Author: Fungai Machirori

Of penises, politics and Pentecostalism in Zimbabwe

We are just past the first weekend of 2014 and here in Zimbabwe, newspaper stands are already brimming with tabloid-style headlines of scandalous news – of the penile sort – to do with former prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai and miracle-working Pentecostal prophet, Emmanuel Makandiwa.

Yesterday, Zimbabwe’s news media revealed that Makandiwa, founder of the increasingly popular United Family International Church (UFIC), had performed a penis-enhancing miracle on a man from Namibia at a New Year’s Day service in Harare. The man is reported to have travelled to Zimbabwe in search of help for his penis which he is quoted as saying was the size of a two-year-old’s. He added that the problem was affecting his love life, and therefore his prospects of finding a wife.

“First month grow, second month grow, third month grow, fourth month grow, fifth month ummm stop,” Makandiwa is said to have commanded the man’s infantile penis which, I must assume, is still expanding exponentially as you read this.

On Saturday, the day before this revelation, the press was again teeming with phallic-related news; in this instance, an exposé of trouble in the un-paradise that is Tsvangirai’s love life. Apparently he and his current wife, Elizabeth Macheka, are living separately due to a range of unresolved issues, including those of the “sensitive personal” variety. The public jury is out and judgments ranging from erectile dysfunctional disorder to hexes over the former PM’s “male member” are moving around freely. Tsvangirai has, however, refuted any such claims, stating that he is fit on all counts.

Former prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his wife Elizabeth Macheka (Pic: AFP)

Ironically, reports suggest Macheka packed up and left the marriage home during a visit Tsvangirai made to seek the counsel of Nigerian megastar prophet TB Joshua, who in 2012 gained cred for his prediction of the death of Malawian leader Bingu wa Mutharika. Well, let’s say he predicted the death of an African leader who was old and unwell, to the silent hopes of many.

And so we, the general Zimbabwean populace, find ourselves having spirited Twitter, Facebook and offline debates, enthralled by speculation about two men’s penises. Actually, make that three men as people are now also seemingly curious about how endowed Makandiwa must be if he can work such miracles on others.

A weekend victory for phallicism, I say. And, I fear, a portent of what is to come in 2014 for Zimbabwe.

As prospects for political change continue to decline, it is the rise of Pentecostalism and tales of the supernatural that seem to have filled the void in the collective imagination of most Zimbabweans. In fact, the myriad problems ordinary Zimbabweans face – such as crippling poverty and lack of access to social amenities – seem to correlate with the growth and popularity of charismatic Christian churches offering instant relief from anything from bankruptcy and HIV to unhealthy addictions… if you only just believe.

Early last year former Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono convened a press conference with Makandiwa and his fellow popular prophet, Uebert Angel, to publicly announce that the two men had not flouted any financial regulations by delivering ‘miracle money’ said to have inexplicably appeared in congregants’ personal bank accounts. And with that controversial move, the already blurred line between the church and the state in Zimbabwe grew murkier.

While a penis-enlarging miracle might seem like child’s play (that pun was really not intended!) for a man of such influence, a man who has even promised to perform the Christ-like feat of walking on water, it does epitomise the vulnerability of so many Zimbabweans who remain desperate for a change in their personal fortunes. Desperate for hope; for at least one pleasure, one relief.

And the commonality of the desperation is compounded by Tsvangirai’s pursuit of the same from TB Joshua.

Just think about Tsvangirai’s case a bit more deeply, if you will. Here is a man, aged 61, married as many times as he has lost in his bid to become Zimbabwe’s elected president (three), who makes a trek to a death-predicting spiritual leader in pursuit of answers and solutions to the problems beleaguering his personal and political aspirations. In a continuation of the comedy of errors that is his love life, he returns home to find his wife gone and, a few weeks later, speculations about his impotence all over the media.

What hope should the ordinary Zimbabwean hold onto, therefore?

