May 2011

Religion in African and Haitian Politics

“Haiti, like Puerto Rico and the continent of Africa, was obviously both in Basquait’s consciousness and in his DNA, but they were not there by themselves……. He freely borrowed from and floated among many cultural and geographical traditions…..his collectivity was fluid”.

-Haitian novelist, Edwidge Danticat in her  memoir, Create Dangerously (2010).

Early one morning the medicine man wakes up in our homestead to kneel alone under a special tree. He chants to the ancestors, asking them to send away any evil spirits which might be approaching. He sprinkles water full of herbs around the large homestead, all the time chanting and insulting the evil spirits. He summons the power of the good spirits to come and protect the homestead. We hear him from our sweet morning sleep and feel safe that those who wish us death and disease have been defeated.

This event could be in Haiti as easily as it is in my native Zimbabwe. Priests or medicine men performing the same function: cleansing individuals and homesteads. Africa in Haiti and Haiti in Africa, the link is eternal.

Sitting in a park in Miami with a Haitian friend, we discuss the role of a voodoo priest in Haiti. We exchange notes on the priest’s work in Haiti, his or her power, and how the medicine man or woman works in my country and other countries like Senegal and Mali where I have experienced the power of the Marabou who is the local medicine man, diviner and fortune teller.

Politicians, religions and crowds.

Where crowds are, politicians abound. Whenever African politicians see a crowd, especially of reasonable size, their backsides itch as if they have been stung by black ants. The politicians fear crowds which they are not in control of. Never mind the purpose of the crowds, be it football, weddings, funerals, anniversaries, tennis matches, religious ceremonies, prize-giving days at a rundown school, televised ribbon-cutting to open a new toilet, the African politician is there.

In my cruel, beloved homeland, Zimbabwe, election time is a desperate time. 'Desperate times call for desperate measures,' observes Barak Obama in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father.

Recently, President Robert Mugabe, a reportedly staunch Catholic, cast away his immaculate imported Savile suits for the flowing robes of the Johane Masowe religious sect in the eastern part of the country. The sect are anti-western education which they view as the main contaminator of the youth. Their curriculum for the education of the youth is apprenticeship to their fathers' skills of making practical things like metal cups, chairs, wire trinkets, metal containers for fetching water from the well, huge metal dishes for men to take a bath in, and many other artefacts for sale. Proceeds go to the church and are supposed to be collectively administered by the elders whose knowledge of basic accounts is next to zero. Sometimes they buy buses which give free rides to members of the church as well as the paying public. Their lorries transport members' handicrafts across southern African borders for sale.

President Mugabe, hugely unpopular with the electorate because of his party's violence and electoral rigging, does not want to take chances.  When I saw him neatly dressed in the Johane Masowe robes, I wondered whether the prophets and elders of the sect had already baptized him in some nearby cholera-ridden stream. For, in that sect, no one wears those gowns without being a baptized member. And with his several academic degrees, how can the President be so audacious as to stand in front of the sect members at their holy shrine, probably the birthplace of their founder, Johane whose detest for formal education and any medicine are part of the daily diet of the sect?

As citizens, we now know  that when the devil begins to preach heavenly salvation, something has gone amiss in the heavenly soup kitchen. Mugabe's fear of losing power and his political pastures badly drought-striken, his party has decided to graze in the previously unheard-of pastures of a male dominated sect where women are treated as nothing more than objects of a man's sexual whims.

This seems an extreme measure in desperate circumstances in which a Catholic president urges for the constitutional recognition of polygamy and the banishment of homosexuality. I wonder what the input of one of his closest special adivisors, the head of the Zimbabwean Jesuits, Father Fidelis Mukonori, could have been in  this bizzare and obscene political gesture. The scene was like seeing a Johane Masowe prophet, with his shaven head, long beard and religious stuff, preaching  and healing the sick in a Catholic cathedral. Desperate times, desperate measures! Imagine these clean-shaven, polygamous, robed prophets preaching in St Peter's Square during Sunday morning mass!

Maybe the next we will hear is news of the Pope on the Hajj to Mecca.

Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe's major rival for the presidency in 2011, would not be outgamed. A few days later, he was on his way to mingle with a different crowd of another religious sect in Gokwe, north-west of the country. But Mugabe's security men, feeling it would be a pinch on the president's behind, banned the religious-political pilgrimage of the prime minister.

