spatial politics

When ordering my business cards a while back (and I do mean a while), I found out that I was hired under a line for spatial policy under the governance unit. I didn’t really want ‘spatial policy’ on my business cards, so I changed it to simply ‘governance.’ But last week in Zimbabwe, I got an unexpected lesson about spatial politics anyway.

I went with my honorary older sister to visit her family. So I spent the better part of a week a couple of hours’ drive from anything that should really be considered a road. My sis’ family lives in a village with no electricity and only a few boreholes for water. I hadn’t really asked for details when she said we’d go visit for Easter. But somehow, even considering the places I’ve been, I wasn’t quite prepared.

See, besides the fact that I wanted to spend time with her mom especially, who has made gifts for me even though we’ve never met, I wanted insights. I wanted to understand how it is that Mugabe is still in power, how he can beat and arrest and release and abuse and arrest and release the leader of the MDC (the opposition party) time and again without people refusing to take it any more. It was bad when I was in Zim five years ago. Now, inflation is up to 1600% and food shortages are looming again. The back of every road sign we passed for hundred of kilometers had "MDC" spray-painted on it in shaky white letters. But what I really wanted to know was, how are people surviving in country that prints money with an expiration date on it?

I got several kinds of answers that apply to the space beyond the cities. One, Zimbabwe is fertile; if you have land, you have a decent shot at making something grow on it – even if it’s only enough to scrape by. So people out in the villages have multiple crops and hopefully some livestock or chickens to keep things going. But the second was more insidious. Sitting on the steps of the house at night in the quiet, there was no radio buzzing in the background. No blue glow of the TV. No version of last week’s newspaper on the table. Though to be fair, the only papers left in Zimbabwe are government propaganda anyway. But it was clear to me that apart from word of mouth, information was not available. And then we talked about elections.

Elections in Zimbabwe are a joke. Intimidation is rampant; people are told that there are cameras watching them and if they don’t vote ZANU-PF (Mugabe’s good squad) “we will KNOW…” But people are hungry. And just before the polls open, ZANU-PF tends to show up in villages with food. They hand it out, a gift from your government. But the thing is, the food comes from abroad – from USAID, from the UN’s World Food Programme – and it was meant to be delivered without political strings. So in the end, those ‘helping’ acts of donations are actually supporting the continued brutality of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, he of the goob-of-a-mustache and raging paranoid storm of an ego.

My sis’ husband’s father thinks the end is near. “You look over there and see death. Over there too, it’s death. So the end is coming.” I hope so. But I hope it’s a different kind of end.