There Is A Joy

There is a Joy. He sits by the river, his arms stirring up the crystal water, his eyes trained on its depth, his smile brighter than the sky. His skin laps up the rays of the sun like the ground after the first rains. He sits alone but not lonely. He is not large but by no means weak. He is what he is. Joy. He looks into the water and sees the many examples of himself in the world and his smile turns into pure mirth.

There is a joy of the mother as she holds her newborn baby in her arms. Unable to believe that her body has done that most mystical of miracles, that most sacred of biological functions, that mystery above all mystery: create life. And here is the life in living, breathing flesh. Its eyes screwed shut against a world it has found itself in, uninvited, a world it did not ask for but nonetheless a world that has welcomed it into its family. A world it shall know, a life it shall live with all its attendant joys and sorrows, all its pains and lows, the highs and the peaks of ecstasy. It shall know the joy of eating, the joy of learning to walk. It will feel the pain of falling from its feet to the ground and from its dreams to reality, the crushing pain of a broken heart and the sweetness of watching the sun set on a day well spent. But for now it knows nothing but the fact that it needs to cry. And announce to the mother who will hug her to its chest and feel her heart burst with a love she shall now spend her life giving it.

There is the joy of art. The joy of the writer as he bleeds his life onto the page, the musician as his spirit is picked up in the arms of his music and flung into the higher reaches of heaven. There is the joy of the poet that most subtle of beings, that being whose heart has found the pulse of the universe beating to the same rhythm. The rhythm that the dancer dances to as she lets her arms soar, rise and fall following the pulsating joy that is found when humanity and art meet. Oh there is pain in it all to be sure. What part of being human does not capture pain? Surely there is pain in the hands of Michelangelo as he silently chips away at the marble to release the figure buried within or the pain of the photographer who has missed that perfect shot. But there is joy in the end, such sweet joy when life lies captured in ink, in stone, in words, in music, in the arms of the stage.

He smiles, his eyes lighting up with the happiness of one who has heard a music that only the Wise can hear; the sound of the universe singing your name. Now he sees two figures in the flow of the river and recognises the joy of young love. Not the flames of passion, or the dangerous scouring heat of lust. No he sees the pure tendrils of young love spread themselves softly, silently around the hearts of two people who in each other see the being that they had glimpsed only briefly before they were born and spent a lifetime looking for. And now have found. And they have found more than that haven't they? They have found the one in whom they can let their hearts repose, the one who can carry their secrets and their burdens, the one who will carry them when they can no longer walk the tortuous path of life, the one who will still be there when Beauty has moved away and left Age to take her place. No need for words for these. Silence is enough. No need for diamonds or trips to Paris, the clasp of their hands transmits a joy which makes Joy's muscles tense up as he sits and regards them in the waters flow and soon he breaks into laughter.

And what is laughter than the noise joy makes when it is can no longer take any more of itself. It rises on itself, into the air around him, tiptoeing over the corners of his mouth as it pulls them into the most genuine of smiles, unlocks the reservoirs of his eyes and lets the tears run freely down his cheeks and into the air it lets out a sound of such sweetness, a scandal of joy, a peal of happiness, an unashamed pleasure in the act of existing. He laughs and bends over himself as he dips a finger into the river and looks deeper into its depths, his eyes bright and clear through the film of tears.

He sees the small joys of a million billion people. The joy of a father as he receives a letter from his son on the battlefield, the joy of a couple as they untangle themselves from the throes of lovemaking, the sweat on their backs not yet dried but something beautiful stirring in their hearts for each other. He sees the joy of two best friends who have discovered that the flame in their hearts burn with the same colour. He sees that infant born to its mother as it returns her hug decades later, the joy of a prophet as he hears the Voice call to him to silent worship, the first drink of water of a thirsty biker, the first step of freedom of the prisoner, the first pay cheque of the new grad, the child who finds a toy it thought was lost. Millions upon countless billions of tiny joys that make the troubled existence of these humans worth it. Joys that can illuminate the darkest of cells, salve the deepest hungers, calm the most turbulent storms that trouble the souls of so many of them. So many examples of himself in their world looking back at him through the troubled depths of the water but still he stirs the water and stirs, his legs cutting through its icy depths until at last he sees what he is looking for.

He sees her there. The most beautiful form of joy there can be. A joy that has found the secret of existence, has transformed life from an act to a sacrifice, to a worship of each passing second, a love that has spread beyond just those around her and has grown to embrace people she has never met, the Joy who cannot sleep while someone she knows goes hungry, who agitates for those she does not know and feels their pain deeply in their heart as the cutting of a knife sharper than the spears of demons. A love that does not know the colours of any flag but simply the colour of the blood that runs through the veins of every person who breathes in their world, a love that realise whether the Others worship snakes, or monkeys or the Son of a Virgin they still share the same humanity as she does. A humanity as sacred and as powerful as the stars that burn in the heavens for every human who ever had the chance to make their mothers sing for joy.

