Olonga explains black armband protest

ZIMBABWE-HARARE-Former Zimbabwe cricket star Henry Olonga has just released a book on his life titled Blood, Sweat and Treason.

Here he explains his 2003 gesture during the World Cup- to wear black armbands mourning “the death of democracy” along with legendary star Andy Flower, who is now the England cricket coach.

He was speaking to SW Radio Africa’s Lance Guma.

Well again Lance, that’s one of those questions which is so general that the scope of this interview just won’t be able to give us enough time to cover it but in a nutshell, myself and Andy Flower had come to the same place.

We had perhaps travelled different routes to get to that place but we both came to the place where we realised that things were so abnormal in Zimbabwe that they needed to be challenged.

Now from Andy’s perspective, I believe and I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I believe he witnessed an old friend of his, the farm getting destroyed, this man’s livelihood obviously being destroyed and also the livelihoods of all his workers because these farm invasions, love them or hate them, have affected white and black people and he obviously got to a place where he felt this needed to be challenged.

There could be other reasons that Andy decided to do that so maybe perhaps I’ll leave him when he writes his book to explain exactly what got him to that place but from my perspective – a number of reasons.

First of all Lance, I’m a Christian, I believe in Godly, biblical values and I gave my life to God when I was about 16 years old, I became a Christian then and ever since then I’ve tried to understand what it is to have a biblical outlook on life and you know, when you’ve got an all-powerful leader who is crushing, oppressing and making the lives of his own citizens a misery, then those people have every right to appeal to a higher power but what about when you’ve got orphans and widows – you know.

The bible is very clear on how we ought to stand in their stead. We are to rebuke the oppressor, in fact this is a scripture in the Book of Isaiah – rebuke the oppressor and contend for the widow and the orphan – Isaiah 1 verse 17 and that spoke to me one day when I was reading it.

Another thing is of course the corruption in Zimbabwe. I mean that absolutely made me crazy. We were getting charged 64% or so tax and we had very little to show for it.

Here in England you get charged whatever percentage you get but at least you get free healthcare and free education perhaps in most cases and many, many benefits – public transport that’s reliable etcetera and in Zimbabwe, most of the time, those taxes do not go towards making the general population live lives that are of a slightly higher standard.

Instead we were seeing politicians enriching themselves – the Willowgate scandal where these guys were buying cars and selling them for profit – I mean we’ve had so many corruption scandals in Zimbabwe I don’t need to go through the list but either way that made me a little angry and I started to think geez someone’s got to speak out against this corruption.

And then there was the DRC you know – we got involved in the war in the Congo where they were plundering the resources there, sure they were trying to ostensibly keep stability in the region at the behest of Lauren Kabila who got assassinated later but ultimately, most of the people who were not getting enriched in the DRC were not Zimbabweans, the average Zimbabweans, it was mainly the people who were connected in high places.

So there are hundreds of things that got me to that place – so I’m just loosely touching on them – my faith, corruption in government, obviously the involvement in the DRC but ultimately it was hearing a story about the Gukurahundi massacres in the Matabeleland region that I grew up in. You know I have memories of our teachers carrying guns.

When I was about eight or nine years old in my first year of attending Reps, there was a guy called Bray Mudavanhu who was one of our teachers there and he used to carry a gun after hours and we used to ask him – why are you carrying a gun? – we used to ask him that, you know all these questions about guns, it was such a fascinating thing for an eight year old kid with a teacher who’s got an AK47 – he’d say things like – hey you know if you hear the bullet or you hear the crack of a gun you’re not dead because normally you won’t hear it, you’ll be dead by the time the sound arrives and he would tell us fascinating stories about this.

But he would also tell us about this guy called Richard Gwesela and the dissidents that were working in the area – as a nine year old, eight year old, you don’t understand what the concept of dissidence is or the Fifth Brigade and what they were doing, but when I grew up, when I was an old man, I say old man relatively but I was 25, 26 I got handed a dossier put together by the Catholic Commission for Justice which I’m sure you guys are familiar with and some of those stories just made my blood boil.

There was a story of these two girls who got gang raped by some Zimbabwe National Army forces for two days or so, it was a number of days and then they ended up being pregnant and then many months later, these soldiers returned and they just bayoneted these girls wombs open and the foetuses which were still moving, fell on the ground. My Lord – when I heard that I just thought what kind of country have I grown up in? What kind of country have I represented at the highest level?

You know whenever we used to go on tours, I used to defend Zimbabwe’s right to be an international Test playing nation. They’d ask us – what about Mugabe, what about human rights abuses, what about corruption and I’d say – ah no, no, we’re just cricketers, we’re here to put the best foot forward that the country has.

I’d say all those cute little answers that you get groomed to say by management, but there was a growing sense that hmm that something was wrong here in this country and people don’t talk about it and so – I know this is a long-winded answer but – ultimately I came to the place where I decided someone’s got to speak out and ultimately, that’s what we did.