Tsvangirai’s manhood may have come under literal scrutiny this weekend, but the truth is that it has been inspected – in a figurative sense – since July’s presidential election and his tepid response to a resounding loss, albeit a loss that seems to have been compounded by many factors out of his control. More and more, Zimbabweans are beginning to feel that he is not the man to deliver them to the ‘promised land’, and that he himself needs to start chanting his MDC-T party’s slogan of chinja maitiro (change your ways) and step away from its leadership.

I will end my analysis with a final irony. It is quite interesting to me that even though much of Zimbabwe’s mainstream press is alight with all these stories about phalluses, few – if any – can bring themselves from the comfort of their euphemisms to actually call the “male member” what it is. A penis.

And this is a perfect metaphor of the times. A fascination with the scandalous and supernatural and yet an inability, a systematised reserve or fear, of calling things as they are. A diversion of the “male member” at the expense of critical, constructive and progressive debate about the male members of society who still very much control the structures that govern our daily lives from the radical prophets to the un-radical politicians.

It should strike us all as unusual that a phallocentric culture cannot bring itself to name the symbols upon which its power is premised.

Indeed, this is the present tragedy of Zimbabwe.

Fungai Machirori is a blogger, editor, poet and researcher. She runs Zimbabwe’s first web-based platform for women, Her Zimbabwe, and is an advocate for using social media for consciousness-building among Zimbabweans. Connect with her on Twitter.

11 years ago

Girls, football and politics in Zimbabwe

I recently visited a primary school in my neighbourhood to run an errand. It was break time when I arrived and the chorus of children’s excited voices had reached its crescendo. As I made my way to the office that I was looking for, I was confronted by emotions that I have become used to feeling each time I enter a government institution: shock at the levels of dilapidation of infrastructure and frustration at the seeming lack of interest in improving it.

As I walked down the concrete pathway, I looked over to the school’s sports field where thick clouds of dust erupted continuously as hoards of children played football.

There used to be a green and fertile lawn on those grounds once.

A Cabinet of three women
Upon stopping to spectate, I began to notice a few other things about this match. Firstly, it wasn’t an 11-a-side affair – most informal games aren’t. In fact, I don’t believe there were even sides to begin with, seeing as there were at least 40 children on the turf scrambling for the ball. But secondly, and this more interesting to me, there was a sizeable group of girls sitting in the bleachers half watching the encounter and half engaged in their own conversations.

There were no boys in the bleachers, just as there were no girls on the pitch.

Again, there isn’t much that’s new about this scenario; it plays itself out in schools everywhere. But I began to think about it from a more pointed perspective.

A few weeks ago, Zimbabwe’s Cabinet was announced. Of the 26 ministers appointed, only three are women. This represents an 11.5% female proportion – a figure significantly lower than the 50/50 threshold aspired for by 2015 through the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development. Furthermore, the announcement came at a time when Senegal had just elected feminist leader Aminata Touré as Prime Minister and Rwanda’s Parliament had recorded an unprecedented 64% representation for women in the Chamber of Deputies. While the main focus of Zimbabwe’s new Cabinet has largely been the reinstatement of an old Zanu-PF guard (with the MDC no longer a part of power-sharing), the retrogression of female political participation calls for some expedient action and analysis.

Aminata Touré was appointed prime minister of Senegal on September 1 2013. (Pic: AFP)

As women took to social media to protest, there was a very clear voice from the men – “Well, who did you want them to put?” – as if a defence of turf and territory had erupted within them.

In many ways, I feel that the soccer field scenario yields some of the answers to Zimbabwe’s present female leadership and participation dilemma.

‘Rough’ pursuits are for the boys
Why do the little girls not play football with the boys?

My first response is to say that they – just as the boys who do play – have been socialised to believe that football and other ‘rough’ pursuits are for boys. Girls are supposed to be dainty and pristine in a system that is preparing them for marriage and motherhood.

There is nothing new in this analysis and we know that it generally means that the little girl who wants to play football – or the little boy who wants to sit and talk – each face an incredible amount of pressure to conform to prescribed gendered roles and expectations. Their peers will tease them if they do not; even their teachers and parents might join in.

