by Zeilig, Leo;
At night, in the darkness, in the rented three-by-two cell in Wood Green with the shared bathrooms, Tendai applied an entirely different ointment. In his voluntary confinement he became emollient and analytical. At three in the morning, almost repentant, regretting his anger and impatience in the day, he wrote contained, encouraging and loving emails to his comrade.
Hunched over a computer requisitioned from the university, Tendai hammered methodically on the keys, his fingers curled, his elbows out, mouthing the words. Identifiable in form, he was changed inside, his spleen relaxed, his organs flat, wide, free of tension – there was a strange transformation at night. The night and darkness gave him peace, not the horror of the unknown but the comfort of obscurity, the prospect of suspension – for a few hours – of the whirlwinds of the day, when he could think and plan and be with himself. The in-between existence of the night lightened his life.
Yet when he was done composing, Tendai would stand up, stretch, crack his back, open his arms, tighten his muscles, tilt the screen so he could see his words, and almost in a fever he’d read half the email aloud and then, when his hostel neighbours had been woken, he was away again and had fallen back onto the side of his bed, writing once more. Each act of passivity – and writing to Tendai was a passive anathema to life – had to be repelled and countered by its opposite: an act, a stand. So even these emails had to be performed and infused with the raw perfume of existence.
And the hail of emails kept coming, relentless, random, loud – arriving unexpected, without preamble, the sentences starting halfway in. For months Tendai rapped his knuckles pink on Viktor’s temples.
*
Viktor leant back in his office chair and felt his back click. He straightened his shoulders and lifted the lid of his laptop. He felt good. The site was getting more hits than before, the campaign was receiving oxygen, there were donations coming in. The air around Viktor this morning was dizzy, thin, excitable – it felt like euphoria, a breakthrough. He wondered whether this was what Tendai has been getting at. Biko was going to connect to Skype at 10 a.m. Zimbabwe time, and the interview would be recorded and posted on Mutations. A sensation. A fucking exclusive.
Viktor was deeply, obsessively committed to Mutations, of which he was editor-in-chief and publisher. There he wrote, for once, without any modesty. He believed that the website was the leading voice of the European left, offering radical perspectives on politics, economics, science and culture to an online audience of 50,000 a month. ‘The appearance of Mutations has been a bright light in dark times,’ declared the blurb on the site’s About page. ‘Each post brings penetrating, lively debate and analyses of matters of real significance from a militant left perspective that is refreshing and all too rare. Mutations is a vital and really impressive contribution to sanity and hope against the madness of the quotidian.’
The site was not the leading voice of the European left, nor was it even a minor voice of the British left – rather, the website had mutated into a noticeboard for Viktor’s own musings, with occasional contributions from invited writers. Then, following the contours of the editor-in-chief’s depression, there would be weeks, even months of fanatical activity, with daily posts, analysis and updates, syndicated to Twitter and Facebook, and for a time Mutations would genuinely swell to fit the hyperbole of its About page. Its list of contributions and articles would make the most hardened e-activists break out in a sweat, wondering at the team of writers, the alchemists of content it must have writing about The Truth On Chavez, A New Strategy, To Fight Another Day and Sartre’s Last Will and Testament.
So Mutations was constantly being taken out of retirement. Recently it had been resurrected as the online platform for the struggles taking place at the university. If the battles within the university were led by Tendai’s unsteady genius, then Viktor would wage the war for publicity and solidarity online. The strategy was simple. The direct and immediate focus was the campaign itself, so Viktor would post updates from the front lines, but he would also try to do something that he believed to be entirely original. He would burrow into the backstories. If the cleaning staff – his comrades – were from Zimbabwe, South Africa and South America, then his efforts would be to raise readers’ consciousness about these countries.
On his first blog post in the series on Zimbabwe, he made the intentions of Mutations clear: ‘We must set ourselves the task of understanding. Mutations intends to collect and analyse data from Zimbabwe, to get to the root of the crisis in Southern Africa – to work out who benefits and who pays. We seek to understand the pain and struggles in the lives of those in Zimbabwe. We realise that these are not individual problems, and they cannot be solved individually. In Mutations we will be asking how we can take action.’
