The Sunday News
Micheal Mhlanga
It is sad to learn that we still have a very titanic pool of young minds who think that colonisation, colonialism and coloniality is a tired subject.
What is worse damning is that chagrins of the discourse are those we expect to be champions of disentangling the remnants of white hegemony perpetuated by the black Zimbabwean who thinks accent, liberal sexuality which is “fake wokeness” and a fancy degree is a hallmark of making it in life. They ceremonially become champions of denigrating any idea which challenges representations of the oppressive white system so that to their friends, followers and Baas John, they appear as the “enlightened” black boy, Alas to you! Shame on you who think that ideas which revoke racial hegemony through reminding our people where we are coming from, the scourging ghosts and the cancerous pretence displayed by some like you are tired, I have no doubt that what is tired is your remote controlled mind, fished out of a swampy Zimbabwean University excellent in producing American puppets and English marionettes which we shall never tire to wish for a Gepetto yearn to liberate it from the web of disliking true enlightenment, opting for rehearsed thinking. I say to you, today I shall talk about the boil which bore your demise and perpetual schizophrenia, which if not treated early, you will genetically relay to your own kith and kin- The Zimbabwean University.
Over the years hundreds of thousands of people have attempted to portray the black person’s struggle and suffering that has occurred with the development of our world. There is, however, no way to accurately depict the feelings and emotions of these people because the majority have never experienced it or let alone even imagined the lives that these people were forced to live. Slavery was one of the most horrific inhumane acts ever instilled on a race of people ever in our world’s history. People were stolen from their homelands, broken apart from their families, and were thrust into a lifestyle that inhibited their every move and instilled harsh punishments on them. It is almost impossible for many of us to comprehend the mindsets that these slave owners possessed, but history paints a truly horrific and emotional picture for us all to see.
What my rehearsing colleague should understand is that colonialism brought new problems for Blacks because now they also had to compete economically with the new influx of whites and other immigrants. The struggle of the black men and women in Zimbabwe over the last 37 years has been one of heartbreak and broken promises. Not until the last 30 years have the blacks of Zimbabwe been given a voice in political matters of the country that has inhabited and controlled them for hundreds of years, however, the voice is still very weak and feeble against the political and economic power of the white man in the world who controls the commerce which runs the politics.
It is interesting to see the way that the whites stereotyped different tribes with different attitudes and personalities like different breeds of dogs. The Coromants of West Zimbabwe were thought to be extremely troublesome and rebellious and the Ibos were much more accepting of their servitude. How these men could actually rip a family apart and think nothing of it is just the beginning of a mindset of the white man that transcended long into the future. The depiction of the trip of a Negro from his homeland to the cane fields of the plantations demonstrates and portrays a vivid image of the mental and physical suffrage that these people endured. It is no different from what the pioneer column did when they decided that the long voyage is costly and time consuming, so the best idea was to residentially enslave. In the process, they created black hierarchies by creating black people who spied on Black people who behaved “black” so that they punish them.
There is nothing as painfully memorable as my primary school experience of anyone who spoke in “vernacular” and was made to wear a tag around his or her neck inscribed “I AM BLACK”, this was the most condescending manner one could suffer just for the quest of making us denounce our identity and aspire never to be us. We were made to believe that being us is a curse, a punishment by a laughable inscription, worse off, administered by a Black Teacher.
When I come to think of it, I see how Rhodes, Moffat, Jameson and Rudd, even in their death, their painful legacy is not tired of oppressing us, it continuously engulfs us in a pandemonium of policing each other to impress the white masters we so aspire to be, yet when we introspect like Fanon’s patient, the prognosis is of a disease of identical inadequacies which scoffs us in.
The problem is the University
Professor Sabelo Gatsheni refuses to believe in the existence of humanity without a knowledge system, he contends that Zimbabwean humanity is a product of a knowledge system. To the surprise of Zimbabwe, bodies of knowledge seem to be economical in demonstrating Black philosophies, even the petite that is portrayed is an invented culture of being a Zimbabwean. Does this mean that Zimbabweans existed without a knowledge system or the knowledge systems of Zimbabwe were deliberately declined for the inhalation of Zimbabwean expertise? He asks, if that is true what probes another civilisation into moderating the prospects of another? In unpacking the role of the university in mitigating such a quagmire, the deduction has exposed the “capture” of the university itself from producing knowledge that furthers our identity. The formalisation of knowledge in Zimbabwe was one which was executed in alarming levels of dishonesty, during a phase of creating epistemic superiority to perpetuate negation; the invention of the university in Zimbabwe was uncritical of the our ontological structure. The academia created itself in a way that sought to institutionalise everyone into western discourses or rather it was created to further the interests of the west since Zimbabweans were not even permissible on the road to stand sophisticated in a creative fashion.
Recently in Mutare, in one of my national voyages, a public speaking high school student alluded to the fact that the general deduction from a realist mind would agree that Zimbabwean systems were suspended, in their suspension other forms of knowledge engaged the formation of a “system in Zimbabwe” I concluded that this means that Zimbabweans began to live in a different way but in the same geographical boundary. I realised that the invention of a university in Zimbabwe which did not bear the Zimbabwean ontology therefore hijacked the function of Zimbabwean intelligence in informing the political, social and the economic dimensions of Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean university till date is stagnant in reproducing overseas ontologies or either dwindling to engross disobedient ontologies in the broader national social scientific framework.
Let us recognise that there are binary extensive assumptions around university instruction in Zimbabwe: first that the overseas presented it, and second that it has declined since freedom. Both assumptions are untrue because Zimbabwe had ontology of itself before interacting with the rest of the world and secondly in the defeat of the Zimbabwean structures that existed before co-existence, Zimbabwe has failed to suggest its own academic brand even in the existing bodies of knowledge. The unrealistic apologetic nationalist academia are bent on justifying the effectiveness of the liberation struggle might contend that the university is producing Zimbabwean knowledge. That case succumbs to the reality of minimal Zimbabwean practices in the extensive socio political field. Since liberation the university has been creating citizens who after graduation are craving to go overseas and adapt with the environment that they were created for. The contradiction between the Zimbabwean goal to realise itself and the overseas trained citizens has established an unceasing conflict between the population and the educationally refined.
When the external forced its identifiable model of university education in Zimbabwe, it meant the overwriting of the existing political systems in Zimbabwe. Through the expertise of western education political organisations were instituted in Zimbabwe instead of the institution of Zimbabwean political organisms of civil governance.
The leadership that assumed the spaces of control was verified using the western indicators. The connection between the university and politics is identically stout; however, the debate is which fragment informs the other. The non-appearance of a Zimbabwean knowledge classification in the academia submits that the political affairs of Zimbabwe are not informed by the native knowledge assemblies. Zimbabwean politics as depicted by many graduates confirms our political transactions as a make of their knowledge systems. This scheme has managed to be self-defensible due to the miscarriage of the academia to lodge its cosmos in informing politics; instead politics is informing the academia in Zimbabwe.
The politics that is informing the academia in Zimbabwe is a creation of an academia that is external which registers the Zimbabwean intelligentsia as a reactionary that does not propose lucrative thought.
Politics has hijacked the creation of sustainable knowledge into creating an academia that respond to superficial political activities of statesmen who themselves are products of peripheral discourses.
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