adminLiterature Rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
Dear Reader.
Today you must brace yourself for an unusual tone of reason. I want to critically interrogate the significance of loyalty from a context of colonial supremacy.
To unpack this perspective there is need to unpack the dichotomy of colonial intellectual conservatism and power consolidation strategies of imperialists and how they have sustained their power up to this supposedly post-colonial age.
Many a times as African optimists and proponents of African nativism – from pan-Africanism, nationalism, African renaissance and decoloniality, we have found comfort in vilifying Eurocentricity and we have fallen short of appreciating some nitty-gritties which have sustained Eurocentric dominance.
We fail to credit the systems used by the colonialists to conserve their imperial culture even when colonial nations/nationhood is believed to be dead. One of the key factors which have promoted the endurance of imperialism is how the imperialists have remained loyal to their cause.
Does this apply in case of African nationalism? Does today and yesterday’s generation of nationalists have a common value of loyalty to the ‘national idea’? Amilcar Cabral long problematised our dead loyalty to the Africa and post-colonial national project. Cabral looks at the death of this endeavour as ‘class suicide’ of the African liberation thought-power.
In the same context, Frantz Fanon (1961) aptly describes this epistemic damage of nationalism as ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’. Fanon’s description of our crisis speaks of a dead memory of where we came from and a blur of the path ahead. This is because Africa has not been loyal to the African project. Africa is guilty of defrauding herself –for not being loyal to the foundation of her quest for freedom from colonial domination.
Therefore, this creates an interesting need to trace how loyalty as a political tool of coloniality has been applied to contain imperialism leading to its perennial power consolidation. The book under review adequately outlines how Rhodesian nationalism was a product of loyal commitment to keeping Africans in poverty and oppression. Why of new Zimbabwe’s national loyalty? As a result, Rhodesia has maintained its influence regardless of its physical decapitation through our armed struggle.
Currently, Zimbabwe has a political landscape whose outlook is a maintenance of a colonial past haunting in the present. This is because the enemy has remained loyal to the agenda of keeping the former colony under the feet of the coloniality of power which reproduces itself through establishment ineptitude later complimented by regime-change innuendoes.
The enemy has remained loyal to infiltration, promoting factional divides of liberation movements not only in Zimbabwe, but in Africa large. The enemy’s centuries of looting Africa’s wealth was not in vain. The proceeds of the looting are still being loyally channeled to regime change projects and destabilising the legacies of Africa nativist trajectories.
The graduation of Joyce Mujuru’s nationalist divisive plot to an opposition party in Zimbabwe openly exclaims how African nationalism is a threat to itself. Unlike the project of colonialism, nationalism has been characterised by self-destructive forces.
Nationalism lacks loyalty to itself. It is against this background, that it is imperative to appraise how Rhodesians Never Die’:
The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, c.1970-1980 expresses an esteemed loyalty to values of imperialism by imperialists –an antithesis of loyalty to nationalism by African nationalists.
This publication presents the theme of political loyalty from a colonial perspective in a way that convinces the reader that Rhodesia was an absolute representation of civilisation.
While it is not true that Rhodesia was an epitome of the ethos of modernising the Africans, this book vividly depicts Rhodesia as a high ranking symbol of civilisation in Africa. Loyalty to colonial supremacy in this book is expressed using Rhodesian social institutions and governance systems which are presented as high ranking in the continent during the glorified dark age of colonial occupation.
Therefore, this publication, Rhodesians Never Die’: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, c.1970-1980 is an embodiment of a modern day colonial conservative loyalist mantra. As highlighted in my previous articles of this series, Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock (1993) offer a conscious preservation of the colonial heritage from a Rhodesian perspective in a manner which suggests a distinguished sense of loyalty to imperialism as a foundation of Western supremacy.
The work by Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock (1993) offers a unique intellectual character as their work pays homage to tyranny which they choose to loyally glorify. This is very rare in our context as many African thinkers find delight in being associated with anti-establishment discourses framed by the West, at the same time loyally servicing the fracture of the values of our liberation past. This constitutes another version of colonial intellectualism led by African thinkers whose works demonise the continent’s envisaged development prospects.
Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock (1993) clearly proclaim a colonial legacy which is still neatly threaded, compact and firm.
