Christopher “Criss Angel” Sarantakos is an American magician and psychic illusionist.
Column by Rejoice Ngwenya
Like our own deceitful local “angelic prophets” who entertain rather than preach, Sarantakos does things that dazzle the eye. If you are gullible and uninformed about physics, chemistry, doctrine and psychology – he makes you believe anything – even a mirage.
We have thousands of such gullible citizens and “Christians” in Zimbabwe. The less enlightened ones — like The Herald columnist Fortious Nhambura — are victims of Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu PF) grandiose illusions. You believe Sarantakos or Zanu PF, you believe anything – like the myth that Robert Mugabe “brought democracy and freedom” to Zimbabwe!
Democracy is a way of life, an attitude, personal and collective experience. If you add freedom to it, it mutates into humanity, the very chemistry and electricity that drives your being, your conscience. I confess. Zanu PF still has remnant democrats.
I have worked, wined, dined and socialised with them. Some are lawyers, businesspersons, academics, Christians while others are politicians. But “bringing” something does not mean you are it.
Webster Shamu was, in the 1970s, “preaching” One Man One Vote on “pirate” Radio Zimbabwe from Mozambique. Yet only last month, he bragged how a vote will not take what a gun brought — “independence”. And so if elections are not a vital cog in the machinery of democracy, why would Zanu PF nauseate us about June 29? They are masters of political illusion!
Fortious thinks anyone who is not Zanu PF or did not “go to war” could not be a democrat. It is even a crisis of untold proportions — he opines — if one had a relative in the army or a “white neighbour”! Paralysing, award-winning idiocy!
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There is major difference between “independence” and “freedom”. Joshua Nkomo epitomised freedom. His brand of militarism was people-centred. He, like Ian Smith, also made mistakes, but there are things that are inexcusable — like killing your own. Zanu PF did it during the “independence” war. Its fixation with Maoist ideology legitimised murder of innocent civilians conveniently labelled “sellouts”. Villagers were pummelled into submission, tortured into compliance and butchered on the flimsiest of all accusations.
Fortious is right — I was not in Zanu PF “military” camps in Mozambique, so I have no record of how many innocent people were “eliminated” after Kangaroo court verdicts or which girls were raped; neither was Mugabe’s high command a bastion of democratic excellence. Tragically, it delivered Maoist zealots into Parliament hoping that time and distance from Mozambique would transfigure them into democrats.
But if Gukurahundi, Murambatsvina, the murder of MDC activists in 2008; if the plunder of white commercial farms; if the de-industrialisation of Bulawayo; the exile of three million Zimbabweans in South Africa, United Kingdom, USA and Australia; if one million percent hyperinflation; if the total collapse of National Railways; if Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the Public Order and Security Act and the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act; if the partisan judiciary and compliant public security institutions; if the potholes on our roads and the empty grain silos; if the monopoly of ZBC and the insults from The Herald; if Mugabe’s 33-year old iron fist rule and Zanu PF’s rigging of elections — if this is democracy — then Fortious and his kind can stuff it!
Zanu PF may have “brought independence”, but they know zilch about freedom. Coercion, violence, compliance, submission, hatred, pain, suffering, corruption, lies, plunder — is not democracy. Like Criss and our own local “angelic prophets”, they are better exhibiting their psychic illusions on Mars.
