2013-2018: Reflections on permanent Zimbabwean (African) ideas — Part 2

15 Oct, 2017 - 02:10 0 Views
2013-2018: Reflections on permanent Zimbabwean (African) ideas — Part 2

The Sunday News

Zimbabwe map

Richard Mahomva

I concluded the virgin instalment of this series by stressing that Zimbabwe is in a state of extreme ideological altercations and that the broad base of these lodgments of divergence around nationhood transcends the oversimplification of the fight between Zanu-PF and its beleaguered opposition.

The current forces sustaining the current national divide are a clear expression of the African value system’s warfare with the Western/colonial value system.

This compels need for rational scrutiny of what Zanu-PF and its opponents genuinely represent in this ideological conflict matrix. So, Zanu-PF broadly epitomises the historical and future aspirations of the African value system within the Zimbabwean political context.

This is because the party extracts its ideological relevance from the organic aspirations of the nation’s freedom from colonial hegemony. By organic aspirations; I am referring to ideas which inclusively resonate with every Zimbabwean’s brutal encounter with colonialism and the involuntary ensued need to eradicate the misfortunes of Western expansionism.

This essentially means that the party’s overall obligation is to fundamentally ensure that it operates as a driving force for the preservation of the African value system which dates back to the anti-colonial battles of the Mutapa State right up to the later strategically instituted segmentations of colonial resistances ordinarily postured in our historiography as Imfazo yamaNdebele yokuqala/The Ndebele-Anglo War of 1893 and then Umvukela wamaNdebele/Hondo yeChimurenga of 1896-7 which gave birth to the Second Chimurenga, the Third and Fourth Zvimurenga of liberating the economy and promoting Black empowerment to the fullest with no apology.

It is on this account that the ruling party is laboured with an acquittal mandate to the founding values of the nation and its history as indicated above.

This is the same history which informs the party’s role as a custodian of the African value system. Actually, the party’s existence is rooted in the African value system and without its rooted base in this value system the party is doomed to fail.

This is substantiated by how the party salvaged its lost impetus in the late 90s when it revisited the residual aspects of the Lancaster Treaty’s terms on the land question. This followed Zimbabwe’s adoption of a narrow capital democratisation immediately after independence.

This resulted in a great deal of the country’s means of production being under white proprietorship. On the other hand, this exposed the country to socio-economic structural adjustments which have imposed lasting injury effects to public service delivery, hence the party’s proposal for the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim Asset) in 2013.

However, prior to the launch of the Zim Asset strategy, the land policy transformation sufficiently threw down the gauntlet of white ego and of course the Western value system. The West’s revert to this abrupt explosive attack to its grip to the coloniality of capital led to the invention of a regime change movement.

Here the embryotic inventory of a so-called “democratic change” was sought through a discourteous labelling of an elected Government as a “regime” which deserved complete exudation from the face of history.

This was only going to be achieved through the demonisation of the African value system which is well outlined in the Chimurenga past and its perpetual manifestation in the country’s political culture — attitudes and altitudes which inform the grammars of political relevance in Zimbabwe.

Therefore, the invention of opposition to the party was a fight against the party’s return to its foundation of endurance which in this case was exclaimed by the land reclamation exercise. To this day, the politics of land still has an immense bearing in defining the course of Zimbabwe’s political route and the country’s patriotic willpower aimed at unpacking the national question and the permanent morals and interests of the nation.

However, in the face of this epistemic contestation which is confronting the Zimbabwean politically contested space there is need for the best political idea to fight its way up to victory. However, victory has only been one sided ever since the invention of the Movement for Democratic Change and its ally opponents to the party.

However, I should reiterate that this situation is not unique to the politics of our dear motherland. This is a historical feature which is spread across the entire continent’s political landscape. It is obvious that the undercurrents of Africa’s political persuasions are products of decolonial and colonial forces of being, power and knowledge. It is on this basis that African philosophy (African value system) or philosophy in Africa (Western value system) situates its values along the contours of the neo-colonialism and post-colonial socio-economic and political dichotomies. This is ultimately explained in Professor Lumumba’s poetic dirge of the ideological crisis confronting Africa’s political landscape, he says “Africa is at war with herself”.

The same lament summarises the Zimbabwean political context and the country’s divergent paradigms of political difference which in many occasions are concurrently misread as notions of national belonging. In our situation, on one end, this has been popularised by the ongoing debate on the need for the establishment to be preserved. On the other end, this debate has been confined to finding ways of putting the establishment to extinction through the whims of a misnamed “Mugabe Must Go” democratic transition which in its true sense is nothing more than a “regime change” plot set to give credence to the Western value system.

