The Sunday News
Micheal Mhlanga
Recent events in our political space have invoked the debate of whether nationalism is questioning itself. The recent emergence of ethnicism within some political spaces demands a revisit to the variables and discourses of nationhood.
A colleague in the past week asked me if we are in the age of Zezuru and Karanga exceptionalism, as well as Ndebele nationalism. My humble response was that this has always been there, what we see today is a magnified phenomenon.
This intellectual question prompted me to dig into my little library where Kohn, Smith, Gatsheni Ndlovu, Credo Mutwa, Ndabaningi Sithole become handy in explaining some of the intricacies post-independence politics has to deal with.
Everyone in Zimbabwe now exclaims that they belong to a nation, which slowly is other than Zimbabwe, by calling themselves by other names.
One would ask, is the nation identifiable through objective criteria and if so, what distinguishes it from other social groupings? Is it instead a social contract that is constantly re-negotiated through daily plebiscite and which thus expresses the will of individuals?
Is it true that nations are expressions of age-old feelings of belonging, rooted in language, ethnicity, or territory, or are instead modem constructs, inventions or imaginations?
These contrasting views of the nation have been reflected in the daily literature on nationalism and have developed into what I can call meditating nationalism-prayed-on-belonging.
A deeper look into what is happening informs me that the implications of the debate as to whether nations are a modem construction or the emanation of a perennial ethnicity are not merely academic.
One of the most frequent ways nationalists attempt to discredit their “opponent’s” claims to nationhood, and hence to political sovereignty or independence, is by challenging their historical foundations and this has been a prominent strategy within the Ndebele monarchy conflict, Shona- Ndebele tutelage as well as pre and post-colonial scholarship.
Indeed, and somewhat inexplicably, there has been a tendency to equate antiquity with authenticity.
The genuineness of one’s claim to independent nation-statehood will thus tend to be measured with respect to its historicity. Thus, in the same way that opposing groups contest the validity of each other’s historical claims to nationhood, theorists of nationalism debate the historical reality or authenticity of nations.
One group I revisited were the premordialists. In their lessons, they insist that nations have existed since time immemorial.
They are accredited with the “sleeping beauty” thesis according to which each nation that has not yet manifested itself is only awaiting for the appropriate leader, or circumstance, to re-awaken.
This can be argued to have been one of the key factors in the monarchical debate however, a delayed entrance into the nationalistic fray. This organic view of nationalism holds that people are naturally divided into nations.
Perhaps we ought to invite their thoughts of a German Romantic, namely, Johan Gottiried von Herder (1744-1803) who sermons that “Nationality is a state of mind corresponding to a political fact”, or striving to correspond to a political fact.
This definition reflects the genesis of nationalism and modem nationality, which was born in the fusion of a certain state of mind with a given political form.
The state of mind, the idea of nationalism, imbued the form with a new content and meaning; the form provided the idea with implements for the organised expression of its manifestations and aspirations.
From this seminal submission, we can agree that nationalism is continuum and inherent hence we cannot escape that debate.
What makes a nation?
As the ethnicists were mounting their critique of the modernist approach, the early 1980s saw the publication of what were to become some of the most influential works in the study of nationalism. Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition were all published in 1983 and they come in handy to one who interacts with them.
It is also this period that Richard Mahomva refers to as when the “state-to-nation” perspective began to crystallise as the study of nationalism in Africa was prompted by the emergence of anti-colonialism.
From the above thinkers, our appreciation of nationalism is born on a response to anti-colonialism that has since faded, therefore what is nationalism based on today?
Undisputedly, calls for independence were couched in terms of national liberation. But why did nationalism manifest itself at that particular moment? What factors triggered its emergence?
Various factors have been put forward to explain the emergence of nationalism in Africa and, largely, many of the accounts provided mirror those highlighted in the broader discussions of nationalism. In 1954, James Coleman identified four types of factors which he saw as having contributed to the rise of nationalism in Africa.
He argued that economic transformations, such as the change from a subsistence to a money economy, growth of a wage-labour force, rise of a new middle class.
He noted sociological factors like urbanisation, social mobility and Western education; also including religious and psychological factors, such as Christian evangelisation, and neglect or frustration of Western-educated elements, arising mainly as a response to discrimination and racism; and political factors to which he illustrated as the eclipse of traditional authorities and the forging of new “national” symbols.
This last element being intrinsically bound to the modem state structure.
However, in our case, those played a historical role but the modern state is questioning itself but the underlying reasons are not adequately given as those factors are no longer the reasons as before.
As can be traced to be the reason of historical rise of nationalism, modern education is also responsible for the crystallisation of self-questioning identities today not at a national level but at an ethnic one. Although what is significant is not so much at which levels identities are finally crystalising — this is in itself contingent upon other factors — as the fact that identities are indeed crystallising and this around culturally defined criteria.
Coupled with modern education influencing revision of the truth and truth questioning itself, a group of anthropologists, collectively referred to as the Manchester School, proceeded in the 1950s and 60s to investigate the impact of urbanisation on the people of the Copperbelt in Zambia.
Their objective was to illustrate how tribal identities could only be understood in relation to their context.
It had indeed transpired from their investigations that tribal identities acquired particular saliency in urban contexts for it was there that individuals were confronted on a daily basis with members of other communities.
In the rural areas such exacerbation and demonstration of tribal differences were, essentially, unnecessary, since the frequency of contacts between members of different tribal groups tended to be relatively small. Tribal identities appeared to be relative and situational, in that an individual’s behaviour was determined by how and where he would meet a member from another tribe.
This is not far from our precarious situation in Zimbabwe, where ethnic nationalism is governed. Some members of the Manchester school predicted that tribal distinctions would disappear under the forces of modernisation and described this process as detribalisation.
Others, on the other hand, upheld that such distinctions would not only be maintained, but further enhanced in the newly urbanising centres, albeit in a form different from that of the original rural context. One scholar described this as the process of retribalisation which in fact is taking toll in our sphere.
Today, in Zimbabwe, the self-questioning of nationalism confirms what is called retribalisation and in all its forms. In order to make sense of the highly complicated social context in which they now find themselves, individuals have enhanced their ethnic identities and stereotyped others.
This is providing them with a “cognitive map” which allows them to determine which type of relationship they entertain with others.
These differences are not always perceived in such stark contrasts as a distinction between us and them, but can, at times, also be perceived in a continuum as “more like us” or “less like us.”
It will be folly to make uninformed conclusions that ethnic nationalism was not going to re-emerge as it once did during the liberation struggle because back then it was informed by an anti-thesis and the atmosphere has shifted, new variables prompt questioning the truth.
What we need to deal with now, is how to deal with it. But whatever the case, we are all Zimbabweans.
Till next week. Yikho khona lokhu!
