Edwina Spicer spoke to Margaret Dongo, the woman who took on Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF party, and won
‘WILL someone remove this barking dog from our midst” President Robert Mugabe is reported to have said of Margaret Dongo, MP for Harare South, during the run-up to Zimbabwe’s general elections last year.
Dongo lost her seat in those elections, but accused Mugabe’s party of vote-rigging and the registrar general’s office of gross incompetence. She went to court, had the election results nullified and a by-election called. A 35-year-old woman took on Mugabe and with him the whole Zanu PF party machinery. To the disbelief of many and the delight of most, she won.
It is not difficult to see why Mugabe hates this dynamic, intelligent ex-combatant. Her crime is her refusal to bow to the Zanu PF party hierarchy, or to be silenced on issues that matter to her. She burns on the subject of war veterans. “We had all been through hell, but once the leaders got their positions, their farms, their houses, their cars, they forgot about the people who put them there.” She speaks from her tiny terraced house in the constituency she represents. The gravy train does not call here.
The other old men of the party, those who have formed the government for the past 15 years pausing only to swap portfolios and move into mansions, do not like Margaret Dongo either.
“They decided that the best enemy for a woman was another woman, and chose my old friend and colleague Vivian Mwashita to stand against me. Poor Vivian — they used her. They offered her a house and she accepted it. A senior Cabinet minister is the father of at least one of her children and she thought the party heavies would do the work for her. She can’t speak for herself,” says Dongo.
Mwashita was no match for Dongo. The two women, despite sharing a liberation struggle history, are opposites in many respects. Dongo is articulate, bright. Mwashita is unable to express herself: in one television interview she repeatedly spoke of “the postage vote, or what-what they call it”. At the opening of Parliament, after the April elections, Mwashita was captured by the cameras sleeping during the president’s address. Her dress sense tends towards that of a superannuated bridesmaid, favouring taffetas and satins in purple, pink and green. Dongo either dresses in neat modern clothes or in the West African style of her friend and mentor, the late Sally Mugabe. “West African women have economic control of their lives, therein lies their strength. Zimbabwean women are not strong enough to pack a punch. You must get in there and make the change,” she says Sally told her.
The people of Zimbabwe love Dongo. After her victory, her phone was busy for a month with congratulations from well-wishers. “Peasant farmers rang me long-distance from call boxes, some suggesting I should run for president.” She laughs. “I’m not ready for that yet. But we should change the law that prohibits people under 40 from standing.”
Mugabe is right to be scared of Dongo and her popular support. She, on the other hand, refuses to be cowed. Her supporters have been arrested, her house stoned. Her husband has received obscene phone calls about her. She laughs. It has never been easy.
Even as a Zanu candidate in 1990 the politburo tried to nullify her candidacy on the grounds that she was too young. Sally Mugabe warned her and she was able to prepare her winning reponse. “When I walked over the mountains into Mozambique and offered myself for guerrilla training, offered my life for the liberation, did they say I was too young? There were no age restrictions in the bush.”
She was 15 when she joined Mugabe’s Zanla forces. “I knew exactly what I wanted: to be trained, to fight and to return to Zimbabwe. But there were problems for women in the camps. We lived by jungle law. Every day some young girls would be targeted by the chiefs and escorted off to sleep with them. How could they refuse? There was no one to complain to, who would listen? They were all doing it.”
On the news that Flame, a Zimbabwean feature film about women in the struggle which depicts this exact issue, had been seized by the police, Dongo says: “But of course they don’t want the truth to come out about the struggle. Zanu PF survives on history so they can’t afford the truth. Some of them think the law of the jungle still applies today.”
It was in Maputo that she met Sally Mugabe. “She believed strongly in equal rights and insisted that women should play an equal role. The men didn’t complain in those days because they needed us. Now of course they’d prefer women out of the way and so they hide behind ‘traditional cultural values’. How can the president say that women should not seek title for their land? He actually said that! Culture is dynamic, it moves with the times.”
As Zimbabwe prepares half-heartedly for the one-horse presidential race in two months’ time, many feel that Dongo is the only voice echoing the thoughts of the majority.
“We have lost direction, we have lost our ideology. We fought to gain the power to serve the people, now we use that power to serve individual wealth. Zanu PF is no longer the people’s party — it’s the president’s party. Drought relief food is looked upon as Mugabe’s gift, not a basic human right. There’s been no education on the people’s right to water, land, housing, education. Bob is ruling Banda-style.
“And when we ask ‘But what about the underprivileged?’, they reply, without a hint of shame ‘Zanu PF is not a welfare organisation’. Yes, the party is now the boss and the chiefs are never wrong. Well, I didn’t fight the Rhodesians to remove white skin, but to remove discrimination and I’ll fight any black man who has the same evil spirit of
If Mugabe isn’t scared, he should be.