adminIts 2245hrs, on Wednesday, we are sitting by the bar counter at Bulawayo’s Cape to Cairo in–the pub whose name is a reminder of Cecil John Rhodes’ dream to dismember Africa from the south stretching up the far north.
More revellers are trickling in –slowly filling the bar to the brim, the music is getting louder. The discussion with my comrade is getting more interesting. I am taking it slow on my Fanta because of my traditional dislike of carbonated beverages.
As the hype in this drinking auditorium is reaching its peak, my colleague clad in khakis storms: There is a resource/power equity gap between Africa’s youth and the liberation generation! He moves his chair closer to mine so that I do not miss out on what he has been reiterating all this time. It’s his natural habit. Whenever Cde Dingilizwe Zvavanhu gets drunk everybody must know that he is a living hero of the second-Chimurenga –including the random strangers he meets during his drinking escapades. I am sure those who meet this pan-African-socialist for the first time during such moments always wonder why he is relentlessly passionate about chronicling his liberation credentials.
Nonetheless, Zvavanhu is a typical template of the‘Nzira dzemasoja dzekuzvibata nadzo’ creed. Besides it all, Zvavanhu is a political-science doctorate degree holder. It’s mainly during these moments when Cde Dingilizwe Zvavanhu gives emphasis on how today’s youth have abortively preserved the liberation legacy. As a result, he argues “the youth will continue failing to understand what it means to be truly free and how the gains of this freedom can be manipulated for the benefit of this generation”.
This is why the greater part of the youths’ space in politics will revolve around banal grammars of disgruntlement, disenfranchisement and regime change. Much of these retrogressive grammars (borrowed from neo-colonial patronage) convey no optimistic prospects of the future as if the youth are deliberately punished by some past which they owe what they know not. However, the truth is that today’s youth owe the past voluntary willingness to be partakers of a renewed process of political, economic and social continuity borrowed from the efforts made by the founding fathers of the modern African continent. This view was broadly canonised by the just ended 28th Ordinary Summit of the African Union (AU) which ran under the theme: “Harnessing the Demographic Dividend through Investments in the Youth”.
But, then what is this gap which Cde Zvavanhu was talking about? Is this gap a creation of neo-colonial divisive innuendoes?
Is this gap a reflection of the nationalist generation’s failure to create sustainable frameworks for youth development in Africa? As I came to terms with the weight of these fundamental questions it also came to mind that the processes of nationalism across Africa were youth-led.
During that period, the youth were the promising future of African freedom and inevitably the passing of time has turned that hope to a reality. Yesterday’s youth are now the decorated symbols of today’s freedom. Therefore, as it stands, today’s youth belong to that perpetual recycle process which is slowly framing the future of Africa. Indeed the youth are hope of the continent’s future and it is the youth’s willingness to partake in the struggle for Africa’s continuity and sustaining the legacies of pan-Africanism and nationalism. That way Africa will move towards progressive ends of genuine liberation – away from poverty and under-development.
For that reason, we need to reflect on the contribution of yesterday’s heroes to our current political space and all its challenges. At the same time, we need to draw lessons from how the liberation generation has managed to consolidate its current political power.
However, in attempting to do that, it is not appropriate to disrespect some leaders’ long service of the continent and misrepresent their servitude to their respective nations and the continent as dictatorship. Julius Malema’s denigration of President Mugabe to that effect is a dove-tailing example. It is not logical for a young leader claiming Afrocentric political ideological inclination like Malema to only notice failures of the classical generation of Africa’s leaders –President Mugabe in particular. Again, it is also erroneous for Malema to categorise ZANU-PF supporters as cowards for supporting President Mugabe against the wish of colonialists.
Does Malema forget that the same “ZANU-PF cowards” and the people of Zimbabwe are the initiators of the Black majority rightful land restoration process which he failed to meaningfully advance during his tenure as the ANC youth leader?
As if that is not enough, it is unAfrican for young African politicians to prescribe to the neo-colonial panacea of Africa’s problems. That panacea is the unpopular and irrational call for the abrupt and unconstitutional termination of office terms of African leaders perceived as radicals in the eyes of the West. I wish Malema could take notes from Thabo Mbeki’s thesis of African solutions for African problems. Malema should also understand that Africa’s political paradigm is guided by vintage ethics of self-determination and distinct guidelines of continuity. Against this background,
I found it prudent to engage views of my former lecturer at MSU, Mr Simbarashe Moyo (2015) who wrote a book titled, African nationalism and the struggle for continuity: A case of post-independence Zimbabwe.
The correspondent intellectual tie with Moyo during the penning process of the above named publication was a thought-provoking venture. For the first time I had to digest Simbarashe Moyo’s academic opinions on the Zimbabwean political terrain outside the tutorial rooms of the Midlands State University (MSU). As stated by Paulo Freire (1972) the classroom affair is a dictated construct of the teacher and the taught. I shared this kind of relationship with Moyo (2015) in the second year of my undergrad-degree course.
