adminKukanganwa chezuro nehope
As I proceed with last week’s discussion impelled by Simbarashe Moyo’s publication titled, African nationalism and the struggle for continuity:
A case of post-independence Zimbabwe; it is imperative for me to highlight that I have deliberately changed the caption of this series. In other words, today’s article would have read, “Africa: Does the past owe us anything? –part 2”.
However, for the purpose of engaging the responses I got after writing that piece; I have found it necessary to restructure the theme of today’s instalment in an attempt to react to the feedback I received from critical readers of this column.
On that same note, let me emphasise that the past owes us the humanity we lost to slavery and imperialism. The past owes our lost endowment to think in African terms in finding African solutions for African problems.
The past certainly has a huge debt to us for branding our race as primitive with no high intellectual right to exist within the global ecology of intellectualism.
The past owes us for its architecture of educated ignorance in the higher stratums of knowledge production. The past owes us for demonising African knowledge(s) and branding them “indigenous” with no relevance outside the continent’s borders yet each one of their universities has a “centre for African studies”.
However, within the political terrain it is clear for all to see that the past has doomed us with colonial hangovers.
That same grotesque past has legitimised the mimic of colonial approaches to modern public administration and governance issues in Africa. With all our broad claims to being post-colonial we are still disciples of Western reason.
The faculty of policy-making in Africa is still eavesdropping the colonial masters’ conversation about the development paradigm which Africa must take. Therefore, we cannot forget Africa’s historical horrors of yesterday as proverbially embedded in the wisdom of the Shona — in this case referring to anti-establishment spiritual intellectualism; “Kukanganwa chezuro nehope”.
Of democracy and human-rights scholars
This is the reason why many of our opposition parties in the continent only exist as franchise brands of Western countries’ foreign policies. They exist as catalysts of the West’s interference with the sovereignty of Africa’s nation-states. At the same time, the very same culture of Western breast-fed political reason produces an anti-African intellectual culture.
This is why most proponents of pan-Africanism, nationalism, African renaissance and decoloniality are viewed as mouthpieces of the establishment.
In this intellectual body, all knowledge that revisits the immorality and injustice of imperialism is seen as primordial —elementary — irrelevant and at the zenith of this educated ignorance, the past is branded prehistoric and not worth revisiting in an attempt to grapple with the source of Africa’s modern draw-backs —one of many being neo-imperialism.
In that same manner, the nationalist movements across the continent are viewed as nothing more than barbaric arbitrary forces sustained by deliberately immiserating their populace.
The battle between the grand-narrative and the anti-narrative
In simple terms, much of the regime change reason replicates what sociologists term the “anti-narrative”. Usually, anti-narrative refers to a flagrant/scandalous articulation of unnatural narratives which violate conventional narrative practices. Anti-narratives broadly refer to anecdotal chronologies, malformed narrative voices, selective amnesia or an extremely ignorant discourse. Of late, I have referred to many Zimbabwean anti-narratives, especially anti-establishment memoirs as re-membering(s) which dismember.
This is evident if one reads David Coltart’s book of a struggle (to exalt imperialism) which continues in the midst of a grand-narrative of national unity which every right thinking Zimbabwean longs for.
However, Dr Tafataona Mahoso offers a unique submission in an attempt to define what an anti-narrative is within the context of “Ben Freeth’s personal (nostalgic) motive for returning to Zimbabwe”. According to Dr Mahoso:
“Freeth, through the anti-narrative, turned out to be a sweeping crusader claiming to speak for ‘thousands of farmers and farm workers’ and seeking to cause the discredited Sadc Tribunal to be reinstated to its former status after it was suspended by the Sadc Heads of State.”
Ben Freeth is a leading anti-land reform proponent who lost his farm to the wave of the Third-Chimurenga’s Hondo yeminda. Just like that Rhodesian Campbell fellow, Freeth has been on the fore of engaging the Sadc tribunal to reinstate his ownership to the land that was conquered by land-hungry Zimbabweans inclusively leading to the fast-track Land Reform Programme in the late 90s.
Mahoso, therefore argues that Freeth is not different from his father-in-law Mike Campbell as they both symbolise an anti-narrative with no space in modern Zimbabwean political logic:
“By ‘anti-narrative’ I mean that the account is cast in a manner to defeat history, to contradict normal ways of seeking understanding through telling a story.
The account deliberately seeks to make a spectacle out of one man, his family and the one farm he once occupied; and to use that spectacle to erase all other successfully redistributed and resettled farms as well as to erase the real narratives of 400 000 African households whose lives were transformed through the African land revolution.
The focus of the anti-narrative is Ben Freeth, his family and former farm workers who, except for just two, also remain silent and out of the spectacle. The former white settler-farmers who chose to share land with Africans and to remain in Zimbabwe to this day have also been erased from this anti-narrative.
The Ben Freeth and Mike Campbell is just, but an aorta of the greater White narrative that has been given undeserved space and attention in the African public discourse.
Any attempts to challenge this white supremacy is branded as racism as if reclaiming the space of Blackness in the face of White supremist ideas is a crime. Hell no! It is not a crime.
Is it not racist when a White claims absolute land control to make Africans mere peasants and field toilers?
Is it not even more racist for the poor African land toilers to just earn a weekly wage in exchange of affording the White farmer and his family quarterly annual holidays in Paris and Lebanon?
Therefore, as the times are changing it is important for regime-change thinkers to know that there is no place for such ideas in modern Zimbabwe.
The late, Professor Sam Moyo’s work bears testimony to the endless state of Zimbabwe’s decolonial intellectual premise. For that reason, it is clear that Zimbabwe is moving towards a radical path of renaissance which will not be bluntly manipulated by cheap intellectual politicking.
Mayibuye!
Online Reporter