adminLiterature rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
Last week’s article produced a distinctive height of debate and demonstrated that the column is communicating to various audiences on decolonising literature. I will not get into greater detail on the feedback I received, but I will focus on some crucial issues raised by Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s feedback for last week’s article. I will also recollect interventions by Dr Terence Mashingaidze, a lecturer at the Midlands State University in the Department of History. I found the comments raised by Dr Mashingaidze highly stimulating apart from the fact that he deserves special mention among many scholars for helping me nurture my passion for writing. In his feedback, Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni argued that:
Terry Ranger was a good liberal-nationalist-Africanist who contributed if not constructed the nationalist school of history. He might have been anti-colonial, but fell short of being decolonial like many of his generation . . . Of course Terry Ranger could not escape what is generally termed “liberal dilemma.”
Prof Ndlovu-Gatsheni further prescribed Steve Biko (2004) to my analytical attention since his work has an extensive assessment of white liberals and their ideological dilemmas linked to Professor Terence Ranger’s legacy under review. On the other hand, Dr Mashingaidze’s well thought debate provoking submission compelled me to revisit Paulo Freire on the “banking” concept of education as an instrument of oppression. The “banking” concept by Paulo Freire is problem-posing on the rigidity of the monologue knowledge transfer. It promotes less exchange and debates on knowledge(s) as such becoming a tool for subjugation of linear knowledge recipients. Paulo Freire then rallies for the supersedence of the teacher-student contradiction. As a critique of the concept, Freire pleads for mutual exchange of thought in acknowledgement of humans’ lack of completeness as far as “knowing it all” is concerned. Therefore, to attend to the remains of last week’s submission I will categorise the article into three; first, exhaustively explaining the significance of liberal ideological dilemmas in Ranger’s contribution. Second, I will consider the same traits of liberalism that have manifested among African think-tanks. Then last, I will assess how the “banking” concept relates to the conditions of coloniality.
Unpacking White ideological dilemma of liberalism in Zimbabwe’s Chi(zvi)murenga
It is needlessly essentialist to castigate one’s world-view and the side they decide to take in any given struggle to resurge a lost ontology to make it co-exist with other ontologies. The struggle to liberate Zimbabwe and other post-colonial issues contextualised as liberation struggle continuities also require one to take a side. However, the process requires that we find a common experience from our differences in our affiliation to these changing struggles. Therefore, it is important to understand the country’s revolution as a continuous process here termed the Chi(zvi)murenga. The diverse contributors to this attainment of “being” since time immemorial have been expected to be guided by internal conviction and discipline to take a single side of affiliating to the struggle. Even those of white descent affiliated to the black struggles. This is summarised in President Robert Mugabe’s definition ideological consistence of one affiliating to African liberation:
Internal discipline is a state of order within a person that propels him to do the right things. It is a stage of individual development that resolves the contradictions within an individual. The pull to be selfish is counterbalanced by a greater pull to be selfless, the pull to drunkenness is countered by one to moderation, the pull to disobedience is negatived by that to obedience, and the pull to sexual givenness yields to sexual restraint, deviationism is corrected by compliance and individualism by collectivism. The individual must comply with the order laid down by the group.
Steve Biko’s critique entails that white liberalism is the opposite of the above guidelines of ideological discipline. Liberalism consists of “nonconformists who explain their participation in negative terms . . . These are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism and the country’s inhumanity to the black man” (Biko 2004:21). The definition provided by Biko can be linked to Ranger though it is not sufficient enough to describe his role in Zimbabwean nationalism. Practically, Ranger was a radical proponent of the anti-colonial movement and it is well fitting to align the above sentiments by President Mugabe to Ranger and what was also expected of him in terms of adherence to ideological discipline. His work before independence will immortally stand to testify this fact. Due to that, Ranger’s thought alteration which he applied to appreciate the post-colonial political sequences of state-driven policies which theoretically represent a pursuit of the Chi(zvi)murenga he stood for qualifies him a sell-out. However, the question is selling-out what?
