Rwendo kusarudzo akakwenya zvichida kashanu
Jana nhasi kuparura rwechimurenga
Kushirikadzi dzisina chekupakura
Nhasi dzotsinhira nesimba rederere
Uku dova regukurahundi riri banga
Kutsoka dzizere man’a

Written jointly by Chinofunga Ndoga and Tendai Gakanje who both are human right activists with ROHR (Restoration of Human Rights Zimbabwe) Yorkshire branch

Acts sanctioned by none but you
Acts known by none but you
Acts of deaths witnessed by you
Acts of darkness commanded by you
Acts unkind, evil and unforgiving

Mischief approved and common to you
Mischief paid art in your covert world
Mischief uncommon and disapproved

In the overt world we reside

My capture!
My demise!

His abduction!
His disappearance!
Her torture!
Her callous murder!

Their arrest!
Their incarceration!

Our trial!
A travesty!
Our experience!
Painful and horrific

You gain from our pain
You locate relief in our grief
You count victories in victims
You!
I hate your success

Achieved at the expense of our sorrows

Where is justice for our experience?
My captor still haunts me
His abductor, still roam the streets scot-free
Her murderer still kills more

Their policeman still acts with impunity
Their prison officer continues to deny them food and medication
The intelligence officer unintelligent
still extracts information under duress
The judge remains tribal
His verdict partisan and poisoned

In Zimbabwe, my country
Alluta continua!

Written jointly by Chinofunga Ndoga and Tendai Gakanje who both are human right activists with ROHR (Restoration of Human Rights Zimbabwe) Yorkshire branch

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to HAT News

Three years ago, I sent Mugabe this card (left), hoping and wishing his time to meet his maker ‘the devil’ was near, and will succumb to illness or something painful and nasty, but against all the odds, the evil guy is still breathing and in charge.

Capital punishment must be abolished everywhere, but I am of the mind, it should stay put in Zimbabwe. Zanu PF have kept it  in force all these years and have used it to kill and intimidate anyone opposing their ideologies. The sterile reason for its necessity in Zimbabwe is:

a-) it is a deterrent
b-) it removes killers from our society.

Truth be said, it is Zanu PF members who are committing crimes against humanity. Innocent Zimbabwean citizens have been tortured, murdered, raped, displaced and orphaned. The death penalty is in fact appropriate to people, notably Zanu PF members, who are participating in these macabre events.

The public needs retribution. The anguish of the victims’ families must be relieved.

The bible says- ‘An Eye for an Eye’. These people must face the ultimate punishment for their evil deeds. And in my opinion, it will be all legal.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to HAT News

The hate-filled morons strings
The violins setting the agenda of humanity!
Slaughtered human flesh gives taste
To the buds of the cannibals!

Without free freedom
Tensions abound,
Brutality consolidates!
Spears sharpen!
And daggers are drawn
For what,
Whose war?
In this sweet democracy!

In this remoteness and emptiness
Of free movement
Hymns and rhymes of dissent dwell!
Recitation long curtailed!

In this bankruptcy of humanity
Human blood from the canals of
Slit open veins flow!
Washing away the records of mischief
Into the oceans of history!

In the Goromonzi palace of torture
A bird of peace languishes!
With a battered soul
And a determination
To expose the junta for what it is!

In this dumbness and deafness of society
The rule of man takes over that of law!
The noose tightens
On the throat of freedom
And with it freedom disappears!

Weeks on end
Soldiers miscount the numbers
Of a plebiscite in dispute

In the shrewdness of autocracy
Souls and emotions are chained!
To the whip that restrict!
Self emancipation!

Written jointly by Chinofunga Ndoga and Tendai Gakanje who both are human right activists with ROHR (Restoration of Human Rights Zimbabwe) Yorkshire branch

Wailing widows
Hungry crying toddlers
Raped pregnant sisters
Armed militant brothers
Toiling moiling mothers
Jobless penniless fathers
Homeless displaced
Starving pensioners
Traumatised lot
Laughing hyenas even

Media parroting propaganda
Courts discharging injustice and injunctions
Unyielding securocrats
Empty barracks
Armoured tanks in motion along Samora Machel Avenue
Hungry soldiers with loaded machine guns parading at Stodart Hall in Mbare
Empty camps
Police in the neighbourhood maintaining disorder
Riot army in gear
Some on horse backs, some in Mercedes, others on foot
Running and leading the marathon of violence
Sweating and swelling eyeballs in the fog of teargas
Coward innocents

Listening to the music of gunfire
The hapless and hopeless taking-in asthmatic breadths of gunpowder
Broken homes, broken bones, missing limbs, hurried burials
Roaming, restless spirits, unappeased
Mobile phone farmers, exiled labour
Exported skills, vegetables overgrown, earth unwatered, barren lands
Empty silos, unpacked shelves,  specified companies, unsellable minerals
Swindled banks, worthless currency, unfed stomachs, morgues overflowing
Countless graves, meaningless consoles
A nation in mourning
A nation at war with dear self
Our home unhomely Zimbabwe

Written jointly by Chinofunga Ndoga and Tendai Gakanje who both are human right activists with ROHR (Restoration of Human Rights Zimbabwe) Yorkshire branch

To join you at the breakfast table
of promises and lies
Sweet coffee of mental trauma
Served sharp and crude
by a monster I vowed to love
Till death do us apart

It’s a three course lunch sweetheart
Politics, patronage and propaganda
Served with slogans and rhetoric
and washed down with red wine
from the vineyard veins of our rivals dead
No sweet heart!
Please order me
Human rights, democracy
and political pluralism

I dread my supper today
Censored news
Served raw by my husband‘s favourite chef
I like a balanced diet not this palate
Hunger, spare me tonight
It’s long before breakfast

Night falls and hope slips away
My love belly is hungry, angry and beckoning
Please fill me up, but the diseased diet
drips with acid shared by all in the women‘s league

Singing and dancing at the vigil tonight
Singing and dancing to the tune
of abduction, torture and murder
Whistling and ululating to the rhymes
of rape and romance
Thumping and clapping to the sounds
of hate and revenge

Enough is enough
I long for peace and progress
I long for harmony and happiness
I long for freedom
from this shame of a marriage
When will priceless love ever be mine?
Maybe an escape….
Is the answer

Human rights abuses visited upon a spouse married to a politician within a tyrannical dispensation …………………………………..

