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Nationalism and History
WRITING about the impact of nationalism on historians, the legendary British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee, had this to say: “…historians have been no more immune from [fixation of national social emotions] than other people. Indeed, the spirit of Nationality has appealed to historians with special force, because it has offered them some prospect of reconciling the common human desire for unity of vision with the division of labour imposed on them by the application of the Industrial System to their work.”
Conduits of nationalism in history
He goes further in more explicit terms: “On this account the national standpoint has proved specially attractive to modern Western historians, and it has been commended to their minds through more than one channel.” The channels include spirit of the age in which they were born and raised and, the Government-owned archives from where they draw raw material for research – primary documents. These two channels thus gave the Western historian his psychological and professional grounding in nationalism as the prime imperative and locus for historical thought.
Outbursts without sense of history
With this in mind and given Toynbee’s disproportionate influence on Zimbabwean historians and political scientists, one found it very strange that national sentiment was absolutely lacking in the recent undiplomatic indiscretion by a provincial minister from Limpopo in South Africa who raged against a sickly patient in some medical facility in that country. The whole saga unfolded in ways that suggested a paucity of historical grounding on our part, thus crippling our response which lacked in robustness to the point of unmerited apology. But let me say a little more on Toynbee the historian.
Sources of Western Society
Reading this British historian, I was quite watchful to see how his country’s national sentiment would obtrude into his sense of historical research. I didn’t need to struggle, opaque even though his style of writing often is. The chief burden of his first Volume of A Study of History is tracing the origins of the modern Western Society which he credits with generating “human” [read western] civilisation as we know it today. Pinning his narrative on two gains of Western Civilisation, namely the rise of the Industrial Society, and the Parliamentary system of governance, he very cautiously navigates between Hellenism and Romanism, readily conceding that both successively played “chrysalis” to the Western Society. That way he avoids being conflicted and dampened, even though the Hellenic Age creates some rough edges which he masterly pruned for a flawless narrative. We all know that apart from celebrated Athens, Greece also produced Sparta which ran on brawn and not brains. Toynbee didn’t allow that historical fact to inconvenience him.
Toynbee and the Age of Barbarians
Then after Hellenic and Roman civilisation came destructive bands we now know in history as the Barbarians. Barbarians were many, and virulently deposited genes in the Western Man, something that revulsed Toynbee. The barbarians included the Vandals, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, Gepids, to name just a few. Most rolled down from the present-day Scandinavian region to subdue their less martial rivals in mainland Europe and the British Isle. This is the part which really excited me about Toynbee and his reconstruction of Western history. Here is how.
Pruning Barbarians from history of the West
Convinced the Western Man and his habitat, the Western Society, could not with dignity claim barbarian ancestry and genes, he swiftly killed them off as unproductive and unreproductive civilisation, completely bereft of the germ of creative power needed to sire any civilisation, let alone the Western Man and the Western Society. These barbarians thus could never play chrysalis to what he terms “successor-state”, which is the Western Society! “Their destruction had been decreed before their foundation fell to be recorded,” wrote Arnold Toynbee, poetically asking rhetorically: “When the house built upon the sands had been carried away by the spate of the Volkerwanderung, what expectation of life could there be for a collection of hovels heaped up on the same treacherous foundations out of the boulders and shingle which the flood happened to have deposited as it came and went?” In that one swooping rhetorical question, an inconvenient gene linking the Western Man and the Western Society to Barbarians who sired them, is swiftly rejected and renounced to remould a squeaky clean ancestry by which to myth-make!
Persistent Barbarian gene
Of course Toynbee would again not be inconvenienced by the later age of Barbarism — better known in history as Colonialism — during which Western Man and Society, true to his Barbarian gene, again overran children of a lesser god here in Africa, there in Asia, Middle East and the Americas. He had little time for what he derogatorily called “the conceit of historical continuity” for which he castigated early historians who mistakenly believed “nobility derives from conquest”!