He sees her and smiles. She sees him and for a moment, a moment ever so brief, spliced between the fingers of time herself, she smiles at him and disappears. Even he Joy has seen her rarely in all his centuries by the riverbank. And even less people have ever known she exists. But for them that do, their Joy was complete and when the day came for them to breath their last they did so with the knowledge that he stood waiting on the other side of the Gates of Death. With a smile on his face.

For you | Für dich

Dear Mr Big Man aka Morgan Tsvangirai

Dear Mr Tsvangirai

Let me set the scene for you. It's 5am where I am and I am supposed to be sleeping but here I am sitting at my desk thinking about you. Please disabuse yourself of the notion, I am not thinking of you in that way, God forbid. No I am thinking about you in a more banal and more realistic way especially now that I read you have been suspended from your own party. I am thinking of all your successes and failures. Especially the failures. Yes, to be quite honest, I am having a very difficult time coming up with the successes.

Let us see dear Sir, let us count them off one by one. You founded Zimbabwe's biggest opposition party and for what seemed like the first time it had ever happened, you stood up to Robert Mugabe and his party, ZANU PF. I remember the strikes, the protests and the stayaways you organised in those forgotten years of Zimbabwe's history, that autumn before the winter that would find us holding the remnants of a country. But how were we to know back then that the dollar would collapse, that we would wind up in queues queuing for our own currency, for sugar, for bread, for water, for dignity. Yes, perhaps in that autumn of our country you were the only one who could see that far ahead. You led, you protested, you told us to vote for you and those few that saw your vision voted with you for what you said would be change and a brighter future.

Change did not come.

Through no fault of your own Mr Tsvangirai. Understand this, we saw you beaten, we saw you holding your bloody head in front of the camera's. We read about your MP's who would be dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night only for their remains to be found days or months later. Or never found at all. We saw the offices of the Daily News bombed and then closed down, we read about your offices being raided and we saw the horrors you went through Mr Tsvangirai. How could we fault you? You more than anyone knows what it is like to sit within the walls of a Harare jail for having spoken truth to power. But already the tendrils of your downfall were planted back then. You see Mr Tsvangirai, people saw you as a plaything of the West, a puppet and not your own man. You know how hard it is to convince Nationalists in any country and any era to see beyond the borders of their country.

Even then there were whispers that you were not that clever a man, that your deputies fought with you and more. But we were entranced bythe image of our country go up in flames like rabbits caught in the headlights of a car hurtling at it. Some of us left. Some of us stayed. You stayed and you vowed to fight. And you fought.

And change did not come.

By then things got worse Mr Tsvangirai. Your own party had split into two distinct pieces, ostensibly over the issue of contesting the Senate elections at the time but there were whispers of tribalism and authoritarianism. You failed there. You failed to provide leadership in your parties greatest test against no other than itself. It would only get worse from there on. Confusion on exactly where your party was heading, your own leaders who seemed at times to contradict themselves, and just the general malaise that somehow Robert Mugabe seemed the more skillful statesman all 'other things' discounted. Even Ambassador Dell in his email to Barack Obama, which Wikileaks so helpfully provided the world with access to, described you as:

Tsvangarai is also a flawed figure, not readily open to advice, indecisive and with questionable judgment in selecting those around him

He ended his scathing analysis with the summation: "Zimbabwe needs him, but should not rely on his executive abilities to lead the country's recovery." You laughed it off but as The Guardian put it, those  "... cables were written by Americans, to be read by Americans and they form the undigested raw material of American policy." What should our policy have been then as we saw you raise your clenched fist for us to follow?

Then change almost came.

The 2008 elections failed to follow the normal course of elections. People vote. One person wins. One person loses. In our case, people voted and you and Robert Mugabe for all intents and purposes won and became the strange bedfellows that was ingloriously referred to as the Government of National Unity, though united you were not and governing was a side hobby to your principal pastime: fighting. Much has been written on how you could have handled an impossible situation better and I will not rehash it or even pretend how it must have been to work in a partnership with a partner who made every effort to pretend you were a nuisance that would go away if they closed their eyes and pretended hard that you did not exist.