Written jointly by Chinofunga Ndoga and Tendai Gakanje who both are human right activists with ROHR (Restoration of Human Rights Zimbabwe) Yorkshire branch

By Tendai Gakanje

My black hands, have worked it all.
They have witnessed my suffering and my endurance.
My heart bleeds as it tells a story of heroism of the pain that every one overlooks.
But my soul strives for…..am still here, still human, voice of the voiceless.

I tell it now for the rest of my kind who lie in silence.
So now………..this voice I give to them,
I will speak for my people.
for together we are still here, still human.

I wake up every morning before any sane thinks about it.
I go; I walk all in search of a penny,
so I can survive, so I can feed and fend for my large family back home
God bless them.
Do I find one?
When will this my suffering end?
Who will take care of my babies? Have I failed them?
Cries the voice of the voiceless…….

I yearn for a belonging, to be around familiar faces,
to be with my family and friends again.
I am alienated.
I am discriminated.
Is it my skin colour?
Is it because of my race or my nationality?
Cries the voice of the voiceless………

Everyone is busy, going on with their own business,
they pass me by like I am none existent, perhaps made of ice.
Yes! They see through me.
Still here, still human cries the voice of the voiceless.

I say this because I know I have to fight.
I say it out because no one else will.
I am their voice, I will speak out loud.
I will fight, that’s what we black women do, F…I…G…H…T!!!!!
Cries the voice of the voiceless……..

The sun is setting.
Time for me to go home, what do I call home?
a bench in the park.
That’s my home, that hard bench.
It knows my suffering, it awaits me this night.
Cries the voice of the voiceless………

I have told it to you
I will tell it again tomorrow and the day after and the next.
I break the silence.
Through all this can you see?
Still here; still human cries the voice of the voiceless.

Tendai is currently volunteering for the African Women Empowerment Forum as a Project Coordinator and Senior Administrator. The organisation supports Women sanctuary seekers and advocates on gender issues both locally and nationally.

Citizen of Jericho merry core
Tainted bliss what a missed – conception
After all are we not standing on the same ground
Breathing the same air why then the hatred; why then the torture
I am a citizen of the world and of a country rooted in its midst
Childless; mindless; tight-less; needless

Somali-tally the deaths
Congolese mail the tale
Zimbabwe count the pennies
Sudan do not be cunning
United Kingdom wont you try me..

Seeker; meeker, weaker is that what you think?
Is that what you know?
I challenge you to rally!!
Behind my fatal cause
Continue to abuse and muse me and you will see
Citizen of the world indeed
How long shall I wait for your acceptance;
And expect the tenancies

Vimbainashe is a volunteer Community Reporter and co-editor of HAT news based in Nottingham. In July 2009, she graduated in BA Honours Mixed Media Textiles design at De Montfort University Leicester. Her most prominent work called ‘Child of our time’ was exhibited at the 2009 Graduate show at the same university.

What have I done wrong in this here life?
Jilted, tilted, wilted before my time
Dumped, dragged with shame in flames

No call; no scream; just in waiting and equating…
To laugh and cry in isolation
Punishment of the highest order
Imprisoned with no crime
Guilty?… before the jury decides
I’m innocent!!

If family do not know you, what makes you think, tick, kick, be slick and nick!
They are not going to care or bare, tare or dare
He are not going to care for a rare mare
Pack and go; Drift and stay
Which is it?…Confused?…on the borderline you are!

Like a hungry stomach you churn not knowing when you will eat
No bounce or ounce ready to pounce
What is it you want?  Why cannot a man be involved with you and evolve
Not get too suspicious or malicious about intentions
Just enjoy the date without relation, elation or correlation
Analysing, tantalising everything…

Regret? Lament?
Elation builds with trust confined
Hear the plea in desperation
Fear not in serenity, there is a remedy…

A gentle-man will be…
In these tropics, a blessed soul to worship you
Sure as the sun shall rise on bended knee he will need
Groom of doom; Bloomed and pruned
Stability with control; Patience with grace
Waiting in worth

There is a man who treats you well; Rings you if I can tell
Makes you feel special …intentionally?…who knows?

You do not have to run around like a mongoose
Lose your cool like a goose feel trapped like a mousse ready for the kill
Like the old fella! What a killa…? You learn to think! Quick!
Why men cannot work you out… like a trout?
See how nice guys always finish last? It is a must!

There is no need to say much,
When things are right, they are tight!
Why bother the dead? When they are resting, nesting, questing for heaven’s door,
Forever on that hurdle;
To seize the moment you do not want to
I guess I will never know!

Vimbainashe is a volunteer Community Reporter and co-editor of HAT news based in Nottingham. In July 2009, she graduated in BA Honours Mixed Media Textiles design at De Montfort University Leicester. Her most prominent work called ‘Child of our time’ was exhibited at the 2009 Graduate show at the same university.