Zimbabwean Quotes

After Barbara’s Contentious Divorce, Everyone Felt Genuinely Hurt, Including Justifiably Kin Left Melancholically Noting Or Perhaps Questioning Rumours Suggesting That, Unannounced, Vincent’d Wed an uXorious Young Zimbabwean.

Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans had starved to death or died of disease under Robert Mugabe; the more incredible story was how so many millions managed to survive. They refused to become victims.

I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely. Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems. In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age. At least you used to. But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

Instead of recruiting Cuban doctors or Zimbabwean teachers, my advice to President Zuma is to solicit the support of His Holiness, and to rope in nuns from all over the world to teach our children.

he heard a rich English accent, a sultry female voice possessed of impeccable diction and brimming with intelligence. Not English, he corrected. African. Zimbabwean.

When I reach the head of the line, I hand my passport to the black official and greet him in Shona, Zimbabwe’s main vernacular. He ripens in smile and demands, “Why don’t you stay here? We need people like you.” By “people like you,” he means white Zimbabweans.

The UNDP has estimated that the Zimbabwean diaspora is providing Zimbabwe with US$1.4 billion a year118 to the country, five or six times more than what Zimbabwe used to receive from donor aid. This has been mainly through provision of food and other necessities to their relatives.

To understand what happened in Zimbabwe its worth trying to see things through the Zimbabwean people prism for a moment. Immune from the propaganda and the western media mind- bend. The real issues started a long, long time ago before the current regimes. Those who came bearing greed and seeking to rip off the cradle of Sub-Saharan Africa orchestrated the demise the people of Zimbabwe found themselves reeling in

When Robert Mugabe, resentful at his overshadowing on the African stage by Nelson Mandela, sent thousands of Zimbabwean soldiers to fight rebels in the jungles of the Congo, in return for diamonds for himself and his cronies, many of the soldiers came back on leave infected. It was said that whole units came back with the virus, shared among them by the bar girls in the noisy village shebeens; and the camp followers who became their ‘temporary wives’ and even bore their children; and by the timid tribal

They discovered that commonly used ethnic labels did not match the genetic clusters and were not reliable at predicting variation in the DME genes. One glaring lack of correspondence was the fact that 62 percent of Ethiopians, who would socially be labeled as black and grouped with the Bantu and Afro-Caribbeans, fell in the same genetic cluster as Ashkenazi Jews, Norwegians, and Armenians. A gene variant involved in metabolizing codeine and antidepressants “is found in 9%, 17%, and 34% of the Ethiopian, Tanzanian, and Zimbabwean populations, respectively.”41 The prevalence of an allele that predicts severe reactions to the HIV-drug abacavir is 13.6 percent among the Masai in Kenya, but only 3.3 percent among the Kenyan Luhya, and 0 percent among the Yoruba in Nigeria.42 Grouping all these people together on the basis of race for purposes of drug tailoring would be disastrous.

I am part of the unashamed. I have the Holy Spirit power. The die has been cast. I have stepped over the line. The decision has been made - I am a disciple of His. I won't look back, let up, slow down, back away or be still. My past is redeemed, my present makes sense, my future is secure. I'm finished and done with low living, sight walking, smooth knees, colorless dreams, tamed visions, worldly talking, cheap giving, and dwarf goals. I no longer need preeminence, prosperity, position, promotions, plaudits or popularity. I don't have to be right, first, tops, recognized, praised, regarded or rewarded. I now live by faith, lean in His presence, walk by patience, am uplifted by prayer, and I labor with power.

In this context Mugabe was eager to maintain the loyalty of key allies, particularly in the security services. As the economy at home shrunk, so did opportunities for domestic patronage. The Congo war provided the opportunity he needed to keep his collaborators happy and busy elsewhere. This explains the urgency with which the Congolese and Zimbabweans set up their joint ventures and how easily Zimbabwean officials

If you look at Mugabe's entire political career, what is always missing is the essence of the person. He is a shrewd politician, a great survivor, but very very ruthless. There is nothing to commend him except his eloquency with words. He is mean-spirited even towards his own people. He is not moved by the plight of Zimbabweans, by people suffering and dying. He's immune to such calls on his feelings; he doesn't respond to pity.

Mugabe concedes immediately. These ex-guerrillas were the backbone of his revolution. And from 1997 he starts putting through what are, by Zimbabwean standards, enormous one-off payments to the fifty thousand war vets, plus generous monthly pensions. Many economists calculate the real collapse of the economy from this moment. The Zimbabwe dollar crashes, never to recover. Mugabe brings Hunzvi into the government; he is too much of a threat outside it.

Are we above or is just another story? Is it human nature? Is it just a norm? Is it segregation causing these deadly wars? Is poverty leading us to the stagnant sea of prostitution? Is the pauperism playing a role in tarnishing our image? Is paucity injecting a lethal poison in our morals? Is penury eating civilization and destroying families? Is the prison meant for classes in the society? Is bribery a new Godly law? Are drugs manufactured for us to numb the pain? Are we scared of reality? Is it true that fathers are disappearing in the society podium? Is it true that the lack of manhood is the root of all question marks? Is it true that the adequate fathers in the society are destroying the sanity of children? Is it true that our uncontrollable passions are born because we lack a muse

A fair lady I suppose, you balanced his spiritual and material being. He symbolized you as infinite love forever together and the dark cloud and ravens sung a dirge Oh! Annabel Lee.

