Chronicle Editor
Reason Wafawarova
IT is sad to note that 19 years after Zimbabwe repossessed colonially stolen farmland there is a grounding myth that says agricultural production has declined because land is now in the hands of “unskilled and incapable black farmers”.
Our people farming on this land are essentially the same people who used to work for white commercial farmers, producing abundantly in what became known as the breadbasket of Africa — our own jewel of a country. This means it cannot be possibly true that these people lack farming skills. A driver who somehow cannot buy or maintain his own car does not necessarily lack driving skills.
What we lack in reviving our agriculture in particular, and our production in general, is the correct mindset, not necessarily the production skills.
Some years back, gospel star songstress Olivia Charamba released a song calling for Africa to wake up from this deep slumber, adding in her lyrics that Africa’s problem is that we, the children of Africa, have told ourselves that we are a smaller people, we are employees and servants; we follow, and we never lead.
This is what happens when we do not know, or when we forget our history. Eurocentric civilisation has been used over the past two centuries to motivate forgetting in the African personality, to create amnesia, and to maintain repression, be it mentally, physically or economically.
We all look up to President Mnangagwa and his Government to somehow secure some people from somewhere out there who are benevolent enough to rescue our economy. The only mega deal that will ever prosper this nation is in us taking charge of production in our own country.
Many of our people, as individuals, would rather seek to forget certain aspects of our history; they do not want to confront this history because they want to escape anxiety, anger, fear, shame and even guilt.
Some young Zimbabweans will easily dismiss history saying, “Colonialism ended 30 years ago; the liberation war was fought four decades ago; this is 2019, and all these things have nothing to do with us today”.
The reality of the black Zimbabwean today is that we are all affected and suffering from the 1890 colonial experience, regardless of whether we know what happened or not. In fact it is worse for us if we do not know what happened.
Our mindset is founded on the colonial legacy. In our own minds lie inferiority, dependency, ineptness, laziness, denial, escapism and self-hate.
Russell Jacoby writes in his book, Social Amnesia, “Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged. To be transcended it must be remembered. Social amnesia is society’s repression of remembrance”.
Simply because we choose not to remember what happened at independence, or what happened during colonialism; what happened during the liberation struggle – that we choose not to learn of the traumas of our past; that does not mean that the history we are trying to escape does not control our behaviour.
Amos N Wilson argues that “the most powerful forces that shape human behaviour are those factors that are consciously not remembered by human beings, that (become) unknown to the person, those experiences a person can swear he has never heard”.
That becomes the paradox of our Zimbabwean predicament. We forget the aspects of our lives that actually shape our behaviour today. We forget that inferiority was nurtured into us by the colonial legacy and that it has shaped our behaviour.
So we have people who do not want to remember the painful parts of our past. They unconsciously try to forget the brutalities of slavery, the injustice over Africa’s stolen wealth, the segregation of the colonial legacy, the incapacitating subjugation that created employees out of us, and some have even succeeded in forgetting these experiences completely; but this does not mean those experiences do not continue to operate within their personalities.
So we look at ourselves and say we cannot possibly own 51 percent of the productive sector of our economy, as former President Robert Mugabe used to advocate for. We do not want to mention that policy anymore now, because we believe we have seen the error of our ways.
We tell ourselves we are blacks, and it is simply not possible for us to run commercial farms productively and profitably, so we lease the land we got to white people we believe have the genetics for true production.
We scorn at the African initiative. We tell each other that Julius Malema wants to destroy South Africa by advocating for blacks in South Africa to assume control of their own resources.
South Africa has a history of repression of the black person, and that repression has only been lifted politically, while economic marginalisation of the black masses has gone unabated for 25 years after independence.
Escapism teaches us to escape this economic repression and the poverty regime in Soweto by pretending that we cannot remember apartheid; pretending that South Africa is an all inclusive democracy whose “internationally acceptable” status must be preserved, and that the high crime rate in Johannesburg is just part of South African life, not a construct of black marginalisation.
So we want a democracy in Zimbabwe that allows us to accept that we cannot run commercial farms, a democracy that says we cannot control even half of the wealth of the country, a democracy that makes us ashamed of having a history of “mistreating” the civilised and capable white man — of destroying the civilisation donated to us by the white man?
So we are supposed to be ashamed that we took back our land in Zimbabwe. We are supposed to be ashamed that Malema wants blacks in South Africa to have their land back. We are supposed to be ashamed, and to view black economic empowerment as undemocratic, unsound and uncivilised – as a breach of the white man’s property rights.
In 2010 The Australian labelled our land reclamation “disastrous,” and lambasted Julius Malema for “congratulating Robert Mugabe.”
We live a consciousness that tells us that prior to slavery and colonialism we Africans were essentially culturally invisible and savage, and that we only achieved civility and visibility when the European came on the scene.
This is precisely why some among us Zimbabweans doubt the capacity of the new farmer; why we have doubted the capacity of our indigenous locals to control 51 percent of the country’s productive sector. We think on our own with no white input we are uncivilised savages incapable of meaningful economic achievement. We do not believe in our leaders just like our leaders do not believe in us.
Those of us who, in the name of human rights, political correctness, or democracy; may choose to repress any knowledge of our colonial or apartheid experience should heed the fact that people who suffer from social amnesia live lives that are determined by fear, anxiety, terror and trauma.
