A Whim for Zim. (a post-valentine's message)

Over the course of a while, as I browsed my visitor stats (a sobering experience, believe me), I noticed an interesting pattern. I kept getting visits from some computer (or computers) lodged in a particularly forsaken nook of sub-saharan Africa. I mean Bob's country, the land of Rhodes, you get the picture?

Oh well, I rarely mentioned the country, despite having it on my heart really most of the time- just how do you deal with the devil's playground?

It's sad to say but when you read reports coming out of the country that's what you conclude: the 'vintage' one (I quote the BBC) has made it his business to flout the needs of his people, to hurt them, in the most bizarre, cruel and brazen ways. The more brazen he is the more he gets away with it. Don't tell me he's going to keel over and die. I don't believe it, although I can't say for sure, of course. He seems a healthy old goat.

So what to do, what to do? I could as well keep a record of Bob's evil acts as I could a record of sick jokes that I've heard.

I link almost at random this current instance; there have been many more. There can be no doubt that the repression in Zim is routine and sadistic.

I may have mentioned on this site that I spent some time- about six months- in East Africa a few years ago. I was fortunate and had no health problems; no typhus or bruscella, and no malaria, entered my blood-stream. Something about Africa did though, and I've been carrying it around ever since.

That something tells me that all we need to do is tell Mugabe 'no', to stand up to him in all the ways available and some that aren't immediately available. I'd favour an armed intervention and I'd bet all I have that just a small one would have miraculous effects, without anything like the Iraqi situation emerging. Not exactly a second Rhodes raid, but not far off in spirit, is what I have in mind.

Well, anyway, I don't seem to be getting the visitor from Zim anymore, so he or she won't get to read this, my small cry on behalf of a long-suffering people. But if there's one thing I'd like people everywhere to take on board about this it would be that it doesn't have to be this way.