Towards election time, African politicians, especially Zimbabwean ones, are so desperate they embark on some of the most absurd electoral projects. Election time makes lay preachers of many a Zimbabwean politician. Some become Majors in the Salvation Army, while others become honorary preachers in several churches and groups. They sign cheques with uncountable zeros in donations to spruce up their new religious zeal and political chances. Tailors specializing in  church uniforms visit their banks with ear-to-ear smiles. Like manna from the political heaven, new cars are splashed into the hands of holy fathers and self-proclaimed prophets of the church if only they could chip in a political twist to their sermons in favour of the generous but desperate politician.

But at night, the Vodou priests are making a fortune as they are secretly consulted by politicians and business men and women about their political and financial fortunes.

Principles and church ethics do not come into play. As Mugabe corners the gods from all religious angles, his youth militias and army engage in pitched battles with Mugabe's perceived political enemies, murdering, torturing and disappearing them while his religious advisors preach the 'love thy neighbour' dictum.

Karl Marx dared call religion 'the opium of the masses', but in today's southern African matrix of diverse religious denominations, the opium seems to spread onto the lips of the politicians too. Officially recognized Christian churches hang on to the illusion that the figures of their baptized faithful reflects a true picture of their following. Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, Pentecostals, Baptists, they all claim a pound of the locals' religious flesh.

Maybe in Zimbabwe, religion has, indeed, been transformed to overflow with the calabashes of a new blend of political opium for shameless politicians and their new religious mentors.

But lore and behold, the Africans of southern Africa are double-faced. Most Africans go to the formal Christian churches on Sundays, and the rest of the week is devoted to other religious faiths like the local, charismatic churches which the formal, western denominations derisively call 'sects' even though they might have a larger following than the western ones.

The 'sects,' with their various styles and colours of flowing robes, clean-shaven heads for men, Moses-style wooden stuffs, bushy beards and passionate prophets, do blend aspects of the Christian faith with African traditional religion, Islam and Judaism. As rebels and breakaways from western Christianity, one of their pillars of worship is that they do not pray in a church. Every Saturday and Sunday, they are seen with their spotlessly clean robes under trees or sitting on top of massive rocks which have been proclaimed holy by their founding prophets.

From the economic perspective, anyone in southern Africa can start their own religious sect without much investment since there is no need for a church building or any other equipment that demands donations from the congregation. All what is needed is the charisma of the founding father, which, in most cases, continues to inspire the followers long after the death of the founder/prophet.

The prophets heal the sick, make prophesies and smell out witches and ill-intentioned people among their followers. They have the authority to arrange marriages according to their divinations of which man suits which woman. In that respect, they have absolute power over arranged marriages. Their beliefs, closely linked to African tradition, shun any monogamous marriage. Old men are matched with girls younger than their granddaughters. The girl has no choice and power to oppose the prophecy of the charismatic one.

And in political terms, the Mugabes of Zimbabwean politics dream of an election day equipped with a sect leader's decree to their followers to support the president. With Mugabe's passionate web of patronage, it is not foolhardy to expect some exchange of material goods between the 'sect' leaders and the president. The Shona people have an apt proverb to question Zimbabwean politician's sudden flirtation with the usually despised religious sects: 'What is in it for a man to wipe clean the nose of the child of a single woman?'

The religious  sects' maxims are clear, and their leaders and followers are prepared to die for them: No western education. No monogamy. No western medicine. No pork in the diet. No donations to the church or to anyone, prophet or elder. No woman's preaching voice except music and dance. No shoes worn at the shrine of worship. On entering the place of worship, everybody is usually sprayed with holy water to cleanse them of evil spirits. After the religious ceremony, usually accompanied with music and dances specifically choreographed as a trade-mark for the sect, women are obliged to go to a secluded place to face the divinations of the prophets to cleanse them of any tendencies towards either witchcraft, jealousy or the use of love potions to control their husbands' desires for a new and younger wife.

With their concoction of African religion, Islam, Judaism(the old testament is their primary source of nourishment), carefully selected sections of the new testament, aspects of western Christianity, the sects flourish in east and southern Africa. Charisma and the gift of prophecy are the only training for the leaders, and the sects command a huge following in southern Africa. So huge is their following that African politicians fail to resist the temptation of being lured into these sects primarily to capture the vote of the semi-literate and illiterate sect members.

