A baby boy had both legs broken by supporters of President Robert Mugabe to punish his father for being an opposition councillor in Zimbabwe. Blessing Mabhena, aged 11 months, was seized from a bed and flung down with force as his mother, Agnes, hid from the thugs, convinced that they were about to murder her.
[timesonline.co.uk]

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• news24.com/News24/Africa/Zimbabwe (Obama speaks out):
  US presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Wednesday the international community must do more to try to help resolve Zimbabwe’s political crisis, and to put pressure on Robert Mugabe, who is clinging to power. He singled out South Africa as one country that needs to apply more pressure on Mugabe, 84, who has refused to step down.

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• africanloft.com (Considering the options left):
  Not only has Mugabe boasted that it is God that can remove the state of Zimbabwe from his claws, more or less telling the opposition that the presidency is not open, yet, Even the MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, is laying low as a refuge at the Dutch Embassy in Harare.

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• allafrica.com (UN Chief urges justice for victims):
  The United Nations human rights chief today called for justice and accountability in response to the campaign of political violence that has marred Zimbabwe’s electoral process. The Southern African nation has been beset by deadly unrest since the first round of the presidential election on 29 March. The violence and intimidation led to the withdrawal of Morgan Tsvangirai, of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), from the 27 June run-off in which he was set to face President Robert Mugabe.

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• int.iol.co.za/index.php? (Is Britain considering military intervention?):
  Britain has drawn up two contingency plans for military action in Zimbabwe, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. BUt the government insisted military intervention is not being considered. The Times reported that two plans have been drafted by Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) following a request from the department’s crisis management team.

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• theleoafricanus.com/2008/06/22/ (Soyinka says let’s remove Mugabe):
  Listen to the interview on the BBC here. Soyinka’s statement comes as the embattled opposition Movement for Democratic Change announced today it was withdrawing from the run-off election this Friday, on June 27.

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• basotho.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/ (Guerilla intervention?):
  Wole Soyinka thinks Mugabe should be whipped off the throne [source]. And I think he should, too. There is no oil in Zimbabwe, so the Occident isn’t gonna go rushing in to save the day. It would in any case have been a bad idea. So the West is out on this one, except for yelling from a distance.

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• news.bbc.co.uk (New Frontline States):
  For southern African leaders meeting in Swaziland under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community (Sadc), the election crisis in Zimbabwe may be proving a headache. But the grouping has its origins in dealing with intransigent regimes, as it was set up during the struggle to end white rule across southern Africa.

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• news.bbc.co.uk (Mandela speaks out/with video):
  Former South African leader Nelson Mandela has added his voice to the growing international condemnation of the political violence in Zimbabwe. In his first public comments about the crisis, he noted “the tragic failure of leadership” of President Robert Mugabe.

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• news.bbc.co.uk (Mbeki calls for negotiations/with video):
  South African President Thabo Mbeki has called for negotiations between Mugabe’s party and the MDC.

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• business.africanpath.com (Hear Zimbabweans speak):
  Lance Guma speaks to political analysts Brian Kagoro and Dr Alex Magaisa, who debate the options for intervention by the United Nations, the African Union and SADC in the crisis. The programme also explores whether Zimbabweans have mortgaged their fate to the hands of outsiders, while doing nothing themselves.

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The children far from urban Maseru, the children of the real Lesotho,

(A country of mountains, anchored in the sky with the stones of Africa,
a land of beauty, death and love,
Of corn and useless flowers, cattle and Aloe,
Of wild skies and serene earth,
And women stooped to sweep the dirt and weep,
Without tears or fear that will show.)

They have been nurtured into greed.

Trained by other passing fools
Who come in clouds of dry
Dusty ignorance and rented cars to pass, not pause,
where God stores storms for future cause.

(And yes, I am certain there will be storms,)

The children sprung from great Moshoeshoe
He who offered heart and tribe and land to the desperate
Devourers of his family.

He who tried to welcome Boers,
Knowing their guns and locust history,

They now plead and curse for whites to give them candy.
“Sweets” cry the youngest ones,
“Give Candy” the older
“Give me some Candy please” the educated, skilled and bolder.

Whose grandfathers fought betrayers,
Leaving bloody footprints in their land
Step by step back into the loving mountains
Where they made their stand,

These kids, beg with open hand.

It’s terribly amusing for some, fun without a fee,
To fling candy out the windows and turn to watch them
Scramble for their cut and learn to be like those of us
Who know greed sensuously and pray to god, “I want it free.”

