SHOCK at “Itai ma Small Houses with Ndebele girls to stop Ndexit” VIDEO

By Tinomudaishe Chinyoka

I have been aggrieved today. I chanced upon a video circulating around social media, very short, but insidiously poisonous. And l got to think: and so it begins.

One of the most poignant events of the 1994 Rwanda genocide was a scene repeated over and over, too painful to think about yet one that real live people endured.

Hundreds of Tutsi girls would be separated from their parents and families, and watch them being hacked to death nemabhemba. Then, shaking with grief and a pain that climbs up the spine and chokes the throat, the girls were marched to open spaces, and made to sit together. Surrounding them would be hoardes of Interahamwe, machetes in hand, some still dripping fresh blood, eyeing the girls and prowling like hungry lions surrounding zebra calves. These men would get the authorisation to go in and claim their prize, which was to go ahead to pick any girl they liked, and drag her into the nearby banana plantation or bushes and rape them to their heart’s content.

Not once, and never with any hope of a rescue in sight, the girls endured repeated rapes every day, any time of day but definitely throughout each night.

Many got pregnant, many gave birth to children they knew were the progeny of the same people that killed their parents. A living testimony that the only blood relative you have left is the product of hate and violation by the very same person that took your family and ended your existence as a human being.

The International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda has found that “sexual violence was a step in the process of destruction of the Tutsi group, a method for the destruction of the spirit, of the will to live, and of life itself.” Several perpetrators have been arrested and sentenced, a majority have escaped justice and got away with their crimes.

And yet, here is the rub: this hate did not just up and happen. Young men did not just decide one Sunday morning to go ahead and set up rape gangs targetting Tutsi girls. It started somewhere.

Many trace it to the voices that first started the process of denigrating the Tutsi community as less than human, as objects on whom things could be done as if they lacked agency to do for themselves. Chief among these was  Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines, a radio station that went about sowing seeds of hate by using this kind of communication to first denigrate the Tutsi through hate speech, to paint Tutsis as the hated ‘other’ through equating them to cockroaches and then target Tutsis by identifying the cockroach ‘other’ as the source of all society’s problems.

The mistake would be to think that that was Rwanda and will not happen here. An even bigger mistake would be to think that for this horror to germinate it requires hordes of likeminded zealots.

This video, made specifically to address the issue of what the speaker calls “Ndexit” (the breakaway of the Matabeleland provinces to create a new country) a very small but no less insidious attempt at sparking a similar movement like the Interahamwe.

Zimbabwe is going through tribulation. Everything has fallen apart. Everything. It is ripe for this kind of wanton behaviour to find an out, and in the kind of hate talk that is examplified by that video, it just might.

This is especially so as we have no functioning social, economic, religious or political systems. People now expect payment when you ask for directions. The police think that their main role in society is to spot traffic infractions in order to extract bribes.

Judges think that their office gives them the right to demand farms from government and to publicly humiliate women that dare refuse their lecherous advances. Businesses look to make as much profit margins as possible. Politicians think that their role is to extract as much money from the treasury as they can, before it all ends.

In this powder-keg, the ground is fertile for sowing seeds of hate. So when a moderately pleasant looking, clean and relatively sane looking young man is seen smiling as he talks nonchallantly about impregnanting Ndebele girls with Shona babies, in the current climate it might just start a movement. Because people do not know who or what to blame, they will latch on to easy targets.

The speaker on the video talks about ‘Ndexit’, at once insulting a whole people through the bastardisation of their name and casting it (and them) as  objects for jokes and ridicule. He talks in a way that is cleverly primed to elicit sympathy: these maNdex think they are clever, but we are cleverer. No question who “we” are, or that “we” might not agree, since “we” have been taken into his confidence.

He makes fun of the desire for a Mthwakhazi Republic despite the fact that this not something that will be laughed away. It is a demand for the right to self determination, and one that must be answered seriously if, as seems to be the current majority view, we want to keep Zimbabwe as one. Making fun of those that aspire to self determination is hardly the best way to address their views.

Having cast this desire for the right to self determination in such pejorative terms, the speaker offers his gem: let us  breed them out of Matabeleland. Let all patriotic Shona men do their duty and make Ndebele girls pregnant. The mysogyny that reeks in the suggestion would be loathsome enough if it was the worst bit. Ndebele women are automatically presumed to be nothing but walking wombs waiting for Shona men to make them do their job.

Not fit to be married, these Ndebele girls must be made into small houses. Presumably desperate for Shona men since their own are not intelligent, lazy to learn or absent in South Africa, yet not good enough or worthy to be married, these walking semen repositories must give birth to enough Shona babies to neutralise the threat of secession.

Presumably these Shona children will be raised to revere their superior Shona nature and ignore the Ndebele ‘other’ who raised them for being inferior, lazy or absent. The absence of the superior Shona father (to be presumed, these being small houses) will somehow have no effect. 

One of the worst fantasies we can carry as a people is the belief that because a genocide already happened in Zimbabwe, it will not happen again. Or that it can only be ignited by a major event or a homicidal maniac like the last time. I am sure that when Radio des Mille Collines started broadcasting there were those who thought that references to Tutsi cockroaches was harmless fun, if somewhat in bad taste.

So we think talk of maNdex and their laziness and their amply endowed women waiting for potent Shona sperm is all in jest, if somewhat not good for the Sunday dinner table. We find no shame in saying ‘muNdex‘ because after all, it is harmless fun. No-one gets hurt by it.

That, sadly, is self delusion. This kind of talk breeds a belief that a quarter of our population is not exactty, 100% like us. That they are alien and lazy. They do not value education. Their women are of loose morals (there is presumably no individuality in Ndebele women, just beauty and loose morals). It is not a huge leap from thinking that a woman who is already waiting for Shona seed need not have her consent sought to have such seed imparted, since she wants it anyway.

