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Micheal Mhlanga
As I sat at the Small City Hall on Thursday, I voluntarily became a witness to a new image of political campaign heralded by a once Inclusive Government Deputy Prime Minister. This style of political comeback was in the form of a book launch whose title is ironic because it talks of his “elusive” dream in Zimbabwe. I say ironic because the former Deputy leader of Cabinet is eluded from reality, knowledge and is no different from many politicians we see today, particularly those in the opposition. I quickly remembered how he was expelled from the MDC but refused to step down from the ministerial duty in which he represented a party which no longer wanted him.
I shall leave the ravishing analysis of the “elusive” book to a colleague on page four of this publication whom I trust so much in doing justice to literary works which do not align well with reality, truth and proper representation of facts — Richard, Mutambara is yours!
The delusion of the eluded
Before I get on with the pressing matters of my series on rethinking our paradigm and reclaiming the political and economic space as young people, let me just say that Arthur Mutambara’s book price was a finance of his comeback campaign, $40!! Ah-ah, but all the same, knowledge is priceless. I was keen to know more about his privileged background, so I bought it. All I can say for now is Professor; your farcical claims that your book has new words such as “womenomics, glocalisation and talentism” were a clear expression that Professors fail too. You have no idea that Doctor Vivian Gondwe wrote extensively about womenomics; on glocalisation, there is vast literature by Dr Mbulisi Ndlovu, particularly the word and on talentism, I suggest you read more on Histol Gabreasky lest you tell young people that you discovered what is already there.
Wait! Your suggestions on a better Zimbabwe are guided by what is called provincial professionalism — a crude assumption that a people’s problems are exclusively fixed by your area of expertise, do not assume that technology is the panacea of our problems, furthermore much of what you suggest is already in motion — check out Zim Asset, Buy Zimbabwe Campaign and Curate Zimbabwe movement among a fledge, maybe he wrote that book pre-2008 and only published it now — too bad.
However, beyond my differences with the Oxford Professor of Robotics and Mechatronics, I should say that your message to young people being vocal in politics as well as academics inspired me. I think that is the exceptional mania I buy from your philosophy, save for that, I do not think you make a good politician but an excellent lecturer. You are eloquent in explaining pedagogic intricacies but you are still hung on yester year student politics poetic melody. Prof, we have long moved from the Ahoyism and Marxist rhetoric display. Young people are now moved by a different tune. Politics of populism is fast changing, especially in the young generation — we call it generation Z and it’s got its own new approach — we don’t sing no more when we are speaking — we extemporaneously deliver ideas.
I hope many young people won’t be hung up on the past like the outstanding Professor. This is to say, young people should daftly rethink and reclaim their space with intellect and a new political culture. Truth be told, we do not belong to the same generation although we have the same task of protecting the gains of our independence. Our heroes, living and dead played an impeccable role of liberating us, we have a huge task of remaining liberated from all residues of colonisation and this takes rethinking what the remains are — even those we think are not and reclaiming our role of pushing the struggle forward. Let me trigger this a bit — what the world thinks of a Zimbabwean youth.
They see primitive barbarians running amok.
Recent representations of youth in Zimbabwe have been dominated by negative images of young militants involved in civil conflict, and of threatening young men in overcrowded urban areas. These perceptions of the threat posed by youth are based on long entrenched misconceptions about Africa from outside the continent. Colonial representations of parts of Africa as a Heart of Darkness have been carried over into contemporary tropes about African political and societal chaos. One of the most influential examples of such characterisations is Robert Kaplan’s (1994; 1997) description of “the coming anarchy”, which has had a notable influence on United States foreign policy across the continent.
Kaplan’s descriptions are typical of such negative images of Zimbabwe, which regularly rely on a perception of African youth in crisis, which is heading toward a darker and more brutal future. Similarly, youth bulge theory, holds that impoverished societies with disproportionately large youth populations are more prone to violence.
As with Kaplan’s thesis however, it relies on some questionable evidence and tends to be coloured by emotionally charged images of angry young men from the global South. Unfortunately, these images have come to dominate international media coverage. From reports of the savagery of young soldiers in various civil wars, to images of African cities with young men overflowing onto the streets without work, desperate and dangerously dissatisfied, young people are portrayed as victims, unable to choose their future paths and forced into behaviour that is damaging, both for society and for their own lives. Such reports, which shape the way we think about poverty in Africa, contribute to the sense of hopelessness in addressing its many challenges. CNN and BBC have been instrumental in creating these representations of Zimbabwean youth.
It’s not true; youth are an engine of change
While there is no doubt a strong link between poverty, youth delinquency and violence, I need to critically examine the perceptions held by the international public of Zimbabwean youth as victimised and as a threat to stability and development. In the era of decolonisation that followed the end of the Second World War, young people were held up as the future of many African societies. Amid the burgeoning nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s, youth were seen to have an important role in building prosperous new societies newly freed from the chains of colonialism. There were chances for young people to both challenge existing power structures and to develop their own visions for the future. This role was often encouraged by the nationalist leaders of the time who saw a need to generate a powerful sense of community and shared destiny among their populations. These leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Robert Mugabe, saw the need to harness the creative energies of young people as part of their new plans for economic, political and social transformation.
Let us make and not break
Far from being passive victims subject to manipulation, young people are constantly recreating their societies through their participation in family, work, culture and ritual, and in finding new ways of coping with their economic situation. It is important to note however, that this creativity doesn’t always play out in ways that can be deemed socially positive. Professor Dingilizwe Zvavanhu describes youth in post-colonial Zimbabwe as both “makers and breakers”, simultaneously constructive and destructive in their interactions with wider society. He shows that young people are always at the forefront of movements for social, political and economic change, through activities as diverse as popular cultural forms such as dance and music, participation in new religious fundamentalisms, and flirtations with occult economies and millennial capitalist movements that often come with misleading promises of an easy escape from impoverishment. The important question to ask then is, how to maximise the youth energy that is directed towards positive social and economic activity into “making” rather than “breaking”.
Let us use Power and Knowledge
At the beginning of the 21st century, young Zimbabweans find themselves in the middle of newly globalising cultures, as they negotiate shifting forms of identity that traverse the modern and traditional. They also have to deal with the implications of the increasingly interconnected world of contemporary global capitalism. These include the way fluctuations in food and other commodity prices can have a drastic impact on their daily lives. Crucially, for my argument here, youth are also increasingly tuned in to emerging global discourses about positive futures. In this way, young people exist as a kind of a meeting point for local and traditional knowledges, and new forms of thinking and doing. Bringing these different forms of knowledge together presents the best chance of meeting the multiple challenges of poverty. As well as material assistance, knowledge is central to fighting poverty. As I argue in the next edition, the role of the young Zimbabwean is to help shape the creative energy of young people in order to be a force for positive political and economic change that is generated locally, according to the needs and hopes of Zimbabweans themselves. Rather than youth being symbolic of Zimbabwe’s poverty and social instability, we need to recast youth as the symbol of regeneration and escape from poverty through decolonising knowledge, politics and the economy. The question will always be . . . Senzeni Na?
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Bongani Ndlovu