Mthulisi Mathuthu: Letter from Kutama archives

Of Third Chimurenga and Herald sports pages
At face value, the Herald's back page is purely sports space with no political tentacles. Yet a deeper analysis will reveal an opposite angle. Since the advent of the so-called "Third Chimurenga" the page, has like the main stream Herald, degenerated into a war zone graced by pompous warlords...more

Bludgeoning an idea
TO THE open minded, nothing heals a society like debates and decisions made out of full consideration of views from all angles, which is why we should welcome the debate on the "Third Way"...more

Mugabe's legendary capacity to self-destruct
PRESIDENT Mugabe's perpetual claim to victimhood when confronted with evidence of political misconduct has crumbled before like a wall of river sand. The evidently sadistic "Operation Murambatsvina" project, which has seen the wanton destruction of poor people's properties across the country, has put to rest Mugabe's tired claim that he was a victim of anybody but a vindictive bully...more

Where power lies
THERE is virtually nobody who belongs to any meaningful political faction in the current government. They all are either navigable people or members of a tribal cabal working towards the enhancement of the supposed Zezuru supremacy...more

Beyond Moyo and Chiyangwa
IF Tsholotsho was a punishable adventure then the Solomon Mujuru faction deserved censure for plotting the rise of Vice President, Joyce Mujuru. The difference now is that we know where Moyo met with his friends while we don't know where and when Mujuru met his team to plot the wife's rise...more

Mugabe's expensive and empty revolution
THIS so-called "Third Chimurenga" is an opportunistic and panic measure erected by the guilty in the face of demands for accountability and competence. Its flaws are as awash as the hair on any head. And if there is anything democratic or moral about this revolution, then moon is made of blue cheese...more

Zimbabwe: A clash of memories
DAY and night we are forced to hear the story of President Robert Mugabe's heroics and that of his army in the 1970's but they are not supposed to hear of how we feel about their conduct since being mandated to steer our ship from Egypt to Canaan. There is absolutely no room for the ideas and views to freely vie for public patronage. It is the same old diet of ultra-nationalism, racist diatribe and
blackmail. We have become insulated from competition and debate...more

Mugabe: a wound through which a British disease came
HOW could Mugabe have been knighted when his party had committed themselves to breaking democracy soon after its establishment? By what alchemy did the British fail to see the irony of having the Harare Declaration proclaimed in a city led by tyrants who had violated every of its tenets?...more

The Emperor is naked
SINCE 1980 President Robert Mugabe has made countless trips to the National Heroes Acre to bury his compatriots. As he returned Sunday to bury the veteran nationalist Edison Zvobgo, one symbolic but sad truth stands out like pike stuff: The more he buries them the more it becomes clear how he has loomed so large in the Zimbabwean politics cutting a lonely figure and a pathetic one man band...more

Of an editor, his hero and surveys
THE results of the much awaited New African magazine poll to choose the Top 100 Greatest Africans of all time is finally out and as feared, President Robert
Mugabe is the main attraction. Essentially the poll was a charade...more

Fighting imperialists? No! Mugabe is alone in the ring
A FUNDAMENTALLY flawed and deeply disturbing notion about President Robert Mugabe's political conduct since 2000 has taken root. It suggests that the Zimbabwean tyrant is embroiled in a fierce fight with British Prime Minister Tony Blair over our troubled country. The reality is interesting. Mugabe is not involved in a fight with anybody. He is an old paranoid dictator who soon found himself under the spotlight and before demands for accountability....more

Victoria Falls: The epitome of tyranny
IN winter the mighty Victoria Falls are most spectacular with rising columns of spray covering a considerable distance from the bedrock and the cataracts into the mainland. Thanks to the acts of the ruling elite who are malevolently bleeding our country, this god-send resembles a boycotted flea market. Nobody goes there these days. For us the evidence was there from the beginning...more

Undermining mistrust to free Zimbabwe
The tragedy of Zimbabwe today rests firmly on dishonesty and the culture of sinister motives. Even at this time when we imagine that there is unity amongst the forces against President Mugabe's tyranny, we fail to realize how we are still firmly ensconced within the orbit of dishonesty and trapped in that which the late Joshua Nkomo termed "Zimbabwe's false start"....more

I am against the killer, stand by the murdered
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?...more

