The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
The tradition of self-location
Auto/biographies belong to the self-writing genre. The key authorship motivation for memoirs and biographies is premised on direct and self-experiences of certain socio-economic and political actors (McArthur, 1992; Gusdorf, 2001). Historical location of the narrative actor(s) forms the bedrock of self-writing. The key foregrounding to self-write is to trigger intended audiences to make sense of the present and assert the future from the perspective of the narrative insider. With political self-written accounts, authors share lived experiences of their interaction with power at varying levels. In Zimbabwe this has seen political players across the institutional and ideological divide actively involved in writing their autobiographies and, in the process, “writing the nation.”
Through political life-narratives, the contestation of ideas has been deeply explored. This way, it can be concluded that political self-writing has a tendency to galvanise the authors’ ideological biases and the political organisations they represent. Political auto/biographies have also been used to deconstruct the ideological positionality and political credentials of authors’ opponents. Therefore, like any other literature, biographies are written from a locus of ideological interest. By design, self-recollection must either compliment or defy the given mainstream historicisation of socio-economic and political events and processes (Woodward, 2002). Over the years, self-reminiscence has contributed to national historiography. In the same light, memoirs are a source of reference for political and economic science knowledge generation.
Usually, memoir authorship is premised on the normative ambition of recreating the self (storyteller) from the “other”. The effect of self-remembering which informs memoir-making either associates or disassociates the narrator with a particular set of ideas or certain fraternal leanings. In the process, autobiographies underscore their storytellers’ sympathies and intolerances on various issues.
Self-writing and the national question
The book, On the Shoulders of Struggle: Memoirs of a Political Insider, is a political account of the Zimbabwe’s liberation story based on perspectives and lived experiences of Obert Moses Mpofu. His connection to Zimbabwe’s political history dates back to 1967 when he joined the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZPRA). The author’s self-attachment to the history of Zimbabwe is prominently located in the country’s post-independence politics. The interwoven connection of Mpofu’s transition from being a liberation combatant, high-ranking official in the cooperate-world to a senior Government official and a leader in the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) offers a multi-dimensional critique of Zimbabwean politics from a deep-rooted nationalist perspective. The author’s participant grounding as mentioned above authoritatively informs this submission which transcends the generic historic elasticity of self-writing to claim space in the humanities and social sciences.
The reminiscences are largely confined to Mpofu’s views on Zimbabwe’s political culture, the philosophy of the nation’s liberation, particularly how it has been conserved as a moral premise for Former Liberation Movements (FLMs). The themes of this book respond to some pertinent enquiries which dominate political theory, historiography and hagiography in Zimbabwe: What has been the thought-premise of Zimbabwe’s revolution? What has it achieved and what does it stand to achieve?
In response to these two critical questions, Mpofu retrospectively accounts for his involvement in the struggle against colonialism since 1967, at the early age of 16. Through an exhaustive pensive glance to Zimbabwe’s political history from Mpofu’s perspective, the reader re-encounters Zimbabwe’s journey before and after independence. As such, this contribution tackles the history of internal contradictions within the nationalist movement. He illuminates the enduring values of Zimbabwe’s anti-colonial project. The mainstream narrative on Gukurahundi is also deconstructed in this account. The topical issues of democracy, human rights, property rights and other freedoms are also discussed. The author also highlights the profound influence which the late Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe had on his political career. The author’s involvement in the birth of the “New Dispensation” is also articulated. In every chapter, the author forecasts the future of Zanu-PF and other liberation movements in the region and across Africa. This serves as a deliberate attempt to remind those who sympathise with liberation movement to work hard for the reinvention of the tenets of Africa’s freedom, given the persistent strategies deployed by imperialists forces to dominate Africa.
Mpofu’s long service in the cabinet under the late Robert Mugabe corroborates his self-location in the political-economy debate of Zimbabwe. The memoir is more organic in as much as it is informed by his intimate interaction with high-level detail of statecraft issues.