In fact the illegal economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the West over the last two decades were specifically targeted at creating these four aspects of social amnesia. In 19 years ZDERA has frightened us, caused us anxiety, terrified and traumatised us.
Our own opposition uses the sanctions regime to frighten and intimidate the ruling party. That speaks volumes about our mindset as a people.
The MDC election campaign has always been based on instilling fear, anxiety, terror and trauma in the poor masses. The people have been told endlessly and variously that without the West their lives will just be miserable, without the whites Zimbabwe will just sink, and that only the MDC is the trusted party that will bring back the joy of associating with the politics of the European.
Frankly there are many in the ZANU-PF leadership who totally agree with the idea of hailing white supremacy, and is in this inferiority-driven motivation that some are engaging themselves to this “Zimbabwe is open for business” mantra.
Our investment policy is now a game of conscious avoidance of white disappointment. We are now convinced that Mugabe’s policies taught us how to make investment flee.
But we cannot build a nation on fear, anxiety, terror and trauma. Those things must never be allowed to be the determining factors of how Africa shapes its future.
As it is we live not in terms of our reality or in terms of the integration of our reality, but in terms of what we are afraid of, what we are ashamed of, what we are trying to hide from; and what we are trying not to confront ourselves with.
Yes, many of us live a life of denial, escape and addiction. We deny our reality, escape our responsibilities and are addicted to Western aid.
What we have done is that our older generation has passed on escapism as history to the younger generation, and that history of escapism has shaped the personality of our average youngster today.
It is good for Europe and the West that we Africans stand robbed of our true history. It serves a great purpose for the imperial order. We live in this jungle of inequality where the former coloniser is the lion — the predator devouring our own history so we are falsely founded on the myth of his own.
Now we have a young generation that devotes energy to not knowing. They direct perception to unknowing. They are actually engaged in a struggle to not know, and they are adamant that they would rather not know that Africans are capable of meaningful civilisation.
But not knowing one’s history is just living a lie. One cannot escape history by choosing not to know. What happens is that when one chooses not to know their history, the whole effort brings one under the domination of the more pernicious effects of that history and it leads to self-alienation and self-destruction.
This writer was up in Australia’s Northern Territory for eight months in 2007, and interacted a lot with Aboriginal communities up there. To say the majority of the encounters were appalling is a gross understatement of the reality.
The contrast of hopeless black men and women lying drunk on streets, dirty, rejected and dejected on the streets of Darwin; while their smartly dressed fellow white citizens strode over their motionless bodies on their way to air conditioned offices and expensive restaurants, was apparent and telling.
Talking to both groups and interviewing them revealed the ever-pernicious effects of Australia’s history on the Aboriginal people — a history Aboriginal people are now expected to forget after a hard-won and long-awaited apology from Kevin Rudd — an apology that came 224 years after the fact.
As Africans suffering from amnesia, we now live a life based on negation; not on affirmation, growth or development. Hankering for aid is a negation, crying for internationally organised elections is a negation, hoping to exploit the country’s resources by giving away the resources to foreign companies is a negation, telling ourselves that the new black farmer is incapable of farming is a negation, underutilising our land is a negation, and doubting our capacity to empower each other economically as blacks is a negation.
When are we going to aspire for affirmation, for growth and for development? When we live our lives as a negation we sink deeper into inferiority, deeper into hopelessness, and we condemn future generations to perpetual poverty.
A negated history negates its own people in return, and when that happens we live a puzzle of a life. This is why we think it is sensible to ask questions like “What is wrong with us Africans?” or to say “We cannot change this anymore”.
Some of us even subscribe to the Ham mythology and we tell ourselves that blacks were destined to suffer in poverty by divine design.
Now globalisation is being used as the latest tool to make us forget history. This writer is often reminded that in the 21st century it is backward “to see colour”. So these black brothers brag that they are civilised and they “do not see colour”. Of course they see colour; but hey, let us assume they indeed do not see colour.
Does that mean that others do not see their colour too? They see no inequality by choice but that does not make the world equal, does it? So to be accepted as civilised and as a global citizen one claims they see no colour, just merit and merit alone in a world that treat black merit discriminately.
The next things are complaints after complaints in the Diaspora that we blacks are manipulated in work places and other forums. Of course when you alone see no colour, you get manipulated because you have blindfolded yourself around people with open eyes.
So in this new dispensation of democracy and freedoms what do we get? We are supposed to go silent on the terroristic supremacy of imperialism, to deny the evil of racialism, to deny there is domination, and to deny the destruction of our planet by those calling themselves civilised.
In the name of the forward march to a better life we must deny that we have been abused and brutalised in history.
The reality is that we are being told who to become because we do not know who we are. This is why we aspire to be little Western democracies all over Africa. We can only ever be African democracies; we will never become Western democracies, however much we may so wish or dream.
Our politicians aspire and compete to win good behaviour awards in Washington, and so do we when we wish to be recognised and awarded as success stories in Western capitals.
Greatness is achieved by hard work and affirmation, not by miraculous political thrusts.
We have a country to build and a future to shape, and in our collective being as Zimbabweans we have to begin to believe in productivity, accountability and responsibility.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
– Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia
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