The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
After a series of deliberations with colleagues on the recent shutdown, I was taken aback to the bitter old days that fast-tracked the birth of new dispensation. To ardent nationalist critical thinkers that was a long nightmare. The torture of consumerist political narratives was just so callous.
It took some revolutionary, soul-deep and philosophically engrained writing to heal the sores of the ignominy of the liberation legacy in the hands of those who were bent to folly power capture in Zanu-PF. At that point the nationalist party was fragmented by metropolitan generational discourse junk whose empty epistemic weight was determined to crush the ageless and enduring values of the liberation legacy.
And little had it been known that the then dying legacy was to be to be restored in November 2017.
Remember Nathaniel Manheru?
It took the ravings of reason by a ghost whose last name was Manheru. Religiously, every Saturday in the Herald he was head-on tackling the once dreaded oligopoly in Zanu-PF. In all that madness, the Nathaniel Manheru column was the only relevant outlet for reading insights into a dispensation that history was making for the present.
On January, 17, 2017, a masterpiece titled; ‘Zimbabwe: Importance of Self-Belief, even Arrogance’ appeared on that column. The article traced the ugly manipulation of history as a knowledge generative pillar to denounce nationalist (Black) self-determination and African humanism. The clarion call of the piece was for Zimbabwe to remake her dignity through questioning the post-colonial. The article suggested the need for rethinking African modernity as summed in the wisdom of the “borrowed mind-sets”. The key theme of this Manheru article was somehow reflective of another genius tabloid piece by Alexander Kanengoni which critiqued Professor Terence Ranger’s “commemorative nationalist” historiography of the 70s and his unceremonious turn to millennial venom attack of the nationalists he once celebrated.
Likewise, Manheru provoked Ranger from his grave by reflecting on his “patriotic history” thesis and unashamedly termed it ‘… an effective, pseudo-academic way of dissuading us from rewriting and reclaiming our history, while indemnifying perpetuation of white “patriotic” history which objectify us as “the” history’. At some point, in this very column, I recall writing on Ranger’s “missed historical factor” in the re-imagining of the Madzimbabwe being, his history and place in the scheme of things. That position was not taken kindly by many academic veterans, tantrums and academic egos were thrown, but well, the rest is history now.
The Common-Wealth and Common Logic
Today, as the Second-Republic pursues an extra-mile re-engagement policy in terms of foreign policy, the forces of coloniality are working extra hard to objectify Zimbabwe as a mere relic. Just last week, the private press was celebrating the country’s blocked potential to be a member the Commonwealth.
The projected perspective by the private press was that of explaining that this was a deserved punitive measure accorded to an insubordinate nation by super powers. This “punishment” has been celebrated as part of the much needed Western intervention to a “crisis ridden state”. Therefore, it is clear that what is being celebrated is a successful sabotage of the ruling’s commitment to international re-engagement. This is because of some obvious local sectorial desires to keep the Government isolated from the family of nations. Zimbabwe’s continued isolation serves as political capital to some local political actors who are bent on peddling false national crisis propaganda to the West.
Britain has been celebrated for lobbying for the ejection of Zimbabwe’s prospects of re-admission into the Commonwealth. This is because some political groups have long benefitted from Government’s hostile past with Washington and London. So to stay afloat, tension must be fuelled and the current administration’s image must be tainted. In response to this mischievous opposition plot to fracture the re-engagement project, the Deputy Chief Secretary in the Office of the President, George Charamba, indicated that Britain was the same country that was calling for Zimbabwe to join the Commonwealth and ironically, today Britain dismisses a proposal it initiated on allegations that the ruling party is grossly violating human-rights.
On the other hand, it is not a coincidence that this issue arises at a time the opposition and its civil-society proxies are flatly proportioning the blame on state security for the Shutdown violence. As usual, the key argument being forwarded is that of the state’s use of disproportionate force. The MDC-Alliance has even went further to classify those under police investigations for looting, vandalism and violence as political prisoners. Without, any doubt, the intention is to raise a false alarm of a mega political crisis unfolding in Zimbabwe.
