Unmasking the familiar face behind the ‘crisis’

Elliot Ziwira At the Bookstore
All this talk about “crisis”: “crisis” after “crisis”, where does it emanate from? Could there be some method to this persistent “crisis”?

It is trite that the “crises” pervading both the colonial and post-colonial nation state of Zimbabwe are traceable to Cecil John Rhodes’ idea that the African continent was there for the taking because it was inhabited by “half-devil” and “half-children” as Rudyard Kipling spews in “The White Man’s Burden”, and his belief that the English were a superior race.

Probably Kheir (2010) is on point when he avers that the “African crisis, is a crisis of inheritance rather than a crisis of capability”.

It follows then that the so-called “crisis” in Zimbabwe is a colonial child.

There are imperatives that inspired black Africans to take up arms against oppression: colonial injustice premised on hegemony, land appropriation and cultural subjugation, which constraints weigh down on the post-colonial nation state of Zimbabwe.

It is easy to discern the method used each time the word “crisis” is used to decry whatever is said to have gone wrong with the Motherland. But what remains cloudy is the colonial link to the inherited predicament that African governments have to grapple with in their attempts to move forward for the common good of all citizens.

The issue of ethnicity thrown about without restraint, is neither here nor there, as it is a colonial creation. Even during the struggle for independence, the bane was used to infiltrate liberation movements and their armies (ZANLA, ZANU’s military wing, and ZIPRA-ZAPU’s military wing), and it remains an albatross around the neck of the nation state of Zimbabwe.

But there is method to all this.

The “crisis” leading to the formation of trade unions and nationalist parties as well as subsequent liberation movements, essentially bares the injustices of colonial governments.

The loss of land, as Alexander Fuller puts it in “Don’t Let’s go to the Dogs Tonight”, equates to the loss of “air, water, food, and sex”, and in Zhuwarara’s (2001) view, losing land is equivalent to losing spirituality.

Because the African is a spiritual being as portrayed in Lawrence Vambe’s “An Ill-Fated People” (1972), Ndabaningi Sithole’s “The Polygamist” (1972) and Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s “Writers in Politics” (1981), customs and cultural values shape the African, thus, the loss of his shrines through dislocation, displacement and dispossession is a hotbed that cannot be lain on without contestation.

It is this loss of spiritual connection that Cesaire (1994) bemoans.

In “Waiting for the Rain” (1975), Charles Mungoshi explores the crisis of spiritual morass which obtains in both colonial and post-colonial discourses.

The “decade of crisis”, which according to Raftopoulos in Raftopoulos and Mlambo (eds) (2009), falls between 1998 and 2008, cannot be explored in the absence of the land “crisis” rooted in Rhodes’ larger mentality which “inspired” the BSAP and “Pioneer Column” mercenaries.

It is mind-boggling that land acquisition by its rightful owners can lead to a “crisis”, yet there was no “crisis” when the same land was grabbed, plundered and appropriated by white settlers way back in 1890.

They simply hoisted the Union Jack on Harare Hill and “in the name of Queen Victoria, took possession of Mashonaland, and all other unpossessed land in South-Central Africa that it should be found desirable to add to the Empire” (Martin and Johnson, 1981).

“Unpossessed land?” Really?

Raftopoulos (2009), maintains that the gratuities given to war veterans in 1997 and intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo war in 1998 led to the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy, and plunged the nation state into catastrophe. He, however, seems to downplay that it is the indigenes’ desire to repossess their ancestral land which sticks out as the major reason for the “crisis”.

Since crises are man-made, it’s imperative to examine the reasons for and against land appropriation and acquisition, which left the post-colonial nation State of Zimbabwe in a perpetual “crisis” as depicted in “Absent: The English Teacher” (2009) by John Eppel, Valerie Tagwira’s “The Uncertainty of Hope” (2006), and Eric Harrison’s “Jambanja” (2006).

In “Absent: The English Teacher” (2009), John Eppel satirises the change of roles between whites and blacks in post-colonial Zimbabwe to highlight how the concept of nation has lost its lustre due to corruption, deceit, ethnicity and individualism.

