The Sunday News
Literature Rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
The colonial history of Britain and Zimbabwe is symbolic of a dog-master relationship. As metaphorically presented by the late war-veteran and writer, Freedom Nyambuya (1986), in her book On the Road Again, the dog’s job is to hunt-down prey for its master. After the hunt, all the steak is for the master’s pleasure and the best the dog can get is chewed bones.
Luis Bernado Honwana’s We Killed the Mangy Dog & Other Mozambique Stories further explores how the colonial bondage made Africa an “exploitation dog” of the Western hemisphere. Mozambique is the setting of Honwana’s narrative, Mangy was a stray dog alienated from the dogs of Portuguese whom in the book are a symbol of repression. Here social class and racial marginalisation are the obvious subject matter. Mangy dog, just like the main character in the story Ghino is unwanted because he is a kaffir. His peers are from the upper ranks colonially constructed human hierarchy. At the top there is Quim; a young boy of Portuguese descent. His Portuguese whiteness makes him head of the gang. Faruk is the second best of the league. He is Arabic origin and Xangai is the Asian element of the crew. These peers’ relationship is reflective of the colonial divide which was all over Africa and is still present in global politics. Due to alienation Ghino identified with Mangy-Dog and this exposed him to further alienation from his colleagues. He is the one who was always assigned to do the dirty work for the crew.
At one point, Quim proposed that Mangy-Dog should be killed. Upon the execution of this escapade it was concluded that Ghino was to give Mangy Dog the last bullet. He had no option because he wanted to stay in the group. Ghino did not want to be the “chicken” in the crew. Due to peer pressure he had to go out of his way to kill Mangy-Dog. The murder of Mangy-Dog was in the interest of solidarity; the same kind of solidarity employed to challenge political reform in Africa by mercenaries handled by Western colonialists.
As Fela Kuti put it: “This is what happens to we Africans everyday”. We are reduced to dogs and we still go ahead to kill Mangy-Dog. Just like Mangy-Dog depicting the struggle against coloniality, our governments in Africa are hunted down by some of their citizens. The very same citizens who should be defending sovereignity of the African state find themselves falling into Ghino’s trap of going against the Mangy-Dog (nationalist movement) whom they should be protecting. Indeed, Mangy-Dog could be wounded and alienated as it is with case of African states and the pitfalls of national consciousness. However, should that be the only reason for us (represented by Ghino) to be responsible for the shedding of Mangy-Dog’s blood? Sadly most of us want to belong to unions, leagues, clubs, coalitions and associations which demand them to send Mangy-Dog to the grave. Killing Mangy-Dog has lucrative rewards. Over the years killing Mangy-Dog has flocked some out of Africa for university fellowships. Killing Mangy-Dog has seen some get noble peace prizes. Killing Mangy-Dog has enriched some sectors of the NGOs community in Africa.
Our Zimbabwean Ghinos
Philip Barclay’s book offers a unique narrative linkage with that of Honwana which is summarised above. Barclay’s account suggests how much the African state symbolises Mangy-Dog. Her life is dependent on the mercy of the former colony which in this instance is represented by Quim (head of the gang). Ghino only comes in as a servile entity of the crew who receives instructions from above and his survival in the clique is based on submission to rules of the game. One of which is to go beyond adding the scars to Mangy-Dog, but his assignment is to kill the already weak dog. He identifies with it at all costs, but the struggle to belong to his clique of foreign benevolent company makes him sacrifice Mangy-Dog. This tragedy represents the greatest folly of our time in Zimbabwe. The Western agenda to kill Mangy-Dog has surfaced in several ways which undermine our country’s toil for independence. In the like manner, Barclay recollects that Zimbabwe went through a period of hope and despair. As explained in last week’s piece, Barclay’s analysis narrowly linked this phase to his period of serving in the British embassy between 2006 and 2008. Therefore there was need to recruit anti-government movers and shakers to bring about political reform in Zimbabwe. Therefore, it is clear that Britain’s meddling in Zimbabwe goes beyond enforcing democracy and providing aid for development. However, it is an indication of shifting the paradigm of power to favour neo-colonialism.
Barclay clearly states that his duties brought him closer to a thousand-fold of individuals who had committed themselves to resist the Mugabe regime. These included pressure-groups, private media institutions, lawyers, sexual rights movements to mention, but a few. He further states that the British embassy was responsible for offering them small grants to execute their resistance to the government.
