Subdued Voices

I introduced myself to the man who had me arrested. Military police with machine guns watched as I set up my video camera. I had finally secured an interview with Zimbabwe’s Minister of Information for my thesis research on the country’s new cultural policy, which bans Western content and heavily funds local propaganda. For three hours, I listened as the minister explained that Zimbabwe is a nation at war against British and American neo-colonialism—the IMF, the World Bank, white farmers, and internal spies and saboteurs. When I asked the minister if his anti-colonial rhetoric masked the fact that he occupied the seat of his old exploiter, his tone changed and so did the topic of conversation: “So, why exactly are you interested in Zimbabwe?” he asked me.

At 2:30 p.m. on December 30, 2005, as I sat aboard a British Airways plane headed from Harare to home, a flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and asked me a simpler question, “Are you Amar Bakshi?” I nodded yes. “Mr. Bakshi, please collect your bags; there are some men waiting for you outside.” Five men in faded tan suits stood on the causeway and told me I was in their world now.

Five days later, I was released from the prison cells of Harare, after days of interrogations lasting up to six hours each, after sleeping on the floor in cells infested with ticks, after listening to the hungry cries of infants who had not seen the sun for weeks. While some of their mothers would be released in several days after paying fines for loitering, others awaited a seven-year sentence for crimes like having attempted an abortion. Their infants would join them in jail and grow up as prisoners.

Our caretakers in the cells matched our living conditions. Drunken police guards would arrive for their shift and immediately announce their intentions to beat us, daring prisoners to misbehave. Using a baton bat, they would strike suspected miscreants on the soles of their feet, behind their elbows and knees and then chain them—not sitting, not standing—against iron bars so that their battered limbs could not relax through the night. This is one form of violence.

Not one mile from the minister’s lush residence, thousands of ‘free’ Zimbabweans experience another form of violence. Still living in plastic tents after having been forcibly evicted from their homes by a nation-wide “Clean Up” campaign last year, they silence their criticisms of government for fear of further reprisals. One of the police officers who guards the camp might privately sympathize with the displaced, but has five children of his own and earns three million Zimbabwean dollars per month, about $30 US. School fees and rent consume his entire salary leaving him with exactly nothing for food.

So he demands bribes, not only from me—the foreigner—but the impoverished families in the camps as well. Those who can’t pay are jailed en masse. Ask him why he does this, and he won’t publicly blame his own poverty. He echoes the minister, smiling at the wisdom of his explanation, “Zimbabwe is at war!” While official rhetoric at its best convinces—and in most cases just baffles—in Third World dictatorships like Zimbabwe, it excuses murder.

In 2000, President Robert Mugabe lost a nation-wide referendum on constitutional reform. The defeat was a thinly veiled criticism of Mugabe’s leadership and a revolt against a proviso which would have indefinitely extended his rule. Mugabe’s response was vicious. He intimidated opposition and stacked parliament and the courts with his supporters, doubled the police force, formed academies to militarize youth, and encouraged renegade gangs to enforce his policies.

Mugabe justified his actions with an aggressive propaganda campaign, branding white farmers as neo-colonialists, blaming them for food shortages, and labeling all opposition as sympathetic to white power. Somewhat more subtly, he claimed that the nation must “act as one” to attack its mushrooming problems, and stop “turning against itself through terrorism.” By this he meant that dissent of any kind was tantamount to treason.

Zimbabwean people don’t buy this. Ask most passerbys what they think about President Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party and they’ll whisper urgently, “Be quiet!” They are all afraid of “getting into politics” and being marked as oppositional. Young people who criticize the government are called “sell-outs” and “white-sympathizers.” Roaming thugs beat them or send them on to the cops who, on a bad day, can lock them up for a year for insulting the president. For the more notable critics of government (oddly myself included), the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO)—known to torture, maim, and cause people to magically disappear—steps in.

The enforced culture of fear is then multiplied through leveraging rhetoric in the petty tiffs of daily life. Take two teenage boys fighting over a girl at a bar. Boy number one takes boy number two aside and says, “I heard what you said about our president. You should be careful, ZANU-PF is a large party, and we wash out poisons like you.” Neither boy belongs to ZANU-PF—in fact, both probably hate the party—but boy number two will leave the club terrified and alone, while boy number one will get the girl. Thus, fear spreads.

This fear was the topic of my thesis—propaganda and repressed youth culture. In jail, we tried to avoid political communication only to discover that everything is political: the fact that fuel is so expensive or that they like MTV more than ZTV (Zimbabwe Television). But we all joked about the difficulty of life in the cell and shared, through whispers, the telling stories that brought us there.

Back home, I realize that I have only begun to tell my own story, and that my capacity to speak with greater freedom obligates me to share what I experienced in Harare’s cells, both to gain some personal control over a chaotic experience, and to contribute, in some way, to its improvement.


Amar C. Bakshi '06 is a social studies and visual and environmental studies concentrator living in Leverett House.