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Quote by Geoff Hill

“In 2002, BBC jounalists Fergal Keane and Mark Dowd made a documentary for the Panorama programme in which they asked how much Whithall had known about Gukurahundi. Sir Martin Ewans, who was high commissioner in Harare at the time, went on camera to say that his instructions from London were 'to steer clear of it' when speaking to Mugabe.”

Quote by Geoff Hill

Book:What Happens after Mugabe?

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What Happens after Mugabe?

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“In the city Maiguru's brother immediately made an appointment with a psychiatrist. We felt better—help was at hand. But the psychiatrist said that Nyasha could not be ill, that Africans did not suffer in the way we had described. She was making a scene. We should take her home and be firm with her.”

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“But are there some things that happen in life to make other things, which once seemed unforgivable, forgivable? Does my surrogate father's grief and suffering make forgiveable what he did to Mrs. Thornton? Has what happened to my Thandi - dammit - has what happened to my Thandi not made my Uncle Zacchaeus's vices forgivable? Because I know how my Thandi's death must have hurt him so! How he must have wept! How it drove him to near madness! Did he not, in the mid-'80s, right after her death, begin to scribble anti-establishment tracts that cut the government to the quick? Incisive, precise pieces that were so unlike his former, literary, wispy self... And can Abednego ever forgive Black Jesus? As Dumo used to say, one can't just exist passively in the twenty-first century. One has to be, actively, an ethical citizen of our global village, seeing in others the mirror of what he sees in himself - humanity - and in himself what he presupposes to be in others - inhumanity. This was one of his sweetest sermons! The loftiest of his speeches, designed to elevate! And yet he, himself, despite admitting that our current oppressors, too, had been, also, once upon a time, victims of oppression under the fascist state of Rhodesia, from which they had learned well and whose lessons they were now applying full force in the jingoistic state of Zimbabwe, in spite of being able to realize all of this, he could not bring himself to recognize Black Jesus's humanity. 'There's nothing human about that man!' he exclaimed, tears streaming down his face. And I don't blame him! I don't blame him for being unable to transcend this, and yet whenever I look in the mirror and see this face of mine which is as black as a velvet night, with my kissable lips and my finely sloping cheekbones, I can't help but think what this, then, makes me.”

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“That struggle between the fallible ambition of man to lean towards immortality and the fleshly evidence of his certain mortality; that tormenting battle with his consciousness, which is able to live vicariously at any point in time, which dreams, loves, hopes, and aspires to the immortal, but is always brought down to earth by his flesh, this container in which he has been contained, and which will inevitably return to the earth to rot. Too much dreaming, and he begins to forget his fallibility and, believing himself to be infallible, he commits horrendous acts of ambition which amount to crimes against humanity; too much dying, and he begins to forget the sacredness of life, the beauty of dreaming, to live in fear and be paralyzed by fear.”

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“Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside. trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when were were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back.”

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“When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky. They flee their own wretched land so their hunger may be pacified in foreign lands, their tears wiped away in strange lands, the wounds of their despair bandaged in faraway lands, their blistered prayers muttered in the darkness of queer lands.”

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“We're hungry but we're together and we're at home and everything is sweeter than dessert.”

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“If these walls could talk, the buildings would stutter, wouldn't remember their names.”

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“What I wanted was to get away. But the moon was too far beyond, and there were white bits under me, where the flesh was shredded off and the bone gleamed that famed ivory, and those below cowered and, if they were not quick enough, were spattered in blood. Then came the jolt, as of a fall, and I saw the leg was caught in an ungainly way in the smaller branches of a mutamba tree, the foot hooked, long like that infamous fruit.”

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“The doctor in Murare is old - old for anybody. He is especially old for a doctor and especially old for an African. But he doesn´t have the luxury of retirement to look forward to. There aren´t enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don´t do it for the money or because thy want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breath or eat or love. They can´t stop. As long as they are alive, they will never not be a doctor. They can be old, or alcoholic or burnt-out, but they will always be a doctor.”

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“Now when the men talk, their voices burn in the air, making smoke all over the place. We hear about change, about new country, about democracy, about elections and what-what. They talk and talk, the men, lick their lips and look at the dead watches on their wrists and shake their hands and slap each other and laugh like they have swallowed thunder.”

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Book:We Need New Names

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