By Mashingaidze Gomo

THE 16 days dedicated to activism against violence towards women and children have come to an end.
It was a time of conferences and speeches heavily sponsored by Western-driven regime-change non-governmental organisations (NGOs).  
It was a time of accolades for both men and women who have made money peddling lies regarding the proneness of African men to violence.
For Western-sponsored regime change agents, it was time to talk against ZANU PF men, African soldiers and African men as the perpetrators of violence against African women and children.
Generally, Zimbabweans were asked to walk the talk in their fight against violence towards women and children.
And yet, while it all felt the morally perfect thing to defend our own women and children, one feels that the wider implications are not so sensitive to the interests of the purported beneficiaries.  
The Western-sponsored media stereotype of the African woman does not promote her dignity.
It does not acknowledge five centuries in which the black woman, her black man and their black children were enslaved by white men and white women to economically empower their white children.
It does not acknowledge Nehanda, Joice Mujuru, Oppah Muchinguri and Freedom Nyamubaya among other women, as freedom fighters who had to take up arms not against black men, but white men like David Coltart, Iain Kay, Roy Bennett and the apartheid war criminal Mike Campbell among other racists who defended the abuse of black women by white men.
In the foregoing regard, the importunate portrayal of the black woman as the victim of senseless violence by savage, power-hungry black men then comes across as a shameless assault on the black woman’s intellect and dignity.
The perfect truth is that the black woman of today is many, many more other critical things besides the defenceless and battered woman portrayed in Western media.
That the black woman has survived centuries of the most traumatic abuse by white people is no small feat.
It testifies to incredible stamina of spirit and the will to survive.
And, if Western sponsors of the savage-blackman-and-battered-blackwoman stereotype do not draw global attention to this most irrefutable of the black woman’s strengths then, they must just shut up. And on their part, black women must know that no dignity accrues to the image of a battered black woman who stands helplessly in hope that the former slave master who still wants to exploit her will rescue her from the abuse she survived in spite of him.
And, in another sense also, one feels that the phrase violence against women and children is in its very essence a criminal charge against African men for a crime that knows no colour, party or creed, but that yet is deliberately ill-defined to force-fit a neo-colonial conspiracy.
It puts the black man in the dock for injustices and abuses originally institutionalised by slavery and colonialism, and are (especially in Zimbabwe) today sponsored by Western neo-colonialism through regime-change NGOs.
The world must know that it is not black men who created slave-breeding farms in Europe and America.
It is not black men who vandalised Sarah Baartman’s humanity, mutilated her black womanhood and proceeded to exhibit it as an obscene sexual curiosity for close to two centuries in a French Museum. It is not black men who hanged Nehanda for resisting the colonial dispossession of both black men and women.
It is not black men who terrorised Winnie Mandela in apartheid South Africa.
It is not black men who are sponsoring the regime-change wars that are spawning child soldiers in resource-rich African countries.
And, it should never be forgotten that we were all once black children abused by the Rhodesians who are now purporting to be support the rights of black children.
Further to this, I also know that lesbians, who are the exclusive beneficiaries of their own womanhood, are not a blessing to virile men. And, I also know that in the same manner gay men who have no eyes for women are not a blessing to women and children.
While gays do not like women and their relationships produce no children, they are predatory to children born out of normal loving relationships between men and women because nature’s basic provision is heterosexual.
And it should never be forgotten that homosexual rights are a Western agenda aimed at dehumanising African societies into a moral directionless that compromises their capacity to resist racist abuse.
Homosexuals are the terminal beneficiaries of the gift of life and it is impeccable logic to reason that there cannot be a crime worse than one that threatens the reproduction of life.
And to say that homosexual rights are human rights is a sinister joke.
Human rights pre-suppose the existence of human beings to invoke and enjoy the rights.
Therefore, if homosexual relationships are terminal regarding the reproduction or regeneration of human life (i.e. the love for women and production of children) then surely, no society that talks about the rights of women and children should tolerate any rights that exclude the same women and children.
HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS and the RIGHTS OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN are mutually exclusive in their wider and more critical implications.
Black people (especially black women) must therefore question why the white sponsors of homosexual rights in Africa are the same ones purporting to champion the rights of women and children who would be the direct victims of the perversion.
The point of this writing is that there are many other dignified ways of looking at African women than as the victims of senseless violence.
The battered woman is actually the exception rather than the epitome or stereotype of black womanhood.
There are several factors that give me legitimacy to comment on the campaign against violence towards women.
I am a black Zimbabwean man born of a black woman I loved very much.
I have female siblings I love very much.
I have an elder sister who used to thrash me and a younger sister I used to thrash not in an act of willful gender violence, but because we were siblings and it is in the nature of siblings to fight.
Today, I am married to a woman I love very much.
But, there are times I don’t want her around me, in the same manner she wants me out of the house when her friends come to gossip.
She says: “Mari yedoro iyi.
“Chiendai kune vamwe varume.”
And, I am old enough to know and accept kuti there are areas of her life where I don’t fit in as much as there are also areas of my life in which she doesn’t fit.
And, it is not wrong and therefore nothing to apologise for.   
It is simply the way things are.
And then, I have female friends I cannot imagine living without.
They are my confidantes.
They have often said to me: “Friendships with men are more comfortable because vakadzi vane makuhwa.”
And I have often said to myself, if it is true kuti vakadzi vane makuhwa, where does it leave me with them as their confidante?
And then, sometimes I feel guilty of loving my daughters more than my son and I know that most fathers are like that, in as much as most mothers are so in love with their sons that they consider their daughters-in-law as rivals.
And because of that, invariably consider their spoilt mothers-in-law as witches out to destroy their happiness as a separate family unit.
And the ultimatum many a man has been given by his loving wife has been: “If you really love me as you say you do, let us find a place of our own, away from your interfering mother (NOT FATHER). If you don’t, then I am leaving, wozonditsvaga kana wava ready.”