how we felt about it in those days when I was a student hitch-hiking to university and back. Without exception, the Zimbabwean students that I knew at university would all comment upon the enormous relief of tension they felt as they crossed over the South African border and were back in Zimbabwe. It was God's chosen country because it was devoid of that racial tension that so marred the atmosphere in South Africa.

Of all the countries in Africa, Zimbabwe had the best chance of developing into a truly multiracial society. And it stayed that way throughout the 1960s, only degenerating into hatred as politics became a matter of life and death in the 1970s. That may have been largely a result of the patience and goodwill of the indigenous population but it was a fact nevertheless. We were heading in the right direction before foreign politicians demanded a rate of change that we knew would destroy what had been building for so long. A new generation of white Zimbabweans was growing up with a full understanding of how the races must work together or perish apart. But political pressure from outside and the corresponding resistance of the white settlers led to a polarization that ultimately tore the country apart.

Maybe that was always going to happen; perhaps that bright hope we had in the sixties was a false dawn that could never arrive. It would have been good to be left alone to try for it, however.

There is much that I have said up there that is open to attack from all sorts of quarters. This is the fight that I have avoided all along, the deluge of preconceived notions, the avalanche of empty slogans, misconception piled upon misunderstanding. I know the arguments; bring them on. As a white Zimbabwean, I have heard them all my life.

But let me just say this first: I was there, I lived it. Can you say the same?

Tags: Zimbabwe