Black murder, white murder. Zimbabwe's story
THERE is a dangerous notion about the story unfolding in Zimbabwe which needs some tackling and frank analysis in order that historians may in future not identify stupidity or dishonesty on our part. It is that President Robert Mugabe's tyranny is essentially home grown and is a surprise to the West and the entire world....more

The message travels faster than Sharuko
MORE than twenty years into independence, Zimbabwe is still one of those countries that train journalists so it can do anything to them. So entrenched is the conspiracy theory that even a poor journalist fits into the imaginary conspiracy puzzle. It is so ridiculous to lump two different people with different hopes, fears and interests together....more

Mugabe and the fear of tomorrow
PRESIDENT Mugabe is in charge of a government that soon after independence stirred genocide in some parts of the country. He knows therefore that in this era leaders known to have sanctioned murder and genocide are humiliated, dragged before the courts of law and at times killed. For that reason he would rather stay on....more

Zimbabwe: A nation united in fear
IF today Zimbabweans are divided on political lines they have at least one thing in common: their collective fear for the future. Mindful of their dire malfeasance of office the political aristocracy is dead scared of the immediate future....more

Just what is the meaning of change?
THOSE who are familiar with the Zimbabwean story only through the press can be forgiven for imagining that the struggle is just about a few conservative old men and women clinging on to their political privileges ranged against the rest who include democrats, the young and the liberal minded whose collective catch-word is “Change"....more

My problem with Third Chimurenga
WE arrived at the scene of the killing on time to find Martin Olds’ dead body lying there on the veranda larded with sanguineous wounds palms facing upwards as though the corpse was begging for devine intervention. This was murder most foul and the perpetrators would not be caught at all because a revolution was going on! That was (and still is) my problem with the so-called “Third Chimurenga"...more

South Africa at crossroads
WE had just driven out of Langalibalele, a dingy township in Cape Town with collapsing dwellings, when we soon found ourselves cutting through an affluent apartment district with canals, irrigated lawns and exotic eucalyptus trees like we were in Amsterdam. The irony is not only a shocking reality but a symbolic sore -pointing to a disturbing case of privilege lying side by side with abject poverty throughout the country. This is the new South Africa...more

The river between
Mandela’s birthday celebrations brought colour and talent together in a fine display of the concept of a “Rainbow Nation”. For allowing a few people to hold them to ransom Zimbabweans today have been experiencing a painful irony of celebrating Joshua Nkomo’s contribution to the Zimbabwean nation through hate speech and crude heckling...more

Who will hang the hangmen?
WHEN they had brought the condemned prisoner before the gallows the hangman readied himself. As the hangman - draped in a black tunic and white head gear - drew closer, the tiny wiry condemned man clad in red prison garb began talking in a mourning voice. Touched, the hangman listened. “Who are you sir? I remember a few years ago one Emmerson Mnangagwa telling the nation that the post of the hangman was vacant. When were you recruited?"....more

Trapped in an irony
HERE in our country we are a people paying the price for bestowing our trust on few men and women who carried their guns promising to bring all the honey and milk to our houses. Like Malawian despot Kamuzu Banda, they have fallen from grace to grass and are for ever trapped in an irony. In that irony they kick, push, kill and propagate in the false hope that we don't see their nudity. Unfortunately that irony is transparent and we know who they are and we see and record what they do in the name of African patriotism....more

Mazenge's letter
NHAMO Mazenge, strode out of the Harare Central Post office with downcast liquid eyes. Once again the family box had nothing and he had known that anyway. For over three months he had, for some reason or another, learnt the painful habit of passing by the post office everyday in the hope that he would find the money his twin brother had sent from the United Kingdom. It was probable that somebody at the state department had opened the letter, took the money and threw the envelope away. Today the disappointment cut into his soul filling the depths of his heart with sorrow. At home he sat down to write to Mdubeki, his twin brother...more

Them against us
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe’s political conduct in the last three years has divided the nation between two false camps pitting "Them" against “Us”. The latter are supposed to be the patriotic Zimbabweans ranged against sell outs who are engaged in the bad habit of pushing the country down just to please their imagined Western masters....more

Armed with Mugabe's traveller's cheque, I enter Moi's Kenya
ON THE day that Kenya's new leader President Kibaki was visiting the central intelligence offices and pledging that the days of torture had been shut out with Moi, President Mugabe was wagging a fingure at the opposition MDC warning its leaders against speaking of torture. Maybe the change obtaining in Kenya will blow down here one day....more