Viktor’s assignment for Mutations this week was an interview with Biko Mutawurwa. The path to Biko had been fairly direct. Tendai had introduced him to Anne-Marie – an attempt, Tendai believed, to draw Viktor out of himself, to connect him to the real. Though Anne-Marie had jolted him south, to see beyond Europe, it had not succeeded in ridding Viktor of his old bile and distractions. Tendai’s curious diagnosis of Viktor’s predicament, of his active inaction, was typical of his flawed overstatements, requiring an understanding of political history to appreciate psychological upset: ‘You see, Viktor, com, those who make a revolution halfway only dig their own graves. You need to orientate south, beyond Gibraltar and your Dark Continent, this City of Darkness, this great primitive citadel.’ Through Anne-Marie and Tendai, then, in a further attempt to draw him out, Viktor was introduced online to Biko.
From Biko came today’s interview. From London to Harare; from nation-state to global activism.
Viktor logged on early to do research for the interview, to find out what else Biko had written, whom he followed, what he read. He stared at dates, circled and underlined words, names of places and people he had read about before. He opened a website for an American NGO in Zimbabwe and saw images of bent, bloodied bodies, bruised and faceless. These victims of Zimbabwe’s modern chimurenga looked posed, pornographic. Viktor felt the optimism leave him in a flood of misery. He felt sick. His hand stumbled across the desk; he found the paper cup and knocked back the last lukewarm mouthful of coffee.
What could we do with this degree of overdetermination? Poisoned and condemned by history, how could they – Biko, Anne-Marie, Tendai – move? What hope was there for action? Oppressed by this history, from Rhodes to occupation, empire and colonialism and then defeat, to a failed, violent independence in 1980, Viktor couldn’t see movement and possibility – only the curse of circumstances.
There was the familiar, strangely comforting sound of an incoming Skype call; Viktor looked up at the screen, saw the pulsing, throbbing image of Biko waiting to be answered. The fleeting despair dissipated.
‘Biko!’ he said loudly.
‘Comrade,’ Biko answered.
The screen flickered and cleared, the square, coloured pixels configured and Biko’s face could be seen, around him a bank of computers with people working and making calls of their own. There was a familiarity to the scene that Viktor recognised. He relaxed.
‘I am going to record this interview, if that’s okay,’ Viktor said, smiling.
Biko smiled back. ‘Fire comrade, fire. I have thirty minutes. Anne-Marie told me you are a serious comrade. We like serious. So fire.’
Viktor had a habit that he found difficult to shake; he had to justify himself, speak of the great fury of the internet. So to the willing, beaming face that shone out of his laptop – the image of Biko failing and breaking every few minutes into a thousand miniature cubes – Viktor rattled out his justifications. ‘Thanks, Biko, for this opportunity. Just quickly, I want to tell you about the site, Mutations—’
‘I love the title,’ Biko shot in. ‘Mutations, yeah. Radical mutations, revolution, rupture. Beautiful, comrade.’
Viktor felt embarrassed – ridiculous and exposed. He adjusted himself in the chair,
looked down at his notes and spoke. ‘Can I ask you some basic questions? What position do you hold in the movement and what is your full name?’
Biko leant forward and stared directly at the camera eye at the centre of the screen. ‘My full formal name is Stephan Mutawurwa, but I started using the name Biko for fear of victimisation, and now the name has stuck. I am the Research and Education Secretary for the Society of Liberated Minds and the President of the Bulawayo Student Union.’ He paused, sat back, then remembering something, came forward to the screen again. ‘And I forgot, I am also a PhD candidate in engineering.’ Biko felt comfortable, entirely at ease – he was in the mood for speaking and relished this chance to extol, to give vent. The words lifted in his stomach. They wanted to get out and show themselves.
