The play showcased at Jasen Mphepo Little Theatre last night titled ‘Chindunduma’ and directed by Tafadzwa Bob Mutumbi coincided with the commemoration of the 75th year of the Nakba, the catastrophe of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, dispersal, dehumanization, and denial of the inalienable rights for the Palestinian people.
In 1948, Palestinians witnessed the traumatic loss of their homeland, and the dispossession tragically continues to this day inflicting untold misery and indignities on an entire nation.
Seventy-five years later, the Nakba remains a human, moral, legal, and political tragedy of an ongoing settler-colonial project predicated on the persecution and forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinian people, depriving them of their right to return and right to self-determination and independence; assaulting their physical presence and their national, social and cultural tapestry; and distorting their history, renaming geography, and manipulating demography.
The Nakba is a continuum of injustice, compounded by a blatant settler colonial regime that employs racist, discriminatory laws aimed at the theft of the land, subjugation of the indigenous people, and normalization of the intended permanence of their oppression.
While marking this somber occasion is a painful endeavor, it is also an opportunity to recognize the resilience of the Palestinian people, who have persevered across generations and defied the odds while at the same time continuing to positively engage the world and contribute to human advancement in all fields.
They continue to defend their unassailable right to life, freedom, self- determination, return, and reparations, undeterred by the brutality meted against them by the Israeli colonizers and by the failure of the international community to do right by them and help them to bring an end to this ongoing catastrophe.
The Chindunduma cast comprises Michael Kudakwashe, Rayne Chiramba, and Charmaine Mujeri graphically portrayed the grief of the Palestine people under the Israeli apartheid regime.
The story centred on a young Palestine family which had its budding footballer killed in a bomb blast while playing soccer. The boy had ambitions to bring the World Cup to Palestine. The father was separated from his family at a refugee camp in their home. Now domiciled in Europe, he has not been able to reunite with his family including his daughter who was born later after the separation. His wife is nursing the sickly daughter and can’t access medical treatment because of the bombing of hospitals by the Israeli security forces.
According to ZimReview, the 45-minute play provoked debates on the complicity of the international community particularly the United Nations in condemning the Israeli security forces for the atrocities on Palestinian citizens. The media was also chastised for calling the standoff a conflict rather than a ‘genocide’.
“Palestine will continue to endeavor to establish worldwide recognition of the crime of the Nakba and to seek long overdue justice through accountability for all the war crimes, human rights abuses, and other violations of international law being committed against the Palestinian people by the regime of colonization and apartheid that continues the drive of ethnic cleansing and erasure that began seventy-five years ago.
“The Palestinian people will not relent, they will not go quietly into the night. They will persevere, confident that the arch of history shall bend in the direction of justice and freedom for Palestine,” said HE Tamer Almassri, the Ambassador of Palestine to Zimbabwe.