However, it was an honour to be entrusted the mandate to read the raw-extracts of his work and forwarding recommendations on how the text was to be structured. At least such a task exposed me to the mind-set of one who is not just a teacher, but an intellectual-equal willing to cross-pollinate his ideas with everyone regardless of their rank within the intellectual scalar chain. Usually, the merits of such an exercise helps develop a literal piece that speaks to all levels of intellect, even outside the university vicinity.
Thus enabling the dispersal of informed thoughts to be consumed by individuals in search of particular truths that have remained locked up in “reserve-sections” of college libraries. In that regard Moyo’s work communicates with all researchers – from beginners right up to the veterans.
Above all, it’s an engaging read for all interested in understanding the politics of regime survival and nationalism in general.
The book has a fitting appeal to readers of Political Science, International Relations and Diplomacy Studies. The wider audience of this book includes public policy formulators and activists. It is a good read for politicians in general and, above all, is a “must read” for future African statesmen whose time to captain the ship of nationalism is at hand.
Moyo (2015) laconically captures the Zimbabwean political conundrum and is intelligently inclusive in how it speaks of nationalism in an African context. Its main framework pillars are nation and regime behaviours and these have a universal application in the appreciation of global politics. Though the content is Afro-centric, the articulated phenomenon is reflective of international politics. It is a peek into nation-making by a self-informed coterie of realist-minded politicians not averse to using any mechanism to stay in power.
The book illustrates the evolution of a nationalist party to a guerrilla outfit to a ruling regime by tracing the “continuity” – using as a template a country whose regime has used ideology as a tool for its own longevity in office.
The conceptual underpinnings of nationhood and regime survival construct the major subject of the book. Through a depolarising intention African nationalism and the struggle for continuity: A case of post-independence Zimbabwe looks at the delayed 1980 liberal dawn as a manifestation of political realism on the part of the regime. In the same manner Moyo (2015) expresses how the success of regime survival is at the root of the disgruntlement and joys of diverse sections of the nation. Obviously this means a drawback on the nation-building agenda and is thus a fulfilment of Franz Fanon’s political prophecy on the future of third-world countries:
“And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonisation and decolonisation are simply a question of relative strength.” (Fanon, F 1963).
Contrary to the widely propagated anti-establishment discourses, Moyo argues that the manifestation of a seemingly “arbitrary rule” in Zimbabwe was a means to an end for regime survival. The offered justifications of regime survival as a politically correct order gives life to the realist theory in this book.
The writer is not concerned with how a state “ought to be”. He is concerned about the genuine political behaviours of the state given the addressed position of Zimbabwe’s power contestations since 1980. In that regard, it would not be wrong to recommend this piece of work as a handbook for political scientists interested in making modern day Machiavellian experiments in fulfilling their political consultancy roles. The ZANU-PF government’s survival strategies explored in this book form good experimental ingredients that can help political scientists to prescribe survival models for nations in the making.
This book comes as an essential requisite for other regimes in Africa facing internal and external survival challenges.
Vivid analytical illustrations are handy in explaining how Zimbabwean nationalism formed a unique feature of African post-colonial identity. The explained issues on nationalism help the reader to see its two-faced character. The writer doesn’t omit the key issues that favour and sabotage the transitional character of the aims of nationalism.
To start with sabotage forces, the listed culprits are violence, hegemony, electoral-fraud, mal-administration, suppressed plurality, poor policy design and implementation. In Moyo’s perspective Zimbabwe harbours all these challenges to African nationalism’s evolutionary process to meet regime survival interests.
At the same time Zimbabwe is still playing a significant role in the representation of third-world countries in the international system. Other African states are ordered to emulate Zimbabwe in terms of its resistance to challenges of Western hegemony.
Moyo treats Zimbabwe as the most instrumental custodian of nationalism due to the radical policies that the country used to counter Western political interests –a stance feared by most African countries.
However, a distant analytical observer of the subject at hand may be illusively deceived to think that the book continues the legacy of “patriotic history.” A closer assessment of the given assertions would reveal that the author decided to focus on politically-correct models of regime survival versus construction of nationhood and its continuity.
Above all the text offers justification templates for African nationalism to be a relevant force of pushing the centre.
ZANU-PF’s de-link from the West is a sign of Africa’s endless abilities to stand on her feet. Basically, this is the main message in this edition of African nationalism and the struggle for continuity: A case of Zimbabwe.
It would be a mistake if any reader interested in African political identities ignores this piece of work. I would have loved to share more of this book’s rich facts, but that would not be necessary after Moyo’s efforts of preparing this good read for you. I hope its condensed matter will find lodgment in the malleable minds of all its consumers.
Mayibuye!
Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network-LAN. Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on [email protected].
Online Reporter