Britain’s long hand to Zimbabwe
Apart from manpower recruitments it is proved that between 2007 and 2008 the Department for International Development (DfID) provided £38 million in aid for Zimbabwe. Most of this funding targeted the poorest and most vulnerable Zimbabweans, with the highest priority being to tackle Hiv/Aids and food insecurity. This is a clear indication that Africa’s underdevelopment empowers Western interference in Africa to enhance the dependence syndrome. Britain went further to channel funding through UN agencies and local NGOs under the auspices of supporting Zimbabwean civil society to monitor human rights abuses and promote transparency and accountability in governance. There are no two ways about it. Britain’s generosity Zimbabwe within this particular period was meant to foster regime-change ahead of the 2008 election. As such, Barclays’ synopsis of ‘hope and despair’ is a mythological cover-up of the West’s regime change agenda in Zimbabwe.
Barclay further outlines the unleashing of alleged violence by the ruling Zanu-PF to its opponents during that period. However, what is interesting is that the writer uses nameless characters in most instances to narrate Zanu-PF’s violence adventures. One is left wondering, if the recollection is genuine or it’s fictitious in a bid to further a particular angle of polarisation. At the same time, Barclay has a strong sympathy for the White farmers who had lost their land during the war-veterans led land reform. This is quite clear that the British have channeled resources to the regime change programme in Zimbabwe to revenge land losses of White farmers. As a result, the British embassy has saved as a haven for anti-Mugabe movements to fight back on behalf of most White farmers’ country of origin. These anti-establishment entities are symbolic of Ghino and substantiate that Zanu-PF’s anti-West position was pragmatic. It was a response to hidden forces of Western meddling in the sovereign affairs of Zimbabwe.
This model of resisting the legitimacy of Zanu-PF manifested through the deconstruction of the liberation memory. This was strategic in reinventing a new trajectory which mainly served to obliterate the support that the ruling party had garnered due to its nationalist liberation credentials. Therefore the best of the country’s critical thinkers and in some cases, shallow anti-government radicals were taken to the fore to fight the battles of the British foreign affairs with the Zimbabwean government. As a result, the subject of regime change is a political reality and Zanu-PF had no other option, but to consolidate its power. This is because the main business of political parties and mainly elected governments is to retain power. Therefore, it is not only normative, but it is appalling to perceive Zimbabwe’s processes of power consolidation as anarchical. No political body would seat back and permit another power-seeking to gain dominance. That is realism and that is the correct state of political significance of any political party and for the past decade Zanu-PF has done exactly at expense of Western humiliation.
Selective remembrance
Most people are swayed into believing that the West is philanthropic to Africa’s socio-political and economic welfare. This belief is informed by donor packages which are given to vulnerable and poor citizenry of the continent guised as generosity aimed at eradicating poverty and bad governance in Africa. However, the West remains the biggest source of the continent’s poverty. This follows the West’s centuries of looting and plundering in Africa. Therefore, all aid is meant to perpetuate the subjugation of African countries and to keep them beneath the supremacy of the empire. The memoir by Barclays is ignorant of that colonial background and how systems inherited from coloniality facilitated the “despair” he attempts to talk about. Africa and Zimbabwe’s despair by large is a result of policies such as Esap which were meant to fracture the early stages of Africa’s political economy. Therefore, it is only defensive and factually unfounded for British diplomats like Barclay to unpack Africa’s current economic challenges with absolute ignorance to the contribution of their home country to the immiseration of the continent.
While Barclay’s book conveys interests in advancing democracy in Zimbabwe, he omits a crucial period of Zimbabwe’s political landscape. Soon after independence, the country was caught up in the one-party state debate. Britain never condemned the road towards the one-party state simple because it had open access to resource syphoning. Then a decade down the line the British become vocal about lack of democracy in Zimbabwe when the country was more inclined to a multi-party system with no innuendos of a one party state whatsoever. These are the same British who never uttered a word during the 1982 to 1987 disturbances. However, decades later the same British government through its foreign affairs division funded civic society groups to market the ethnic genocide propaganda in the best interest of crushing the legitimacy of Zanu-PF since the launch of the land invasions.
Therefore, it is not enough to bank on Barclay’s memory to draw a conclusive view of Zimbabwe’s political challenges. Likewise, it is logically imbalanced to reflect on Zimbabwe’s political condition basing on outlooks of our sovereignty’s enemies and those who fund initiatives that deconstruct the liberation legacy. The roots of Britain’s antagonism to Zimbabwe are quite clear. They date back to the days of the missionaries who paved way for the empire’s conquest in Africa. Britain’s scar dates back to the 1957 independence of Ghana as it marked a turning point in the direction Africa’s anti-colonial movement was taking. The Land Reform Programme only re-energised the open expression Britain’s prejudice towards Zimbabwe. However, Barclay’s memoir is only important in exposing how Britain the epicentre of the regime change project in Zimbabwe. When read critically with an open-mind, the book can be used to challenge the view that Zanu-PF uses an outdated anti-British political propaganda. As such, it is untrue to argue that Britain’s interest in Zimbabwe is to promote democratic participation of citizens in politics and socio-economic development.
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]
