The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
This past week has been quite dramatic in terms of setting the agenda of understanding the political turns that Zimbabwe is taking. In fact, the pace of the unfolding events is just, but too ferociously fast for any rational political observer.
I am even sure that even the most genius of political scientists will find it hard to arrive at a rational ability to unpack the outcomes of this political episode.
At this point, everyone has suddenly become an expert in terms of giving predictions of the fate that awaits this supposed new political era.
In my view this fast turn in events calls for abstemiousness and avoiding crass lamentation or celebration.
Consequently, I recommend the need for us to critically project our focus to what sustains the values of the liberation legacy as we are grappling with the current state of affairs in our country.
At the same time, we need to locate all concerns which influenced our determination for independence from colonialism in our current pathway to decide the future of Zimbabwe.
These concerns represent what I refer to here as “perpetual ideas” or the liberation legacy; failure to adhere to these ideas will continue to be the cause for “perpetual succession” politics.
The liberation legacy is the campus for our navigations to the present patriotic assignments we need to fulfil in giving dignity to our dear motherland.
Therefore, as we continue to engage, construct and deconstruct what it means to be Zimbabwean at this moment; the liberation legacy must be an exclusively embraced manual and not selective inclinations to its tenets.
On that note, it’s imperative for me to point out that we must remain vigilant to what unites us as a people than what divides us.
As such, I want to assure readers that this weekly column will continue to be a channel through which redemptive thinking is vigorously deliberated in favour of the long-lasting values of our people.
This section of the newspaper will continue to debunk the supremacy of coloniality and its sabotage to our struggle to be free from short lived neo-colonial ideas. No matter the tide and time, pan-Africanism lives here!
As such, there shall be no retraction of all erstwhile submissions I have made here. As you may recall, from the outset a declaration was set that this column will be a conduit of decolonial thought alternative for our national aspirations.
I say this having observed how some individuals across the political divide are now coming to the alter of “national consciousness” to denounce their contributions to the pitfalls thereof.
This awakens us to the undying intellectual acumen of Frantz Fanon which dates back to the 60s in which he calls us as the Wretched of the Earth. In this book Fanon problematises the post-colonial state for incubating pliable cadres who are pretenders to the cause of the nationalist project.
These are the uncouth haters of the revolution who have long laboured in favour of personality cults and not ideas which gave birth to the advent of the post-colonial state in Africa.
This lot of pretenders has mastered the art of uttering statements of convenience to forage their self-centred proximity to power.
One typical example of such a plastic character who will never be forgotten by the history which Zimbabwe is making is one Kudzanai Chipanga, the Youth Leader of Zanu-PF.
The fact that he also came back to retract his words is by and large reflective of one who is inconsistent.
This further substantiates how he was never a man of solid character from the time he was appointed by the youth to a defender of revolutionary ideas.
His unfortunate ordeal made it clear that he was never a man of himself, but was a programmed interlocutor of initiatives allegedly aimed at dismembering the revolutionary party. His level of inconsistency also points out to a bigger tragedy fuelled by characters who are loyal to individual interests and not institutional interests.
Indeed, he and others like him substantiate a mass calamity which is produced when a people’s movement is under ideological unconsciousness.
In such times, the ideologically bankrupt are appointed to mislead the revolutionary mass.
This is not unique to Zimbabwe as its clear for all to note that nationalist project is subjected to management by reckless opportunists bartering the “alluta continua” dictum for the “continue looting” mantra. These same characters have also immensely contributed to the diminishing of many African nationalists’ legacies across the continent.
This broadly substantiates that as we move ahead in sanitising the narrative of national belonging against the odds of “captured nationalism” as problematised by Fanon we need to ignite pre-emptive measures to eradicate narrow successional motives at the expense of the will of the people.
This is because the ideologically weak with no revolutionary tutelage are loyal to personal interests and not collective interests which decide African solutions for African problems.
These are the very same guised opponents of national unity and agents of succession and secession politics.