According to these two colonial conservative academics, Rhodesia did not and will never die. What is true in their submission is the extent to which Zimbabwe is still struggling to find the correct parameters of self-political definition. We are a country whose policies are supposed to bend to Western dictated norms of the market place. We are not free to think outside the terms of Western imposed democracy perspectives. We are just supposed to conform to the rules of globalism –where African/Third-World ideas do not matter. The current political culture of the nation and the continent is influenced by foreign ideological perspectives.
#ThisFlag to bond notes
As if the tragedy of our political acculturation and its tragedy is not enough, we are a fatal accident in the making in terms of our social world views and economic outlook. For example, the current issuance of the bond notes to mitigate the country’s stagnant cash circulation is being intensely resisted because pressure groups serving interests of colonial hegemony are mobilising masses to resist the use bond notes as relief legal tenders for the scarce American money we are using.
There is hyped encouragement for the people of Zimbabwe to abhor a national innovative mechanism to cub the crisis of using US’ borrowed currency. We are in this situation of cash crisis because we have no faith in products manufactured at home. We cannot support our emerging industries. On the other hand, we have meagre confidence in our craft-literacy.
Here in Bulawayo regime change agents and the academia have challenged the government to revive industries and yet the same institutions who supposedly posit that intervention demonise local economic innovation strategies set by the government. One then wonders why such supposedly progressive lobbying contradicts itself.
It’s ironic that they want local industry to be revived, but when the government sets statutory instruments to protect the survival of the remnant industries the same comrades are quick to incentivise the masses to vent rehearsed/incentivised anger to the streets.
This clearly proves that much of the NGO induced activism about employment creation and reviving industries is not honest and all interventions made to confront issues of national importance. Their true agenda is to promote a regime change public consciousness of the challenges facing the nation. This is why every government initiative is intensely resisted because the premise of loyalty in engaging national challenges is not nationalist.
The premise of loyalty to confront prospects and failure of the national project is neo-liberal. Our Western handled comrades are quick to blemish the honour of our flag and demeaning the sacrifice of the liberation martyrs it represents. Just because our flag serves no sacred meaning to their conscience (loyalty) they are not ashamed to express their Western puffed anti-government antics by just denigratingly exploiting our flag as a discursive tool for their hatred of President Robert Mugabe.
They have no affectionate embrace of our national flag –a reminder of our task to be loyal to values of nationhood. To them our blood earned flag is just, but #ThisFlag. Likewise it is #ThisFlag which secures visas for new merchants of regimes of regime change’s residence in countries fixated to the pedagogy of loyalty enshrined in their own flags. These are the very same flags we find in stipend packages of Western donations to Africans.
Reflecting on the dead #ThisFlag may seem a bit outdated and out of touch with new political trends and debates in Zimbabwe. After all, it’s not lucrative to reflect on a dead political project. However, what is worth noting is the fact this dead project including its dying #Tajamuka cousin represent a new exposition which substantiates that the legacy Rhodesia is eminently present in our political discourse.
For the past 36 years we have failed to establish a true sense of loyalty to what I once referred to as the ‘Zimbabwean idea’.
What is this Zimbabwean idea? This is the preservation of the liberation values of indigenous centred dictates of political autonomy. It is passion for economic development premised on empowering the African populace to capture economic resources to sustain the social backbone of the nation. The Zimbabwean idea speaks of decolonising the thought processes and institutions of this country.
However, we are a nation which is largely preoccupied in the Western constructed ‘idea of Zimbabwe’. The idea of Zimbabwe is colonial. It captures its dominance by dictating what/how Zimbabwe ought to be through the eyes of imperialism.
The idea of Zimbabwe is a smart soft power project to conserve colonial hegemony in the country’s polity and socio-economic systems.
As also dictated in the publication under review –by Godwin and Hancock (1993), the idea of Zimbabwe maintains that repressive conservation of the view that ‘Rhodesians Never Die’. This shows that we are country that is guided by loyalties to paradigms of oppression. We are loyal to destructive self-hating political discourses. This is why the land reform programme produced a dense human rights and democracy scholarship all in the interest of portraying political failure of the former British colony.
This is because we are a country with misplaced loyalties. We are loyal to dismissing indigenous mechanisms meant to develop the livelihood of our people.
This is an undisputed mark of how we have helped to build the momentum of a Rhodesia that will never die, but lives in us.
We have only succeeded in making the triumph of African nationalism an empty epistemic mortuary of colonial systems.
The mortuary of nationalism is empty, colonial hegemony is still alive and is incessantly tormenting Afrocentred social progress, economic development and Africa’s political autonomy. Africa needs to be loyal to the values of her struggle.
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]
Online Reporter