Indigenous knowledge and missed racial factor: A Zim perspective

Literature rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
LAST week’s inaugural instalment clarified the sustaining ideas of this new born column and of course revealing its role as an alternative thought avenue for advancing knowledge decoloniality. It highlighted the fundamental objective of this pro-indigenous “literature rethink” space. While all literature provides the mind with the opportunity to learn, the mind also performs a function of “unlearning” the knowledge it receives. That way the mind converses with the newly encountered knowledge and challenges its deficits.

The previous article set the agenda for challenging the disguised objectives of colonial and neo-colonial intellectual generosity to define Africa and the fate of her people. In our case, the neo-colonial narrative represents what I term the “missed racial” factor of knowledge production which manifests in the sub-conscious negligence of local perspectives on local issues. One of the issues used in the service of the missed racial factor is the land reform programme that continues to shape discourses of the present political economy and at large the intellectual faculty of Zimbabwe’s social-sciences. This follows residues of ideological supremacy of the colonial contact with the soil of our ancestors supplemented by incipient ideas of global belonging presenting our historical state of being as trivial subversions of globalisation.

This is why the Zimbabwean land reform has not only received literary polarisation at home, but at the global stage. This shows that all academic narrative fraternities are framed from the centre defined as the first world knowledge producer rather than the periphery which is the other side which constitutes ideological recipients, chiefly the black majority. Therefore, Zimbabwe’s post-land reform political path constitutes a fair reflection of the relationship between the global giants and African states. Due to that, it becomes difficult to analyse Zimbabwe in isolation of external higher politics of knowledge generation and power struggles. This prompts the need to constantly locate the country’s academic narrative development in issues of global power. The described situation mostly defines the “missed racial factor” in terms of the African owned story in the local literature. Apart from its relevance in Zimbabwe, the “missed racial factor” offers an omniscient articulation of Africa’s failure to be democratic and adherence to human rights according to Western moral barometers.

The “missed racial factor” further emerges as that loud sounding voice deforming Africa’s recollection, with commands for erasing the knowledge banks of the past to make Africa fit well into the cryptic puzzle of itself determined modernity. However, indigenous knowledge embraces the past. Moreover, the indigenes just like the globalisation deportees in Africa and their diverse countries of origin carry their past into the present shaping their various destinies. This makes it ridiculous for Africa to be made to forget the history of slavery to colonialism. Moreover, this makes it irrational for the people of Zimbabwe to forget the protracted liberation struggle informed by the “missed racial factor” and its whims of knowledge control. Likewise, it is even remiss for us to “cherry-pick” the anti-establishment route guided by knowledge generated in thought banks of individuals whose ancestry architectured the plunder of Kaguvi, Chaminuka, Lobengula and Nehanda’s soil.

Therefore, beyond the missed racial factor, it is essential to embrace that all writing is political and at any point writing is a medium of ideological supremacy carried from the past to the present. Arguably any idea advancing the missed racial factor obliterates the past of the African, and that is wrong!

This reminds me of a discussion I had with Talent Moyo, a fellow colleague from the University of Zimbabwe (UZ). He neither waited to post his review on my Facebook timeline like others who had read the article, nor did he delay to send me an email like Moloi Lehasa, a Development Studies doctorate student from the University of South Africa (Unisa). Moloi was inclined to the submission of last week’s article and thus asked for referencing details to quote it for his forthcoming paper presentation. Moloi’s study is titled “Towards an Afrocentric development paradigm” and will be presented in Boston, Massachusetts next month.

However, Talent Moyo highlighted that the article dwelled on the past and was an expression of a redundant discourse. The honest critic by Moyo clashes with the view that the past cannot be neglected. Probably, as a response to Moyo, marginalising the past in our narratives is in itself a representation of the “missed racial factor” which emphasises on being ahistorical in understanding Africa. The extensive reasoning to Moyo is that the “missed racial factor” erases the gruesome colonial past yet championing its heritage now carved in our conscience, justifying the liberal amnesia that defines the restoration of the land to its rightful owners.

