27 is the number of years President Mandela was in gaol before he became president.


27 is the number of years since I wrote the piece of poetry below in march 1980 regarding the immanent accession to power of Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe who has imprisoned his entire people in a web of horror for 27 years next month.
Curiously enough, my name NiK means 27 in a memory enhancing structure known as ‘The Major System’; whereby the number 2 is represented by the letter N and the number 7 is represented by the letter K [see how many sevens you can find in K] [consonants by the way, are silent]. 27 is also the designated name of one of the country’s longest established prison gangs. The number 27 pops up fairly often in the lotto and is also my birth date. It also [my specific birth date 27] has apparently some significance amongst those who are into the occult-. Currently however its interest lies in the Mugabe factor.

I am not going to say much about the Roz. I’ve said plenty over the years and so have many others. I believe he is doing exactly what he said he would do 27 years ago in the same way that Adolf Hitler explained in Mein Kampf [my edition published in 1927] that he was going to implement a final solution for the Jews. The fact that no one chose to believe either of them is not their fault.

27 years ago I heard the announcement on the radio that Mugabe’s Zanu party had won the election in Zimbabwe and the meeting I was attending at the time ended abruptly. Later that morning I walked across town back to my office. – Salisbury, soon to be Harare, was as silent as the grave. There were no jubilant supporters on the streets, nor on the road home that day; although later the thug gangs appeared and made it obvious that a new era had dawned. The movie Mad Max could have been shot on that day- that is how deserted the city was. We all knew that the future would be awful and not being financially well positioned for the cataclysm to come I went home packed my family into an oversized sardine can and left the country almost immediately. We had to wait somewhere near the border for a few weeks while the dog’s anti rabies shots matured to fruition. Many warehouses storing the goods of evacuating families were firebombed. They were anxious weeks.

The year before the election I had directed a piece of live theatre in a city centre open-air venue. It was a two weeklong performance of Wole Soyinka’s disturbing play about a Mugabe type dictator’s brutal rule in a mythical African country. The play is called Kongi’s Harvest. The night before the show opened I caused consternation amongst my cast when I announced, as part of what I intended to be a stirring motivational speech, that they were taking part in a unique opportunity. Such a play with such a disturbing message about the corruption of power would certainly never have been allowed by the proto fascist Smith regime. Everybody agreed.

Many of our earlier shows: Sartre’s No Exit, Ionescu’s The lesson, Journey’s end, Boesman and Lena and the Blood Knot for instance had to pass a special pre-performance trial. We performed solely for the benefit of a censorship committee sent by the government to decide if we were presenting potentially subversive material. By Kongi time the censorship committee was history.

They would never have approved Kongi’s Harvest [which I produced in spite of the authors objections and refusal to grant rights-I was that convinced of the importance of the message of the play for the future of Zimbabwe that I defied the ban imposed by a man I revere as the Shakespeare of Afrika; and paid the royalties due, to the national theatre association for distribution to the great man when things eventually became sensible again. I did hear years later that he came to Harare and met with members of the cast].

I then suggested to my cast that it was probable that Kongi’s Harvest would be banned by any incoming nationalist administration. My all-black cast of about forty players revolted. They raged, ranted and walked off the set, accusing me of the all to familiar cry of racism, as our President has done again this week in the curious belief that only white people worry about criminals.

The cast demanded that I apologise for suggesting that a future black administration would ever abuse the rights of the citizenry as the Smith regime had done. I said that I regretted that I had to tell them the truth; that the probability they were doomed to suffer indefinitely was more than 90%. I eventually got them back on stage and the show enjoyed a patchy response from a less than enthusiastic populace. The theme was too real.

After I left Zimbabwe for good, I did return twice for exploratory visits and on each occasion was appalled at the disintegration of a once ordered society. Surely it wasn’t that hard to keep the thing running? Two years after independence my lead actor Christopher Chisvu produced a knocked off version of Kongi’s Harvest. It was banned on the opening night and Christopher became one of the first who had to go into exile to escape the repressive Mugabe.I was later accosted by a man at the Norwood pick n Pay who told me that he had a message from Chisvu and the remnants of my cast…I was forgiven: they now understood… It was, as a reader recently observed, a Pyrric victory.

By 1982 the stench of fear was tangible in the Harare atmosphere. A delightful but anonymous former fan of my theatre company, a man who suffered a deformity in the form of a hunchback was murdered that year by CIO [Central Intelligence Organisation] agents in Beit Bridge when they set out to ‘straighten his hump’.

During the intervening period North Korean trained troops massacred close to half a million citizens of an unfashionable part of the country, either through direct action or through subsequent famine. The evil perpetrated by this powerblighted regime over the past 27 years is longstanding and legion. The eventual list of victims, of what has been a Zimbabwean holocaust, will grossly outnumber the great wall of the heroes that we are busy constructing here in Tshwane.