However, the reasons for the economic meltdown depicted in Eppel’s novel are not only to be blamed on the black leadership, pertinently the ZANU PF Government, for history reminds us that the new Government of Zimbabwe extended a hand of reconciliation to Ian Smith’s Rhodies, which hand was spurned for ulterior reasons.

Colonial legislation created a crisis on land ownership. The Land Acquisition Act of 1992 effectively sought to correct the imbalances created by the 1930 Land Apportionment Act and the Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951.

The post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme was also meant to mitigate the same crisis. Even the issue of compensation that white former commercial farmers clamoured for, which the Government of Zimbabwe under President Mnangagwa’s New Dispensation undertook to settle to foster win-win outcomes for the common good, is rooted in the crisis sowed in colonialism and segregatory colonial laws.

Blacks lost not only land because of exclusionary settler laws, but they also lost their being, for with the loss of their land their spirituality and wealth in the form of cattle also suffered major dents.

It is preposterous, therefore, to refer to the challenges that come with decolonisation as a “crisis”, because as Fanon (1967) maintains, “decolonisation” like colonisation “is violent”.

The economic disintegration that has played havoc on the nation State of Zimbabwe, which some quarters would rather call a “crisis” for political mileage and posterity, is depicted in Valerie Tagwira’s “The Uncertainty of Hope” (2006) through adept use of metaphor, setting and characterisation.

Like Eppel, Tagwira hoists the reader on an intriguing whirlwind voyage of lack, corruption, individualism and betrayal.

The fictional experience depicted highlights the despondency, frustration and hopelessness pervading the characters’ travails, yet the desire to repossess the means of production, the land, is neither rubbished nor thwarted.

Mbare; a slum for black labourers united by hardship, inadequacy and normlessness, is a colonial construction.

Hope for the African, robbed of years of his being, is not to ape the erstwhile coloniser, nor is it to recreate a new Mbare in his psyche, but to create opportunities for himself. Such opportunities can only come to fruition through ownership of the means of production, for as Mashingaidze Gomo highlights in “A Fine Madness” (2010), there is no freedom without ownership of the land.

Both Onai and Tom in Tagwira’s novel are conscious of this fact.

Let those who thrive on “crises” propagate “crisis”, but for Rhodies, whose mantra is “we built this nation”, “crisis” is when an African asks for a change of roles and demand his “pound of flesh”, to borrow from William Shakespeare in “The Merchant of Venice”.

This rationale obtains in Eric Harrison’s “Jambanja” (2006) and Jim Barker’s “Paradise Plundered” (2007).

Here one is tempted to ask: whose paradise? Plundered by whom?

There is no chaos that beats colonisation, no chaos that beats a people’s loss of spirituality through exposure to foreign gods and their enforcement on them.

Rhodes believed that blacks were animals and perpetual children, and his progeny equally believed, or believes so, therefore, whatever is meant to call them to order curiously becomes a “crisis”.

Collective memory recalls how the settler godfather puts it to his fellows in the Cape Colony: “Does this House think that it is right that men in a state of pure barbarism should have the franchise and the vote? Treat the native as a subject people . . . Be lords over them . . . The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise.”

Inspired by Rhodes, Ian Smith felt that “inconsistent”, “unintelligent and “unprincipled” people of colour should not be allowed to vote as De Waal (1990) notes. But democracy calls for one-man, one-vote, the reason why the crisis of exclusion that colonialism fashioned had to be corrected through a protracted struggle at the cost of thousands of black people’s lives.

Their lives mattered too, and still do as enshrined in the Constitution of Zimbabwe.

As Zimbabweans reflect on the essence of freedom and independence, it is worthwhile that they take cognisance of the many “crises” pervading the Motherland, where local and alien gangs coalesce around “crisis” with the view to fashion “crisis” out of greenbacks as a way of thwarting the “crisis”.

But could it be possible then for one to strangle the hen that lays the golden eggs?

When “crisis” wears a familiar colonial face fixated on impeding the progress of the post-colonial nation state, Africans, nay Zimbabweans should unite to unmask this apparition, for indeed, their destiny therein lies.