Dzikamai Bere is the National Director of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights), the country’s first and largest post-independence indigenous human rights advocacy group. Founded in 1992, ZimRights brings together more than 250,000 members who stand up for their freedoms of association and assembly. Bere began his career in the judiciary but early on turned toward activism, driven by a belief that lasting change starts in local communities. For our occasional series “Human Rights in Five” he answers five questions about becoming an activist and how human rights helps communities.
1. What was the specific moment or experience that made you decide that you were going to do this work; that made you realize that if you didn’t do something, no one else would?
It is a journey. Like I always say, you don’t find activism — activism finds you. In the face of injustice and in the moment of responding, you find yourself becoming an activist.
When I look back at my journey, it goes way back into my childhood. My first confrontation with injustice was in secondary school, where I witnessed a member of staff abusing a female colleague. I spoke out — I was very young then, not sophisticated, not diplomatic. And because I raised my voice, the system, as they always do, descended on me. I was punished in a great way.
Fast forward to university: I was appointed as Special Projects Editor for a student magazine called The Varsity Post, where I started interacting with activism, sharing students’ grievances.
I never took that beyond campus until 2008, when I was working as a magistrate. The conditions for judicial officers deteriorated significantly. At that point, magistrates and prosecutors decided to go on strike. I was one of the people who stepped forward to fight for their rights. That campaign allowed me to reflect: do I want to be a judicial officer, or do I want to do something else?
In that reflection, in February 2008, I stepped down as a magistrate to join civil society and fight for human rights. I felt I needed to be closer to the ground, to where the action is, and to openly speak out. I had always spoken out — I was writing under a pseudonym, organizing here and there — but when I resigned as a magistrate, I felt a new lease of freedom to speak openly and to act truthfully.
2. Have you ever questioned your path in human rights work? How did you overcome these doubts?
Initially, before I joined ZimRights, I was working for the Human Rights NGO Forum, and I experienced that moment of reflection, which was triggered by the fact that ZimRights was a people’s movement, was in trouble.
We were having conversations around reviving ZimRights, those conversations made me realize that human rights work is not a career — it’s a vocation. And it comes at a very personal cost. While you may enjoy the work you are doing as a young activist, you also must be alert to the factors that will sabotage your passion for the work, including economic factors. You look back and ask yourself: can this pay the bills? Many times, it fails to pay the bills.
How did I overcome that? I had a very good family that stood with me and said, ‘You can do this.’ Luckily, I also had alternative forms of income, which allowed me at that time to make that significant sacrifice.
A second level of support came from peers and mentors in the communities. As repression becomes more sophisticated, activism also has to evolve and become complex in order to confront the systems of power and shift the power to the people. You are not able to do that without the mentorship you need. The pressure sometimes can actually put you down.
3. What role do you think the international community – organisations like the UN – should play in supporting human rights defenders?
There are two levels for this struggle. Our vision at ZimRights is a society in which communities actively lead in creating and sustaining a culture of human rights. The key words in that vision are community leadership, meaning the people who experience the violations directly. But they are unable to do that on their own, which is why international solidarity is very important.
To quote a colleague: international solidarity is the currency of small men who cannot master the power of arms or the finances of the big corporates and has to depend on solidarity to confront powerful systems.
And we know that politicians, who are the primary duty bearers for rights, respond to that critical mass. They respond to the international community.
4. Can you talk about a specific case or project you are working on right now and its importance to the community?
We are currently running a campaign called the Protection of Vulnerable Communities campaign, (PVC).
The story of this campaign is a very sad one. It goes back to 2022, when we went to a community called in rural Kariba. That community is home to minority tribe in Zimbabwe of the BaTonga people, who were displaced around the 1950s during the construction of Kariba Dam, a huge regional project that supplies hydroelectricity to the region.
But can you believe it? Until June 2023, [this community] had never seen electricity. There is energy poverty in that area, and these are the people whose ancestors paid the ultimate price for us to have electricity.
That is just one example of many vulnerable communities.
Reflections on these issues allowed us to launch the Protection of Vulnerable Communities campaign. During the preliminary work, we called on the government to look at the plight of these communities. Some tokenism did come out of it — for example, they did connect electricity to the clinic in the community, so we celebrate that. But the communities themselves still have no electricity largely.
Now we are pushing to repeal legislation that we think enhances the marginalization of communities, such as the Communal Lands Act and the Vagrancy Act. Our vision is to see Zimbabwe put in place what we are calling the Protection of Vulnerable Communities Act. This would first remove the existing laws that strengthen the culture of marginalizing vulnerable communities, and second, put in a legal framework that actually allows us as a community to deal with the root causes of marginalization rather than simply condemning it.
5. Is there a seemingly small victory in your human rights work that has had far more significant impact on an individual or community?
On 12 April 2023, we launched the People’s Human Rights Manifesto, part of our Shifting Power to the People strategy. It came out of conversations we were having with our members about how elections, which are supposed to have an empowering impact on communities in Zimbabwe, have actually developed a disempowering impact on the communities.
Through analysis, we identified three forms of power that needed to be dismantled.
One is the culture of bribery, where politicians think they can just come to the community, distribute goodies, get votes, and then go back home and forget about those communities.
The second one is what we call cultism, where elections have become more like a beauty contest. It’s not about what you stand for, it’s about who you are. Politicians parade themselves, get votes, and then never care about the communities.
The third one is violence, where politicians deploy violence, they throw the fear of god in communities, and communities rush and vote for them.
We were saying that when politicians come to communities, it is no longer time for them to think they’re the ones who know what the community wants and [deliver] manifestos with no goodwill.
But the communities developed a list of the ten key priorities you find in the People’s Human Rights Manifesto. So when the politicians come, instead of telling the communities, ‘This is what you want, this is what we’re going to give you,’ the communities say, ‘Come, sit down, you keep quiet and we will tell you what we want.’ Beyond this, they asked the politicians to sign up to the commitments. Six parties, including the ruling parties, have signed this manifesto, and we can see post-election, ZimRights [members] are using the manifesto to hold those leaders to account.
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