before the night of weeping shall be the morn of song?

?We are witnessing the death of Zimbabwe. We Zimbabweans are socialised to internalise pain. South Africans would not put up with what we are enduring?

 Together with my colleague, Mongezi Mngese, I visited Zimbabwe for 12 days in mid February.

 From the moment of our arrival we were confronted by the crisis facing the country. Everybody speaks incessantly about ?the situation?. Visually the first impact is the sight of endless queues of cars waiting for petrol often with no signs of their drivers. Much more disturbing were the long queues of people hoping to buy basic foodstuffs like bread, mealie meal, cooking oil and sugar.

 Recently the government has fixed the prices of certain basic commodities at the point of sale.  Because the prices are not fixed throughout the process of production it is not economically viable for companies to produce at the official price. Virtually anything can be obtained eventually, at a price, on the black market. Vast numbers of people on basic wages or without formal employment do not earn enough to buy enough food to eat. Survival is often dependent on relatives who live in South Africa or the UK. I asked a friend if he still cycled for pleasure, as I knew him to be a keen cyclist. ?No, I no longer have the energy. I am too hungry.?

Our visit began in Zimbabwe's second city of Bulawayo. We had been invited to lead a residential healing of memories workshop and train new facilitators coming from Bulawayo and Mutare. All the participants came from either churches or community organisations and most were involved in some kind of caring profession.

 I also tried to come to Zimbabwe with a loving embrace for all its people.

 We arrived in Bulawayo on Valentine?s Day. A new organisation of women of all races and tribes had decided to demonstrate and distribute flowers in the streets calling for peace and love.

 One of the women who was to cater for our workshop spent the night in police cells and was released without charge the next day. To the delight and amazement of our participants we ate well during the workshop but only because a number of items on the menu had been specially imported from South Africa and Botswana.

 I had expected a phone call asking us not to come to Zimbabwe because of the deteriorating political and economic situation. I wasn?t sure if people who were struggling with survival would have the emotional and spiritual space to focus on how the past of the country had affected them. I am happy that I was proved wrong. ?We speak about the present situation every day ? let?s focus on the past? and we did!

 When Zimbabweans tell their stories, it is apparent that there are many layers to their pain. During the struggle for independence up to 1980, many Zimbabweans had bitter and painful experiences of torture, death, discrimination and exclusion, which parallel the South African experience under apartheid. Especially in Matabeleland, during the mid eighties, several thousand people lost their lives at the hands of the Zimbabwean army in political conflict, which the apartheid regime also sought to fuel. Since the government lost a referendum on constitutional changes in 1999, Zimbabwe has been characterised once more by increasingly violent political conflict culminating in the still bitterly contested outcome of the presidential election in 2002.

 I have long felt that one of the negative influences, which fuels the present situation is a past that tended to be buried rather than acknowledged and healed.

 Several Ugandans, presently living in Zimbabwe, also participated in the workshop and helped to bring a continental perspective together with our own presence from South Africa.

 On the second evening of our workshop we focussed on the ways in which we are all called to be signs of hope. As is so often the case the crisis brings out both the best and the worst in human beings. People spoke of the queues as places where new friendships have been created and common bonds forged in adversity. People are listening and responding to each other?s pain and need and learning to share what little they have. This generosity exists alongside great tension and frustration.

 I spent the last 5fivedays in Harare and outlying centres of  Marondera and Ruwa. Friends pointed out to me the piece of land where food is distributed weekly, but only to those who can produce a party card (and it is too late to join now!).

 In order to survive the majority if not all Zimbabweans are involved in illegal or immoral activities on greatly varying scale simply to survive. E.g. Nobody changes foreign currency in the bank with an official exchange rate of US$1 to Z$55 as opposed to the parallel exchange rate of one to 1300. Many people spoke of the police as partisan  instruments of coercion, intimidation and repression  and no longer the defenders of law and order. Crisis, economic meltdown and the breakdown of law and order also has its beneficiaries ? some by good fortune and some through criminality. Over and above the legal process of land reform, individual greed has emboldened some to illegally commandeer land belonging to others purely on the grounds of race.