Viktor continued, his head still bowed into his notes. ‘Can you explain something about your political evolution?’
There was no hesitation in Biko’s response; he had answered these questions before, for other interviews – for American and Australian left-wing papers and websites – but there was nothing stale in his response. ‘I started off as a rebel without a cause in high school. I remember it was when the Chidyausiku commission was set up by the government and run by Godfrey Chidyausiku – for a new constitution in Zimbabwe. They came to Goromonzi High School, where I was a student, as part of their outreach.’
Biko paused, thought quickly and resumed more slowly. ‘Now, you must understand that the struggle over a new or redrafted constitution is not the dry process it might sound like in the UK. It is a popular process of democratic control across Africa, and in Zimbabwe the commission was seized by democratic forces. So we had a writers’ club that I organised as a sort of a study circle, with our own, confused political views, which were mixed, muddled – and when they asked us to make a presentation to the commission, I was nominated. It became my first public political statement.’ Biko stopped again, then laughed loudly, so loud, in fact, that the sound distorted and Viktor looked up from his pad and quickly adjusted the volume on the computer. He checked if the interview was still being recorded.
‘When I look back at it, I can see it was a ridiculous little exercise in constitutionalism, the procedures of a shame democracy. Pathetic and audacious. Times were different then. I said that we demanded that in the new constitution there be a two-term limit on the office of the president. The next day in the Daily News the headline was,‘Schoolboys Harass Chidyausiku’. It was also the quote of the week in the Financial Gazette! After that, the little group I ran met Comrade Nelson, who had just started at the University of Zimbabwe as a law lecturer. He was Chair of the Society of Liberated Minds – he was in Bulawayo as part of the campaign against the constitution – and he found us. He hammered on the door of my family home clutching the rolled-up newspaper, his locks hanging even longer than they do now.’ Biko remembered the scene. His mother had answered the door and stood, her arms on her hips, assessing Nelson with naked bravado. ‘We sat speaking for four hours in the backyard, then he invited me to Harare and we spoke.’ Biko laughed again, ‘Rather, he spoke, for what felt like days without stopping. He managed to silence me! I attribute my political clarification to the Society and the programmes we carry out on the ground.’
Viktor started to relax. He enjoyed the musical dance of Biko’s words. ‘Can I ask you about your family background?’
Biko didn’t hesitate. ‘There are more interesting questions, but if you want, comrade. I am the first-born son and the only son, and I have a sister after me. My father was the principal of Bulawayo High School. He was involved in the armed struggle. My mother is late, she was self-employed and occasionally worked as a trader, going to commercial farms to sell jerseys she had knitted.’
Viktor was confused. ‘When you say late, just to clarify, do you mean deceased?’
Biko was perfectly still. He was not smiling; he looked at the camera intently. Viktor met his eyes. ‘What else could I mean? Late. Deceased. Dead,’ Biko repeated.
Viktor flushed, coughed and pulled his notes up. ‘What were your political motivations, your ideas and thoughts at the time – can you tell Mutations about your political evolution?’
Biko was leaning back, smiling again. The screen was clear and his eyes were wide, alert. ‘We have been trained by leftists, by Nelson and others. We have been trained. The issues were around class analysis, to start off with. We are very much dialectical materialists, and we saw an obscene accumulation of wealth by the political elite under the guise of people empowerment.’ Biko found his groove. This was where he wanted to be.
‘The degeneration that occurred in the institutions, the degeneration that occurred within the fabric of the academic offering at the university, is something that we viewed with scepticism. We saw it as a conspiracy by the neo-political elite, but there was also a frustration which Mugabe now uses as his own. We saw what we call the un-rattled Rhodesians’ establishment. So, you know, you had this obscene accumulation by the black political elite, but you also had this totally undisturbed, unperturbed privilege of the former elite and what seemed to be an organic or strategic alliance between the two elites. The emergent black elite and what we often referred to as the conspiracy of silence, they were beneficiaries.’ Biko stared intently at the camera, at Viktor, wanting his comprehension.