And with crazed amounts of homophobia in Zimbabwe, anything that sits outside the bounds of ‘normality’ is deeply chastised. I recall once overhearing a father tell his son not to touch or play with his sister’s pink teddy bear because he would “become gay”. The boy, just five, was obviously puzzled. But therein had begun his socialisation around the colour pink, teddy bears and sexuality.

But I also began to look at the football scene from a practical perspective. The playground was dusty and the boys’ uniforms were getting filthy. While already an accepted consequence of ‘playing rough’, there is another layer to the matter.

From what I have observed, most boys do not do their own laundry; a maid or mother or sister or aunt takes care of this chore, leaving the male child free to soil and damage his clothes as much as wants to. Someone else will take care of the mess.

But the same is not usually so for the girls who, in efforts towards entrenching domesticity (or is it independence?), are washing their own clothes long before puberty hits. So playing football with the boys has a few more ramifications than mere social stigma; playing football means getting dirty, and then having to clean the mess up yourself. Put simply, it means extra work. Even if the girls did start to play, they might play with a bit more caution and attention to dirtiness.

So what could, or would, happen if the school I visited decided to invest in growing back its lawn? Could a change in at least some of the girls’ behaviour be seen? Could such a structural modification challenge the socially driven aspects of their action, or inaction?

Supporters of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe listen to his televised speech during the official opening ceremony of the first session of Zimbabwe’s Parliament in Harare on September 17 2013. (Pic: AFP)

If we change the arena, we may draw a few parallels. Just like football, politics is a dirty game. And the dirtier a woman gets, the more she has to ‘clean herself up’ while facing social stigma for her stance. Furthermore, if a girl is not opened up to the possibility of parity and full participation in her childhood, we shouldn’t expect to magically see this manifest in her when she’s a woman. Even the portfolios that Zimbabwe’s female ministers hold are telling of the positions that are deemed appropriate for a woman: Women’s Affairs (Oppah Muchinguri), Small and Medium Enterprises (Sithembiso Nyoni), Higher and Tertiary Education (Olivia Muchena). Unlike finance or ICT portfolios, these are women’s ‘normalised’ roles, like sitting in the bleachers.

I do not write this to exonerate President Robert Mugabe from blame for his heavily imbalanced Cabinet. But I do write it to make clear to the men who have dismissed women’s protests that they do so from a privileged position in society where all arenas, no matter how dirty, are normalised to their needs and aspirations.

Zimbabwean society needs a social and structural shakeup for women and girls to begin to get somewhere. And this starts with the seemingly small acts that take place during tea and lunch breaks in school yards. Those girls in the bleachers hold some of the solution, as do we, their mothers, sisters, aunts and elders.

This post was first published on Her Zimbabwe.

11 years ago

‘Life goes on’ for women in Mugabe-led Zimbabwe

Everyday Tendai Phiri* (32) wakes up early to set up her cardboard stall along one of Mabelreign suburb’s main roads where she sells airtime, biscuits, cigarettes and savoury snacks to passing motorists and pedestrians.

Beside her makeshift stand, she unwraps the swathing she uses to bind her nine-month-old daughter to her back. She then lays a sheet of canvas onto the ground before carefully placing her baby onto it. Wrapping the child in thick fleece blankets, Phiri attempts to cushion her from the remnants of a winter cold laced with uncertainty about Zimbabwe’s future.

With more than a week having passed since the announcement of Zimbabwe’s election results, reality is now sinking in for Phiri and many other Zimbabweans: another guaranteed term of office for 89-year-old President Robert Mugabe. While Phiri won’t say which party or presidential candidate she supported or voted for, her general fears of a return to economic mayhem point to dissatisfaction with the outcome of the polls.

“The things we lived through all those years back are just painful to remember,” she states softly. “We have already been through too much.”

Harare West, the constituency in which Phiri lives and voted, was an electoral anomaly for many reasons. It was one of the few that fielded two female candidates from the main contesting parties of Zanu-PF and MDC-T; one of the few in which a female candidate – Fungayi Jessie Majome – won a contested seat; one in which the MDC won one of its 49 seats in Parliament, and also a constituency with one of the youngest parliamentary candidates, 25-year-old Varaidzo Mupunga, representing Zanu-PF.

