Lloyd Sachikonye’s When a State Turns Against its Citizens Launched at Lobby Books
Lloyd Sachikonye’s When a State Turns Against its Citizens: Institutionalized Violence and Political Culture was launched at Lobby Books last Thursday night. A small group of committed activists was present to welcome this latest addition to the literature of contemporary Zimbabwean politics, including Kader Asmal.
The emcee for the evening, Zimbabwean activist Clever Chikwanda, introduced the author and discussants, saying that the book had come at the right time, with Zimbabweans grappling to resolve the issue of the runaway violence in their country.
“The old adage that we have to look back in order to go forward is revealing,” he said. “The author takes us back to the colonial regime showing us how the government of the day employed violence as a repressive mechanism during colonial period. It was used in the liberation struggle and was also adopted by the successive government, by ZANU and ZAPU. To some extent Abel Muzorewa and Ndabaningi Sithole used it, and even the MDC has adopted it. Some parties have employed violence to deal with intra-party conflict.”
The author took the podium and described Zimbabwe as a “country of contradictions”. He said, “It’s a country with one of the highest rates of literacy on continent, and one with the largest proportion of educated, skilled professionals; a country that showed great promise 20 years ago; a country described variously as a ‘jewel’ and a ‘bread basket’, but now a country deeply mired in political violence and a moral crisis.”
He continued that the roots of political violence went back to the 1950s and ’60s, more than half a century ago. “Those roots are found in the ruthless suppression of moderates. There were beatings and the use of dogs against those who campaigned for independence. Even guns. People were shot in the township. But violence came also by the nationalist parties themselves from early 1960s, with the original ZANU and ZAPU – particularly ’63 and ’64. They used stones, they used the sticks, they used petrol bombs. During the liberation war violence was waged by the colonial forces against civilians and by the liberation armies against ‘sell outs’.”
(The full text of Sachikonye’s speech will hopefully be featured in a later post on this blog.)
Two discussants, Horst Kleinschmidt and Frances Lovemore, a civil society doctor working for human rights, continued where Sachikonye left off.
Kleinschmidt said we had to make sense of what it means if we came from a history of violence. Gesturing out the window and across the square to a tree he said, “I would like you to ponder the memorial stone, next to that place where ‘the slave tree’ was, a huge tree that stood for 200 years under which slaves were traded. That’s an origin of violence that goes back even further than the 60 years covered in this book, if we are to look for the historic relationships that have an impact on how social makeup turns out later on.”
He emphasised how important it was to say that history matters. “We need to understand it and study it if we’re to deal with the type of society we aspire to.”
Frances Lovemore, whose organisation provides medical and psychological care to the victims of violence, spoke of the remarkable hope that lived on in the hearts and lives of ordinary people. For her, the most remarkable thing was how in the depth of violence in 2008, 200 a day were being brought into the hospital with fractures of both arms and legs and the small bones in their hands, and yet people came to hospital bringing food, newspapers and good cheer, begging them to vote again, desperate to protect democracy.
She said she had a deep respect for what Zimbabweans had tried to achieve with minimal retaliation. She thanked the author for putting down so clearly the issues that need to be discussed.
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Book details
- When a State Turns Against its Citizens: Institutionalized Violence and Political Culture by Lloyd Sachikonye
EAN: 9781431401116
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