One would have thought Mugabe's new religious fervour would instil into him a new conscience and political vision for the land of our birth. But no, the over four million Zimbabwean refugees, escapees from his political violence and economic mismanagement, might as well 'go to hell.'

Yes, indeed, Mr. Barak Obama, 'desperate times call for desperate measures' where a climate of fear is part of the electoral burden for the intimidated voters of my cruel, beloved homeland. The medicine man, like the vodou priest of Haiti, will have his pound of nocturnal flesh in the darkness of the night.

April 2011

The Power and Fragility of Poetry

As I walked onto the improvised stage in the community hall of my suburb, I realized that the audience was outnumbered by 'men in suits and dark glasses'.
 
“Welcome to you all,” I said to the crowd, “and thank you for leaving your comfortable homes for the discomfort of poetry on this beautiful Saturday afternoon. I welcome you all, including distinguished members of the secret police”, I said to the shrinking faces of government agents whom I recognized in the audience. They sat stone-faced like carvings done by a bad sculptor. I watched them for a second then continued, “I hope you all enjoy our poetry performances.”
 
After introducing the five poet-performers of the afternoon, the most famous Zimbabwean musician, Oliver Mtukudzi arrived and volunteered to play background music. It was quite a combination-powerful poetry and beautiful music together for the afternoon!
 
My good friend, poet Chirikure Chirikure opened the show with his famous poem, “Marutsi” which translated means, “Vomit”. In the poem, the poet challenges a powerful ruler who has forced the poet to eat the royal vomit. The poet, a subdued captive, recognizes that he has to fight back. He will eat the vomit but after, he promises to vomit into the eyes, ears, head and body of the royal Excellency. He will vomit into the food, drink and the path of the well from which dictator fetches water.
 
'Gwendo guno waitira tsvina mutsime'. (This time you have defecated in the water well), the poet warns the king..
 
It’s a disgusting poem but extremely powerful and well written. The public would not stop cheering and interrupting with praises to the poet. The withered faces of the unsmiling secret agents warned me of the sad news ahead.
 
When my turn came, I read my poem, 'I Will Not Speak' from my anthology, 'Rainbows in the Dust'.
 
“Poetry looks at the private parts of the republic”, one line says. I could see a certain horrified turbulence on the faces of the secret agents. With the musical strains of the guitar from Mtukudzi, I felt, once again, the freshness of that line and many others in the long poem. I forgot about the presence of secret police as I read the English version and recited the Shona language version with music and dance.
 
At 'open mike' time, many youngsters came with poems they had either written on the spot or before. It was a flood of good and bad poetry, but poetry all the same.
 
As we wound up our afternoon performance, two men in dark suits and glasses came and asked me to have an aside with them. They led me into one of the men's bathrooms and locked the door behind us. I was nervous. I could not figure out where they had obtained the keys to the bathroom of the community centre.
 
Aggressively, one of them charged at me with a hateful face.
 
'What do you mean when you say ''poetry looks at the private parts of the President?'' the man screamed.
 
Luckily, I had my poetry book with me. I reminded him that the line was 'poetry looks at the private parts of the republic.' If he decides to interchange 'republic' with 'President' that was his own right as a critic. I showed him the exact line and he screamed at me once again: 'You are trying to be clever. It is the same, as far as I am concerned,' he yelled.
 
The power of poetry had put me face to face with the fragility of the poet. After showing me their pistols and handcuffs, they promised me that was the last performance we will have in that community. They claimed our poetry was too political and we needed police permission to perform it. And they kept their word,, a poets' platform killed by those who have physical as well as political power.
 
As I write poetry, I have the joy of blending contradictory images and metaphors arising from the life we live.
 
A writer (poet) is, according to Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, 'the sensitive point of the community.' As such, I believe the poet sees records and warns about the external and inner turbulences in a society.
 
Human life tends to be full of queer mixtures of beauty and ugliness, human sorrows and joys. When a society is too satisfied with itself, the poet creates new images of the risk of hidden decay that might creep in without people noticing. As the empire reaches the height of its glory, the poet has the eye for the hidden decay which might creed in like an invisible worm.
 
For, in my language, we say when a drum is playing at its sweetest and loudest, it is about to burst. When the most gifted dancer of the village does not know when to stop dancing, his madness is not too far away.
 