Posters of two female candidates in the Harare West constituency. (Pic: Fungai Machirori)

With Zanu-PF having amassed a majority of more than two thirds within the incoming Parliament, the party has gained the authority to make amendments to the new Constitution that Zimbabweans voted into power in March this year.

“It’s most unlikely that the Zanu-PF party will use its two thirds majority to enhance women’s rights by, for example, inserting a proviso to the effect that the quota for women’s seats should only fall way when gender parity will have been attained in the seats that are up for contestation,” said Majome who also served as deputy minister of Women’s Affairs, Gender and Community Development in government’s previous term.

Quotas for female parliamentarians are one of the gendered reforms within Zimbabwe’s new Constitution that were promoted by the women’s lobby prior to the constitutional vote. Sixty seats – distributed via proportional representation based on votes won by parties within Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces – have been allocated to female politicians for the life of Zimbabwe’s next two Parliaments.

Another key reform put forward in the new Constitution is the establishment of the Zimbabwe Gender Commission to investigate and secure redress for gender-related rights violations. Also, the new Constitution dismantles a patriarchal legality that previously made it impossible for a woman to apply for a birth certificate and/or passport for her child without the consent of the child’s father.

President Robert Mugabe speaks at a rally on July 28 2013. (Pic: AFP)

In the run-up to the presidential elections, Zanu-PF attempted to appeal to the female electorate by highlighting the sexual misadventures of main opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, through an advertisement broadcast on national television. In it, a woman recounts her story of being dumped via SMS by the former prime minister who is referred to as “a bad example” with “a lack of decency”.

But Mugabe himself has not recently endeared himself to women.

Last year at the official announcement of Zimbabwe’s census results, the president attracted critical commentary for blaming women for the nation’s slowing population growth rate. In his speech, he asked why women had been given wombs if they were not utilising them and implored them to give the nation more children. In the run-up to the elections, Mugabe again drew large criticism internationally for referring to SADC’s facilitation team spokesperson, Lindiwe Zulu, as a “stupid” and “idiotic” “street woman” for raising concerns about Zimbabwe’s readiness for elections on July 31, a date only confirmed weeks before the polls.

Read Zim elections: Give us fresh ideas, not insults

But discussions such as these still speak little to the immediate needs of women like Phiri.

To earn a profit on her bulk airtime purchases, she needs to sell at least US$92 worth of stocks daily. For now she is making, at best, US$50 a day. With her limited mobility – owing to the baby she has to bring to work and tend to – she is not as vigorous in selling as some of her male peers who often venture into the middle of the road to entice drivers to buy their wares. And so Phiri is now looking for a job as a maid.

Like Phiri, Angela Dhewa (28), a sales consultant with a local manufacturing company, is more concerned about the decisions she has to make about her immediate future.

“Does the fact that I can get a birth certificate for my child without my partner protect me from dying in a labour ward with no electricity, water, medication and birth attendants?” asks Dhewa who has no children and is considering the prospect of leaving the country for fear of what may follow. “If those sorts of matters are not first taken care of, there will be no child for me to register, whether or not I have a partner.”

A poster of Tsvangirai, still clings to the broad-necked tree that Phiri sits under for shade at lunchtime. Some sections of the glossy paper with Tsvangirai’s face have peeled away from the hold of the plastic tape and are tattering away on the same wind that seems to have blown all hope of his assuming leadership of the nation.

I make this observation to Phiri.

“What can we do?” she asks rhetorically. “Life goes on.”

*not her real name

11 years ago

Zimbabwe: We cannot go back to 2008

“I just hope we won’t go back to 2008. That is my only wish.”

With just two days to go before Zimbabweans go to the polls to cast their votes, this is becoming a refrain one hears more and more of when the topic of elections is raised in offices, homes, kombis and at social gatherings alike.

