Tawanda Mutasah: "In 1999, five years, at that point, into our friendship and successive professional collaborations with Everjoice, my wife shared with me that, on a visit she had paid EJ at her home in Johannesburg, she had seen her name and my name, and our phone numbers, neatly typed up and held under a magnet on EJ’s fridge. They were, or in time were set to be, among names of her family, like Fungwa’s, or her friends like Ennie Chipembere, Sophia Nyamudeza, Teresa Mugadza, Deprose Muchena, Bella Matambanadzo, Brian Kagoro, and others – that would be put up on the refrigerator for those in EJ’s household to call in the event that they couldn’t reach her."
By Tawanda Mutasah
The 31 July arrest by Mnangagwa’s regime of internationally acclaimed author Tsitsi Dangarembga, lawyer Fadzayi Mahere, and other peaceful, socially-distancing protesters, some of them even standing alone or walking near their homes holding mild-mannered protest placards, rounded off a febrile month of citizen discontent and state confusion.
It was a month in which Zimbabwe’s callous regime showed its true colors often and vividly, including in how the case of Hopewell Chin’ono and Mduduzi Mathuthu unmasked the regime’s posturing to the international community about fighting corruption.
At a recent public function, the opening of The Sprout Restaurant in Harare, we saw former First Lady Grace Mugabe moving within the same orbit as senior ZANU PF figures, her presence neither resisted nor theatrically embraced.
In this second and final part of the article, I continue to examine the potential outcomes of ZANU-PF’s succession politics, focusing on whether Kudakwashe Tagwirei (whom I metaphorically refer to as “Mamvura”) will succeed in his presumed bid for the presidency, whether General Constantino Chiwenga will recover his political standing and take over, whether someone else will ascend to the throne, and whether President Mnangagwa will ultimately retire in peace.
Rutendo Benson Matinyarare, long celebrated as the chief acoustics engineer of Zimbabwe’s most delicate economic sculpture, the ZiG—now appears to have discovered an inconvenient truth: even the most beautifully crafted clay cow cannot moo indefinitely without cracking.
