guest column:Fr Oskar Wermter SJ WHEN many years ago I got to know a little boy of three years of age I said to him: “Michael, let’s go for a walk. I would like to see the fish in the dam.” Michael refused. “Handidi,” he said (“I don’t want to”). Practically everytime you invited him for a venture, he would reply, “handidi”. He was no longer Michael, I started to call him “Handidi”. He liked the fish. But he did not like to be asked to go and watch them. He wanted to do “his own thing”. Young as he was, he wanted to be “in control” over what to do and not to do. It is part of our growing up that we want to be in charge and take control. A boy loves his mother. But he also loves his freedom. She loves her son, too, in fact she is so concerned and anxious about him, that she is inclined to deny him this freedom to which he thinks he is entitled. Parents must not regard their sons and daughters as their lifelong babies. As the little ones grow up, warm loving care and affection may stifle their independence. The time comes when parents must let go. Their love must turn into friendship and tolerance. They cannot retain “full control”. The children must mature into grown-ups, no longer controlled, but released into freedom and able to follow their own paths. Giving freedom and responsibility to children, with confidence in them, that is perhaps the greatest act of parental love, provided it is based on guidance when they were young, so they are now trusting their elders. The relationship between husband and wife is not one where the two try to exercise power over each other; it should not be a rivalry for control, one trying to control the other. Total control and the ambition for unlimited power does not join man and woman together. Respect does and affection; empathy and loving kindness are like a welding torch bonding the two together and making them one. Control and power, force and violence — that is the stuff of politics. The settlers and immigrants did not know that this was Zimbabwe. They gave it a name they had invented, Rhodesia, and regarded it as their “own, a white man’s country”, and they were determined with enormous intransigence to keep it that way. Even settlers who had sympathy for the locals, many of them their workers and employees, insisted that they, who had developed a farming industry here, must remain in control and retain power, even with the use of military force. They lost the war and were ejected from the seat of power. But they bequeathed their obsession with power and absolute control to those who had vanquished them. They buried their guns only to dig them up again for a very bloody war with their enemies (Gukurahundi, 1983–1987). “Regime change” was “out” for owners determined to retain control of the land for ever. The new democratic constitution knows “regime change” only by the ballot, which is the democratic way. But the “ruling party” considered itself as being entitled to holding on to power and retaining total control on the basis of their military victory which cannot be undone. “
