The Sunday News
Literature rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
One of Africa’s grand-fathers of literature, Chinua Achebe says; “The five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own
stories.”
This view must be taken seriously by any academic with a patriotic sympathy towards Africa. The invitation to African intellectual militancy requires no hesitancy for both the aspiring and established intellectual ideologically convicted to the reversal of “How Europe Under-Developed Africa”. This is a call that requires an alacritous response. Indeed, the time has come for Africans to tell their story. This does not apply to contributors to decolonisation narratives who have ran the race up to the finishing-line like; Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Chancellor Williams, Mahmood Mamdani and Ngugi wa Thiong’o to mention, but a few.
The time is now for Africa’s thought-power to augment the steward role of deconstructing five centuries of mental degradation. The intellectual subjectivity of Africa was achieved through a knowledge production system which constructed self-hatred for the African. Therefore, Achebe’s call falls upon every academic’s shoulder if the absolute identity restitution of the continent is to be achieved. The call comes upon realising that after demolishing imperial power through protracted conventional warfare, today we stand challenged by a bigger enemy, the colonised mind!
At its rudimentary practice, the colonial mindset is a complex adversary compared to the physical coloniser. The mind is the bank of ideas and in the context of Achebe’s submission, today’s generation has inherited five hundred years of coloniality thought investment. As a repercussion, we are a generation struggling with issues of religious fraternity, ideological bankruptcy, identity and self-definition. I know such a proposition invites opposed feelings from the so-called African liberals who see identity as a matter unimportant at a time being progressive is defined by assuming global citizenship — which in itself is an identity. On the other hand, White compatriots are quick to label such thinking as racist and betraying modernity in the era of globalisation. History regarded as essentialism along Afro-centricity is intolerable. One is better off being ahistorical to be a good global citizen.
This global citizenship not only sees the world as a sphere for liberalising markets, it also sees the need to liberalise Third-World identities. It advocates the acquisition of homogenous belonging which is standardised by Western constructs of universalism. African cosmology is of less significance as it is dented by paganism. Universalism advances modernity focused more on spiritual globalisation which revolves around the divinity orders of Europe.
Hence the rise of radical Islamic fundamentalism. Globalisation views African philosophy captured in the writings of Okot B’ Tek and our very own Pathisa Nyathi as nativist peripheral definitions of being. Africans subscribing to such ideas are not “liberal”, they are not open-minded as far as global citizenry demands. To be more descriptive, indigenous knowledge in globalisation terms is regarded as primitive and narrow because it has no standard equivalence to Western values. Globalisation criminalises ethnicity, nationalism, pan-Africanism and African spirituality. It is only recently that Zimbabwe has produced writers like Cynthia Marangwanda (2014) who have grounded their work on African spirituality to debunk the hegemonic global spirituality code.
In the preface comment of Marangwanda’s novella, I stated that the book is important;
In a society that is servile to dictates of other civilisations, this piece sanitises African spirituality blemished by the colonial past and its present ghosts of neo-colonialism. Here the departed souls continue to vindicate their progeny and are the reason for their social alienation. The narrator is a victim of such, using her reincarnated and omniscient voice in this piece she offers a rebellious alternative to the eulogised values of modernity, for example Christianity (Mahomva, 2014).
Furthermore in Zimbabwe, embracing an Afrocentric dimension in terms of socio-economic and political dialogue is treated as pro-establishment affiliation. This has seen many proponents of what is viewed as “nativist” or “indigenous” in the global political language being isolated by fellow citizens for being secret supporters of nationalist movements. It is as if the historical character of the nationalist movement binds everyone who embraces the past in shaping the present. Post-land reform literature has expressed the dominance of the global voice over the nativist and indigenous thought. This is expressed in writings like; Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis, edited by Amanda Hammar, Brian Raftopolous and Stig Jensen (2003).
The centrality of the submission by the editors and other contributors of this book is that the land-reform programme was a racist initiative which promoted narrow citizenship along African bias and liberation war credentials. It looks at the land-reform as a state sanctioned pandemonium which violated global human rights. The themes are ignorant of the history of violence attached to the land seizure by Rhodes. The book is a fabrication of history as it is silent on how African land fell on White ownership from heaven and how war-veterans “invaded” land.
In a chapter by Eric Worby (2003), the land reform programme was an end to modernity. In his analysis, land seizure from whites means a passage from development to sovereignty. The explanation of the historical transition experienced by Zimbabwe represents White ownership of land as a sign of “development”. In global terms “development” signals human development standardised along the lines of finding lodgment in Eurocentric terms of belonging.
Therefore, according to Worby the other side of develop-ment which describes the primitivism of the Zimbabwean land question is “sovereignty”. To him sovereignty means narrow belonging in an era demanding global political fraternity. It means being “nationalist” and failing to be cosmopolitan as a result justifying the political polarisation on Zimbabwe by the West after the land-reform programme.
The shared account reveals that the idea of promoting varying turning points of the African revolution is not acceptable to globalisation. Economic repatriation is not a welcome idea to the agenda of globalisation. This is why countries like Zimbabwe with a radical approach towards nativism and economic indigenisation will never belong to the “progressive” ideas of globalisation.
The only licence to acquire global fraternity for Zimbabwe will be “nationlessness’”. Its account of the said “primitive” national discourse should be dismissed to pave way for “progressive” thought trajectories of globalisation. What is striking about the tenets of globalisation and its attributes of universalism is that it views all identity preservation of the African as facets of a “provincial world-view” and narrow thought-power conceptualisation. This implies that globalisation serves the agenda of ideological imbalance based on promoting the supremacy of the global centre and the global periphery.
Globalisation, in its construction is acrimonious in terms of the homogeneity it advocates for. Its guidelines for knowledge production are shaped along creating cosmopolitan belonging outside Afrocentric terms of celebrating ethnicity, nationalism and writ large pan-Africanism. These guidelines of using writing to immortalise thought and in the process make history add to the five hundred years of the misrepresentation of the African reality.
The misrepresentations of such important turns of post-independence history in Zimbabwe call upon us to tell our story. One cannot deny that most of the academic writing that has been generated after the land-reform was weaned by neo-imperialist motives. It’s no doubt that most accolades received by many of our writers abroad were a reward for their loyalty to the global agenda and not nationalist nativism.
The challenge of borrowed mindsets is a threat to social-science indigenous knowledge generation. It is a cancer to the memory of our present to the next generation justified to view us as defunct heirs of the liberation struggle. This calls for urgent intensification of indigenous knowledge vacuum filling in the midst of the misnamed globalisation centred academic projections of post-coloniality especially in the case of Zimbabwe.
Part 2 of this series will delve into how the global agenda of knowledge generation champions modern racism and how indigenous thought is a threat to continued neo-colonial racism. As such the academic has a bigger decolonisation role to play.
n 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]
