Zimbabwe bloggers shine a light on their troubled country

"I note that there are no officers in the line, which is good as it means there's nobody to order the cops to start hitting me," he writes. "But then again if they do start hitting me there's no one to tell them to stop."

The "fat white man" is not just some cheeky cyberdissident -- he's a British diplomat named Philip Barclay. His blog is found on the official British Foreign Office website.

Barclay's exhilaratingly undiplomatic https://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/harare, at https://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/harare/, veers from humor reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves books to bleak horror. Zimbabwe, he says, is a country where "good manners and repression go hand-in-hand."

With most of Zimbabwe's independent newspapers shut down by President Robert Mugabe's authoritarian regime, bloggers and cyberactivists fill the vacuum. It's a world peopled with intelligence agents from the old white-led Rhodesian government, pumping out news updates; fleeing journalists who have parachuted into the wide, blue freedom of the Internet; and emigres who left the country 10 or 15 years ago but can't get it out of their systems. But the most compelling blogs are from the people who have stayed home.

There are those who write everything in red, capitalized italics, calling for the violent removal of Mugabe. There are whimsical letters from the bush. There's poetry. And there's more than the occasional outbreak of whining.

In short, it's a world filled with as much paranoia, rumor, frustration, stoicism, humor, rage and wild hope as the country itself.

Bev Clark, who calls herself an "electronic activist" and helped found a website named kubatana.net, portrays Zimbabwe's bizarre contradictions and numbing frustrations with wry, cynical humor that sometimes bubbles into anger.

Comrade Fatso, a lanky, dreadlocked Zimbabwean poet whose real name is Samm Farai Monro, elegantly captures the atmosphere of a country that is waiting, trapped, afraid.