She was that lass I loved to admire when she plucked roses in her Charlotte novels she beamed like sunflower, when she laughed at romantic lines, I loved her little sequin nuggets those fine details about her, those indefinite little prose. Her smell made me wonder, Do books have frankincense? I loved to stare at her favourite book by

Hannah do you even know the meaning of evening silences? Watching the ebb, the halo hanging upon your eyes? Hannah do we even know the love we twined in those pines? We walked with veils like of virgin shyness? Those constellation, those stars that gleam and thrill, those seamless touches, those eyes, shyness and sheen, those Hannah, those nights painted by Vincent Van Gogh, those nights I took you in my arms and held you like an eg

If you fail to prepare for life, prepare to fail.

A Motswana in Zambia or Zimbabwe was referred to as gwerekwere and so was a Zimbabwean or Zambian in Botswana. Post-colonialism tragedy.

As it was, being a Zimbabwean immigrant was the worst thing a person could be in Southern Africa. They were the new Hebrews – homeless.

If there is one thing that we should have fixed in the new South Africa it is education. After my matric I enrolled for an A-level course in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Within the first day of studies my South African friends and I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that the South African system had well-nigh destroyed us: the Zimbabweans were far more educated, more assured and more able to grasp the advanced concepts put before us by our teachers. We were left in the dust. Today, a tour of South Africa’s banks, pension funds, asset managers, insurance companies and other financial services firms will show you that it is Zimbabweans and other black Africans who are at the top of the pile. The reason for this is not difficult to find: Zimbabwe and other newly independent nations did not fiddle with their education systems. The system worked in colonial days and under post-liberation administrations. South Africa’s education system, however, was allowed to stutter, calcify and rot by our own post-1994 administrations, including that of Nelson Mandela.

It’s not just Africa’s movie and music industry that is booming. African literature, led by the Young Lions, or rather, Lionesses, is seeing a revival, too. I mentioned Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her TED Talk about Africa’s “Single Story.” But Adichie, 37, is best known for writing, and her novels Half of a Yellow Sun (now a film directed by fellow Nigerian novelist Biyi Bandele) and Americanah, winner of the United States’ prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013, are international best sellers. Adichie is able to write in an authentic African voice and yet still connect with huge numbers of readers in the West. I have been told about other young African women who are taking the literary world by storm such as Zimbabwean NoViolet Bulawayo, who was long-listed for Britain’s Man Booker Prize, and her countrywoman, international trade lawyer Petina Gappah, a finalist for the United Kingdom’s prestigious Orwell Prize in 2010. These talented women are part of a confident, new, global Africa.

Now Mugabe has a policy to ‘look east.’ To look to the Chinese to invest in us. What is a Chinese going to understand about Africa? It will take another hundred years! Mugabe’s policies are denial. The base of the Zimbabwean economy is Western investment for over one hundred years since colonialism. The fabric of this economy is investment.

The Zimbabwean “Look East” political policy has not been supported by more specific and realistic strategies.

Most Zimbabweans still have the colonial model of government and governance in their minds and hearts, and unless we can move to more modernized conceptualizations of government and governance Zimbabwe will be condemned to a repetition of the past. That is the problem today, where we are repeating the settler colonial projects, but in reverse, with Black racism replacing White racism, Black ownership replacing White ownership, but retaining the same system.

Paul R. Linde in his 1994 book, Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa. “Major mental illness cuts across all cultures,” Linde writes. “Amazingly enough, or maybe not, acutely psychotic people in Zimbabwe appear very similar to those in San Francisco. . . . They suffer from disorganized thoughts, delusions, and hallucinations. The content of the symptoms, however, is very much different . . . Zimbabweans do not report hearing auditory hallucinations of Jesus Christ, rather they report hearing those of their ancestor spirits. They are not paranoid about the FBI, rather they are paranoid about witches and sorcerers.”1

Impunity breeds corruption, abuse, and lawlessness, and undermines the rule of law, the respect for human rights, and the trust in public institutions.

Zimbabwe needs a new democratic narrative, culture, and vision to reflect the aspirations, values, and needs of the people.

The media is the fourth estate, the watchdog, the public voice that informs, educates, and entertains the citizens, and holds the government accountable to its actions and policies.

In addition, things that I had lived with unthinkingly because they were widespread took on a new strangeness, and terms that made up part of the basic trappings of conversation started to chafe. I began to feel as never before how limiting catch-all labels for different groups in society are... Words such as 'black' or 'white' felt cramped and inadequate as a means of talking about ethnicity, suggesting, as they did , that I must have more in common with an Albanian donkey farmer than with the Zimbabwean-British family living down the hallway from me... The same things held true for some of the terms I had been used to framing the world with. Words like 'developed' and 'developing' ... suddenly revealed themselves as Trojan horses packed with assumptions.