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My Turn With Tichaona Zindoga
Don’t use cricket rules for soccer matches: is that not reasonable enough? That you do not mix apples and oranges and hope to count them as if they were the same?
However, when it comes to cultural matters, there are people who are affected by this to a point of anger.
Take for example two prominent gentlemen in the country, Ignatius Mabasa and Fred Zindi.
Mabasa is a seasoned writer, linguist and cultural expert, while Zindi is a professor in music or some such arts field.
Both gentlemen are not what you would call youths, from a rough estimation, on the other half towards a century.
One thing they have in common, too, is that they are columnists in this paper.
One may add that the duo may reasonably claim to know a lot of things cultural.
But Mabasa got a lot of flak for this week’s instalment with the title “Zim Diasporans: Celebrating Stupidity, mediocrity, collapse?”
(In fact, he had not wanted it to sound it like a poser but an unequivocal statement of fact.)
For those that missed the piece in question, the writer was very critical about the trending “Zviri kufaya” videos in which mostly young people post self-recorded videos of themselves in foreign lands in different situations they think are exciting.
Like eating a lot of food, drinking, having a white girlfriend or boyfriend — all refrained by the phrase “zviri kufaya” loosely, “life is good here”.
They pose this usually in contrast with the gloomy situation back home, or so they suppose.
As a matter of fact, this meme (as such trends and fads are called on the Internet), and unbeknown to Mabasa, may actually have started in Zimbabwe with locals mocking those in the Diaspora that life is good here in Zimbabwe — hatiuye ikoko (we won’t come there).
The videos are generally meant to be harmless, hilarious videos portraying Zimbabweans in various parts of the world and even feature some white people speaking broken Shona not necessarily mocking life back home but doing banal things as cooking sadza and vegetables.
There is no politics, tribalism or racism (as far as I have observed) in this craze and it is one thing that has managed to unite the young Zimbabwean netizenry as these hilarious videos, which are also a form of escapism and letting off steam.
Mabasa thinks otherwise.
He condemns the whole Zimbabwean Diaspora on the basis of “Zviri Kufaya” telling us that those that feature in them are housemaids, “ignorant underachievers”; and “culturally and spiritually in an orphanage”.
He infers that life in the Diaspora is not “worthwhile and meaningful” and what he calls a “dog’s’ life”.
And all these hard words because of two-minute videos by young people!
It would be also instructive to note that in condemning young people and those in the diaspora, Mabasa relies much on Shona colonial novels and Zimbabwe’s early post-independence settings as bases for his comparisons and moralising.
Readers were unhappy with Mabasa’s generalisations and moralising about “Zviri Kufaya” with most of them trying to teach him a thing or two, largely, about getting a life and how to prevent him from dying early.
Here is one Robzam: “You need to appraise yourself of the origins of ‘Zviri kufaya’, this originated from Zimbabwe in a joking way of mocking those in the Diaspora. Those in the Diaspora are in the same spirit reciprocating. Anybody with a good sense of humour can easily read through this banter, relax, you will give yourself high blood pressure. Don’t take life too seriously, you will die young.”
Wayfarer said: “Come on Ignatius, I expect better from you! First, you’re being rather uptight and losing the joke in the process. One can equally refer to videos shared by Zimbabweans in Zimbabwe as part of this ‘Zviri kufaya’ social media meme, which was a two-way banter. But most importantly, how do you take a handful of videos to represent millions of people and deduce from them that those videos are representative of all of those people? By what logic do you arrive at such a stupid generalisation? No handful of people is ever representative of the whole, especially when that whole is so populous and also very diverse culturally, intellectually, socially and economically.”
Another one: “You need guidance mr journalist, do not shame your employers, it’s better to reduce pages of your newspaper than writing silly staff (sic).”
And so the comments went on.
It is to be hoped that Mabasa picked up a thing or two.
The greatest advice to Mabasa and others is to accept that times have moved and that they may have done worse things in their time.
It is allowed.
The problem comes when they apply ossified rules to the games of today.
Which is what Fred Zindi is guilty of.
If you hear Zindi moralising and mourning about the current contemporary urban music you would be tempted to consign the young musicians to the gallows.
While he may be right about language and sex and other features of today’s music, he is gravely anachronistic because he doesn’t live the age and the universe of today’s young people.
He tends to be normative or prescriptive. Life is not lived in the normative of “what ought to be”.
Life is empirical — such as the idea whose time has come called Zim dancehall music.
No matter how much Zindi will fear that this genre will upstage his wonted and favoured sungura and other yesteryear music beats, the current trend will continue, not just as a passing fad.
There are good grounds for this presumption.
If you live in the high-density suburbs you will notice how the music has become a culture that has permeated even children as young as three years who will be dancing and singing to this music.
This effectively means that there is a whole generation to come of dancehall consumers and musicians — whether they have the money or not.
Now, Fred Zindi wrote in this paper in May lamenting “Dancehall’s bad influence on Zim”, and how commercially unviable he thought it was but positively singled out Winky D.
Reader comments would have told him just how misplaced his views were; and are still are.
“Zimdancehall to de world!” wrote one respondent. “We nah go sell out we souls fi money!! . . . there is nothing wrong with sex, sex is sex, there is nothing called provocative sex. I have never heard a Zimdancehall artiste promoting rape. They even denounce gays saka where’s the problem? Siyai vapfana vepa Mbare vaite twunhu twavo . . .”
This reader questioned also how and why, if sungura was the moral beacon, so many of its singers have died of Aids.
Then there was this scathing reader, Freedom of Choice.
He said: “I don’t know why the Herald allows this idiot to come & write his often prejudiced opinions in this newspaper. Fred Zindi is backward & a very very outdated man who still wants to talk about social & entertainment issues for 20-year-olds. How is it possible a very old man always wants to talk about things that should not be his interest? This is so annoying. I actually don’t even love dancehall but reading stupid opinions about something which youngsters rightfully enjoy, is just not acceptable (sic)”
Some of these comments can be so below-the-belt like, and this column is not immune to the same, especially for its political polemics.
But they also offer critical sanctions, which must be heeded.
Online Reporter