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Literature Rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
This week’s article extends the on-going series which is a retrospect of the recently held Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) convened by Leaders for Africa Network (LAN) between 20 and 21 October.
As alluded in the inaugural instalment of this succession of thoughts since last week, the symposium is an annual assembly which is consciously self-mandated of auditing ideas produced in the interest of imagining belonging — as espoused in varying Zimbabwean literary genres. This interest derives its justification from how literature has posed as a medium of articulating the contested and homogenous notions of what it means to be Zimbabwean. Over the years, Zimbabwean writers have been classified into patriots and sellouts (Ranger 2003; 2004).
With a pretentious fear of hegemonic partisan remaking of Zimbabwean history by the ruling Zanu-PF, Ranger (2004) argues that literature has been used to ascertain partisan insinuated notions of patriotism. The submission posited by Ranger in his valediction work as one of the early Zimbabwean historians is evident of literature’s function to construct and deconstruct all imaginations of nationhood.
Ndiyani akanganisa?
Before, independence, Ranger’s work mobilised the povo to fight for land. Surprisingly, after independence the same scholar’s work became an anti-establishment driver of condemning that which the masses had gone into the armed struggle for. Ranger and the trail of his similar breed of scholars are proof of how much binaries of socio-political and economic hierarchies are an invention of literature. As a result, it is irrefutable true that literature and other communication medium play a strategic role in persuading humanity to embrace plurality and intellectual homogeneity.
However, what then becomes of high concern is whether the embraced pluralities are constructive or deconstructive. In the case of Zimbabwe attempting to unravel this exposes one to the existence of a new negative form of split patriotic consciousness. This new brand of patriotic consciousness is dominantly energised by whims of regime-change and sponsored vilification of the person of President Robert Mugabe through literature.
From David Blair’s Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the struggle for Power in Zimbabwe to Peter Godwin (2010) The Fear: The Last Days of Robert Mugabe — it’s clear that the war is between Western neo-liberalism and African fundamentalism embodied in the decolonial charisma of His Excellence President Robert Mugabe.
Cry blood Africa
This is not unique to the Zimbabwean political landscape alone. Across all experiences of the Third-World one cannot ignore how forces of history — capital, power, privilege and social marginalities continue to influence the function of literature and defining intellectual chasms in the form of epistemic brutalities and hostilities as argued by Maldonado-Torres (2016: 1):
Colonisation and decolonisation as well as coloniality and decoloniality are increasingly becoming key terms for movements that challenge the predominant racial, sexist, homo and trans-phobic conservative, liberal, and neoliberal politics of today.
While colonisation was supposed to be a matter of the past, more and more movements and independent intellectuals, artists, and activists are identifying the presence of coloniality everywhere. The reason for this is not difficult to ascertain: the globe is still going through the globalisation and solidification, even amid various crisis, of a civilisation system that has coloniality as its basis.
It is this background of socio-political and economic conflict borrowed from the past manifesting in the present. As a consequence, the Zimbabwean epistemic crisis must be understood within that context. This is part of the broader contested power of global modernity marshalled by Western prejudice:
“Therefore, the continued unfolding of Western modernity is also the reinforcement, through crude and vulgar repetitions as well as more or less creative adjustments, of coloniality. This is reflected in contemporary “development” policies, nation-state building practices, widespread forms of policing, surveillance, and profiling, various forms of extractivism, the increasing concentration of resources in the hands of the few, the rampant expression of hate and social phobias, and liberal initiatives of inclusion, among other forms of social, economic, and political control.” (Maldonado-Torres 2016: 1).
Knowing that the existing global societal struggles have a history, knowledge banks become key assets of negotiating transformation of all humanity in its diverse and conflicting historical character. Therefore, contemplating this givenness of humanity in the globe through history is to acknowledge that all situations, all institutions exist in history which deserves critical appreciation and comprehension.
Our current discontent with the IMF, ICC, World Bank and other multilateral institutions can be better located in a past which must be conceptualised from a position of Africa’s subjection to Western domination. This can only be achieved if the continent is producing African thinkers, innovative political-economy builders of the future who are diligent disciples of decoloniality, African renaissance, nationalism and of course pan-Africanism — without which, we will be underdogs of Western domination. Only then can we talk of credible African knowledge banks as strategic key sources of looking into the future from our own context and immediate reality.
This equally translates to the grass-root panacea for Zimbabwean challenges. We do not need to look at externally induced “ideas of Zimbabwe” before we have afforded the “Zimbabwean idea” an opportunity to excel or to fail. How then is it that even possible if we are not thinking from our immediate environment and its surrounding prospects? How is the success of our nation possible if we are guided by irrelevant external approaches to deal with our internal struggles?
A plethora of our antagonistic Global-North and Global-South experiences determine how we depict each other premised on the past. Unfortunately, the crudeness of this past constantly stands as a warning (which most scholars ignore) for Africa to look within for her salvation and not to look elsewhere. Therefore, our literature must be a medium of rescuing Africa’s newly found liberation from re-experiencing an unwanted past to navigate new avenues of engagement with former exploiters of the continent. Only then shall we find our lost path of development.