The poet creates all those images which warn us that we might be strong as communities, but at the same time we are so fragile, just like the poetic words which can easily be blown away by the wind. A poet who has written one million poems never feels like a millionaire with millions in the bank. His/her millions are the millions of images which give society a million dreams and a million doubts.
 
The power of a poetic metaphor can inspire men and women to fight for their freedom and dignity. But at the same time, the poet realizes that the power of another poetic line can inspire a vicious tyrant to torture and kill. Poetry is like the human face. You can never read all there is on the human face, let alone the human heart.
 
It is a question of power. Only two years ago, President Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe, declared on public media that 'the pen cannot be mightier than the gun.' As head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he knows he wields the power of the gun, and can use it to shoot the poet and burn the books of poetry. Equipped only with a heart and a mind, plus pen and paper, the poet is fragile. His/her words can easily be blown away in the whirlwind of bullets,, prisons and torture chambers.
 
The power and fragility of poetry! So many poets have perished in the dungeons of prisons or on battlefields not of their own making.
 
Maybe there is something beautiful in this fragility. As Zimbabwean poet, Charles Mungoshi once wrote:
 
'If you don't stay bitter for too long,
You will salvage something from the old country, ......
The whoof-whoof of cattle grazing,
The voice of village women coming from the water well, Your father' voice saying; all is not lost.'
 
I believe poetry has this magical quality of taking us to other landscapes, other imaginary lands, other voices and their beautiful or ugly echoes. That is the power and fragility of poetry.

March 2010

Fragile Human Spaces

It’s 1996 and I am travelling the countryside researching a book about people and their relationship to their landscapes. Early one morning, I come across three women walking to the market three miles away.

I notice one woman has three baskets packed with different kinds of fruits, a baby on her back and a small water container in her hands. I stop her and say, “The market is far away and you are carrying so much, and with the baby girl too!” but she only laughs at me as I dig out some money to buy some of her bananas and mangoes. Pointing at the baby on her back she says, “If I don't do this hard work, this one will starve to death. I want to buy her two new dresses this year.”

This brought memories of my own mother who would gladly sell her last chicken to send us to school or my aunt who always told me that men are the laziest human beings on earth. I remember aunt Makumbi often declaring, “Men cannot fetch water from the distant well, they don't want to learn how to cook and they don't want to go into the forest to search for firewood. It is us women who do all the work while men just sit under the trees drinking and making useless conversations!”

African women in the countryside carry all the burdens of work that one can imagine. They are the story-tellers but their stories are never recorded. They are the educators of children whom they teach to be strong, to flower in life so that rural life can change. They send the children to school with a gentle pat on the head. It is this understanding of a woman’s quiet strength and importance that I realized they should be featured in my literary work.

My literary view was shaped from the experiences of life in the countryside. I grew up under the roof of wide blue skies and the protection of women who dared to feed us before they could eat anything themselves.

Literature should search for the fragile human spaces and describe them. That way the writer can discover the gaps in social justice that the laws of the country ignore. The wounds and smiles of the weakest members of society are the subject of serious literature.

In my literary perspective, there are three categories of characters: victims and victimizers, and then those who are not sure which side they are on. Women are usually the victims and men are the victimizers.

As I wrote my novel Ancestors I discovered that history as told through me, my uncles and my father was distorted. Women were never mentioned. All the heroes were the men who wielded spears and muskets to defeat the other ethnic groups and advance to capture the next piece of land. We were never told about the wars we lost.

In my mind, I began to search for certain answers. Who was cooking for these fighters and feeding them to have the energy and strength to fight? Who was washing their clothes at the same time healing their physical and spiritual wounds? Who was taking care of, and raising the new warriors so they could grow strong? Women.

Women were the silent heroines who did not demand any public space as they dedicated themselves to their work in silence to bringing life to our lands.

When I write about women in my novels and poems, I feel the joy of recording the voices that have been silenced by society. I try to record their joys and sorrows, the dances and movements that express the sagas of their lives. The discovery of one's weakness is the beginning of that person's strength. The women of our lands discovered that they were weak, and thus discovered their strength. The men of our lands live under the illusion that they are strong, and so become weak.

Power and powerlessness.

For me, literature must juxtapose these two realities in their entirety. The man wielding a gun could be the most vulnerable human being in the community. The woman captured to be raped and shot could be the stronger of the two. She builds up her conscience while the victimizer corrodes his.

