Snow on an April Sunday

I woke up late - somewhere in the middle of The Archers omnibus, just as Ruth was successfully convincing David that Pip had spent the night at Jonathan's - and the snow here is now melting rapidly. However, when there was a bit more white on the ground and on the trees than there is now, I took the photo below (and a couple of others which can be found here) from my window.

Sacrifice and democracy

I don't comment on world affairs very much in this journal, as there are others who probably have more insightful things to say. This post is shorter than it might be because I am meant to be writing about an eighteenth-century duke (not for LJ). As a child in the 1970s, however, one could hardly miss the constant references to Rhodesia on television news. I remember Bishop Muzorewa becoming prime minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia, and later read his memoir Rise Up and Walk; and remember Lancaster House and the constitutional dance that saw the country once more become the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, with Lord Soames as governor, before the general election that brought ZANU and Robert Mugabe to power as prime minister of Zimbabwe in 1980. Later that decade, in 1988, one of my A-Level history teachers emigrated to Zimbabwe, depressed, she said, by the tendency of British and other European politicians to follow perceived trends among the voting public - Robert Mugabe, she told us, was a leader of a calibre no longer found in Europe, dedicated to challenging the people and uniting them around a common purpose. I wonder where she is now.

I am not surprised by current developments, sadly, particularly ZANU-PF's decision to challenge the electoral count before the results have been publicly declared. I think that for many on the government side in Zimbabwe, elections ought to be ways for the Zimbabwean public to pay homage to the blood sacrifice made by the guerilla movements in the war against Ian Smith's Rhodesian government in the 1960s and 1970s, where history has been edited to make Mugabe the sole military leader. For a majority of Zimbabweans to have voted against ZANU-PF would thus appear an act of apostasy from the national faith, to which the people have to be reconciled, by force if necessary.