Emmanuel Sigauke Interviews Zvisinei Sandi
E: Welcome to the United States, Zvisinei. How do you find Stanford?
Z: Beats the University of Zimbabwe! No teargas anywhere on the premises, no Blackboots to kick my head in, and a relaxed set of healthy, well-fed students! Coming from Zimbabwe, I have always associated university education with violence and fear. This takes some adjusting to.
E: It’s been a while, hasn’t it? What, thirteen-fourteen years? And even then I remember you running through the teargas, and writing your heart out? How much of that have you done recently?
Z: It’s more like fourteen years, actually. But no, I don’t know that the writing has done me much good, or the running. They caught me, Emmanuel. In the end the Blackboots caught me and it wasn’t pretty.
E: I am sorry about that. But I for one have always enjoyed your writing. Tell me more about that. What inspires you? What’s the breath of your writing?
Z: My inspiration is Africa, that big, beautiful continent, so rich and yet so unfortunately troubled. It’s like a talented giant in a restless sleep – one unfortunate turn could turn the house upside down. On a smaller scale, my inspiration comes from my home country, Zimbabwe.
E: Zimbabwe, a small part of that troubled giant. What are your thoughts on the current Zimbabwean situation?
Z: Zimbabwe is an incredibly gifted country, with the best literacy levels in all of Africa, the highest percentages of professionals and the most hardworking population I know – a land so rich that people find gold virtually anywhere
under their feet, and diamonds. But there is no measure for the damage bad governance can do to even the greatest of countries. Sometimes I find myself comparing it in my mind to a young bull – powerful, amazingly handsome, eager and ready to face life. But on his back sits an evil leprechaun, with a red-hot iron thrust into its spine. The bull jumps about, twisting and turning and foaming on the mouth in an effort to throw off its torturer. He is so beautiful and strong, almost majestic, and his life is so full of potential. If only he were allowed to run free, and graze on the hills, and beget sons like himself… But the ugly leprechaun wants only to break him to his own purpose and the result is untold pain and destruction. That’s what Robert Mugabe has done to my country.
E: Your persona in “Child of the Streets” presents a very interesting angle, all alone and lost among thousands of other city dwellers. Does he perhaps represent your own exile?
Z: Giggs tends to look rather like a mental image, doesn’t he? Almost like the majestic bull with the evil leprechaun sitting on it’s back. But Giggs is a real person – a lonely, homeless teenager, strong and full of promise, but wasted among Harare’s rubbish pits. I met him a few years ago while interviewing homeless people for my novel, Vagrant Souls. We sat and talked, shared my packed lunch, I gave him the few Zim dollars in my purse, and then he walked away. I never saw him again. “Child of the Streets” is a mixture of what he told me, and the impression I had of him. On whether he reminds me of my own exile… Yes, he does. Rather poignantly.
E: Would you care to explain how?
Z: The US is a lovely place, full of all kinds of opportunity and it has treated me well. It has given me a place to hide and lick my wounds, to begin thinking of the future again and to realize that however challenging my injuries may be,
I am still a young woman with a lot of living ahead of me. However, being unable to go back home is a different issue altogether. I am Zimbabwean through and through – a daughter of the rich soils of the Dande and that is where I belong, together with the spirits of the thousands of my kin all the way back to Munhumutapa. Sometimes I find myself thinking of my father – of the crinkled smile that has seen so many weathers, and of the calloused, hard-working hands that raised me. Sometimes I find myself actually reaching out to touch him, and then I realize that, like Giggs, I am reaching out for shadows. It’s a heartbreaking feeling.
E: Do you think that powers like the United States and other countries are doing their best to help troubled countries like Zimbabwe?
Z: I think that it’s all to do with ignorance. By that I do not mean the ignorance of the guys in the White House, because those are kept well informed. I mean the ignorance of the ordinary guy in the street, the one whose vote is going to
influence what kind of help, if any, is going to Zimbabwe. When I first came here to Stanford, I was taken to hospital under the care of a young intern, all blue eyes, fair hair, enthusiasm and total ignorance. I remember thinking that I
did not want her near me then. I could not bear to have her sweet innocence corrupted by the ugliness of what I had lived through. But later on I found myself thinking that this kid was the real America, with her innocence, her nice little boyfriend and her ignorance about what goes on in other parts of the world. She was America, and I, with my battered body and tears and snort and all the blood and disorder of where I had come from, was Africa, and it was up
to me to make her, and others like her, understand. Until she does, Zimbabwe and other places like it will remain dark places where ugly things happen and nobody comes to help. There is not dialing 911 from Africa.
E: A very passionate topic, I understand. But the main question, what everybody would like to know, is this: What would be the best solution for the crisis that Zimbabwe is going through right now?
Z: You know what I would like to be able to say? That I want to see all the bad guys beaten down and thrown in jail. I would like to see everyone who has ever tortured or raped or committed murder in Mugabe’s name brought to book. That’s justice isn’t it? The way things should go. The right way. To God and the Glory. To honor and justice. Right?
E: Are you suggesting that there is another way acceptable to individuals like you, who have witnessed first hand the atrocities that Mugabe has committed?
Z: Honestly? Nothing would please me more than to have the people who did this to me tied up and helpless in their turn, with me standing over them, and for one blissful moment, to forget any law ever made by God or man. But things do not work that way. We are human after all, and that sets us above unthinking beasts. An eye for an eye gives you nothing but two half blind, bitter people, slashing at each other in the darkness of their half-blindness. It takes a moral giant to see the bigger picture – to let bygones be bygones and to have the strength to salvage what they can from the mess and I, of all people, with what I have seen and what I have suffered, should be the least forgiving.
E: So you would advocate forgiveness?
Z: I do not ask that anyone forgive a monster like Mugabe. That would be too much for any normal human being, and believe me, I have been there. What is needed is that there be a breaking point somewhere in this deadlock, a point
for the transition to begin. If turning the other cheek is what will bring that transition, so be it, that we may all move forward, not backwards. I want something to come out of that beautiful land. I want something for the children that I will one day have. I want the spray from the mighty Victoria Falls to wet their happy faces, with no hidden monsters anywhere to come out and disturb their peaceful innocence. I want them to splash around in my childhood haunts in the Ruya River, and to swim in that pool where old Sandi, my grandfather, was murdered, so that his spirit may float freely over the hills, knowing at last that his violent death was not in vain.Biographical information
Zvisinei Sandi is currently a Scholar Rescue Fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She lectures on the human rights situation in Southern Africa, especially in Zimbabwe and South Africa and also collaborate with the Stanford Law School's Human Rights Clinic on its on going project in Southern Africa. She taught Social and Political Philosophy at the Zimbabwe Open University as well as at Masvingo State University. In addition, she has worked as a journalist and political activist in Zimbabwe. She has published poetry in numerous print and online journals such as Poetry International Magazine, but her writing and activism have brought her hostile attention from the Zimbabwean government, resulting in threats and physical attacks. Contact Zvisinei.