Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-Hwedza is far from Harare the capital of Zimbabwe, 138km to be exact, but isn’t a backwater such as Bikita , 347km, 4hrs8min or hot Binga, 548km, 7hrs 4 min of bottom-numbing sitting.
However the place has had its fair share of the political vice grip, treated as a hidden forest where news will be slow to seep out, and as elections draw near, 2018 isn’t smelling rosy to its people.
During the last elections Hwedza was visited by some goons in suits who promised guns and roses for anyone, (detected by a hidden gadget in the booth) to have voted for the opposition.
The grannies quacked and voted correctly.
Politically excitable youths hacked onto the threats and made them their own psychological machetes which they wielded around the village creating an environment filled with paranoia.
In Goneso, Gukwe village, Sabhuku Gukwe has a fear.
A strong abiding fear that with each new day 2018 is getting near. He remembers the last elections with a mixture of shame and a vulnerability that he has not managed to work out of his system since then.
“We were once ordered to convene for a meeting and I sent word out that we are going to have a meeting to all the people as is my duty. They obeyed and came for the meeting in numbers maybe expecting an ordinary rally or even receiving goods from donors”.
“However on the day of the meeting none of the people that addressed us were politicians. We didn’t know them”, he says with the engrossed look of a man who is watching a de javu experience for the third time.
He is the one that sent the message that assembled all the old ladies with strong fears for what they don’t understand and in a part of him he knows he is culpable to a certain extent.
It’s a small part of his conscience yet it rankles him now as 2018 and the prospect for other such meetings becomes a frightening reality.
“Some people don’t trust me anymore and see me as some kind of a sellout. You don’t grow back that trust in people overnight”, he says ruefully as a man who has lost a part of himself, never to regain it again.
He is thus not looking forward to the 2018 elections and would rather they were not held at all.
“Elections bring a lot of divisions within villages and even families. After the last elections we were left with a lot of problems around here. We had brothers who no longer saw eye to eye, fathers and children, all sorts of divisions that are very hard to believe”.
“It’s very painful to see the effect elections have on people in these rural areas”.
“Maybe it’s because we are lost out here where no one sees us”, he concludes in resignation.
That sense of being at the tether-ends of the country has necessitated a political gamesmanship that has seen the worst scenarios playing out in the jungles of rural areas.
The pieces of news that ultimately filter out from there have to wage a fight of factuality and believability as political propagandists and the media tussle to come up with what’s true or false.
At the end of the day truth has often suffered a stillbirth. Men have died at the hand of political zealots and the wider public has never known it.
People have disappeared and no one has held an Africa Unite Square demonstration, as for disappeared journalist and political activist Itai Dzamara.
They have become a smoke that went up and vanished.
Today it’s still an open debate whether people actually had limbs hacked off or not during the last elections.
The story has ultimately become an election fetishistic tale.
Speaking to Gukwe however one gets the feeling that elections are a simple crudity that exists way below the high sounding jargon about democracy and rights.
“By the time the last elections ended many people here didn’t see eye to eye, and even up to this day some have not yet reconciled”.
“They actually bring and leave a lot of animosity within the community and as the village head I’m caught at the center”, he says.
However the center in which he stands holds a lot of power sometimes, especially during a year in which the country suffered another drought.
According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) nearly 5 million people face starvation in the country and the majority of these are in the rural areas such as Hwedza.
That’s where Gukwe comes in and his ironic center of power and vulnerability.
He oversees the sharing of maize, beans and other foodstuffs which, though given out by the government, have become political tools shared according to political orientation.
“There is nothing much I can do about that”, he says and retreats into silence. A cagey but stony silence that says you are going overboard.
I cannot pick whether he is supportive of the pattern of events or he is just a weak and dispensable cog in a larger wheel grinding on, uncaring about his views as the local village authority, ready to grind him away if he objects.
Whether he is happy to act along or agitated to change things is beyond facial discernment.
According to some village women at the shops, those who have attended rallies held by Joyce Mujuru’s Zimbabwe People First, the new political party, have been told that they won’t be receiving any more food just as all those known to support the MDC-T and its variants.
It’s a classic rock and a hard place scenario.
Follow your personal inclinations and feelings (be idealistic) and you will die of hunger, or support the right party (be practical) and you won’t lack for much.
In the city the talk these days is about the continuing likelihood of the multiple opposition parties uniting and facing (ZANU PF) as a coalition. This has raised the hopes of many that at last the revolutionary party may be removed from power.
For the rural people in Hwedza, and its village head, the scenario is a recipe for a distraught community about to be caught in a cruder version of Game of Thrones where fire breathing dragons are actual human beings.
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