Their preoccupation is short term interests with no historical qualification in defining contemporary questions of national interest. Almicar Cabral warns us against such characters because they are not true to what they claim to stand for, they always wait for any opportunity to appropriate, claim and celebrate easy victories.
Therefore, in the mid-point of the current political situation we must be guided by the Amilcar Cabral creed “To Tell No Lies; and Claim No Easy Victories”. Cabral’s teachings evoke the need for a critical appreciation of this era which largely defines Africa within the confines of the politics of self-aggrandisement.
This is what makes Fanon relevant to our situation hence the need to reflect on his ideas as we attempt to define the future of Zimbabwe.
First, Fanon’s condescension for the national bourgeoisie ascends from his consciousness of how their primary goal of decolonisation is not essentially transforming the political system and improving the situation of the majority.
Their prime wish is to gain access to the wealth and social status that had previously been requisitioned by the colonists. They wish to drain the povo and natural resources for their selfish benefit just as the colonisers did.
They simply have no heart for the povo and their immiseration which they are responsible for as a result of duplicating the character of the erstwhile oppressor.
The subject of perpetual succession situates it relevance in Fanon’s introspective confidence in the national bourgeoisie, defined by its Eurocentric education and culture, credited with founding the political parties, which give rise to the country’s future leaders and those that negotiate the terms of decolonisation with the colonist country.
However, the societal and financial well-being of the national bourgeoisie prevents them from supporting a violent insurgence (which might dismantle their self-serving status).
In fact, “once a party has achieved national unanimity and has arose as the outstanding negotiator, the colonialist begins his manoeuvring and delays negotiations as long as possible” in order to “whittle away” the party’s demands.
Consequently, the party must eliminate itself of extremists who make the granting of liberation charters problematic.
The result of such a path to decolonisation is simply a cloaked form of the former colonialism. Prior to decolonisation, the “mother country” realises the inevitability of “freedom,” and thus drains most of the “capital and technicians and encircling the young nation with an apparatus of economic pressure”. The young, supposedly independent nation, therefore, is forced to preserve the economic conduits recognised by the colonial regime.
The national bourgeoisie, in their incomplete and lifeless state, do not have the means to provide either capital or classy and refined economic leadership to the new republic, and must therefore have faith in colonial bankers’ loans and counsel, which all aim at forcing the new nation to remain hooked on its former coloniser just as it was during the colonial period.
The desire to end this dependence on the colonial powers leads the new country to attempt the impossible and rapidly develop an idealistic, organic, nationalist form of capitalism that is thoroughly diversified for the purpose of economic and political stability.
Additionally, Fanon projects that after colonisation the national bourgeoisie occupy the posts once reserved for colonists from within their party ranks.
Thus, the party becomes a “screen between the masses and the leadership”, and party die-hard revolutionaries are neglected as the “party itself becomes an administration and the militants fall back into line and adopt the hollow title of citizen”.
Therefore, it is only through a violent insurrection aimed at destroying everything touched by colonialism that a new species of new (decolonial) beings will be produced.
On the other hand, Fanon prescribes the need to obliterate the religious and tribal divisions aggravated by the colonists. The depreciation of these divisive attitudes will facilitate urgency of harmony to be realised by the masses.
The individualism espoused by the colonists will succumb to the quest of the colonised for Pan-Africanism and revisiting the legacy of nationalism. It is through this struggle that a new national culture will be defined-not a culture defined by borrowed values.
From that point aspirations for freedom will be gained.
Therefore, it is from this premise that I hope Zimbabweans are going to engage in terms of understanding the source of our political-economy crisis in making sure that we do not “go back where we are coming from” (Masipula Sithole 1991). Beyond preoccupation on succession we must advance the logic of continuity of revolutionary ideas.
Kune nzira dzemasoja dzekuzvibata nadzo. Tererai mitemo yese muhondo yechimurenga!
-Richard Mahomva is an independent researcher and a literature aficionado interested in pan-Africanism, decoloniality and Afrocentricity. He is the Project Coordinator of Leaders for Africa Network; Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the annual Reading Pan-Africa Symposium. Feedback: [email protected]
