John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York in the UK, explains why he cut up his clerical collar. "As a clergyman I am identified by wearing a dog collar. Last Sunday I cut it up during a television interview and will not wear it again until Mugabe has gone. The people of Zimbabwe have lost their identity."
From his essay in The Guardian.
A friend of mine who has just returned from Zimbabwe wrote to me quoting what TS Eliot wrote in The Waste Land in 1922: 'Unreal city/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many.'
What strikes those who visit Zimbabwe is how many have been undone by death. Zimbabwe has the highest proportion of orphans in the world (1.3 million), largely due to the devastation caused by HIV and Aids and their related illnesses, which kill 3,200 people each week. Then there are the needless deaths every day which occur because most of the doctors have fled a health system in ruins. Most have no transport to get to hospital, or, in the unlikely event that they reach one, money to pay bills. Added to all of this is hunger and malnutrition. It is no accident that the average life expectancy of Zimbabweans hovers around 35, lower than any war zone.
The very identities of individuals, of families and the nation, are eroded daily by the struggle for life. This is the most tragic part of the history of Zimbabwe, which so successfully struggled to liberate itself from a racist rule that limited the identities of citizens to the colour of their skin. Now racism has returned to haunt Zimbabwe in a different form as the world looks on, cowed by the fear that to criticise those who rule over a land so steeped in death is to enter into the shoes of former colonial masters. Such misplaced fears must be put aside.
It is not colonialism that is to blame, but rather the ruinous policies of President Robert Mugabe. For all his bluster against Britain and those anti-colonial tirades that play well with those former freedom fighters and soldiers who now occupy government positions in Africa, the wail of suffering and the stench of death are evidence enough of the failures of a corrupt and brutal regime, bent on staying in power at all costs.
Read it all here.
1 comment:
I watched this live on BBC News 24. It was a dramatic, but I fear ultimately futile, gesture. Mugabe will stay while other African regimes allow him to. Topple Mugabe and who may be next? There is a closing of despotic ranks. Reform is far too threatening.
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