Moreover, his leadership ascendency in the ruling Zanu-PF as a Central Committee member in the late 90s and his subsequent elevation to the Politburo over the years, as well as his current position as Zanu-PF Secretary for Administration, gives the authorship of this self-account a high discursive authority on Zimbabwean politics. Indubitably, the substance of this account accurately reaches out to aspiring national leaders.
This text reminisces the path of political survival by perhaps one of Zimbabwe’s political doyens. In this tarn of personal recollections, the author is holding the political aspirant (now as a teacher) by the hand in writing himself back to history. Touring through a life passionately lived for the love for Zimbabwe, the reader sees through the gaudy images of young Mpofu joining the armed struggle up until to this day where the man stands as a grandmaster of political craft.
Self-narratives and alternative inventions of memory
By their very nature of self-representation, auto/biographies are inherently identity-centred. In this way, auto/biographies stimulate debate between those who identify or dissent with the ideas of self-location as presented by the memoir protagonist/narrator (Smith and Watson 2001). In inventing oneself as a protagonist, alternative representations of those who identify with characters projected as antagonists in a memoir — or the said antagonists — are then bound to create counter-narratives. In this sense, when reading Edgar Tekere’s Lifetime of Struggle (2007), and Joshua Nkomo’s The Story of My Life (1984), one cannot miss apparent efforts in both memoirs to de-centre Mugabe as a betrayer of the values of the liberation struggle.
Dr Nkomo’s autobiography, published in 1984 while he was in exile in the United Kingdom (UK), captures his disgruntlement emanating from his political alienation and the political disturbances between 1982 and 1987. Having been a victim of public castigation by Robert Mugabe the then Prime Minister of Zimbabwe (1980-1987), Nkomo’s autobiography becomes an influential counter-narrative. This aptly expresses the role of political memoirs as the authors’ responses to external representations by their political opponents (Smith and Watson 2001).
This view asserts that memoir writing is usually grounded on the need to respond to external representations of the self. This entails the inevitable facet of subjectivity associated with autobiography authorship and its responsiveness to the public construction/representation of the concerned narrator. To this end, self-writing is usually immersed not only in historical self-location, but it seeks to expose personal achievements, ideological convictions and other direct self-appraisal viewpoints. When put into perspective, one can note that the public disparagement of Nkomo’s liberation credentials as the “Father of Dissidents” by Mugabe might have influenced the authorship of Nkomo’s autobiography.
As a way of confronting the public ridicule, Nkomo engaged in an exercise of historically writing himself in a bid to negate the undermining of his notable legacy to Zimbabwe’s liberation. To this effect, a cross-cutting theme in Nkomo’s The Story of My Life (1984) is that of his grand political credentials which had been dismissed. Nkomo’s emphasis on political seniority in his memoir is deployed to substantiate his long and uncontested walk in the fight for Zimbabwe’s liberation. The book projects Nkomo as a circumstantially marginalised master-builder of the nationalist movement. Through this writing, Nkomo, re-centres himself into the history he had been politically de-centred from after losing the country’s first election into independence in 1980 and being subjected to persecution.
The memoir vividly points out to Nkomo’s legitimate entitlement to power though he suffered political victimisation at the time the book was published. After the signing of the Unity Accord in 1987, with Nkomo now part of the Government he had expressed resentment towards, it becomes evident that memoirs harbour subjective political realities. Self-representative prejudice is put to test by changing dynamics of power. The irony of Nkomo’s self-representation as an isolated political figure is whitewashed by his role as the Vice-President of Zimbabwe after the signing of the Unity Accord in 1987. He was also accorded the national fatherhood status as “Father Zimbabwe” after being referred to as the “Dissident Father” at some point.
In December 2013 the state-sponsored immortalisation of Nkomo through the erection of a statue in his honour outlives his self-presentation as a political victim in his memoir.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado. Feedback: [email protected]
To be continued
