(MISA/IFEX) – Poet Sikumbuzo Dube faces a one-year prison sentence and a Z$20,000 (approx. US$370, £250) fine for writing and reciting a poem ridiculing President Robert Mugabe. Ridiculing the president is a crime under the Public Order and Security Act. Dube, twenty-five years old, is one of thousands of illegal Zimbabwean migrants who have been […]
(MISA/IFEX) – Poet Sikumbuzo Dube faces a one-year prison sentence and a Z$20,000 (approx. US$370, £250) fine for writing and reciting a poem ridiculing President Robert Mugabe. Ridiculing the president is a crime under the Public Order and Security Act.
Dube, twenty-five years old, is one of thousands of illegal Zimbabwean migrants who have been deported from Botswana. During the week of 18 March 2002, he was being held after repatriation at Plumtree Prison, on Zimbabwe’s western border, when warders overheard him reciting a composition entitled “Cry, the Beloved Country”. This is the first case of its kind.
The Public Order and Security Act was signed into law by Mugabe shortly before the March presidential elections (see IFEX alerts of 18 February, 15 and 11 January 2002, 29, 23 and 21 November 2001). The act bars criticism of the seventy-eight-year-old head of state and has empowered police to break up opposition briefings for diplomats and journalists. Prince Butshe-Dube, the Plumtree prosecutor, said the poem triggered a furor in the prison. Inmates were divided into two camps, those who enjoyed the poem and those who felt offended by it.
The title was taken from Alan Paton’s novel set in South Africa in the 1940s, but the full text was not disclosed in court. Dube, who was remanded in custody for trial scheduled for 3 April, told Jabulani Sibanda, the Plumtree magistrate, that he thought it was not a serious crime to ridicule the president as newspapers printed worse criticism than his poem and nothing was done to them.
