Ants and Elephants

The world looks on amazed as more and more Zimbabweans start to vote with their feet.

They are not able to wait for the elections in March 2008, because by then they will be dead. Neighbouring Zambia, Botswana and South Africa are now facing a ‘tsunami’ of starving, desperate Zimbabweans as their borders are breached and overrun by illegal immigrants.

These hopeless, hungry people are running away from death. They are economic, not political refugees, but the countries on the receiving end are under pressure not to acknowledge them. For if these thousands of self-evacuees are recognised as refugees, it means that Zimbabwe is officially in a conflict situation and there is a real humanitarian emergency. It would mean that Robert Mugabe and his government have officially failed, and the United Nations, the Red Cross and all the other world mechanisms could be mobilised in a glare of international publicity, to rescue the innocent families fleeing Mugabe’s African paradise.

Everyone knows that it is time for the evil oppression of Zimbabwe to end. It is time for Mugabe and his attack dogs to go. Mugabe is too old to understand what inflation is and how it is created. He and his party, like swarms of locusts, have eaten or broken everything in the land, leaving nothing behind but starvation and despair.

What is ZanuPF doing that is constructive or productive? Nothing. Is Mugabe doing anything that is useful or good for the people? No. The party knows only how to take, take and take, and they arrest, beat, and torture anyone who tries to stop them, just like a nightmare version of the simple-minded bullies we all knew at school. And now that they have destroyed everything, like those hated little bullies, they don’t know how to fix it.

One of Africa’s most beautiful countries has been raped and looted while the world stood by and watched.

As we are so frequently reminded by our ‘brothers’ in the African Union, Zimbabweans must find their own solutions. So what can the people do?

Perhaps they should consider the old Ndebele saying:
"Indlovu ibulawa yibunyonyo."
... which means that an elephant can be brought down by many ants - in other words, many small things and actions can overwhelm and defeat even the largest giant. We just have to act in unison!

“Let’s all join together and vote him out!,” shout the opposition parties. And they point to historical examples where evil regimes were overthrown by peaceful mass action.

But in those countries there was still food in the shops and water in the pipes. Zimbabwe has run out of both. Families are reaching the point where they look about and calculate that they have just enough energy and resources to get themselves over the border to a land where there is food. They are unarmed, defenceless and without hope in their own homes. They know there can be no violent overthrow of the hated dictator, and so they are acting with their last reserves of courage and dignity. They have hung on for years hoping for change, but now they are forced to leave.

This is mass action, and it is unprecedented in a country not at war.

What if it went further? What if everyone deserted, and in the words of poet Leonard Cohen, “There’s no one left to torture’? Mugabe has already started to “Drive out the Filth”. Maybe we the citizens, should take it much further.

It would be an extraordinary thing if one day, he and his cronies woke up to a silent city, one where no servants, no bodyguards, no drivers would come when summoned. The streets outside the Presidential palace in Harare would be deserted, everyone gone and no one left to do the bidding of the crazed old man. Would his jewel-encrusted wife Grace know how to make breakfast without water, food or electricity? I would love to see her try.

Meanwhile, the once-proud population of Zimbabwe may soon form a ring of shame round their country’s borders, massing in their millions in refugee camps, and at last, visible to the world.