African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [161]
A United Nations report: ‘All of Africa is bedevilled with rhetoric. There is no connection between what is going on and how it is described. And Zimbabwe is the worst of them all.’
THE TOYOTA SCANDAL
The enterprising editor of The Chronicle who exposed this scandal was sacked, or, as the government put it, promoted, to a job where his journalistic talents cannot be used. The Chronicle is now almost as bland as The Herald.
But–say the Passionate Apologists–The Financial Gazette is well-informed and critical, and there is a magazine, Parade, which is not afraid. Cynics reply, Why not? The Gazette and Parade are only read by intellectuals, the Povos never read them.
As a result of The Chronicle’s exposures, the Sandura Commission was appointed: the resulting hearings in court were attended by jeering, shouting, laughing crowds, while the defendants reached heights of imaginative perjury described by one member of the audience as ‘a combination of Baron Munchausen and Cecil Rhodes boasting about the annexation of Mashonaland. I tell you, comrade, only Zimbabwe could have come up with that one–it was better than any theatre.’ All of Zimbabwe applauded Mugabe for appointing the Sandura Commission: at last he was behaving as he was expected to behave, a bulwark against corruption and a defender of the good and the right. The students were particularly full of praise. But then the guilty ones were pardoned by the President, and the people who committed perjury in court and who expected jail sentences were pardoned too. ‘One law for the Chefs and one law for the Povos,’ said the cynical. Said, by the by, the now very cynical. As we all know, there is no one more furiously cynical than an idealist betrayed. Needless to say, the rumours about why the President did this ill-judged thing flourish. ‘They’ say that people very close indeed to the President were implicated. ‘They’ say that the President cannot afford to offend the corrupt Chefs who keep him in power. The charitable say it hurts Mugabe to see old comrades who fought with him in the bush disgraced and in prison.
Maurice Nyagumbo
Zimbabwean hero who fell from grace
Maurice Nyagumbo, who was Zimbabwe’s senior political affairs minister until his resignation last week over an illegal car deals racket, has died in hospital after taking poison. He was 64. He resigned after a judicial inquiry set up by President Mugabe implicated him in a scandal which involved helping people to buy new vehicles, to resell them on the black market at inflated prices.
Before his fall from grace, Nyagumbo had been a prominent figure in the struggle for Zimbabwean independence, and spent many years in jail for opposing white minority rule. After independence was granted in 1980 he became a leading figure in the government of Robert Mugabe, rising to be, effectively, number four in the cabinet, and number three in the ruling ZANU-PF party.
Maurice Nyagumbo was born to peasant parents in Rusape, Southern Rhodesia, in 1924. He received some primary education at mission schools before leaving for South Africa in 1940 to seek work. He slept rough, worked at various jobs including waiting on tables, and found a home among black ballroom The Times, Obituary dancers. He then joined the South African communist party until it was banned in 1948.
He was deported from South Africa in 1955 on the grounds that he was in contact with the Mau Mau in Kenya. Back in Rhodesia he helped form the African National Youth League before becoming secretary of his local branch of the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress. In 1959 he was detained for his political activities,