The great problem with modern democracy seems to be the equal access to thieving by all and sundry. Under the previous system [ in repressive Smith’s Rhodesia] looting of the State chest was relatively limited to a handful of rumoured ‘landlords’. Nonetheless in spite of his fascist behaviour, only a decade back the crafty Roz had fooled everyone outside the country into a belief that Zim’ was an emerging player on the world stage. Like so many of today’s capitalist businesses who are in bed today with the anti democratic government of the People’s Republic of China there were plenty of profit makers who enjoyed a short term boost from Mugabe’s lack of public accountability.

And then whammo- he implemented the policy he’d outlined before 1980, to which I referred in the poem below. The poem was banned by a British government administration hell bent on handing power to the nastiest man around and getting the hell out of the action. Only sceptics like myself had ever believed Mugabe would engage in the scorched earth policies that followed his election reverses in 2000: scorched earth for him, and, one suspects, relief from our own government. [One has to assume our government’s tacit support for a policy of national suicide involves some twisted revolutionary logic].

Frankly I think Mugabe decided like the spoilt child he is that if the people were not going to play with him then he was going home and talking has toys with him. ‘I’ll break the country and then you’ll be sorry’. Of course our government’s response may well be Machiavellian. Given our national propensity for monopolies a vigorous and thriving Zimbabwe was an impediment to our adventures north of the Zambezi. The Roz’s fit of temper suits us perfectly [in a non-humanitarian sense].

The probability that Zimbabwe can be restored to full service effectiveness again during this century is close to improbable. A century of capital acquisition has been destroyed. It is ‘Close to impossible’ because the most practical solution would be improbable: the complete deregulation and privatisation of the entire State with concomitant open borders. Even then it would be debateable. The era when ordinary decent criminals were sent out to colonise the ‘new world’ are long gone. Many of the country’s trained and skilled people have been snatched up by a world that is experiencing its own critical skills shortages.

Today’s most probable ‘knowledge’ imports will be Chinese and possible south Asian groups. If I were a fiction writer, which I am, then I would have some 50,000 Chinese ‘workers’ operating in Zimbabwe by 2011. China has a surplus of some forty million men due to the unintended consequence of their one child policy, and it would be a fun move to stick 50,000 soldiers disguised as traders and more traders, who could at the right moment appropriate the State by proxy- it may already have happened. There will be no mass return to the homeland by Zim exiles as many, such as those promoting the local ‘homecoming revolution’, fondly envisage.

Does this mean that I think Mr Mugabe is in danger of immanent expulsion from the Presidency?

No I don’t, I give the probability of his overthrow no more than 2 on a scale where 0 equals dull improbability and 100 equals comprehensive certainty.

What I have always found interesting though is the way that, right from the outset Zanu PF has mirrored all the evil ways of the old Apartheid regime in their Zimbabwe reign. The pace of horror was accelerated though, for the evil apartheid regime needed three decades via Sharpeville and other bad things to mature to the full horror represented by the Biko murder in 1976. ZanuPF emerged from the election fully matured as an evildoer. Today the Roz called on the world to ‘Go Hang’. When told of Biko’s death our own faceless flunky government gangster representative famously told the world that the death ‘left him cold’.

Nonetheless the beginnings are there- The people must suffer enough to rebel and ordinary common people in our continent have acquired an almost infinite capacity for suffering. That was the point reached by places like Rumania and Ukraine and even pre-2006 Lebanon, which may yet fail to survive the Hezbollah inspired hurricane destruction of Israel’s bullying credibility as a regional superpower last year.

Ultimately the world has cared less about much more important places than Zimbabwe, and it is almost inevitable that the opposition has to start funding their own ‘resistance’ campaign- They do not really seem to have the stomach for it which is good for us to their south. A civil war to our north would impact badly on our emerging regional dominance, by virtue of creating a pretty solid barrier.

It is most unlikely that Mr Mugabe will live forever; he will almost certainly live another 3 years because we are sure he is anxious to make thirty. Thirty is a much luckier number for Bob the Roz than 27. 30 is tomorrow and we all know tomorrow’s never come. In the meantime he has to figure out a plan to eradicate his opposition before they can regroup and he should achieve that- Playing by the rules always serves those best who bend the rules to their purpose, whilst denying their opposition the latitude to do the same. Still: here’s hoping 27 proves seminal for the Roz notwithstanding my scepticism.


Election Manifesto.

It is a one step two step
slanging match again
I run you down
You do the same
One step, two step,
Throw a bad word
Never think of telling
Where the whole thing will go.
Never think, or never dare
mention how to do it.

No it’s
One step, two step,
Ignore the pointed question
Hover on the edges, until
They’ve all forgotten
Then promise something
No one thought to mention.
One step, two step,
Shifting from
The centre…………….

.NiK(1980)

Published …Sting Magazine, Former Rhodesia 1980. (Now
Zimbabwe) Banned by the British Interim
Administration…1980:
A faceless British foreign office type at government house,
Part of the interim administration that stepped in when
the Smith regime collapsed in 1980 and submitted to a
national referendum, told me my poem was in ‘bad form’.
Refers to the election that brought Robert ( Bob the Roz)
Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe.
Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s ‘ Lobster Quadrille.’

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