This is the inspiring story of a very brave and courageous woman. She may very well bring Mugabe down! She reminds me of Cindy Sheehan, an American mother going against Bush' illegal war.
From Underground, Leading a March for Democracy
JENNI WILLIAMS, Zimbabwe’s hell-raising practitioner of nonviolent civil disobedience, was hauled from a Bulawayo jail cell during one of the first of her 33 arrests for leading street protests for social justice during the past five years of President
Robert Mugabe’s rule.
In a tiny office, she accused the baton-wielding police of assaulting her. When officers tauntingly told her she was a liar, she turned around, dropped her pants and showed them the bruises on her backside, recalled her lawyer, Perpetua Dube, who was watching.
“You can’t bare your bottom to me!” one of the officers shouted, threatening to charge her with indecent exposure.
Mrs. Williams, a spitfire rebel with an appreciation of the absurd, subsequently described herself in an e-mail message to friends as sitting on the softest cushions she could find and “giggling in between wincing in pain.”
As of Thursday, she was back in a Bulawayo jail cell — this time for leading a sit-in on the grounds of government offices to demand food for the starving and the immediate formation of a power-sharing government with the opposition.
During years when millions of her compatriots fled abroad to escape hardship and repression — among them her mother, husband and three children, now in their 20s — Mrs. Williams, 46, a stocky high school dropout with a gift for grassroots organizing, has lived underground in Zimbabwe, moving from safe house to safe house as she and her colleagues have built a formidable protest movement among the church women of Harare and Bulawayo, the two largest cities.
“Zimbabwe is my home, so why should I go?” she asked. “We have made a pact as a family. I am supposed to prepare Zimbabwe so everyone can come home.”
Dozens of times, she has led seamstresses and maids, vegetable sellers and hairdressers onto the streets in Zimbabwe’s struggle for democracy. They sing gospel songs, carry brooms to figuratively sweep the government clean and bang on pots empty of food.
On May 28, Mrs. Williams and 13 other marchers were arrested in the capital, Harare, as they demanded an end to political violence. Mr. Mugabe’s enforcers were then engaged in systematically beating thousands of the opposition’s supporters before a June presidential runoff that pitted him against the opposition leader
Morgan Tsvangirai.
The police said Mrs. Williams and her fellow protesters promoted violence by handing out fliers that accused Mr. Mugabe of “unleashing violence on voters.”
AND Mrs. Williams, listed as accused No. 1, faces an additional charge of causing disaffection among security forces, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. In a newsletter, the organization she leads —
Women of Zimbabwe Arise!, known as
Woza — said it told soldiers and police officers to refrain from beating people, a statement the police charged was “likely to induce the members to withhold their services or to commit breaches” of discipline.
“Hear us loud and clear — your leaders may get generous retirement packages, but you will be left to face the justice of the law and the anger of the people,” the newsletter warned.
Mrs. Williams and her fellow leader, Magodonga Mahlangu, 35, were held at the Chikurubi prison in Harare for 37 days and released only after the now-discredited runoff was over. In court papers, the police singled out Mrs. Williams as a leader of great influence.
“She has got many sympathizers all over the country,” the police said in arguing against bail. “If accused is released, she is likely to go into hiding.”
And that, of course, is exactly what she did.
“If we force Mugabe out, it will be the women who are his undoing,” said John Worswick, a ruddy-faced farmer driven from his land in the country’s chaotic land reform program who now leads Justice for Agriculture, an alliance of displaced commercial farmers and farm workers. They are the ones with the mettle for this, he said. “Jenni’s rattled Mugabe more than anyone else.”
Mrs. Williams’s troublemaking lineage stretches back to her grandfather, an
Irish Republican Army man. He left County Armagh and wound up a gold prospector in the British colony of southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He took as his common-law wife an Ndebele woman, Bahlezi Moyo, who became the family matriarch and bore him three children, among them Margaret, Jenni’s mother.
Margaret Daunt’s husband, a mechanic, was an absent father, so she raised her own family of seven on what she earned working in hospitals and hotels. Now 74 and living in London, she recalls that when she was at work, Jenni was “a little mother cat” to her siblings and quit convent school to help pay their school fees.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/world/africa/18williams.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
