Chronicle Editor
Richard Runyararo Mahomva, Pivot
The reflective opportunity of commemorating our freedom fighters enables the nation and the entirety of the anti-colonial movement in Africa to audit its successes and failures. At the height of our highly celebrated independence people resides the ideological foregrounding of those who led the path of Africa and Zimbabwe’s independence.
Their conviction to the motherland was clear. They were determined to unapologetically dismantle the colonial system.
Their heroic mark in this respect remains sacrosanct and clearly defined. Therefore, the mandate of our present generation especially our living revolutionary stalwarts is to ensure that we do not compromise the freedom which was born out of blood sacrifice.
We are obliged to put the nation and the continent first in all decisions we make. Our efforts in serving national and continental interests must be invested in acknowledging that the freedom we enjoy today is a product of those who were structurally denied the same constitutional liberties yesterday.
This means that the independent African state’s political culture and policy-making behaviours must be predicated on introspective benchmarks questioning the following:
As a people, who are we? Where do we come from? What has made us what we are today?
First and foremost, Africans have a shared experience of a struggle for humanity that bears the scars of slavery and colonialism to this day.
We cannot talk of modernity in isolation of the miscarriage of our development as a result of the interval interruptions of imperialist looting, violence and plunder.
Surprisingly, when assigned by immediate development needs to make public policies, Africa continues to blindly seek validation from races, nations and institutions that never wanted us to be free from colonialism in the first place.
The trappings of global integration continue to inspire policy positions that are estranged from redemptive paradigms of power but are excessively bent more towards neo-colonialism.
Africa still thinks that the solutions to her economic problems will come from multilateral monetary organisations which made profits from slavery and colonialism.
We still think that nations and institutions which gave solidarities to the advent of colonialism would be happy to see thriving and genuine post-colonial states.
Instead, we have been lured to endlessly commemorating the epochal dimensions of colonialism under the normative of being ‘‘post-colonial’’.
The academic and policy-making notion of being ‘‘post-colonial’’ has failed to produce pragmatic footprints of homegrown principles to economic growth.
Africa continues to seek validation from global monetary institutions that structurally aid neo-colonialism. The same institutions continue to prescribe how our economies should be run.
In refraining from the organic of her philosophical bedrock, Africa still lacks a self-defining paradigm to economic development.
Perhaps, liberation ideological compromise misnamed as reconciliation (with erstwhile colonisers) has its virtues in politics of recognition and credibility where coloniality is still in vogue and where international engagement is still gridlocked.
Under these circumstances, we are forced to go out of our way to appease colonial powers to access investment opportunities. Technocrats produced by the colonial epistemic empire are hired by African governments to design domestic policies which are configured to discourses of Western dictated fiscal management principles.
The same technocrats emphasise a lot on designing statecraft which is modelled to invite capital. But we dare not question where the West acquired the capital it uses to control the levers of decision making in African politics.
Market exchange politicking has even depleted the revolutionary foregrounding of African liberation movements.
In response to the technocratic prescriptions which are devoid of the revolutionary ideological basis, the anti-colonial movement is entangled in the grammars of subservient engagement and not a humanising form of engagement with colonial capital.
The supposed modern anti-colonial movement finds itself crammed in Wallstreet grammars of political enunciation which are disconnected from the aspirations of their loyalists. This disconnect is not by any chance reflective of an acrimonious interface between the people and their cherished anti-colonial mother body.
Instead, this disconnect is born out of newly forged pro-capital registers which aim at broadening the socio-political base of the nationalist movement with investment attraction. History is awash with abundant evidence of how African nationalism has always been reaching out to Whiteness regardless of its fat ego and prejudice.
It is in the spirit of Ubuntu that Africa and Africans continue to reach out to other nations and nationalities.
This propensity towards engagement is driven by an inherent Afrocentric predisposition of acceding to the view that humanity finds its existence in unity and equality.
In doing so, African nationalism pays allegiance to the cause of humanising power and the interaction of forces of capital.
This is why our liberation struggle was fought for equal access to the means of production.
Today, the African liberation movement must not be ashamed of pursuing the agrarian revolution. Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF government has led by example in this respect in the wake of the millennium.
More continued effort in the promotion of such cardinal values is imperative in ensuring that the anti-colonial valour of our heroes is preserved for posterity. Our fight for economic freedom must remain guided by the sacrifices of our living and departed liberators.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU, MSc-UZ) is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado. Feedback: Twitter: @VaMahomva & Email [email protected]
Bongani Ndlovu