Sweden gives Zim Culture Fund US$1million – a discordant note

2. We all know what the phrase means. Aspirations are not just material but emotional and spiritual. It is not enough to have one’s stomach filled, there needs to be the sense of a life dignified and uplifted by having one’s aesthetic and emotional sensibilities met.
We saw this neglected in the 1960s in the UK, where ‘progressive’ town planners and architects demolished swathes of Victorian tenements – tearing down the social networks meshed among them – to make way for high-rise apartment blocks which became hothouses for crime and civic breakdown.
At first sight, the Swedish government’s decision to allocate US$1million to support the launch of the Culture Fund of Zimbabwe Trust in Harare recently seems entirely uncontroversial. The objectives as stated are laudable and no-one can take issue with them – to support the cultural sector to ‘eventually spawn economic growth and much needed employment’: to give bread and roses.
The Women’s University Vice-Chancellor, Dr Hope Sadza was quoted as saying that Zimbabwe ‘is endowed with potential to emulate the culture industries of India and America which contribute vast amounts to their national economies.’ This is true. But at this point one feels obliged to sound a discordant note.
Such aspirations and such a scheme is befitting of a country with a reasonably honest and reliable administration that cares about promoting civic welfare. This is manifestly not the case in Zimbabwe. The country is indeed richly endowed with all manner of natural, human and cultural resources, this is true. But the present government has looted, driven out or squandered most of these endowments.
There is not a hope of such resources flourishing for the public benefit for as long as the country is ruled this present clique of gangsters. The possibility of a reformed Zanu (PF) reaching an accommodation with the country’s civic and political opposition remains an elusive dream.
The current regime offers no indication that they would countenance any form of power sharing. For this reason, ‘mediation’ talks in South Africa are doomed to fail. Talks are only meaningful if there is the agreement at the outset that the outcome will be some sort of compromise. This is something that the present government is dead set against. It does not seek compromise; it seeks outright victory, even if the price is the total ruination of the country. It does not matter if the house burns down to the ground; what counts is that the government remains master of it at all costs.
This complaint is not against the Culture Fund, but against the apparent refusal of its sponsors to consider how its exalted goals are even remotely attainable, given that the present government is indifferent or acts in direct hostility to its own population. Where the cost of a newspaper and other disseminators of culture now exceed the cost of a loaf of bread.
So what alternative slogan should the sponsors of the Culture Fund adopt? May I suggest: give us bread, yes, give us roses, yes. But first give us change. -Henwood works for Amnesty International but writes for The Zimbabwean in his personal capacity.