But I will note that you spent those crucial years criss crossing the globe, meeting world leaders and making speeches from the podiums that stand at the centre stage of global politics. Unfortunately Mr Tsvangirai those podiums did not stand at the centre of Zimbabwean politics. You left a fractured party at home which you seem to have never tried to heal. You left voters to themselves and off you went on taxpayers money to beg for more money. You also spent those years embroiled in one scandal after the next. Someone was pregnant by you, another claimed to have married you and there were rumours of yet others. If you do not have the panache of the French, where Holland can be photographed on a scooter on the way from a night of pleasure with his mistress and still not only survive politically but be admired, I would have advised you to keep your laundry clean. Nothing riles a good Anglophone like the stench of a scandal in a politicians bedroom. Just ask Bill Clinton.

And there was more Mr Tsvangirai; the mansion, the perks, the money and grandstanding over what I called a flawed constitutional process. Mr Dell's words seemed to have become prophetic; you had become an albatross around our necks and as I listened to Freshlyground's Big Man, I thought of you: "Wear fancy clothes, drive big expensive cars...You do for you, just what you want to do.What's the solution? Material pollution!" Those suits fitted you quite well Mr Tsvangirai but perhaps they fitted you too well. No longer did we see the man who had raised his fist to the heavens in fury and promised change to the masses. No longer did we see any change at all. Instead we saw more of the same. A party riveted by fighting, an opposition that failed to present a united front in any sense of the word, we saw and heard fights between yourself and your deputies and we wept. How could you unite a polarized country when you failed to unite your own party? Perhaps when you met Angela Merkel you should have asked her how she united the opposition in Germany and swept into power. And perhaps asked her why she still refused to live in the Chancellors residence but remained in her modest home. There is power in symbols Mr Tsvangirai. You seem to have missed all the lessons.

Then change finally came.

But it wasn't the change you had promised Mr Tsvangirai. It was a change back to the way things were. A change that saw Robert Mugabe tell Grace to start redecorating because they were not moving out of State House any time soon. You lost the elections. Again. And those who had voted for you wept. And those who had believe in your promises wept. And those who had listened to you turned to you and preached to you what you had preached to us for so long and so consistently.

Change.

And you refused. You dug in your heels and refused. You blamed everyone from heaven's gate to the foundations of hell. Everyone except yourself. There was some brouhaha where people were beaten up in your party's headquarters. Yet more brouhaha saw those people suspended from your party for asking for a change in leadership. It has been a remarkable and spectacular failure of leadership Mr Tsvangirai. You failed to unite your party. You failed to lead it. And now that it was breaking apart you stood and looked surprised. Unfortunately Mr Tsvangirai, we are not. How can we trust you to lead us through the finer points of our country's great constitution when you seem not be able to agree on the broader points of your own party's constitution? What is change if it is not what you act? What is wisdom if you fail to learn tomorrow from today. What is leadership if you have failed to lead.

Bigger men have resigned over smaller things. Germany's President resigned over using his credit card while on holiday. What action do you propose for wasting the political capital you had gained and using it to beat Mr Mangoma to a bloody pulp? Bigger men have resigned over things distantly related to them. South Korea's Prime Minister today resigned over the ferry disaster that claimed the lives of at least 187 people. What action do you propose for drowning the dreams of millions of people Mr Tsvangirai?

Nelson Mandela stepped down to let those who followed him to continue his struggle for him. Mr Tsvangirai, follow his footsteps, gigantic though they must be for you. Resign and let us finally see the change you have promised to us for the better part of two decades.

Africa needs Great Men not Big Men.

Yours,

Bongani Ncube-Zikhali
A concerned Zimbabwean citizen

Happy Harare, Zimbabwe

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UWC Scholarship : Deadline 28 February

United World Colleges Scholarship Award

UWC is a worldwide movement of senior-secondary Colleges promoting international understanding through education. The Colleges follow the 2-year International Baccalaureate curriculum, an alternative to A-level as a university entrance qualification. Students from all races, religions and backgrounds live and work together, and engage in a wide variety of community service and other activities in addition to the rigorous academic programme.

Partial scholarships are available to Zimbabweans for colleges in Armenia, India, Norway, Germany, USA and Swaziland for entry in August 2014 (January 2015 for Swaziland). These scholarships are awarded on the basis of demonstrated need, i.e. families will be expected to contribute the equivalent of what they would have spent on sixth-form fees in Zimbabwe; candidates should therefore discuss this with their parents before applying.

Applications, in the student’s own handwriting, from those with excellent 2013 O-level results (7+ A grades), a good record of extra-curricular and service activities, and a commitment to the UWC ideals and to representing Zimbabwe in an international community, should reach the address below before 28 February. They should include full biographical and March contact details (e-mail address, if possible), exam results and a covering letter giving the reasons for the application. Only short-listed candidates will be contacted, and interviews will be held in Harare in March. No further correspondence will be entered into, and no documentation can be returned to applicants.

UWC Zimbabwe National Committee
38 Broadlands Road, P O Box EH 49
Emerald Hill, Harare