So they choose, in innocence, how they want to be,
And I brooded on how to best respond, in ignorance, how to make them see.

Can I tell them of their Ancestors, the trials they had to face,
Or the courage of the mothers and fathers of their race?
I can’t, I’m ignorant, a passing shadow of useless noises when he speaks.
They will grow and learn for years and I’ll be gone away in weeks.

There were but two times I spoke to them and thoughts passed from me to them.
Once I greeted boys with “Dumelang bo-ntate”¹ and they laughed and clapped their hands delighted with the linguistic capers of this monkey from foreign lands.

But they need to hear, or I need to speak, of the price that they will pay
On their trip from past to future, before they lay in deep red clay.

How to help these tender ones in their search to be like me?
I decided to roll the window down and holler,
“Ke e jele!” ²
© Pavo Real

¹Greetings, gentlemen. ( I am told this was startlingly age inappropriate).
²I ate it!

Ed’s note:
Pavo is right. The greeting is inappropriate for boys younger than oneself. The appropriate greeting would have been, “Lumelang banna,” or “Hello guys.” Sesotho is rather strict in the way one person addresses another. I hope you enjoy this magnificent poem. If you need further information on Sesotho greetings, check out this post.
~Ed.

News from Lesotho is disturbing. Democracy and the rule of law are advancing backwards. Recently, a curfew was put up, after attacks were carried out on prominent politicians’ homes. That rings a bell. If you can link to this, or reproduce it on your blog, I would be most grateful. Or tell a friend over coffee. Or just read it and sympathise with us in spirit (or whatever deed). I know I sound desperate — I am. This needs to be talked about and shared. I have just received news from home that:

Thabo Thakalekoala of Seapoint in Maseru, a vocal and prominent freelancing investigative journalist, was arrested on Friday morning (22 June 2007) and charged with high treason. He is appearing in court today (25 June 2007) to be formally charged.

On the day of his arrest he had just read a letter over the air on his popular morning programme “Rise and Shine” on Harvest FM. The letter was supposedly given to him by a group of army men and requested to read it on his show. The soldiers vehemently denounced the rule of one Mosikili in Lesotho who they say is a foreigner and therefore is not elligible to hold such office. This comes after it was discovered that the PM holds a South African identity document (a fact he has publicly admitted), no wonder the rampant looting of state coffers by way of the 84% salary increments and the M4000.00 Kompressors and the M2000.00 Camrys.

We look back in sadness at the deaths of Mahlomola Motuba and Mike Pitso, two journalists who were killed for their brave and fearless reporting of unfairness and prejudice in the past regimes. We have been taken back decades in our learning curve, and are now starting from scratch to plant the seed of unity and true freedom. We take courage from the fact, however, that history has not been kind to dictators who parade themselves as democrats. ‘Nete ke tutulu ha e patehe, or “Truth is ‘unhideable’.” We call on the international media to take note of this heinous act by the Lesotho Government to gag transparency and free access to information, especially as state media is totally not accessible to anyone else but the ruling party.

Re sa lebeletse. Khotso.

Background information:
www.protectionline.org

UPDATE:
http://sotho.blogsome.com/2007/06/25/learning-curve/#comments

I was fifteen, but I remember the events of 16 June 1976 like it was last week. Black kids rose against the Apartheid state in South Africa, and refused Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools. They stamped their collective foot and said “No!” And their cry shook the world. Police opened fire and the first kid to go down was Hector Pieterson. I know you’ve seen the now famous picture of his limp body in the hands of Mbuyisa Makhubo, his sister running alongside them.

“I saw that he was bad, but I thought that he was just wounded, you know,” remembers Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole. [source]

There were to be many victims that day. Hector’s photo was plastered on the conscience of the world (though few did anything about it), but there weren’t enough photographers to shoot take pictures of the other victims. Hastings Ndlovu was another such victim, and it is said he may have even died before Hector. Here’s the story of his death.

Klein was dumbstruck as to how a school child, in the middle of the morning, was being admitted to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital with gunshot wounds, and questions raced through his mind.

“Children with bullet wounds?” he wondered. “But how? And by whom? A robbery? By school kids? In the middle of the day? Where would the guns come from? Black South Africans are prohibited from owning guns.”

The answer came: “They were shot by the police.”