The sad reality is that since its invention, the opposition has failed to challenge the organic impact of the African value system in the psyche of our country’s marketplace of ideas. This is why we have festivals, book fairs and creativity hubs which seek to capture the soul of the African value system and adulterate it with pseudo democratic values.

It is as if there was no democracy in Zimbabwe until the invention of the opposition by the West. However, this attempt to corrupt the African value system has also been sustained by the Government’s inability to fund all forms of knowledge production.

In last week’s piece, I also indicated that this regime change project now resides in the nationalist movement’s failure to broadly articulate its ideological trajectory in the same manner the agents of externally induced “change” are doing. This is because over the years we have witnessed the extent to which the regime change agenda has assumed its relevance from misrepresenting the legacy of the nationalist movements and many at times producing lethal affronts to the values of the nationalist cause.

This observation is confirmed when one closely and critically monitors the authorship of the land reform literature. The over-supply of opinion on the land reform largely captures an anti-Zimbabwean narrative of the land question. This is why it has become common knowledge for the land reform to be viewed as a “jambanja” across all social-science disciplines.

The danger of producing such anti-narrative and giving it credence of expression in centres of learning is a threat to the founding values of the nation. Moreover, this compromises the mandate of the country’s centres of learning as conduits of generating rational patriotic consciousness.

Sadly, this false projection of the Third-Chimurenga has only attracted defence from a few intellectuals in Zimbabwe and abroad. Of late, Prof Sam Moyo has been at the forefront of unpacking the misrepresentations of the land reform programme.

Many of our thinkers and emerging intellectuals have failed to access the logic of the Afro-centred sophistication of Prof Moyo’s rich timeless findings of the Zimbabwean land reclamation agenda. On the contrary, there has been an abundant toxic dependence — if not an over-prescribed leaning towards anti-African views on the land reform programme. This slant to the denial of the virtues of the land reform — which is synonymous with the denial of the African identity has been catalysed by the quest for preserving the unjust history of the coloniality of capital.

There is a clear erasure — if not expurgation of the authentic African narrative as one may seek to understand the issue of land reclamation as captured by neo-liberal Zimbabwe political-economy scholars like Brian Raftopolous, Norma Kriger, Patrick Bond, Jocelyn Alexander, Joan McGregor, Elizabeth Schmidt, Amanda Hammar and many more colonial intellectual conservatives.

This is the reason why many of our scholars will never embrace the land reform as a process which catalysed a successful reconciliation with history and its marginalisation impact on the country’s rightful majority.

The same anti-land reform pedagogy also claims merit for being none-racial yet the question on land was racial from the outset. However, the none-racial credibility of this view is guilty of hefty factual crimes to history and the political culture of this country which influenced the land reclamation process.

This is because a majority of the scholars whose work has pointed out the failures of the Zimbabwean land reclamation project are white writers. Even the journals publishing these anti-land reform works are white owned — the same journals’ editorial boards are largely white. Even some of the local publishers which have been at the fore of promoting the anti-Zimbabwean land reclamation discourses are white owned. I know such a submission is prone to make the writer to be viewed as a racist, but there is no way that can be avoided because the land question in Zimbabwe is a racial topical matter.

What emerges clearly from this observation is that the promotion of “whiteness” and reclaiming the lost spoils of Rhodesia is the reason why the regime change project has been able to continue misleading the thinking of our people and the academia in particular.

For far too long, Zimbabwe has excessively given room to these ideas due to democratic obsessions which reside in misguided promotion of free thought. However, the promotion of this “free-thinking” is sabotaging and straining the dissemination of the uniting values of the nation and its aspirations which we need to jealousy guard in the classroom and beyond.

While it is critical to promote national debate or debate around the national question, there is a perennial ideological dissemination prerequisite in any given context to make sure that there is a balanced supply of experiences; especially those experiences which give meaning to the essence of nationhood. In the process, we need to be cautious not to confuse nationhood with split patriotic national consciousness and its concealed undercurrents of realism which may be misread as national interests. This is because we know for a fact that our national interests are expressed through the African value system and not the opposite.

Consequently, if we are to be consistently aligned to the historical national values of Zimbabwe there is no way we can find fault with land reclamation.

Probably we can only critique the methodological approaches to the land reform, but to conclusively dismiss the process — as has been the case with many research works and opinions put forward to the public sphere is not justified.

To this point, we are all challenged to be critical of the factors which are sustaining the regime change agenda in Zimbabwe.

-Richard Mahomva is an independent researcher and a literature aficionado interested in pan-Africanism, decoloniality and Afrocentricity. He is the Project Co-ordinator of Leaders for Africa Network; Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the annual Reading Pan-Africa Symposium. Feedback: [email protected]

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