For me, the silent and fragile human spaces are where the reality of life begins. Those voices that would not be heard are my subject in the search for human possibilities. Are we not all searching for the gold in us? Sometimes in that search, we find the ugly madness, the rough road in our souls. In literature, I try to dig into that human experience which makes us either beautiful or ugly and indeed, we can be ugly. But even in our moments of ugliness, we still have a grain of beauty that literature can search for and explore.

Literature is always a celebration of the exploration of possibilities, the encounters with others and the acknowledgement that we are not alone in the making of social life and history. As the sensitive point of the community, the writer, the artist, is always searching for the silent heroines, whom are never mentioned in national anthems. This is why I honor women and why they are the subject of much of my work.

February 2010

Africa's Contribution to World Culture

I was sitting on a train on the long journey from Stavanger to Oslo to obtain my American visa. My short piece on literature and landscape had just been published in both French and English, and I was reading both versions to check everything since I did not want it to be seen as an 'exotic' piece.

A good African writer does not want to be treated as exotic. Literature comes from different landscapes and the tendency to make African literature look 'exotic' has been big, like a tourist attraction. Good art is good art no matter where it comes from.

Picasso drank of the artistic waters of Africa. Wole Soyinka, African poet and dramatist, drank of the artistic waters of England. Chinua Achebe, Nigerian poet, novelist and essayist, now a permanent resident in the United States, wrote the first internationally-famed African novel. He shares his vision with writers of the world in which the word is the magic with which we conduct all our actions and dreams.

The novelist Doris Lessing once said 'world literature without African literature is like an orchestra with some pieces missing.’

So the orchestra of world culture is made up of many voices from many parts of the cultures that enrich our world. Some of my favorite authors come from so many corners of the world. They enrich my vision and dreams of a better world, a more energetic literary culture from which we all drink the waters of artistic life.

Halfway through the ten-hour journey, a young black African man came searching for his seat. As he took his seat, a deep silence engulfed us. I looked at his name on the seat label and guessed he must be from Congo.

“Your name looks Congolese,” I said to him.

“Yes, I am from Congo,” the young man responded.

“Which one? The big one or the small one?”

“The big one, the one they call Democratic Republic of Congo,” he said.

“Oh yes, I have met many musicians from there, Pepe Kalle, Papa Wemba, Mbilia Bel,” I said to him.

The young man looked at me with anger and disgust in his face.

“I don't like music. I am an economist and I think music in Africa has been abused. The politicians make us sing and dance while they loot and plunder the resources of the country. Art in Africa has been used like a drug. Art is the opium of the masses in Africa. So, I don't like music. It is used in Africa to forget the real issues like political problems, public corruption and many other problems which the continent faces,” he argued.

With Black History Month here in the United States before us, the questions the young man raised have become pertinent. I remembered another incident in 1988 on the Goree Island at a broadcasting seminar for UNESCO. An African-American came to me on the small beach and asked me if I was an African. When I confirmed that I was, he became very angry.

“I hate you!” he scoffed, without even asking my name.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because it means your ancestors sold us as slaves,”  he pronounced before walking away with his wife.

These two incidents and many more make me think in a different way about Africa's contribution to world culture. We have bad images and beautiful ones, but the bad images should never be shelved or ignored as if they never existed.

For me, culture in its diversity means everything. It is at the center of what we do or don't do, how we run our lives and how we wear certain historical masks and pretend that certain things did not happen.

The fact that Africans are seen as some of the best entertainers in the world is a distortion of the history and culture. A great deal of African music sung by those who are in diaspora is full of sadness. It is a pain of being exiled but at the same time a celebration of the survival under those experiences.

Jazz, soul, blues, rhumba, kwasakwasa, all the music varieties which have taken root all over the world with their base in Africa usually express the sadness and pain Africans went through over the years. At the same time however, it explores the joy of African encounters with others. Whether those encounters were good or bad does not matter. The celebration is simply an acknowledgement of what happened and what might happen.

Africans have managed to celebrate those historical moments of sadness through music, song, dance and painting. The capacity to turn sadness into art has been one of the biggest contributions by Africans to world culture. The dances we choreograph are a celebration of our sad and joyful encounters with others. They are full of laughter, joy, sadness and longing for what could have been.