View the Mail & Guardian‘s special report on the Zimbabwe election here.

If you know anything about Zimbabwe, you will appreciate the dire situation that was 2008. In short, our nation was imploding with political unrest and violence, an ailing economy, a cholera outbreak, runaway inflation and widespread food shortages chief among our challenges.

The spectre of that year – its challenges remedied, albeit incompletely – returns to many Zimbabweans as a point of memory, sometimes even a point of jest.

But rarely do we consider it a reality that could be relived.

A few weeks ago, resilience that had not been asked of me for quite some time was tested as I went through the voter registration process. Having arrived at about 2pm at the designated site for my constituency and ward, I figured the process wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours at best.

How wrong I was!

As the hours chimed forward and wintry shadows grew longer, I felt as though I had been transported back to the time of snaking queues for basic commodities; the spectre of 2008.

My five hours waiting patiently in line however did not yield a loaf of bread, or a bag of sugar. When 7pm hit, the head of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) voter registration unit callously told us that they were closing up and that we ought to return the next day if we wanted to register.

A disbelieving and angry hush came over me and the rest of the people in line, now steeped in early evening darkness.

“If you don’t want us to vote, then we won’t,” shouted one of the frustrated people in line. “That’s what you wanted all along, after all!”

A few other people murmured their disapproval and with that, we forlornly dispersed, reminded that just as with basic commodities, basic rights can be scarce to come by.

A woman (2nd R) waits to obtain her national identity card during a voter registration drive in Harare on May 9 2013. (Pic: Reuters)

While we stood in that line, I had been reminded of the Zimbabwean brand of perseverance, mixed with a healthy dose of innovativeness that we call kukiya kiya. This strategy – of finding creative ways to survive the direst circumstances – is one that we have all had to employ in our recent past, and one which has come to define us in many ways.

There was the stocky woman with a shrill voice who everyone had taken to calling ‘Moms’. She kept engaging one of the police officers in charge of the line in idle conversation, which disconcerted him and caused us to peal with laughter. A Rastafarian in the bright colours of the movement, and whom we nicknamed ‘Dread’, offered general political commentary which aroused much emotion and discussion. And the softly spoken women with the six-month-old baby on her back, who had been denied the right to go to the front of the queue, became our symbol of silent strength.

It was cruel to be turned away from that place, but it was also a reminder of the fact that come what may, Zimbabweans hold strong.

I returned to the line the following day to find that most of the people who had promised to return were nowhere in sight. Justifying taking one day off from work for registration would probably have been hard enough; a second day would have seemed indulgent.

I watched as teenage first time voters took to the line with zeal and enthusiasm, sadly whittling away in their numbers as the morning sun reached its peak in the sky. In my mind, I took stock of how the past five years of relative economic stability, of no queues and rare long waits for basics, may have been the reason these young people could not withstand the wait; because they did not have a reference point from which to remind their bodies how to stand in the same spot for hours.

After six and a half hours, I finally managed to register my name to vote in my constituency. A white handwritten slip was given to me detailing all the facts that would be important for me on election day.

Relief overtook me. And ironically, a sense of achievement also.

How could the accomplishment of a mere single task – over two days and almost 12 hours – make me feel so accomplished, I wondered.

Was it normal to celebrate this?

Given the circumstances, yes. But I do not want to make it the norm to find comfort in hollow victories like buying a packet of milk or a cake of soap or getting certification to vote.

I do not want to return to 2008 with all its dehumanising elements.

My resilience – Zimbabweans’ resilience – is much better used for something more progressive than this.

We cannot go back to 2008.

12 years ago

Home: A place of memory

If I do the maths, I have, over the last five years, split my existence across nine permanent addresses in five countries on three continents, and travelled to several other places in between.

Just as soon as I was getting the hang of the guttural sounds of German and confidently engaging in general pleasantries, I was on my way back to Zimbabwe to reacquaint myself with the hustle of a nation rebuilding after the tempestuous times of 2008.

