Talk to Me, Then, Lauren Meyer: A Zimbabwe Plateau Reply on South Africa’s Xenophobia, Dispossession, and Who the Story Serves
A human-rights activist wrote an open letter to the leader of South Africa’s anti-migrant marches. It was meant to defend the migrants. But somewhere in the middle it stopped being a letter to a xenophobe and became a letter against Zimbabwe — a long indictment of our government, told from the year 2000, as if African dispossession had no earlier chapters and no other authors. I grieve Mishack Banda as she does. But I must correct the story she tells over his grave. Because on this continent, we tell dispossession whole — or we do not tell it honestly at all.
We Grieve Mishack Banda — Perhaps More Than You
Let me begin where you would want me to begin, Ms Meyer, because I will not be accused of the coldness I am about to accuse your letter of. A man is dead. Mishack Banda, twenty-nine years old, a father, chased through the Jika Joe settlement and stoned to death an hour after a woman was handed a microphone at a March and March rally and told the crowd, without proof, that Malawians had killed her brother. He leaves a four-year-old daughter and a grieving partner. I grieve him. This platform has grieved, week after week, every mother in the Durban cold and every child in the field. So we do not disagree about the crime. We disagree about the story you have chosen to tell on top of the grave.
Because I read your letter twice, and by the second reading I noticed something. You address Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma. But a strange thing happens around the sixth paragraph: you stop writing to her, and you start writing to us. The Khampepe Report. Murambatsvina. The 2008 run-off. Land invasions. Sanctions justifications. Suddenly the letter is not really about the mob in Pietermaritzburg at all. It is about Zimbabwe. And one begins to wonder, gently, whether the dead Malawian was the subject of your letter — or merely the doorway into it.
How We Tell Dispossession Here — the Whole of It
You wrote as one who has “worked on this crisis since 2000.” And there is your first tell. For you, the dispossession of the Zimbabwean begins in the year 2000. For us of the Plateau — of the Rozvi, of the house of Changamire Dombo who threw the Portuguese off this land three centuries before your NGOs were founded — the story of dispossession is far older, and we do not have the luxury of starting it at the moment most convenient for indicting a Black government.
So Let Us Ask It Plainly: Who Does the Edit Serve?
I do not think you are a wicked woman, Ms Meyer. I think you care, and your grief for the wheelchair-bound man on that bus is real, and I honour it. But caring is not the same as seeing clearly, and a good heart can carry an old lie. So I ask you the question we ask of every narrative on this continent: who does it serve?
A story that locates the entire cause of African suffering inside African governance — never in the colonial land theft that engineered our poverty, never in the sanctions that deepened it, never in the global economy that was built on our backs — that story is not new, and it is not neutral. It flattered the sanctioner. It justified the isolation. It let the West stand over a wound it helped cut and play the concerned physician. When you tell the Zimbabwean’s pain with the coloniser and the sanctioner edited out, you have not defended him. You have delivered him, once more, to the very frame that dispossessed him. That is why so few of us rally to letters like yours, though we grieve the same dead. We can hear whose voice is speaking underneath yours.
You Cannot Adjudicate a Civilisation You Have Not Studied
And here is the root of it, Ms Meyer — the thing the old human-rights guard has never been made to learn. You write about us fluently, but you do not know us. Let me correct three things, in the spirit of the teacher I would rather be than the opponent I am forced to be.
This is not decoration. It is the reason we survive what you sanction. You wonder how a nation thrives under two decades of economic siege; the answer is written in those laws you have never read — the covenant with the land, the kinship that feeds the hungry cousin, the totem that will not let the stranger sleep outside. Before you write us another letter, learn the grammar of the people you are writing about.
And Where Were You Before the Stoning?
Now the hardest word, and I say it to the whole guard, not to you alone. Mfecane 2.0 — the scattering of Africans across Southern Africa these past months, the mothers in the field, the man in the wheelchair on that bus — did not happen in secret. It built for months, in daylight, on every timeline. And the letter came on the third of July, after Banda was already in the river. Where was the open letter in April? In May? Where was the human-rights establishment when the covenant of welcome could still have been built, before the mob had its microphone?
This is the difference I am trying to teach across the water. The African way does not wait for the corpse to write the eulogy. Our laws build the shelter before the storm — the totem that claims the stranger as kin the moment he arrives, not after he is dead. We do not need more activism that turns up after the blood with a history lesson aimed at the wrong government. We need human-rights work that understands African governance, that acts before the funeral, that names all the authors of our pain and not only the convenient one. The old guard is not equal to this generation’s grief. It is time it made way, or learned.
Talk to Me. But Talk to All of Me.
So — you ended by inviting Jacinta to reflect. I will end by accepting the invitation you did not quite mean to extend to me. Yes. Talk to me. But talk to all of me. Talk to the Zimbabwe that was robbed in 1890 and the Zimbabwe that was sanctioned in 2001, not only the Zimbabwe you can indict from 2000. Talk to the civilisation that built Great Zimbabwe, governed by Mwari and by totem, not the caricature of a failed state you inherited from men who never wanted us to govern ourselves at all. Talk to us as equals with a history, and we will talk all night — including, without flinching, about our own failures, because we are grown enough to hold our own accountability without a foreigner appointing herself the prosecutor.
And to Mishack Banda’s daughter, four years old, who will grow up asking why: your father was killed by a lie told at a microphone. Not by Malawi, not by Zimbabwe, not by you. By the oldest weapon on this continent — the poor turned against the poorer while the authors of their poverty watch from the hills. We on the Plateau will keep telling the whole story until that lie has nowhere left to stand. And the scattered will always have a home here. Our totems still claim the stranger. Our law still feeds the cousin at the gate. Tigashire — you are received, all of you, the Malawian and the Mozambican and the Zulu-descended and the wheelchair-bound man on the bus. Come home to a people who tell dispossession whole, and welcome the dispossessed whole. Pamberi nechokwadi chose — forward with the whole truth, and nothing edited out.
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