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This week’s article takes an interesting turn following the previous episodes of reason on Literature and the “idea of Zimbabwe” in search of the “Zimbabwean idea”. However, this piece offers a duo analytical contemplation of coloniality at global level and the Zimbabwean context — with high-pitched attention on the country’s background of colonial power as physical domination which is currently marred by coloniality which can be understood as colonial hang-overs in institutions of the country’s political-economy, governance, its intellectual and innovational factories in the form of tertiary institutions dotted across its boundaries.
As such, the article is underpinned by the epistemic margins of decoloniality as a model of “dis-covering” the indignity of the hierarchies of coloniality in Zimbabwe and how the outside world informs consciousness of being Zimbabwean.
The supreme logic for this position being decoloniality’s current relevant intellectual reciprocation to the inadequacy of Africa’s decolonisation processes as attainment territories deodorised by flag independence. It’s an established fact, decolonisation gave birth to African states which are still grappling with finding the essence of being post-colonial and at elementary state are struggling to become real nations as prescribed in European political philosophy.
As such, decolonisation can be best credited for its par-excellent prosperity in dismantling the physical colonial boundaries and leverage of imperial expansionism.
The triumph of decolonisation and its façades of pseudo nationalism inspired by the West remains problematised as Africa remains disintegrated, dismembered and crumbled in compliance to the agenda set at the infamous Berlin Conference which to this date has been an assault to the unitary terms of pan-Africanism.
This reprehensible and appalling Berlin confederal declaration of interests in Africa by Western states was an open expression of the West’s devaluation of the Africans’ humanity to serve their accumulation of capital, raw material extraction and industrial expansionist interests which manifested through the commodification of Africans and the availing of Africa’s land and water-bodies for imperial penetration and degradation by Europe.
The Berlin assembly of 1887-88 was a prestigious occasion for re-ascertaining the inhuman civilisation by the haters of Africa.
In fact, this had been a long procrastinated project in terms of its formalisation. Prior to Berlin, there was need to dismantle Africa’s contact with the Ancient Near East and the Chinese of course.
There, the imperialists and plunders of the continent sat down to craft a consensual modus operandi — a blueprint for a modernised approach instituting the slavery of mother Africa for human and material resources.
This project was guised as a Western outstanding strategy to civilise the barbarians. Outstanding indeed, as barbarity — punctuated by murder of existing African kingdoms, assault of African cultures and dehumanisation became the new code of civilising Africa.
What a shame! Enough of the conceptual issues though they could not be avoided on a subject of this kind.
Enroute to America
The inaugural submission of this new series is inspired by the current global political pandemonium. Indeed the global political culture is in a state of hubbub as the empire has taken to the gallery the grotesque, wrinkled, withered nudity of its antiqued fleshed skeleton. The children and grandchildren of the empire — the wretched of the earth have been left in a traumatic state of astonishment — having seen the coloniality reclaiming its realist blatancy which has concealed its hatred of those in the zone of non-being through the veneer of global homogeneity. They are shocked by the reverse of the values and claims of human equality and upholding of human rights peddled by the Western world’s neo-liberal fallacy. The recent USA election outcome is an open indication of how much coloniality of power is still resident in global politics. It is an indication for all to see that the West cannot love those it deprived humanity yesterday. Now with the aid of its bottled magnitudes of institutionalised hate, how can America be a lover of their former slaves? Though some Africans are in denial, this is another free reminder of how the West became great as a result of denying us our humanity and how we will never be humans in their eyes.
It’s confirmed, coloniality has not changed operation model, it is still founded on pillars of narrow Western trampling of the world. It has not changed its character of hierarchising humanity and denying others their space to be human.
This same position can be noted in the publication under review: Rhodesians Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, c.1970-1980 by Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock. I will elucidate more on the book as this series pens out.
Meanwhile, in America Africans and other minorities have concluded that the USA election outcome was a triumph of White supremacy and open affirmation to the power of racism as global political realism.
Coloniality needs no further dis-covery, as it is, the third-world must start taking notes again from the West. America has since reminded Africa of her burden since the time of Nkrumah to unswervingly battle two existing ontological hierarchy stalemates namely: global coloniality and internal reproduction of coloniality. In this case, global coloniality hierarchises humanity racially yet the continent reproduces humanity and hierarchises it tribally. In worst cases xenophobia takes a particular form of racism practiced by people of the same colour. Therefore, the lessons from Brexit to Donald Trump epitomise narrow nationalism, racism and xenophobia on a global scale is in resurgence. It clear that Berlin and other imperial orders never subsided in the first place. America has just taken refuge under liberalism and neo-liberalism to conceal the supremacy of the coloniality of power. However, this does not imply that Hilary Clinton was a better candidate either.
Nevertheless, the truth confronting the world now is Trump’s presidency which represents a unclothed triumph of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in this century.
On the other hand, the paranoia emanating from Trump’s victory especially by Africans at home is substantial of our people’s love to be where they are not loved.
This follows Trump’s campaign rhetoric which was most explicitly fixated on limiting undocumented immigration, but the overboard innuendo of his declaration was a hateful plan to curtail immigrants entry into America. Trump was not even ashamed to openly declare interests in the recolonisation of Africa and eternally detaining some African leaders into the dungeon. What a world of madness!
It’s clear, Trump has foregone the centuries-old deceit of his country by exposing that America “the great” is not so different from apartheid Rhodesia. It is a racist republican. His term will do more in expressing the “American dream” and its premise on high degrees of establishment violence, global hegemony and centrality of capital in dominating other state actors in the international system. Trump epitomises the American dream’s prejudices against minorities especially Blacks whose lives have never mattered in the eyes of White supremacy. It is from these lens of global coloniality that we are able to capture the meaning of what Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock refer to as the immortality of the Rhodesian spirit.
Rhodesians Never Die
I wish I could go further with this discussion, but there is always next week for me to go deeper. Next week, I will do more to critically appreciate the authorship of this book by Godwin and Hancock. However, reading this book just reminded of some old poem I wrote a long time ago and probably sharing it here will give a glimpse of the themes which are contained in this book which will be subject to further review next week. This piece from my achieve is titled, He won’t go and it reads:
Rhodesia is a dead man, but the living summon his soul to sojourn among them.
He is not only a ghost by night, his evoked spirit is a shadow that meets our eyes in broad day light. His voice, an echoing sound haunting our ears.
Blame him not for his wandering soul, but the living.
This wretched soul is the legion that possessed the shepherds.
None has the power to exorcise the shepherds. Sheep are led by demons.
Daily they are holocausted and the aspiring good shepherd is slaughtered.
Yes, we put the Union-jack in the box, yet his roaming spirit mocks us.
We have failed to pull down the walls of poverty. We dislodged him from the Parliament yet his spirit still lives in our law books, dispossessed him of power but not the skill to run our resources as he did.
He laughs at us when we celebrate walking on pavements he still owns, going to pubs that were
no go zones for Black skins and drink our minds out.
While wearing out the strength in us and prostituting our sisters he is giving his seed to the virtuous remnant.
These bear his scions and even after his body ceases to roam among the living, his tongue and faith will not die.
His bastards call the ways of their mothers’ land evil and pagan.
The living won’t let him go. He is their partner in crime.
Rhodesia is here to stay!
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]
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