But barely months into my re-acclimatisation, I had switched borders for South Africa where a world of intricate hand signals for hailing taxis opened up to me. That and the bunny chow special my workmates and I indulged in on far too many of our lunch breaks.

But before getting too much into that comfort zone, I was learning the codes of gauche English etiquette employed aboard the London tube. “No matter what, do NOT make eye contact,” was the instruction that I tried to dutifully abide by.

My most recent expedition was to the US where I was to acquaint myself with yet another new set of rules. It’s a trunk, not a boot, and enunciated ‘t’s – as in asking for a glass of water – almost always lead to a repetition of the request to ensure that it is really English that you have just spoken.

Between all of my trips, however, I have always touched base with Zimbabwe, living here for a decent number of months at a time.

Thus the question has always been the same upon each return: For how long am I home before I leave again?

Home.

I was seven years old the first time I moved house. A traumatising development for my young mind, the news triggered endless episodes of weeping and fruitless dissuading.

And so it was that on a sunny April afternoon, a giant grey removal truck came through our yard to devour the contents of the only home I had ever known. A home which we proceeded to leave bare, our echoes frightening the lazy specks of dust floating on the spears of sunlight piercing the now-empty space.

Home, for me, was now a place of memory.

(Graphic: Kenny Leung)

Vines of granadilla fruit which twisted their way from our neighbours’ side of the durawall to ours, falling traitorously into our backyard, were no longer to be savoured. Anna, my daily companion and mate from across the fenced side of our property was not to be chatted to anymore, though we promised to start writing each other letters when we could read and write well enough. My mother’s Saturday ritual of cultivating her beds of of nasturtiums, marigolds and petunias was to cease for we moved to a first-storey town apartment with no garden, no granadillas, no Anna.

Home had taught my child’s mind a lot of things.

It was along our home’s long gravelly driveway that I first learnt pain when, aged about four, I pedalled my tricycle too fast down an incline, only to veer off course, overturn and fall into a mess of blood and tears.

Courage was learnt one afternoon, playing outside, when I encountered a snake coiled up between the veranda’s edge and the rain gutter. It was the maid who I would run to in a panic. And it was she who would expertly maneouvre herself around the veranda’s edge, finding the right position from which to smite the reptile’s head with a metal rod that she then used to carry its limp body to the compost heap with, fascinated little me in tow.

Home also taught me about life’s inequalities, particularly as I observed the old man from next door who doubled as maid and gardener for our white neighbours. While my family called him ‘Sekuru’, the madam whose voice always sounded shrilly and insistently from some inner room of the house, preferred to call him ‘Zaka’. I would later learn that this was not even his real name, but merely the name of the area from which he hailed.

I remember once watching him, through the lattice fence, as he meticulously clipped his madam’s lacey underwear onto the clothesline. Upon perceiving me, a look of emasculated shame coloured Sekuru’s features, followed by a command to me to go away and play elsewhere.

Home was the initiator of many lessons I continue to imperfectly assimilate into my being and even today, if I close my eyes, I see and feel it vividly.

With more movements and changes of house throughout my adolescence, I acclimatised to the impermanence of place, even once writing a poem that began with the lines:

“If you start bringing in the boxes

And wrapping and packing up the tea-sets and plates

I’ll know it’s true –

That this is no longer home…”

And perhaps, it is this acceptance that explains my fascination with travel and my frustration with people who fail to appreciate that life is never about fully arriving or leaving.

I left the one place I truly considered my home over 20 years ago. But not fully, for it is a place that still lives within, and a place I recreate, albeit imperfectly, with each new undeserved vine of good fortune that twists it way into my yard, each Anna I encounter whose friendship I accept as being potentially fleeting, even if we do exchange email addresses and promise to stay in touch across continents and time zones.

I am never fully home, but I furnish a semblance of such a dwelling place in every act of courage, in every wince of pain and shame, in every place that allows me to appropriate another room for the house that is my memory.

And with this realisation, the question that has plagued my conscience for far too long has lost its ability to frustrate me.

“How long are you here for?”

The truth is that I am always here; here in the place of memory.