Toynbee and African historians
Like I have said, Toynbee justifies and invents palatable and usable history for the Western Man and Society, and does so unashamedly. My good friend, Professor Miles-Tendi, taking after the likes of the late Terence Ranger and Jocelyn Alexander, but seemingly oblivious to Toynbee, derisively calls this “patriotic history”, which he wrongly regards as a peculiarity of Zanu-PF. The implication is clear: real history is written from a scholarly, non-committal angle, with “scientific” detachment. Yet no western historian ever lives by that fallacious claim, least of all the iconic Toynbee. I hope our historians and political scientists begin to wake up to this basic fact so they see research as nationally conscious and committed. The Indians do it so well, which is why they have been able to launch themselves into the 21st Century, with bursting self-confidence.
South African diplomatic furore
This week a South African provincial minister, who is also a medical doctor for Limpopo Province, triggered a potential diplomatic furore when she abused a visibly ill patient said to be a Zimbabwean illegal migrant. As I write, it is yet to be established that indeed the distraught patient is Zimbabwean. Not even her name has been given, or evidenced adduced that she smuggled herself into South Africa, and solely to get medical attention which she can’t obtain or afford in Zimbabwe. No one seems interested to verify these missing key facts, even though a whole debate and emotion has been aroused on such assumptions. Instead of raising these inconvenient facts, Zimbabweans like serial critic Hopewell Chin’ono have joined in the lynching of the poor lady, alongside the “irresponsible, undemocratic, profligate and corrupt” Zimbabwe she is thought to hail from.
Missing and drowning facts
What made the minister raving mad was that this alleged illegal sickling migrant strained Limpopo Province’s health budget, even displacing local South Africans from accessing health services they sorely need and are constitutionally entitled to get. As both a minister and a doctor, her duty, she firmly asserted, was to South Africans only, and not to migrants fleeing from misgovernance and broken services back in their countries of origin. It is a point which ANC’s Gwede Mantashe has since buttressed.
Offending against Hippocratic Oath
As the storm which the provincial minister triggered grew, reactions spanned the whole gamut: from a round denunciation of the ministerial doctor deemed to have offended against the Hippocratic Oath, to a sturdy defence of the same minister for defending South Africa’s national interest and sparse resources imperilled by sickly immigrants from misgoverned neighbourhoods. Realising the storm which the official had brewed, the South African Department of Health gingerly navigated between defending their official and remonstrating with her for an intemperate handling of an obviously sickly case. All this against conflictual calls to get the minister-doctor fired, or alternatively getting the South African Government to show a stronger hand in dealing with the “unresolved” political question in Zimbabwe, from where the patient is thought to have hailed.
Sideswiping key facts
What is to be made of this portentous incident? First, it clearly revealed how Nationalism is such a potent force in both people-to-people relations and in inter-state relations. Once the vapour of Nationalism rose, facts mattered little, even becoming superfluous. Who the patient is, what nationality she is and how she got into South Africa to then access its medical facility appeared superfluous. South Africans sideswiped and pruned facts at will, while inventing new ones to lend righteousness to their charge.
The story of WENELA
Second to be dismissed was time and history. It seemed an accepted fact that cross-border movement between Zimbabwe and South Africa began with what South Africans charged as post-independence Zanu-PF misgovernance. Yet cross-border movements between Zimbabwe and South Africa traces as far back as the 19th Century when mining started in South Africa. Then, Zimbabwe was yet to be colonised. After colonisation, more cross border movement took place, this time as some colonial interstate arrangement. The culmination was WENELA — Witwatersrand Native Labour Association — which drew migrant labour from across Southern Africa, including from Zimbabwe. Zanu-PF was not yet born, let alone in the governance saddle.
South Africa, hatchery of pathogens
Significantly, many cross-border diseases in the region were bred in mining compounds of white South Africa. These pathogens were re-exported to many countries in the region, Zimbabwe included. Many of WENELA’s victims suffered from asbestosis and tuberculosis contracted in South African mines and mining compounds; they are yet to be compensated. If anything, they were sent back to their countries of origin, to burden health systems there, and eventually die. No one challenged the lady minister with these well documented facts from history, which this sickly woman was a mere latter-day personification.
Miscegenated regional proletariat
Several years later, and a few decades after South Africa’s democratic dispensation, today countries which make up South Africa’s hinterland remain labour dormitories which continue to supply South African mines, factories, farms and households. That makes the country a melting pot of miscegenated identities, social relations and a vast pool of trans-boundary proletariat. White South Africa remains the greatest beneficiary of that labour migration, to the extent it recruits and employs foreigners. All blacks in Southern Africa, South Africans included, have become one vast labour pool in which nationality matters little except for senseless chauvinism, xenophobia and horizontal conflict among the wretched. Does the junior minister expect neighbouring states’ health systems to shoulder the health burden arising from the deeply and historically ingrained system of labour migration which white and apartheid South Africa created, and which post-apartheid South Africans are happy to man for white interests, to our collective detriment as a miscegenated Southern African proletariat?