Literature must be a vanguard of the truth about the shared experiences of the two worlds whose potential for uniform development and prosperity was lost in the slave plantations and boundaries of colonialism. They can never be a present without the past, the two must dialogue and negotiate their path into the future. In the Zimbabwean context, this epochal interaction (the past and the present) also plays a crucial role in rituals of conceptualising the forces which bind humanity in space and in time as expressed in the spiritual function of music in the Shona world-view:
“The philosophical underpinnings of the Shona spirit possession ideology is that as they conduct a bira ceremony, they strive to bring the past experience into the present. This realm is achieved by making sure the context in which the ceremony is performed resembles that of their ancestors. Even the dress, food, beer, utensils, traditional objects and music are brought closer to what they used to be in the past.
Ultimately the past is experienced in the present and the present experiences the past. These juxtapositions create space for the spirits to interact with the living, and it is the function of mbira to create such a spiritual realm.” (Matiure 2016:31).
In simple terms, literature must relate with the past and perpetually locate the foundations of the present in defining contemporary challenges at the same time exhuming prospects of development of the historically “under-developed” (Rodney 1970) Third-World — The wretched of the earth (Fanon 1961).
Our Chimurenga: The Zimbabwean idea
Therefore, is the Zimbabwean writer immune from the burden of using the pen to remember our Chimurenga? Is the writer free from the obligation of reminding today’s generation that had it not been for a protracted nationalist vandalism of colonial domination this country will still be rendered at ransom by European racist rule? Writers who choose to ignore this past will also speak to the povo out of context. This is because the theology of our nationhood is hinged on that experience.
The knowledge produced by academics detached from this national liturgy will not be relevant to our context and addressing our struggles borrowed from the colonial past. The crisis in our craft-literacy and craft-competence is a burden we borrow from the “idea of Zimbabwe” which is a prescription of neo-colonial remedies to Zimbabwean challenges and aspirations for self-definition.
We are starved of home-based logic because we have an inflated tolerance of colonially crafted knowledge which informs the thinking of our policy makers.
The adored policies are the ones which are hostile to the “Zimbabwean idea”; hence indigenising the economy is demonised.
Giving lost land to the sons and daughters of the soil is criticised. Even our own Chimurenga musical philosophical vanguards like Thomas Mapfumo went to the point of castigating the land reform. In his song Marima Nzara (You Have Caused Poverty) (2001):
“ . . . the singer criticises the Mugabe government for attempting to introduce equity in land redistribution. He takes the process of removing excess land from a white minority as an “invasion”; he sees white settlers as a silent and persecuted group, endowed with a natural capacity to farm. In the song, Mapfumo claims the Mugabe government is misguided in taking away land from those with the capacity to farm: “baba mairasa kudzinga vanorima . . . baba muchaona, . . . baba makaura kudzinga vasevenzi (Father, you have missed the point sending away white farmers and sending away the labour force).”
Instead of exploring the democratising potential of land redistribution, Mapfumo in this song claims that Africans exist to be, and are only validated when they are, “vasevenzi,” or manual labourers.” (Vambe 2004: 179).
On the other hand, the university is not promoting a conscious appreciation of craft-literacy as lamented by Speaker of the National Assembly Advocate Jacob Mudenda:
“I have wondered and I have addressed myself to various universities where they have departments of economics. There has not been a single critique of the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim Asset) from any of our universities, where you get these doctorates in economics, but they have not criticised this document constructively. And worse still, you cannot have an economic blueprint that is not subjected to an annual review.” (The Herald 12 October, 2016).
The above claim substantiates how a greater part of our problems emanate from colonial readings of our plight and our continued search for redemption from neo-colonial truths which conflict with the “Zimbabwean idea”.
On the other hand, recollecting national memory is also subject to criticism as it is confused with state monopoly of subjecting Zimbabweans to ideas of the ruling. As such, the idea of patriotism has been defiled by reactionary academics inclined to propagating the “idea of Zimbabwe”.
Their discourse is only inclined on problematising every initiative biased towards promoting values of our liberation and promoting home-grown solutions for our challenges. Research institutions’ credibility is essentially subject to liberal endorsements. Any initiative which gives epistemic priority to the needs of the poor African masses is viewed with high insecurity. There is little room for African ideas in Africa and yet we claim to be free from the burden of colonial power.
Therefore, Chinua Achebe warns Africa’s soldiers of the pen:
“The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done. In fact he should march right in front. For he is after all . . . the sensitive point of his community . . . I for one would not wish to be excused. I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past — Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God).”
Therefore, it is imperative for writing to be a constant reminder of our foundation and objectives in relating with the rest of the world and defining the space of our own ideas and not the ideas of the neo-colonial haters of Africa.
n 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]
Bongani Ndlovu