I look at a piece of Zimbabwe almost every day. The slightly abstract mother and child carved in black springstone radiate extraordinary love and tenderness and is probably my most cherished piece of art gathered from foreign reporting.
But like so much about Zimbabwe, it creates mixed feelings, because I recently discovered that the internationally known sculptor, David Mutasa, who has exhibited at the Smithsonian, ran for President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party twice (he was defeated in the 2008 spring elections) and stands accused of doling out grain rations from the family mill only to Mugabe supporters.
Reading Margaret Zondo's account of growing up in Zimbabwe in this issue brought back many memories of my only visit to that country a decade ago to cover the 8th General Assembly of the World Council of Churches.
About 15 years before, in my 1983-84 seminary year, I first heard about the atrocities carried out under Mugabe's rule.
The dean of Harare's Anglican cathedral, John Da Costa, was visiting the parish I was assigned to. At one presentation, he asked any journalists present to leave because he feared publicity about what he had to say would jeopardize more lives.
Fortunately, I had not yet taken up this career and so I listened, stunned like everyone else, about the infamous Fifth Brigade, a group of terrorist soldiers, who raped and butchered thousands of men, women and children, sometimes piling them into mass graves.
It was part of Mugabe's war, both tribal and political, against rival Joshua Nkomo, himself a terrorist.
Things worsened over the years. As Zondo notes, Zimbabwe's economic turmoil makes the current rattling of world banks and stock markets seem like a placid sea. In Zim, as it's fondly known, inflation now runs in the millions of per cent each year.
In this fertile, stunningly beautiful country, bread (if you can find it) costs one price when you enter the supermarket and another when you get to the checkout.
Zimbabwe has gone from being the breadbasket to the basket case of Africa.
The human numbers are overwhelming. In a population of 11 million, a quarter of adults have HIV/AIDS. The median age has plummeted to 18, with life expectancy at birth of 45.
Canada's median age, by contrast, is 40 with life expectancy of 82.
About 80 per cent of the population is unemployed and living below the poverty line.
About the only bright spot is that the country's infrastructure of airports, roads, railways and phone lines was well enough built that perhaps it can be rehabilitated if and when Mugabe disappears from the political scene. Unfortunately, civil war is also possible.
Zimbabwe is yet another example of the West's abandonment of Africa. Having (in large measure, successfully) plundered both the continent's people and natural resources before it became clear to Europe's colonial powers, weakened after two world wars, that ruling from afar just wasn't possible.
With culpable negligence, those same powers and the industries they supported utterly failed to reasonably educate the indigenous population. White Western powers left abruptly, leaving political vacuums that sucked pre-existing tribal conflicts into the vortices of violence we still have today.
U.S. foreign policy blanks out at the eastern edges of the south Atlantic; Europeans still barely tolerate each other, let alone help others, and smaller countries like Canada seem simply not to care.
The situation across Africa is not unlike Yugoslavia under Tito. Once the iron fist is removed, long-simmering disputes erupt in violence. But the West eventually moved in to deal with Kosovo.
Not Africa. Not Rwanda. Not the Congo. Not Darfur. Not Somalia (with the exception of a bungled U.S. foray). Not Zimbabwe.
Yet as Andrew Faiz points out in his column this month, we have a shared humanity – humanity that arose in Africa, let's not forget. Our lack of commitment to sub-Sahara Africa in particular is like ignoring a gangrenous limb. Amputate it, and the body is mutilated; fail to treat it and it poisons the whole body.
Jesus and Paul both taught us to see God's face in every human being. To recognize we are part of one body. The global indifference towards Africa is appalling. We ought to be ashamed. I wonder why we are not?