Klein says a quick survey in the casualty ward revealed that all except one child were shot above the waist: in other words, the police had shot to kill. Then his old high school friend and a neurosurgeon, Dr Risik Gopal, arrived and checked Hastings’ condition.

Gopal confirmed what Klein had suspected: no one could survive such an injury. And indeed, a “short time later, Hastings was dead”, having been in a coma from the moment he was shot, Klein says.

Klein worked in Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital for several years, and had been warned that it would be a “baptism in blood” - particularly on Friday nights. But after years of handling “grisly injuries” from assaults using a range of weapons, he thought “nothing could penetrate the emotional barriers I had learned to erect”.

Not that day.

The sight of “uniformed children riddled with bullets”, accompanied by their “terminal breaths”, left Klein feeling helpless and hopeless, and he could only watch in despair as life ebbed from the “fragile frame” of Ndlovu.

The white hospital administrator walked into the ward and Klein told him to expect trouble that night in Soweto. The administrator replied: “Oh, no, by tonight everything will have blown over.”

Klein, a coloured doctor who under apartheid ethos had no authority to shout at a white person, couldn’t contain himself. He yelled: “In Soweto, you do not shoot children and get away with it. There is going to be shit!” He walked away with tears in his eyes.

Klein had to break the news of Ndlovu’s death to the boy’s friends and relatives, a difficult task not made easier by repeating the news to other relatives of dead children. “I remember the looks of disbelief, the anguish, the tears. And I remember my own grief welling up afresh each time I delivered the grim news.”

Gopal, now the chief neurosurgeon at the hospital, said they stood at the window and watched police shooting children. Some of the staff members saw their own children being brought in with gunshot wounds. “There was a lot of emotion on the day. It was just chaos,” he says.

By late afternoon the government had prohibited blacks from assembling in groups larger than three. Workers, when they disembarked from trains and taxis, got together before walking home, wondering what was happening, unaware of the ruling.

Police opened fire on them, expecting them to know about the prohibition, and they arrived at hospital asking innocently why the police were shooting at them.

Others arrived at hospital with strange wounds, says Klein: small entrance holes in their upper bodies, with larger exit wounds lower down. One man said: “We were sitting in our kitchen, having dinner, when bullets came in through the roof and hit us.” Police were firing from helicopters overhead. [source]

The purpose of this post is of course to remember these children’s sacrifice. I remember the personal friends I made after refugees started flowing into Lesotho from all over South Africa. I remember how we would gather round and sing freedom songs in the evenings, how knowing them made us better politicians at that young age (I was fifteen). I remember how we’d listen to Radio Freedom being broadcast from Tanzania by the African National Congress. I remember how the sound sucked because the Apartheid government was doing its best to kill the signal.

I remember.

The other purpose of this post is to warn us about being inactive in the face of grave injustices. After 1976 and what it brought to South Africa, you’d think the world would do something. You’d be wrong. You think the world might do something for Darfur today? Wrong again. Mention a calamity in the world and ask yourself if the world might intervene, and you’d be wrong to think it would. But America did intervene in Iraq (not in Darfur). Find the error. Did America intervene in South Africa with…

1. the mere existence of Apartheid
2. laws such as The Immorality Act of 1950, which stated that no one could make love to anyone outside of his or her race
3. Nelson Mandela and many other leaders in prison
4. the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960
5. the Soweto uprisings of 1976
6. the fact that more than 3 million blacks were forcibly removed from their homes and resettled in black ‘homelands‘.
7. the gruesome killing of Steve Biko in 1977
8. the killing of Ruth First, wife of Joe Slovo, by means of a parcel bomb
9. and many other injustices carried out against a whole people because of the activity of melanocytes in their skin

So, how did the world react? How did the big Occidental powers react? This is part of what happened: “[Chester] Crocker attracted the attention of the Reagan transition team with an article he wrote in the winter 1980/81 edition of the Foreign Affairs journal. In the article, Crocker was highly critical of the outgoing Carter administration for its apparent hostility to the white minority government in South Africa, by acquiescing in the United Nations Security Council’s imposition of a mandatory arms embargo (UNSCR 418/77) and the UN’s demand for the end of South Africa’s illegal occupation of Namibia (UNSCR 435/78). [source]” That’s what happened. The Reagan administration went on to apply and implement its policy of Constructive Engagement.

Let us remember this day with a particular thought for those who died; let us remember it also with a particular thought at preventing it from happening in the future now. So, watchu gon’ do?

Nkosi, sikelel’i Afrika