The Sunday News
Pathisa Nyathi
OF LATE I have been thinking of the old days when I used to teach science at various secondary schools in Zimbabwe, ranging from Loreto Mission, Usher Institute, Howard Institute, David Livingstone Secondary School to St Columba’s High, inter alia. I was a rolling stone then and succeeded in gathering no moss. However, my memory of those days was related, in particular, to the teaching of osmosis. As a young teacher then, thinking very highly of science and failing to take gleaned concepts outside of the science realm, I now view the same ideas in a different light. At the political level, the same ideas encountered in osmosis are truly applicable.
For decades now, I have been researching the history of Zimbabwe’s struggle for independence. The way I understood it then is different from the way I do now. Delving more and more into the intricacies of the struggle for independence, new ideas and insights emerge. I have, of late, been viewing the struggle in terms of generation of ideas, political consciousness, mobilisation and finally, in some instances, political and military action. What has been happening in all these instances relates to ideas, their movement from areas of higher concentration to areas of lower concentration. What is here being referred to as areas are actually mental sites.
When people are exposed to certain conditions which are not the ideal, their minds are engaged and soon come up with new ideas, call that political consciousness if you please. Indeed, we find out that this was the case during military training of guerrillas in camps. Political education led the way. It was like building some electromotive force, a state that would sustain the war where armed politicians were movers.
When trained guerrillas got to the operational field, their entry point was political education of peasants.
That process of imparting on them political consciousness raising preceded mobilisation that was followed by active support of the armed liberation struggle.
The emphasis here is on the fact that guerrillas possessed higher levels of political consciousness which, in the main, were not existent among many of the peasants. We should not however, imagine that all peasants operated at the same political level. Many among them had been politicised much earlier than the young guerrillas. Take the example of the Maduma brothers in Luveve (Bulawayo). Their father was already politicised ahead of them, being a member of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu). Later, many of the Maduma brothers got entangled and participated in the armed struggle for independence. There was Stanley who was active in the sabotage campaign, also known as uMtshetshaphansi or Zhanda after the French word for the police. He, along with the likes of Phillip Mhlanga, were hunted down by the Special Branch.
Israel was equally inspired to take part in the armed liberation struggle. Alongside the likes of Moffat Hadebe, Roger Matshimini Ncube, Rhodes Malaba, Keyi Nkala and Elliot Ngwabi, they are reputed with having fired the first shots in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. That was on 14 September 1964 at Zidube Ranch in Mambale (Bulilima-Mangwe) owned by a retired judicial magistrate Forewil Roberts.
There was yet another or two of the Maduma brothers who are among Zimbabwe’s unsung heroic families in the struggle for independence.
Here we see the application of osmosis that I referred to above.
Maduma, the father influenced his sons. It is assumed the father possessed political ideas about the untenable political, social and economic conditions of Africans in a racially inspired and driven Southern Rhodesia. There were several urban grievances and experiences that gave rise to political consciousness, that is possession of political ideas regarding the concrete political, economic, social and cultural situation.
That led to inequality between the minds of the father and his sons.
Our thrust here lies in seeking how ideas, or political consciousness, move from sites of higher concentration to sites of less concentration.
However, in this article the focus is on rural areas. We seek to deal with those processes that were at work, initially to generate ideas or rebelliousness. Where ideas were concentrated in certain some mental sites, how did they move to other mental sites of lower concentration of political ideas? In actual fact, this is the same as some kind of analysis of concrete situations that led to political consciousness and how that consciousness was transmitted to other minds or people.
The starting point in rural areas was the reality of the colonial project and its aftermath. Africans were militarily hammered hard by a people who regarded themselves as racially superior. The force of arms was used to deal with Africans and reduce them to be a people subservient to conquering whites. Many died in the hands of white settlers. Racism was at the centre of black-white relations characterised by repression, economic marginalisation, dehumanisation and discrimination. It was exactly what is still happening in the United States of America where a police officer will press his knee on the neck of George Floyd till he runs out of breath and dies. To them black lives are no lives at all.
Those who stood up to oppose the colonial object and got captured were either hanged or imprisoned to varying custodial terms. Bitterness against colonisers started then. Families of those killed or incarcerated shared an oral narrative of oppression and repression. Already, that became a way of perceiving the colonial system and its perpetrators. However, oral narratives did not encompass everyone.
It was the aftermath of colonisation that informed Africans’ political consciousness. In some instances, their kings and chiefs were deposed.
That translated to loss of power and independence. The colonial government ruled through an iron fist informed by racial superiority. The native commissioners were cruel and brutal, demanding that they be saluted as “Nkosi!” African men’s hats were crumpled and hastily placed in pockets when they were in the presence of a native commissioner. African men were expected to crawl or get down on their bums when approaching native commissioners’ offices. A sjambok in white hands was liberally applied on African bums.
The colonial project was essentially an economic in character and intent and was facilitated by political and military interventions. Economic resources are land-based. One way for the coloniser to access those resources was to evict Africans from their ancestral lands. The Land Apportionment Act (LAA) of 1930 apportioned land for whites, for blacks and national parks. The Act was promulgated following recommendations of the 1925 Carter Land Commission. The two world wars influenced land tenure in Southern Rhodesia.
The Carter Land Commission had to wait till the cessation of hostilities in 1919.
The Second World War broke out in 1939 and that delayed implementation of the LAA. However, after cessation of hostilities in 1945 the provisions of the LAA were revisited and implemented. There emerged a litany of rural grievances some of which had already been introduced and implemented in earlier years. Poll tax, hut tax, dipping fees, farm rents and labour in exchange for residence on alienated
