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Ranga Mataire-Writing Black
Whether one is a neutral, an opposition activist or a ruling party supporter, it’s hard not to notice milestones being achieved by Zimbabweans at the international scene.
From moot competitions to robotics, Zimbabweans continue to shine. Even those afflicted with an anti-Zimbabwe malaise are having to eat humble pie.
It’s just hard for one not to attribute the achievements to the environment obtaining in the Second Republic through the robust and astute leadership of President Mnangagwa.
Nothing happens on its own. Upon assuming the presidency, President Mnangagwa led from the front in envisioning a future not shackled by a colonial past that rendered us hewers of wood and drawers of water, but one that is judged by the substance of one’s intellect.
It is that guidance that has unleashed intellectual ingenuity among Zimbabweans who are excelling in various fields.
Zimbabwe has always been a unique country endowed with abundant natural resources and a human resource base that can hold its own at whatever level.
However, for the country to continue attaining the sort of excellence that has been witnessed in the past weeks or months, we must start envisioning a future with a mindset of an un-colonial past.
Our history, our culture and our well-being as a people did not start with colonialism. It started well before colonialism. Zimbabwe’s engagement with the world before European colonialism has unexpected uncolonial power relations.
A good example is the engagement between the Munhumutapa State and Portuguese traders. The relations between the two were not on slave and master basis, but purely on trade with mutual respect of each other.
The problem we have today in Zimbabwe and Africa in general is that our success is premised on referencing the “empire”, the colonial hegemony represented by Europeans.
Yet before the coming of Europeans to Africa, we had our own reference points represented by our own heroes and heroines in various fields. Colonialism disrupted and distorted our intellects to a point where current generations lack firm credible historical references of triumph beyond colonialism.
There is a flawed and disturbing assumption today that reinforces the idea that oppression was unavoidable and that subordination is a timeless norm that explains slavery and racial injustice in Zimbabwe and Africa in general.
It is difficult today to explain to a young person still in high school or those in universities that there was a time when relations between blacks and those from other continents were never based on racial superiority.
Africa’s encounters with the outside world has not always followed the path of domination and dispossession.
The challenge we have today as black Zimbabweans is to envision a future based on our own ingenuity as equal partners in the global world without reference to Europeans modes of success or modernity as the standard.
Yes, we can appropriate different aspects of technology, but we must endeavour to go beyond appropriation and start creating our own knowledge systems.
Our rich historical past is the imaginative landscape upon which we situate the future in our minds. We need to decolonise our minds in order to give birth to a promising future.
We must dismantle the current world order that consigns us to a future that re-enacts a limited sense of our past. Our capacity to envision a brighter future is usually hindered by presentism, which is the propensity to interpret the past through the lens of the present.
We are often dragged backwards by a sense of thinking that how things are now is how they have always been and is how things will always be.
The international community as defined by current modes of existence in the African context refer to a white world. It is never about Africans in the Caribbean or other parts of the world not inhabited by Europeans.
Yet if truth be told, black people as evidenced by those who used to inhabit Great Zimbabwe and the Munhumutapa State had always thought and acted in ways that indicated a sense of belonging to an international human community not defined by racial notations and well before colonial occupation.
We are also aware that these international relations were entrenched into the everyday actualities of African traders and ordinary people.
Without a solid historical reference, most black people find it hard to imagine that African political authority commanded so much respect in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The era of conflicted that later gave rise to the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas fuelled by the competition for access to trade makes imagining African intellectual autonomy difficult.
But imagining such an autonomous past is the only way we can unleash our ingenuity and envision a prosperous future.
Through spirituality and trade, black people on the African continent were relevant and critical players in a shared global world.
The notions of belonging were in fact ingrained in spatial imagination of both the inner and the outer worlds, that revealed vibrant trans-regional networks. Notably, their cadence of relating was out of step with the familiar pulse of subjugation.
History must never be read only to pick up lessons for the present. History helps us to make sense of contemporary struggles, but it is also a tool for reigniting a sense of originality and the zeal to challenge the narrow confines which often limit our potential as a people and imagining unlimited possibilities of a glorious future.
Online Reporter