This is the perspective that is being broadly taken into the public domain as the “objective” explanation of the labour and fuel price hike Shutdown. The public is being made to believe that the opposition had absolutely no contribution whatsoever in the orchestration of the 14 January violence. It is on this basis, that opposition biased human-rights lawyers are unleashing a defensive attack on the state to even protect characters caught on camera looting in shops and vandalising property.
Technically, we are experiencing an impish return of the human-rights discourse which was fading into the oblivion owing to the pluralist realities of our time since November 2017. Initially, the motion of human-rights was massively explored to defend white property rights during the days of the land reform. In those days, the ruling party’s image was soiled for endorsing the black land repatriation. It was alleged for turning Zimbabwe into a rogue state because it did not value property rights. In return, Zanu-PF was slapped with massive international community castigation for not protecting the White property owners. Sanctions were sent firing because property rights were not respected. Because “White land” was invaded.
Fast-forward to 2019, black people’s small business premises are burnt down, their little stocks are looted and no one dares to conjure the property rights narrative which was used to defend the “rights” of the White farmers who lost the land to the people’s revolution. The civic society groups which got angry on behalf of Rhodies for their farm losses are silent when fellow Africans’ supermarkets, bottle stores and butcheries are subjected to looting.
But, just yesterday the anti-land reform human-rights advocacy troops labelled the war-veterans and many other land-hungry Zimbabweans as criminals. Their crime before the moral court of the White property rights defenders was that they looted, vandalised and invaded farms owned by colonial settlers. Today, a synonymous thread of looting, vandalism and violence occurs – of course under a different context and irrational justification terms surfaces, but the property rights prefects override the criminalisation of the offenders. Instead, they push for deliberate sympathy for the suspected looters and calls them “political prisoners”.
What emerges from this is a clear contradiction on the parameters of property rights logic and human-rights discourse which espouses white capital protection. According to the set trend with regards to private property protection it’s now clear that when “White property” is threatened the international community responds with aggression, but when Africans vandalise one another’s property as a means of political protest that is justified as anti-establishment action to push away a “failed regime” from power. When this happens “human-rights” lawyers are deployed in full force to defend those alleged of carrying out and inciting ugly acts of violence against the state.
For a fact, there is nothing wrong with funded law societies with a genuine aim of promoting democracy by providing citizens’ access to the right to justice. However, there is a problem when the same justice representation system has biases which ignore the criminality of private property vandalism. One then wonders if the cause of these lawyers is to sincerely and inclusively protect constitutionalism with regards to property rights or their mandate is to secure the interests of colonial capital.
The coloniality of being accepted
Unfortunately, this is the same democracy and human-rights contradiction we are supposed to stomach to be accredited affiliation to colonial institutions. Our sovereign self-belief must be cast down to standards set elsewhere on how we should govern our country. All this is meant to define a structural dependency criterion to qualify us as beneficiaries of the empire’s philanthropy and mercy. Could this be the wisdom we are embracing to carry our national aspirations? Are we in such a desperate position to belong or we just need to advance what satisfies our immediate freedom interests as a liberated people?
I posed these questions on one of my social-media blogs, in response, a respected UK-based Zimbabwean academic, Professor George Shire shared the following:
“ Neoliberalism is planetary. It is amoeba in character, it takes different forms in different countries. Our economic futures are interconnected with those of our geopolitical position. That is why it is important to note that in our postcolonial times regional institutions matter. The only hope for all those countries in our region (Sadc) born out of the liberation struggle is the decolonial and dewestern option.”
True to his proposal for the need for us to keep searching for alternatives from within Prof Shire submits that:
“Those who think that our problems are managerial are sadly mistaken. What drives the human rights discourse is the re-Westernisation and neoliberal project. Therefore, we must give up the idea of the economic having a free rein and take-up the Hondo ye pfungwa trajectory with the same vigour as that of the independence movement, and Hondo ye minda.”
Going forward, it is crucial to acknowledge that “the intellectual, political and cultural ancestors that we use to think our pasts, presents, and futures matter a great deal”, says the Professor. The wisdom that gave birth to our independence must be perpetually used to influence the direction of our domestic and multilateral politics.
Pamberi neZimbabwe!
– Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent researcher and a literature aficionado interested in the architecture of governance in Africa and political theory.