And once we dispense with their  unequivocal consent, is it not then a very short step from putting them a few in one room to cut costs, then one flat, then one building, then….well, why not in one football field toshara hedu takasununguka?

This is not scaremongering. Last time round, 5th Brigade went about cutting up pregnant Ndebele women because they were carrying Madzviti seed. It was not good enough, because mwana wedzviti idzviti.

 Anyone, no matter their tribe (and there is a long list of credible scholarship suggesting that these distinctions are a colonial  invention with no basis beyond language and geography) but l am appalled that there are living and breathing people in our country who think that intelligence and laziness are confined to a particular people.

It is shameful that when we agitate for the right to vote, for the rule of law, for justice and equality for all, we include the rights of those such as he.

I am worried enough about our country to know that when you create a pinata out of a segment of the population, you are inviting many disaffected people to pick up baton sticks and machetes and start hacking at it.

I love our country enough to know that it will never develop until we start thinking of all Zimbabweans as equal and pulling together. An underdeveloped Matabeleland and a developed Mashonaland equates to an underdeveloped country.

And l worry enough about Zimbabwe to know that the sexist and tribalist depiction of Ndebele women as loose and so desperate for Shona men that they will debase themselves in the manner implied in the video is not going to help us build a responsible citizenry or cohesive nation.

And l am angry enough about this video to understand the responses thereto. l watched another video where the speaker offers a R10,000 reward to anyone that catches the person who created the insulting videos. It is not stated whether this is dead or alive reward but the implication is obvious. As a lawyer l want to tell the author of the video to immedeately withdraw that offer.

While the offering of such a bounty so publicly might be ill-advised, it tells you how pained people are by this sort of thing.  That is how tragedies unfold. Someone will heed his bounty offer. He becomes a hero figure whose prosecution is taken as confirming the greater Shona tribal agenda against the Ndebele, and before we know it, we have sides assigned to us and no option but to stay there for protection and fear of being regarded as moderate. Because if the Rwanda genocide has something else to teach us, it is that being moderate comes with a heavy price indeed.

We must condemn hate speech in the strongest of terms. This video has no place in our society. We are better than this. But if l am wrong, and we are not, then woe unto us.

We find ourselves in this morass because of two very unrelated factors, one in our control and the other not.

The social media revolution, which has made it possible for anyone with an opinion to project their voice across dimensions and distances further than even some radios and newspapers of old could, has not always had a positive effect. In the past, journalists primarily projected facts and rarely opinion, and even then had to satisfy a whole posse of subeditors before their views could see the light of day. This filtering process acted as a kind of peer review, and opinions such as those in this offensive video would have found it hard to see the light of day.

Nowadays, anyone is a journalist and, even worse, the journalist is their own subeditor and distributor. Anyone with a smart phone can send any thought they have to the entire world. We have just seen how the epidemic of fake news shaped the US election. That is a robust democracy with solid institutions, but it was susceptible to the effects of this phenomenon called citizen journalism.

What chance we have in our corner of the universe against the power of social media is best answered in one word: none. We have no power to control this new media, nor should we particularly want to per se. The emergence of Pastor Evan Mawarire and the #thisflag movement that he started is good enough an example of how social media can be a force for good.

The solution it seems, can be found in what it is we can control. I have written previously about how we need to address the stain of our genocide, and stop thinking that the Unity Accord between Zanu PF and PF Zapu addressed everything. It did not. Mhosva hairovi. Takavuraya vanhu, ngatitaurei toripa ngozi.

There are other things we can control.

We can control the way in which resources are distributed throughout the country. If an impression has been created that Ndebele youths are not going to school but moving to South Africa, we might want to look at how many good schools are in Matabeleland as opposed to the rest of the country? How many 6th Form High Schools did we build there since 1980?

How many good government jobs are available in Matabeleland as opposed to Harare or Mashonaland? What are the programmes we have put in place to encourage tertiary education in Matabeleland?

We can also control the kind of democracy we practice. We can stop beating our youths for not being Zanu PF supporters. We can acknowledge the damage caused by bureaucratic requirements around the procurement of birth certificates and passports in a region where tens of thousands of parents were murdered and thus making it both hard and scary to approach government authorities.

And we can set up bilateral arrangements with South Africa to reach out to our disaffected citizens there.

More than anything else, we are in control of what we do when demands for self determination are made. The present practice of ignoring such demands or painting those agitating for it as lunatics is shortsighted. Both the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights recognise the right to self determination.

The majority needs to be educated to understand that it is possible, and in fact sometimes desirable, to accede to this right. That keeping the country together when such demands are made is not to be achieved by denigrating the demands as “Ndexit”, but by a process of listening to and addressing the often genuine grievances that cause such demands in the first place.

If it is the majority consensus that Zimbabwe must stay as one, as many of us believe, then acting like what is being asked for is a crime is not going to best guarantee such unity. What would work, and what we must be doing, is to listen to such demands and look to see how the overall need or reason for the demand can be addressed without breaking up the country.

What we cannot do is to allow voices such as those in this video to be what speaks for the Shona majority on such issues. We need leadership on this issue, and that, again, is something we are in control of. First as a country through our government and, ultimately, when (as has happened) government fails to lead, us as the voters.

It is in our control to demand the government we need, one that respects all its citizens and protects those communities that, owing to crimes committed against them in the past, need such protection. If our police force was not trained only in apprehending people for driving on the yellow line, maybe there would be an arrest over this video. But, alas, since there is no clear violation of the Road Traffic Act in the video, the hate will stand unanswered.

That, is unfortunate.

Tinomudaishe Chinyoka is a UK based lawyer and a prominent former student leader at the University of Zimbabwe