 On my last morning in Zimbabwe I went to meet with a senior office bearer of ZANU(PF) who had himself been a cabinet minister for more than 20 years. I asked him specifically about the politicisation of food. He said that he had been responsible for food distribution in 1994 and that food was distributed to everyone regardless of political affiliation. He suggested that partisanship on the part of  ZANU (PF) was a response to actions by the opposition MDC. I asked about torture. He conceded that two journalists had been tortured a year or two back but asserted a lack of knowledge of any other cases. He blamed the opposition, the white farmers,  the NGOs and the British for all that is wrong in Zimbabwe. He conceded that there had to be reconciliation and negotiations between the government and opposition providing they dropped their legal objection to the outcome of the presidential election. I wondered later if the government would be willing to drop its high treason charges against the leader of the opposition.

 I guess many of us and especially  politicians are generally better at ?blame? than ?responsibility". Like the rest of us, how many leaders carry within them poison from the past which still infects the present.

 He agreed that the issue of succession to Mugabe had to be addressed but it had to be a dignified exit. ?Who are these young people, who know nothing, to tell us how to run the country and deal with the economy??!

 Encouragingly, he told me that he welcomed my role in contributing towards the healing of memories of all Zimbabweans,

 The generation of freedom fighters could not accept that they no longer governed with the consent of their people. Was this ?generational dimension? and the collegiality of liberation movements a  factor in the apparent  dogged support of  President Mbeki for President Mugabe.

 Again and again I was told that this year the crisis in the country will climax and something will give ? many with great  foreboding.

 Almost all I met of all races spoke in support of land redistribution. The objections are to the methodology that has helped turn the breadbasket of the region into a basket case. 

The economic melt down together with the famine and AIDS, means that  nearly eight million people now face death by starvation. With thousands of farm workers mainly of Malawian and

Mozambican decent driven off the land there is a rapid increase in criminality often accompanied by violence by hungry and desperate people.

Almost every Zimbabwean I spoke to, most of them historically anti-apartheid and pro-ANC, expressed a mixture of incomprehension, anger, frustration and disillusionment at what they perceived as South Africa?s apparent disregard for their plight and our failure to speak in defence of the erosion of basic human rights. The assertion  by Presidents Obassanjo and Mbeki that the

situation in Zimbabwe has improved was met by disbelief. Many people I met were erstwhile supporters of ZANU(PF) and only some now supported the MDC while disillusioned with the ruling party. I had the impression that most Zimbabweans were not expecting either ?megaphone diplomacy? a la Blair or for the SANDF to appear on their doorsteps. However they did expect that we would publicly distance ourselves from the  violations of a range of basic rights, which are enshrined, in our constitution. They expected from us the kind of solidarity which they have received from Botswana, Kenya, Senegal and Mozambique and which the world gave us during our own struggle.

 As someone remarked to me recently: ?It is difficult for us as South Africans to have a rational conversation about Zimbabwe ? because so often what we are talking about is ourselves and the issues and fears we have as a nation and not at all about Zimbabwe,

 Tragically the Christian community in Zimbabwe is very deeply divided over what is happening in the country. In spite of such division we are beginning to see an increasing number of voices from a wide spectrum of denominations acting collectively in a prophetic way. After a service at which torture survivors spoke of their experiences, Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo was warned by the police that the service should purely be of a religious nature and not mention aspects critical of government. He said he had told the police that it was impossible to separate issues of hunger, economic hardship and violence from religion. "If people are suffering the church cannot excuse itself."

 Paulo Freire once said that the ?oppressed ?s idea of  being human is to be like the oppressor".

 Will Zimbabwe?s  next government break the cycle that turns victims into victimizers?

 In its own humble and modest way the Institute for healing of memories will continue to offer  our workshops as one way in which people can acknowledge the ?poison? which the past has embedded in them and begin to let it go. In so doing we can help build a more whole and compassionate people and encourage people to take a step towards healing their wounds.