'I am against the killer. I stand by the murdered'

'I am against the killer. I stand by the murdered'

05/04/04
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IN Richard Wright's moving book Native Son defence lawyer, Max, warns of the return of more corpses to the fireplaces throughout the whole of the USA if an effort is not made to discard prevailing paranoid and racist ideological fallacies the nation is entangled in.

The story is about a poor black boy who accidentally kills a drunken white girl and goes on to burn the corpse to avert racially motivated retribution.

In modern day Zimbabwe this warning should apply particularly in the backdrop of the Zengeza by election which, as has become the norm in Zimbabwe, came and went with corpses.

Therefore lets talk about corpses within the context of freedom in Zimbabwe.

Nearly everybody has in their lifetime seen certain corpses whose images and general condition will never clear off their mind. I have seen three my self and
all of them fit in the context of political intolerance such as is prevailing in Zimbabwe today.

I shall list them in the order of their impact on my person. The first one was that of Martin Olds which I saw fresh after its delivery. It was still as warm as a loaf of bread with the blood oozing out freely from anywhere. It lay on the veranda of his house cross-legged with palms facing upwards as though he had been crucified on the concrete floor.

Before that I had never imagined that a human being could be endowed with so much blood as I saw on the floor and on his tattered clothes. It was a bloody corpse to say the least and it was shocking to know that a man could be killed that fast so early in the morning in that fashion in a country which is not at war.

That was in 2000.

The second one was delivered in 1993 but I only saw it on TV and on magazines. The Americans had been caught off side in Somalia with everybody condemning their occupation of that troubled country. Suddenly Somali women, men, vagabonds and children were shown chasing an American soldier right round the streets of Mogadishu.

Somebody tripped him and he fell to his mercy. Vagabonds became useful that day as they threw anything at him. I saw pain with my eyes as a man, with all his body parts functioning, was being reduced to pulp. A picture on the BBC Focus on Africa showed the Somalis gesturing to their victory and happiness before a broken corpse with some man's jerk boot resting on the wounded neck exposing torn out veins.

I also saw some men no longer beating the soldier but madly pounding a piece of his flesh. He could have been dead three hours! Never before had I imagined
that human beings were capable of causing so much damage to one pathetic person with such a balanced combination of much rage and enthusiasm. I had never seen beautiful women having anything in common with a vagabond. Usually they flee from street people but on that day they worked together.

The third corpse was delivered in 2002 just before President Robert Mugsbe's controversial re-election. It was that of Bulawayo war veterans leader, Cain
Nkala. Normally relatives want to see a corpse of their beloved one before it is lowered into the belly of the earth but that of Cain was a bother. It had to go by all means. I will never forget the amount of pus and a swarm of flies I saw settled on Cain's body as it was exhumed legs first from a shallow grave just next to a Solusi farm, which was a killing ground for the Fifth Brigade in the 1980's.

That was a pathetic corpse of a man consumed by a fallacy he believed in. The Third Chimurenga consumed Nkala weeks after I had seen him on TV extolling its
values quoting from Karl Max's Das Kapital.

Now what have corpses got to do with us, some might as well begin to ask.

Everything can be used for good. I sympathise with corpses whether white or black. To quote the Iraqi journalist, Hanaa Ibraheem, "I am against the killer,
whoever he is. I stand by the murdered, who ever he is. The culture of peace is a language of civilization and the language of the future.."

Therefore, if there is a zone in a human feeling which refuses to be contaminated by racial or tribal divides or ideological attitudes what are the possibilities of
us in Zimbabwe exploiting it to avoid the return of the corpses in the farmlands, Zengeza and Kezi?

Both Olds and that American soldier were strangers whose beliefs I didn't know about. As for Nkala he is a man who led an organisation which I know has caused more damage and trouble for my country. He even believed in the carnage called the Third Chimurenga.

But their corpses had a profound impact on my thinking. We can use those corpses to build a new paradigm by stopping for a moment to imagine how each
one of us were to feel if these three corpses described above belonged to our villages or homes.

The very sight of a man killed deliberately sets the ball rolling by making us hope for a future under which we will see less and less of such corpses. This entails that Zimbabweans should learn that election time is the time when different views vie for public patronage and not blind praise feeding from ultra-nationalist feelings guard-railing an exclusive political culture characterised by murder and rapacity.

I know that the ruling elite has various uses for the corpse. I remember hearing that after killing a dissident called Danger in the Mtshabezi area, his body
was paraded all over the area with the soldiers jumping on it when dismounting their truck. The idea was to instill further fear in the civilian population using Danger's corpse.

Olds's corpse was used by some naïve white people to demonstrate to the world that they alone were the targets of the Third Chimurenga. It was as if Mugabe
intended wiping them all overnight.

This carnage is not a racial drama per se. It is an opportunistic measure by paranoid and guilty people who betrayed a revolution to erect their evil edifices just for personal aggrandizement. It clutches at anything and throws everything to postpone The Hague.

In the case of Nkala his killers used his corpse to demonstrate their puerile patriotism. He was declared a national hero just to cover up for official murder.
But these people who take advantage of the poverty they have brewed over the years to recruit unemployed young school dropouts to murder their relatives are in
the minority. They are also in the afternoon of their lives. We can start from there. Now. Before the 2005 elections - thuthuma@yahoo.com
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