Mnangagwa and the pornography of violence

A female chief superintended Philips accompanied by Dr Nyamukure were assigned to take pictures of MDC parliamentarian Joana Mamombe, Chinembiri and Marova for investigation purposes. They were made to remove clothing and expose various sections of their body parts: those pictures were going to be used as forensic investigation into abduction, torture, and rape allegations. Evidence was needed to establish rape and torture at the hands of the notorious state secret service, the CIO. Today we read on social media with utter horror and dismay that a police superintendent Philip advertently leaked sensitive pictures some had private body parts. There are legal consequences of leaking such sensitive pictures to the public: pics are circulating on several WhatsApp platforms as we speak: as entertainment or as graphic news reporting!!!

Circulating sensitive photos queer's problematic with our relationship with violence, it betrays the basic moral values of humanity. It now appears as if the medical officer shot the pictures for entertainment. Has the general populace normalized violence and are we so accustomed to viewing pictures taken to give evidence of torture and rape: How did citizens access and circulate photos taken by the police investigation team to determine committed crime devoid of mercy and decency? What gratifies us in viewing photos of naked, raped private parts of injured ladies? How do we compulsively indulge at pics taken hours after hours of physical, psychological horror, rape, and torture by criminal CIO?

This factually means that these young women are suffering yet another form of torture: we do not need to imagine how honourable Mamombe and her friends suffered the torture and rape, we now see it in pics as normalized graphic information for public consumption. It feels as if abduction and torture is not enough, their dignity and privacy has been grossly violated by the state. In civilized countries, police superintendent Philip would have been arrested for breach of confidentiality and the state would be found in violation of human rights, dignity, and privacy of the abductees. The pornography of violence is evident in us citizens too who circulated those pics on WhatsApp's: at worst, its entertainment.

Viewing these pictures on WhatsApp means we are proportionally responsible: the female police superintendent who shot the pictures and the consumers of these pics on WhatsApp come together to wounding honourable Mamombe, Chinembiri and Marova emotionally. We have systematically developed a sustained culture that increasingly revolves around cruelty, and widespread approval of violence for generations.  

It is a week since the abductions of prominent Mamombe, Chinembiri and Marova took place. These women are in hospital with emotional and physical trauma orchestrated by the state: the feared CIO. It is a month since the state police brutally assaulted local citizens: Nokuthula and Ntombizodwa women in Bulawayo. These women were beaten up for hours on grounds of lockdown violations and sustained serious injuries. But the president of this nation is mum, has said nothing about evil actions and atrocities that have been committed by the state machinery. What does his silence say about himself and his government? Be it the army and the police, these institutions are trained to protect the government of Zanu PF elite but brutalize, murder, and maim the masses, here is the place where violence was ingrained and legitimized in their initial training.

Zimbabwe is ruled by a thug, a murderer, a money launderer, a hard-core criminal, and these predicates describe the subject nature of Dambudzo Emmerson Mnangagwa. He is implicated in murders and abductions predating independence. Our president loves and glorifies the pornographic violence and intense hate: these traits earned him the presidency.  To force someone to eat faeces is an act of maleficence. According to Barack Obama, evil is "a will to absolute negation, a nihilism that metastasises through the failing body politic in its necrotic wake only dead eyed zombie incapable of any authentic feeling" close quote.

The outcries and outrage from the public and international outpouring come from the brutal nature of abductions, torture, rape as the weapon that Zanu uses to punish the opposition and dissenting voices. These abductions and killings and torture and rape are daughter metastasis of the liberation struggle. This state sponsored violence we experience today is a replication, a modus operandi of the war on liberation and its widespread approval of violence. The use of violence as a corrective during the war of liberation is not different from violence that manifested itself into genocide of early years of independence and it has been the pornography of violence this government continuously nurtures for decades.  

During the struggle and the war on independence, men and women were brutally murdered for flimsy reasons. When these executions of victims of the struggle for independence took place, camp dwellers were frogmarched to watch executions. It is the same methods of killings and executions, torturing and rape on women and girls: the victims of which are dehumanized commodities.

Zimbabwe since independence has seen horrors unimaginable by common sense. We have seen beatings, burnings, stoning, rape, shootings, and abductions. How many deaths will it take until the world knows that too many people have died? How many abductions will it take until the world knows that too many of us have vanished. Where is our Itai Dzamara today: Yet we continue to live as if nothing happened to him.
Energy Mutodi's distasteful statement about the abductions cannot come from a normal sense. To repeat what Mutodi wrote in his twitter messages is indirectly becoming part of the consumer of pornography of violence. The nation should not be misled by sacking Mutodi from government because it does not mean anything to us povo. There are serious battles between the army and government that we do not know, and we should never be part of it in any way or form, never sympathize with one side. Remember how we were deceived when the army staged a coup against Mugabe. Little did we know that in less than one year, the army and government will be pointing guns at us.

Several civilians died in demonstrations regardless of our outpouring of support given to the army during the coup. The crucial role citizens played is sanitizing the coup: they cheered and accepted the army takeover of the nation. As a result the government of Mnangagwa got legitimacy from the international community. But now we have expired, our contribution has lost its sale by date and it is for this reason we are treated as disposables. We have endured our entire life of silence in the screaming faces of rape, torture, deaths abductions, maiming, beatings, we wonder still how we shall continue with our lives under such obscure circumstances.