As a leading nationalist historiography scholar Ranger’s castigation of the state-led post-land reform reframing of nationhood through history in the midst of regime change politics is what his anti-colonial contemporaries may regard as selling-out. Our generation can trace Ranger’s selling-out to his demonisation of the living nationalists most of whom were sources of his academic grounding. It is the same nationalists such as James Chikerema, Nathan Shamuyarira, Maurice Vambe, Joshua Nkomo to mention, but a few whom he exploited to legitimise himself as the supreme voice of Zimbabwean nationalist historiography (Ranger 2013). This reality in Ranger’s life is synonymous with the description of white liberalism pointed by Biko (2004:23):
As a testimony to their claim of complete identification with the blacks they call a few ‘intelligent and articulate’ blacks ‘to come around for tea at home’, where all present ask each other the same old hackneyed question ‘how can we bring about change. . .’ The more such — tea-parties one calls the more of a liberal he is and the freer he shall feel from the guilt that harness and binds his conscience.
Surprisingly, Ranger (2004) later directly turns against Robert Mugabe his other supposedly anti-colonial contemporary. He accuses the Mugabe Government for arrogating history to service its political realism. However, one is left wondering if there is no political party that legitimises itself through history. Moreover, if it has some authenticate claims to the same history it appropriates to define its present to attract political favour. Until today some conservatives of coloniality will always refer to history and how colonial governments were more progressive compared to the post-independence regimes.
This is the reason why some Africans would get angry on behalf of the white liberals because they view them as companions of the African race’s struggles. Some of these Africans include those who are constantly invited to white chaired platforms as representatives of the African plight. Later on the same intelligentsia becomes ashamed of its original place of belonging. All they love is living in the West even it means becoming self-imposed exiles. For some their self-actualisation is reached when they are granted university residences in Europe and America as voices of regime change for their mother countries. They later relate with their countrymen as upgraded versions of “being” and not as equals having been accorded the status of “becoming” by the colonial knowledge system. Likewise, the knowledge they would have produced in their lifetime remains relevant to the white liberals back in Europe and America. Such African liberals become celebrated in knowledge banks that denigrate Africa. This in many occasions has been that black liberals have no problem with bartering their birthright to become intellectual trophies of Europe’s ideological conquest.
Terence Ranger the parable
It is politically correct to condemn Ranger for selling-out, but on the other hand his views deserve due credit as it is essential for every revolutionary process to interrogate itself. One may ask, why Ranger as a medium of interrogating the African revolutionary experience? This is because we do not refuse knowledge no matter where it comes from. What is important is for that knowledge to co-exist with our experience. Again, this reflects how much we need to start investing in local knowledge generation to avoid confronting individuals whose ideas belong to where they come from and not our country which only becomes an explorers’ case-study for harnessing knowledge to their monopoly of it. The legacy of Ranger also speaks to those with temporary loyalty to what they say today and do the opposite tomorrow. My sahwira Tinashe Dzapasi makes Shona proverbial reference to this aspect of human inconsistence as: kukanganwa chezuro nehope, therefore Ranger’s legacy is a parable to all of us to stand for one thing at a time and not to assume the propensity of mutant shape shifters when we are no longer vindicated by the status-quo from the winds of change. Liberalism as cited by Biko (2004) offered a racial passport to choose sides which is something I think the African was and is not privileged to do.
The African revolutionary nationalists and intellectuals were proponents of the absolute coloniality overhaul. Therefore, nothing has changed up to today. The matter is the side that one chooses as a definition of what they would want to be remembered for when their writing lives to speak for them when they join their ancestors.
The coloniality “banking” concept
Revisiting the legacy of Terence Ranger is a refreshing reminder that our knowledge generation must be owned by none, but ourselves. We can no longer be at the receiving end of learning. We must start unlearning the pedagogy of liberal denigration of Africa as though the continent is naturally endowed with a lesser intellectual function. We need a new decoloniality paradigm shift of perceiving ourselves from the mechanical processes of Europe’s violent exertion of its ideas on the continent. We should now cease being vessels of banking borrowed knowledge to interpret our lived realities. Instead of a depository knowledge system, we need to continue cultivating the culture of evaluating knowledge relevant to our condition. That way relevant knowledge banking will shape our development. #borrowedmindsetmustfall.
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