‘Government ministers suddenly owned commercial farms. They had been given them by their white counterparts and worked hand in hand with the white commercial farming sector. You had an incestuous relationship between the former oppressors and what we viewed then as the new oppressors. So we were motivated, I mean, we were ideologically clear. This was in the late nineties. At school and university we identified the administration and the police force as the pillars of strength for the establishment. So we attacked. We still do, you know, since we went all out to try and make them dysfunctional, to expose their true nature and show themselves.’
There were too many words in Viktor’s life, and now he could feel them caressing him, falling on him, showering him – he was distracted by their sound, their clatter, and fought hard to find their meaning. He felt Biko’s sentences sensually, his punchy, insistent phrases gathering under his arms and in his throat and ears. There was something more to the meaning, a greater significance, than this interview – something in his tone, in Biko’s movement, in the dance he was making of the interview.
Viktor’s palms were wet. He held on tightly to his notes and read the question: ‘How had the nature of student protest changed? What was going on in Zimbabwe’s societal relations in the nineties that was different from before? Can you describe for our readers and listeners the mutation of social classes?’
Biko’s laugh was long and hard, but not mocking – he spoke affectionately. ‘So, the alienation of labour, of the working class, from a possibility of a settlement or accommodation with the regime around any sort of social contract from ninety-six, ninety-seven, and the rapidity with which higher education was privatised – both of these processes were coming from IMF and World Bank structural adjustment and were willingly, even enthusiastically introduced by the regime, by the jackals. So essentially this meant that we no longer had student discontent but outright student rebellion on our hands.’ The screen broke up, tried to re-form – Biko shouted suddenly, ‘A REBELLION!’ The picture formed. Biko was leaning forward. Viktor thought of Tendai – he had the same habit of expressing himself in capitals, to give to his words more than their flimsy life and simple meaning. If life depended on so little, then these words must be wielded, breathed into, made to tell, to march and to fight.
Biko was still talking. ‘So you had the most violent demonstrations, and then a third thing that happened during that period: the prices for almost everything were liberalised, the fuel price increased, everything shot up. And in the government the largest number of redundancies was created there; now you had students supporting their parents on their stipends which were not enough because their parents had
been laid off work. So ...’ Biko opened his hands, then brought them together in a sweeping movement and held them together under his chin – he looked around, almost wanting the others, the workers, parents and students working at the rows of computers in the cyber-café to pay attention and listen. ‘So, in a sense, as poverty increased, you had a convergence of these forces. And the critique started off really being around issues of social economic justice. The right to a living wage – the students started couching their demands around the right to a livelihood.’
Viktor was excited; he forgot himself. ‘Ah, so you mean the student became, in a sense, a worker?’
‘No,’ Biko answered, then, pausing, he screamed: ‘No!’
Biko was not angry; his exclamations were simply that, exclamations – the desire for things to be clear, for his listener and for himself. Words were an inadequate gauge in themselves, so, as Viktor had picked up, he sought to hurl them, make them into more than they were. In some ways this was Biko’s understanding of revolutionary action – into the vacuum and darkness of life we had to shout, and if there was no answer, if nothing came back, we had to shout louder. The shouting was dictated by the void, and into it he had to throw fresh salvos of words, each with instructions to struggle and fight. Viktor, occasionally astute to human passions, saw this; he understood that Biko had an appetite for life which could not easily be satisfied.
‘No, comrade,’ Biko was calming down, ‘students were not workers, for the simple reason that there were no jobs. The two thousands was the epoch of retrenchments. They were, in a way, parent and student, declassed.’ Then, stopping, he adjusted his back, felt the satisfying click of his vertebrae, licked his lips. ‘Think of the state of the Russian working class after the civil war in 1922. What did Lenin say? “Dislodged from its class groove, the Russian working class has ceased to exist as a proletariat.” I am exaggerating, comrade, but not much.’
