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| author/source:Star (SA) |
| published:Tue 13-Jan-2004 |
| posted on this site:Wed 14-Jan-2004 |
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| Article Type : News |
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| She is now a foreigner in her own country. Robbed of her birthright, as thousands more will be of theirs |
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By Allister Sparks.
Meet Judy Todd, an icon of our sub-continent who has just been robbed of her birthright. Judy was born in Zimbabwe in 1943 and spent most of her adult life engaged in the titanic struggle for her country's independence. She was among those who joyously celebrated when President Robert Mugabe came to power in 1980. Now, in one of its more egregious acts, the Mugabe government has stripped Todd of her citizenship. Just as the old apartheid regime did to so many black South Africans, it has turned her into a statutory foreigner in the land of her birth. The reason? She has become critical of the government's human rights abuses.
It is President Thabo Mbeki's belief that the only reason there is such a global outcry over Zimbabwe is because a few whites have been hurt. He believes the Western world has been relatively indifferent to the suffering of millions of black people in other African countries, but injustices inflicted on a handful of whites in Zimbabwe has thrown the West into a frenzy, with demands that he should do something about it. He sees this as racist and it angers him. I expect therefore that he will see my outrage at what has been done to Todd in the same light. No doubt there is a grain of truth in Mbeki's complaint, certainly as far as the British media is concerned. But the trouble with his perception is that it blinds him to the fact that what is happening in Zimbabwe goes far beyond injuring a few whites. It is the unfolding of a major African tragedy in which a once prosperous country - an African success story - is being wilfully vandalised.
The same with Todd. Yes, she is white (though that in itself should not be of concern to a party founded on the principle of non-racialism), but what has been done to her is also being done to many others who are not white. It is part of a major act of political "cleansing". At least 2-million Zimbabweans are first-generation citizens whose parents came from Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi to work on Zimbabwe's prosperous commercial farms and in its mines. With Mugabe's destruction of the economy, these people have lost their jobs - and not surprisingly many have become supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. In a move clearly aimed at disenfranchising them, the Mugabe government passed a Citizenship Act three years ago to force anyone entitled to a second citizenship, by birth or ancestry, to renounce it or be stripped of their Zimbabwe citizenship.
Todd's father, Sir Garfield Todd, was one of the first victims. Sir Garfield was himself a towering figure in the Zimbabwe struggle, an implacable enemy of Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front government. He was born in New Zealand and came to what was then Southern Rhodesia as a 23-year-old missionary in 1934. With his wife Grace they threw themselves into hands-on missionary work, building schools, teaching and helping to improve agricultural methods among the peasantry. They came to know many of the bright young people who later formed the core of the independence movement - among them Ndabaningi Sithole, first leader of the Zanu party, and Mugabe himself, who got his first job as a teacher in one of Todd's schools. Todd entered politics in 1948 as the most liberal member of the ruling United Rhodesia Party (URP). When the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was formed four years later, most senior members of the URP moved into federal government, leaving Todd to take over as prime minister of Southern Rhodesia.
But he was far too liberal for the conservative white Rhodesians and was ousted by Edgar Whitehead. Then in 1960 Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front swept the URP into oblivion. The long, hard years of the war of independence followed, during which Todd identified with and gave covert assistance to many of the black nationalists. Smith detained and house-arrested him. When Mugabe came to power in 1980, he promptly recognised Todd's long commitment to the struggle by making him a senator, saying he wanted "those who had dishonoured him see him being honoured". Six years later Mugabe supported a further honour when the Queen knighted Todd. But when Sir Garfield became critical of Mugabe's policies in recent years, the president invoked his new law to strip him of his citizenship and his vote on the eve of the 2002 presidential election. He died that year.
Judy Todd is very much her father's daughter. Soft-spoken and seemingly reserved, she is in fact tough and indomitable. When Smith detained her father, she abandoned her journalism studies at New York's Columbia University and returned to Rhodesia at the age of 22 to become an activist in her jailed father's place. She too was imprisoned, thrown into the maximum security section of a male prison. She promptly went on a hunger strike. When efforts to force feed her caused her to lose consciousness and come close to death it made world headlines. Judy Todd not only lent support to the liberation movements of her own country but had strong links with members of the ANC. When our own time for change came, she was a member of the Commonwealth observer team at our historic 1994 election. But, as with her father, the Mugabe regime found her criticisms of its abuses unacceptable. In 2001 the Registrar-General of Citizenship, Tobaiwa Mudede, refused to renew her passport on the grounds that her father's birth in New Zealand gave her a right to that country's citizenship.
Todd challenged the ruling and in May 2002 the High Court ordered Mudede to renew her passport. Instead Mudede appealed to the Supreme Court, which by that time had been "cleansed" with the appointment of new politically compliant judges. In February 2002 the Supreme Court handed down a judgment saying Todd was a citizen of both Zimbabwe and New Zealand. "For the avoidance of doubt," the convoluted judgment added, "the respondent has two days within which to renounce her New Zealand citizenship. In the event of her failure to do so, she will lose her Zimbabwean citizenship." Todd did what she was ordered, but the New Zealand authorities responded that since she had never claimed New Zealand citizenship they could not help her renounce what she did not have.As her temporary passport expired, Todd found herself stranded in Bulawayo with no citizenship and no travel documents. Her lawyers took up the matter with the minister, deputy minister and permanent secretary of home affairs, but to no avail. Eventually, exhausted and exasperated, Todd did what she had long vowed she would not do. She applied for a New Zealand passport last month. So she is now a foreigner in her own country. Robbed of her birthright, as thousands more will be of theirs.
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