The defining moment in my life that shifted the way I was thinking...and brought me to ubuntu.
Great question. Tough to answer.
In the sense of living and breathing and working and playing.
In knowing a number of Zimbabewan families and holding them dear to my heart, this story caught my eye today. I wrote a paper on the history of Zimbabwe recently and hold much more appreciation for their struggles.
Civilians are beaten and intimidated, opposition politicians are jailed, and the economy is still trying to recover from hyperinflation that once reached 231 million percent.
It's one thing to read about the crisis in newspapers and magazines, with reporters retelling the story with the detached voice of their craft. But it's much more powerful to hear directly from Zimbabweans themselves—people who have endured beatings and rapes inside the country, then faced crocodile-infested rivers to get out with the help of human smugglers.
My favourite question in the Interview of the author of Hope Deferred, is this:
You write that “with this collection, we hope to complicate any single or simplistic narrative about Zimbabwe’s recent history.” In your mind, what’s the biggest mistake that North American observers make when they look at the situation in Zimbabwe? What are we getting wrong?
Actually, you have some excellent journalists reporting on Zimbabwe in major U.S. newspapers. But there’s still a tendency to see Africa as a single place and as a lost cause. And within that framework, Zimbabwe’s crisis narrative was often reduced to the depiction of a black dictator snatching white farmland. To have the Western media focus on “suffering whites” played into President Robert Mugabe’s hands and helped him to present his government as working in the interests of the black majority. Hope Deferred seeks to correct this view by spotlighting the suffering of ordinary black Zimbabweans as well as the leadership and activism of black Zimbabweans organizing for change there.
Read the entire article
It's that line - 'there's still a tendency to see Africa as a single place and as a lost cause' that gets me. Get interested, know the personal stories if you can before you categorize this huge continent as one big lost cause. It's not.
Civilians are beaten and intimidated, opposition politicians are jailed, and the economy is still trying to recover from hyperinflation that once reached 231 million percent.
It's one thing to read about the crisis in newspapers and magazines, with reporters retelling the story with the detached voice of their craft. But it's much more powerful to hear directly from Zimbabweans themselves—people who have endured beatings and rapes inside the country, then faced crocodile-infested rivers to get out with the help of human smugglers.
My favourite question in the Interview of the author of Hope Deferred, is this:
You write that “with this collection, we hope to complicate any single or simplistic narrative about Zimbabwe’s recent history.” In your mind, what’s the biggest mistake that North American observers make when they look at the situation in Zimbabwe? What are we getting wrong?
Actually, you have some excellent journalists reporting on Zimbabwe in major U.S. newspapers. But there’s still a tendency to see Africa as a single place and as a lost cause. And within that framework, Zimbabwe’s crisis narrative was often reduced to the depiction of a black dictator snatching white farmland. To have the Western media focus on “suffering whites” played into President Robert Mugabe’s hands and helped him to present his government as working in the interests of the black majority. Hope Deferred seeks to correct this view by spotlighting the suffering of ordinary black Zimbabweans as well as the leadership and activism of black Zimbabweans organizing for change there.
Read the entire article
It's that line - 'there's still a tendency to see Africa as a single place and as a lost cause' that gets me. Get interested, know the personal stories if you can before you categorize this huge continent as one big lost cause. It's not.
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