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Youths the world over are often associated with radical, positive change. Universities are good incubators for such radical ideas and hotbeds of many a revolution. That is as it should be, as they look for greater opportunities and a better future. That is what happened in Zimbabwe in the 1970s, with the youth leaving the country to fight for political and economic freedom.
Not so anymore, or so it seems, especially in relation to Zimbabwe.
It is across the border in South Africa where the youth have taken their proper, radical role, setting an agenda for a lethargic ruling African National Congress, which they view as sitting rather too comfortably on its liberation war laurels and ignoring the plight of disempowered majority blacks who keep voting it into power.
Lately the youth in that country have been fighting all the symbols of their colonial past and its oppressive rule. They forced the removal of the statue of that British arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town, and damaged others around the country.
They again recently led a major campaign against plans to increase tuition fees at universities which they felt their parents could not afford and turned a basic right into a privilege for the rich, in this case, mainly whites, the major beneficiaries of apartheid and other racist policies.
In their relentless fight for a democratic South Africa fit for black South Africans, they have won a battle at Stellenboch University to have Afrikaans dropped as the official language of instruction. They say the language is discriminatory to the extent that it is spoken by just about 6 percent of the white minority and this tends to disadvantage the majority black students. More than 20 years into majority rule, they can’t understand why two thirds of the teaching staff are still white.
That’s another country, another youth but Zimbabwe’s.
Cross the border north into the land of the “Lion of Africa”, as outgoing US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Bruce Wharton acknowledged in his valedictory remarks last week. “Robert Mugabe is a lion of Africa,” said Mr Wharton. “He has dedicated his life to creating a free and independent” continent. He acknowledged that President Mugabe was “one of the leaders, not only of Zimbabwe’s liberation but of the Frontline States.”
The past few weeks have been particularly bad. Media reports of youths from different political parties fighting each other for rally venues are a disgrace given that the country is still nearly three years from the next scheduled elections in 2018. Then on Thursday last week youths allegedly aligned to the MDC-T staged an illegal demonstration in which they clashed with the police. They were demanding the resignation of the “lion of Africa” for the economic malaise.
Here is a misguided youth which cannot appreciate the real war Zanu PF and Mugabe are fighting, a war to give substance to the vapour of political freedom and self-determination by taking control of the means of production from settler colonialists. Here is a youth which cannot situate the economic slowdown in the broader global context of recession and falling commodity prices because of reduced demand in China. Here is a youth which has been brainwashed to believe that economic sanctions on Zimbabwe are an illusion by Zanu PF to mask its mismanagement of Rhodesia’s “jewel of Africa”.
We have a youth and opposition movements opposed to black economic empowerment policies because to them Africa’s salvation is in the brains of former colonisers. They are the new proselytes to the gospel of the “whiteman’ burden”. Where a South African youth demands that “Rhodes Must Fall”, we have in Zimbabwe youth who pray to have Ian Smith on a national pedestal as a tribute to white colonial rule.
These are the contrasting fortunes of Zimbabwe and South Africa as represented by the youth. They want majority rule in South Africa; we are content with symbolism. In one country they are crying for a party which can lead the agenda for radical change, in another we are faced with a youth yearning for a golden era of Rhodesia not even their parents know of, let alone enjoyed.
Iwe neni tinebasa. There is desperate need to decolonise the mind. Mental slavery is deeply embedded in Zimbabwe’s reactionary opposition politics. They are a shame to the entire African liberation spirit, whose fight gave us Martin Luther King Jr and has yielded a Barack Obama presidency in racist America.
Online Reporter