However, my confidence to write this piece is inspired by Raymond Sango, a disciple of the late Agrarian scholar Professor Sam Moyo:
The rejection of the land reform by intellectuals in some sections is a rejection of blackness. It is a thinking informed by an inferiority complex nurtured by decades of enslaved and killing of the African spirit. For these folks, the land reform was wrong because “racism doesn’t exist’ . . . a colour blindness reflective of naivety and again the inferiority complex. (Sango 2016 —commenting on the previous article on my Ras Mkhonto Mahomva’s facebook timeline)

I am sure Sango summarises the issue of the “missed racial factor” in terms of knowledge generation in Zimbabwe and Africa at large. Last week we analysed the introduction of the book, Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State, and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Hammar, Raftopolous & Jensen; 2003) and Eric Worby’s chapter therein. This week we will extend our focus to Jocelyn, Alexander’s chapter; “Squatters”, War Veterans and the state in Zimbabwe, in the same book.
The chapter offers a radical deconstruction of history by stating that:

It is something of a truism to state that the process of controlling and contesting access to land powerfully shaped the Rhodesian state, and both White and Black politics in the colonial period. It has no less obviously played a central role in independent Zimbabwe (Alexander 2003; 83).

This view presents an anecdotal fallacy on the land significance to the Rhodesian government. It is as if land was not an essential bloodline of the Rhodesian political-economy. As a result this justifiably vilifies the aggressive land grabs of post-independence as racial atrocities committed to a white community that had insignificant attachment to the land. Alexander’s analysis deliberately omits the truth on this subject, yet in itself is founded on pent-up angers of the white community and yet she wants to convince us that land was not an issue of high interest to Rhodesia and the progeny of the pioneer column members. This substantiates that the missed racial factor aims at promoting state downfalls through misrepresentations of the past and yet enforcing the selective remembrance of nationalist pitfalls.

The research is keen on stressing early independence challenges to resolve issues of land hunger among the masses leading to the rise of the so-called “squatters”. Therefore, in her opinion Alexander presents the Government as less concerned about land redistribution in the immediate post-independence epoch. This observation is ignorant of the fact that such state conduct was in adherence to principles of the Willing-Seller and Willing-Buyer which largely served white interests yet Alexander deliberately sidelines the Lancaster Treaty to vilify Zanu-PF as a political party that had petite interest in addressing the land issue. The chapter also states that Zanu-PF’s diminutive interest on land attracted the rise of land squatters. This further proves that land was a central issue to the blacks as well contrary to Alexander’s analysis.

It is also misleading to argue that land did not play a central role in Rhodesian power contests, whereas land was the source of livelihood for both races. The super minority being more starved of it in their various countries of origin, exerted horrific bloodshed on the black-owning majority in the land of their birth right. Then they became owners of this land which Alexander states was not central to their politics. Useless as land was to the whites they created pseudo legal innuendos in the form of infamous Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951, a sibling of the Land Apportionment Act of 1931 which awfully Alexander (2003:83-117) dissociates Rhodesia’s centrality to the land.

Moreover, the African had a sacred attachment to the land and hence the struggle for liberation.
The analysis by Alexander dismisses the virtues of the liberation struggle and one of this was land.
The “squatters” in Chimanimani reflect that land was a pertinent matter not only a decade after, independence, but it dates back to the causes of the liberation struggle, thus its modern manifestation as the “Hondo yeminda/battle for farm land (Mahomva 2015:see The Post 1980 Chimurengas Explained page 30-57).

This is why the war veterans she talks about as forerunners of the “illegal” land reform took the centre stage of the process.
To disqualify her assertion, Fay Chung (2006: 133) argues that the war veterans were inspired by their interest in land to invade the farms in the early 1990s: Tongogara veterans were resurrected finally in the war veterans’ revolt of 1997, and they played a pivotal role in the land resettlement programme of 2000-02. Because they were of peasant stock, the issue of land resonated more forcefully with them.

It is on this basis that we can conclude that the missed racial factor has continued to shape post-land reform literature and social science discourse.
This further demands us to continuously pursue a critical appraisal of this publication to see how it awakens the missed racial factor and how it locates the political discourse of Zimbabwe in the global hegemony debate of the coloniser and the colonised.

Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network-LAN. Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on [email protected].