SA mines and sub-regional impoverishment
Apart from British, European and American mining capital, white South African capital has been the strongest in exploiting minerals in our countries in the whole region. Much worse, in keeping with the logic of mining capitalism, South Africa has been exporting our minerals as ore, for processing inside South Africa itself. That way it has kept its economic hinterland predominantly primary, thus reducing earnings from finite minerals. Alongside that has been suppression of high-employment tertiary industries, against ever burgeoning regional populations. Regional dormitories and warehouse economies for its manufacturers have been the inevitable result. No one challenged the irate minister on that.
Zimbabwe’s health personnel in SA
Countries like Zimbabwe, which is charged with ills of misgovernance, have done far better in providing social services, principally overall literacy and highly-rated skills. These include skills in the medical field. Again South Africa, alongside Britain, Australia, America and many western countries, has been sucking these skills dry. Zimbabweans who man South African medical facilities, including facilities in the irate minister’s Limpopo Province, amount to several thousands. Under Sadc protocols, no citizens hailing from a country with a medical campus may access medical schools elsewhere in the region. This means Zimbabwean medical skills exported to South Africa are predominantly home-grown or home-financed, with South Africa ranking among the largest beneficiaries. That strains manning levels here in Zimbabwe, while vastly improving those in South Africa itself, not to mention improved health care giving. That imported medical personnel provides labour there, without discriminating on grounds of nationality or migrant status, in obedience to the Hippocratic Oath, the same way neighbouring countries, including Zimbabwe, did during years of liberation struggles. It also pays taxes, makes medical contributions, thus exposing this simplistic reading that Zimbabwe exports social problems and dependency only. We have also been a solution to South Africa’s national health question, whatever the real origins of the woman in question may be.
Spatial sub-regional service imbalances
Thanks to logic of colonial spatial development, almost all border areas in our region were historically neglected. Or had marked disparities in levels of social amenities and services. We see that between Zimbabwe and Zambia; Botswana and Zimbabwe; Mozambique and Zimbabwe and of course between South Africa and the rest of her neighbours, Zimbabwe included. That South Africa is better developed, offers better services comparatively, owes little to nature of governance both of itself or those around it. It owes largely to the historical place and status South Africa has attained since 1652 when the Dutch landed there, followed by the English.
If truth be told, like most post-colonial states, black South Africa has been struggling to maintain same service levels against democratised access of the broad citizenry to non-discriminatory social services.
Zimbabweans at home can pay!
In those circumstances of spatial differentials in service levels and access to facilities, the spirit in SADC has been to allow for communities on either side of borders cross-border access to facilities and services. This has made for good neighbourliness, with the only difference being by way of tariff policies which individual countries levy for services rendered. With Zimbabwe’s US-dollar economy, showing by way of its citizens’ ability to buy health services from as far afield as India, one finds it hard to imagine why and how Zimbabweans fail to meet their medical expenses should they be hospitalised in any country while on visit. This of course excludes migrant labourers in any country hailing from Zimbabwe. By law and by right, these should be the burden of employing economies. Why would/should Zimbabwe insure the health of labour that migrates to another country, frankly?
Raising fresh wounds of history
Unwittingly, the zealous South African official has opened a Pandora’s box sure to drive a wedge between South Africa and the rest of SADC. Already SADC is smarting from the abuse of its citizens through profiling or worse, through physical harm. All this is over and above burdens of and injuries from history for which South Africa, acting on the logic and law of succession, should be held accountable. As an angry donkey, I have within my master’s household health victims from WENELA. They are yet to be compensated, much as talk of that has been opened, closed and reopened interminably. Looked at from the vantage of long apartheid, who exported and exports more strain on health systems in the neighbourhood? Anyway, why divide a miscegenated apartheid-bred proletariat which should be harnessed and mobilised to make demands against white capital in the region. I thought humans thought better than we donkeys! Let me bray.
Online Reporter