On January 4, the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law launched the inaugural Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series featuring activist leader Jenni Williams of the Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) organization. Williams captivated an audience of 70 with her harrowing account of the persecution and violence non-violent activists face at the hands of the repressive Mugabe regime.

Jenni Williams, a Zimbabwean activist, spoke Tuesday as part of the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series. Williams is national coordinator of Women of Zimbabwe, Arise!, or WOZA, a nonviolent organization that protests against human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

“We are human-rights defenders to the nation, mothers to the nation…we defy unjust laws and take our issues to the streets to find a nonviolent way of protesting,” Williams said after showing her audience a slideshow titled “Zimbabwe’s Elections: 30 Years of Torment, Torture & Death,” which depicted images of torture under Robert Mugabe’s regime in her homeland.

Following the slideshow and a video showing members of WOZA protesting for proper electricity, Williams started her speech on a somber note.

“2011 is going to be a year of hell in Zimbabwe, so excuse me for not saying, ‘Happy New Year,’” she said.

“If my grandchildren cannot get a better Zimbabwe, they will think of me badly. We have to correct the past wrongs and re-establish the social dignity of our people.”
-Jenni Williams

In a country where the average life expectancy for women is 37 years, the unemployment rate is 94 percent and Mugabe has been in charge for 30 years, leading a regime accused of corruption, nepotism, bribery and human rights abuse, WOZA seeks to bring democracy and justice to Zimbabwe, she said.

“We aim to mobilize through civic education,” she said. “We capacitate ordinary people with skills for community leadership…we’re creating a society where no new Robert Mugabe can flourish.”

WOZA has carried out 35 street demonstrations in the last 18 months. The grassroots organization relies on ordinary Zimbabweans. Both women and men have swelled its ranks to 75,000 members.

“Our activists are not the employed or the ones who go to university,” Williams said. “They are ordinary people struggling for ordinary everyday things that the politicians needs to be focused on.”

After choosing to remain in Zimbabwe despite mass exodus and the migration of her husband and children to the UK, she has been arrested 33 times, including after the electricity protest. She was held in prison for six days, then returned to her activism once she was freed.

Williams also moves between safe houses in Zimbabwe every six months and was at one time under risk of assassination, she said.

Nonetheless, Williams said, she believes fully in nonviolence, quoting Gandhi and saying, “We love anyone, even our enemies.”

“She’s a pioneer for protecting human rights,” said Davis Albohm, a graduate student in African studies. “She’s doing incredible work that I think a lot of people would not be brave enough to undertake.”

Williams credited her fellow WOZA members for their achievements.

“A shared burden is a burden lightened,” she said. “Our organization has empowered people. We’ve trained them to be human-rights defenders…we see the Zimbabwe we want in our mind’s eye, and we feel it in our hearts.”

Williams said Zimbabwe’s political environment “remains highly violent, uncertain and tense,” speaking of the very real possibility that President Mugabe, now 86, will die in power before opposition defeats him.

Williams said her group’s goals went beyond simply deposing Mugabe.

“Robert Mugabe is only the face of a political system…we want to put the democratic yeast within the society so the loaf will rise,” she said.

Victoria Alvarado ’14 said the talk was “very, very emotionally striking.”

“I found myself in tears at points. She came here to show us that we can help,” Alvarado said.

Williams’ suggestion to the audience was to “appreciate what you have and protect your own rights and freedoms. We need a model to copy.”

And on why she continued to fight a dangerous struggle, Williams cited the future, not only of her nation but of her family.

“If my grandchildren cannot get a better Zimbabwe, they will think of me badly,” she said. “We have to correct the past wrongs and re-establish the social dignity of our people.”

The Program on Human Rights at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) in partnership with the Stanford Humanities Center, kicked off the first public event of the Human Well-Being and Human Rights Collaboratory series on November 30th to mark the debut of the book, Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives.  Director of the CDDRL Human Rights Program, Helen Stacy, introduced this event as part of a larger interdisciplinary research effort at Stanford University to examine the condition of human-well being and universal values from the bottom-up. Stacy explained that the language of human rights is often dominated by government actors and lawyers, who rarely hear the voices of victims and grassroots leaders in the policymaking environment.  This event focused on the human rights crisis in Zimbabwe, providing a platform for stories of human tragedy that put a face to victims who are often grouped together in anonymity. 

Stanford was the first venue for editors Peter Orner, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco University and Annie Holmes, Zimbabwean writer, editor, and filmmaker, to introduce their book to the public. Hope Deferred is the culmination of over 50 interviews the editors conducted in Zimbabwe and neighboring countries to capture the individual testimonies and document the lives of a diverse group of Zimbabweans devastated by the reign of terror that engulfed their country in 2000. Zimbabwe is one of the most well documented human rights crises in the world, but personal accounts of murder, rape, economic ruin, and human tragedy are missing from the mainstream dialogue. Orner and Holmes conveyed the magnitude of these events by providing first-person accounts of victims, culminating in an oral history of a crisis that has engulfed a nation of over 12 million people in economic and social ruin.

The editors read passages from their book and engaged in dialogue with Dr. Stacy, recounting the heartbreaking tales of opposition activists whose families were brutalized by the ZANU-PF, young women raped by soldiers, farmers evicted from their land, and soldiers who perpetuated these crimes at the hands of the government.  All of these individuals shared the common language of pain but sought to provide their personal testimony to begin the healing process.  The editors' hope that the emotional narratives of Hope Deferred will stir the attention of the international community and open up dialogue around the current crisis in Zimbabwe. The audience was clearly moved by these stories, directing poignant questions to Orner and Holmes about the Zimbabwean crisis, Mugabe's grip on power, and the impact of the refugee population on South Africa. 

While, the situation in Zimbabwe remains unsolved, this event and the series supporting it seeks to elevate the human narratives at the core of human-well being, and to place deeper humanistic understandings at the heart of the policy and legal responses to human rights crises.