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Last week I was lucky enough to watch, for the umpteenth time, Richard Attenborough’s 1982 Oscar winning film "Gandhi". The movie may be over 3 hours long, but it is a brilliant depiction of the life of Mahatma Gandhi, a man who lived a non-violent, simple life and is often seen as the spiritual leader of a pre-independent India.
"On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was shot while he was walking to a platform from which he was to address a prayer meeting. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a Hindu nationalist with links to the extremist Hindu Mahasabha, who held Gandhi responsible for weakening India by insisting upon a payment to Pakistan. Godse and his co-conspirator Narayan Apte were later tried and convicted; they were executed on 15 November 1949. Gandhi's memorial (or Samādhi) at Rāj Ghāt, New Delhi, bears the epigraph "Hē Ram", which may be translated as "Oh God". These are widely believed to be Gandhi's last words after he was shot, though the veracity of this statement has been disputed." (Wikipedia)
The character of Gandhi is played by Sir Ben Kingsley, who we saw on our television screens last week as he left a polling station having voted in the recent English elections.
I have yet to find anything attributed to Gandhi that substantiates the saying uttered during the movie, but the comment, "Enforced poverty is the worst violence against people," struck a chord with me and I have been ruminating on it ever since.
In Zimbabwe, Mugabe and his cohorts live in opulence that we could only ever dream of – should that be your whim – and although he and his party claim to be the 'protectors' of the country’s sovereignty, they do very little to better the lifestyles and standards of those that they stood on to get where they are.
An estimated 4 million Zimbabweans rely on food aid to survive, whilst others have been obliged to resort to eating roots.
Following Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, an estimated 1 million Zimbabweans either live in inadequate, shared housing, whilst others live in shallow holes on the destitute farms where they were either dumped or forced to live on.
Murambatsvina saw many Zimbabweans lose their jobs as the forced eviction from their homes, and the buildings’ subsequent destruction left them without a residential address, and employers were reluctant to have virtual vagrants on their payroll.
For most Zimbabweans, because employment is so very hard to secure – unemployment is said to affect 90%-plus of the country’s workforce, which I believe is a conservative estimate – a day is spent foraging for food in rubbish dump sites, or begging a few coins in the cities’ streets, and, more often than not, they go to bed (if they are lucky enough to have one) with an empty stomach.
Even those within the system – prisoners in remand cells or serving sentences in Mugabe’s disgusting hellholes – do not receive enough food to sustain any kind of health.
Meanwhile, Mugabe traipses around Africa stating that the country is at peace and is ripe for foreign investment. Now doubt he eats the best that money can buy, wears the best suits imported from England or France (he cannot travel there due to targeted travel sanctions), and has the latest technology at his fingertips.
When he travels in Zimbabwe, it is in a rather obscene motorcade, with outriders, pick-up trucks filled with armed personnel, numerous luxury limousines and an ambulance. The windows are blacked out and I am sure that Mugabe does not pay attention to the destruction and poverty that his rule has caused as he zooms past at a reckless pace.
By keeping the subjects at bay through poverty and humiliation, he is able to get on with his true mission – sucking the last of the lifeblood out of the Zimbabwean economy, milking the natural resources of the land dry (diamonds, land) – whilst his party ensure that the population who have already voted him out of office are subjected to further dehumanisation and enforced poverty.
Gandhi, if indeed he said it, was right. "Enforced poverty is the worst violence on a people."
Robb WJ Ellis
The Bearded Man
