The Sunday News
Richard Mahomva
The on-going series on the topical Gukurahundi issue by the Zanu-PF Secretary for Administration — Obert Mpofu in this paper evokes a whole new set of questions on how our past has been archived.
It raised more questions on why this narrative has been largely used to depict the fragile condition of the nation in justifying innuendoes of secession revolving around the Matabeleland question. Mpofu’s contribution is even made more intriguing considering that he belongs to the present and the history he is telling now. Of greater interest is that he is a member of the same political party which has been endlessly vilified for committing a “mass crime against humanity”. This is how crude the disturbances of the early 80s have been exclusively classified as a Zanu-PF violence orchestrated measure to consolidate power and crush opposition. Therefore, it is refreshing that today we have the story coming from the side of the “accused” after many years of state silence on this issue. The courage to present the position of the accused by Dr Mpofu in his first instalment last week is part of a bigger stride of breaking the norm of institutionalised forgetting. This is part of the greater project of ritualising the past so that we come out of it as reformed actors of national peace and reconciliation. The National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC) serves as a progressive deposit to this noble national endeavour.
For too long the grand narrative on Gukurahundi was largely aimed at intensifying a deliberate reawakening of the past to criminalise the ruling Party for being at the centre of violence. This necessitated a progressive counter-narrative and it is only now that individuals like Dr Obert Mpofu are coming out not only as members of Zanu-PF, but as former Zipra cadres to share their story. Pathisa Nyathi (2018), has also contributed to this debate with his book which discusses the creation of dissidents as a neo-colonial symbol of post-independence instability. Whenever the Gukurahundi issue is raised, many a times the idea is to try erase the memory of unity which was immortalized in 1987 through the coming together of the Nkomo and Mugabe led wings of the nationalist movement to give birth to Zanu-PF. Therefore, these emerging perspectives on this contentious issue will help in remembering the forgetting we had long institutionalised.
The spirit of the Patriotic Front which had been long left in the trenches of the Second-Chimurenga is being slowly rekindled as we desolate the forgetting we have ritualised over the years. In (un)forgetting the past we invalidate the agenda of those preoccupied with exposing the mistakes of yesterday to gain monopoly of the present. By dismantling organised forgetting we reactivate the unifying spirit of regional balancing which is now crystallised in the new Constitution. That way we are reminded of the just call for the fair representation of regions in the echelons of power and the distribution of the national cake. This is why devolution occupies the centre of the aspirations of nation-building.
Long before we arrived to the Second-Republic, the narrative peddled to dislodge Zanu-PF from power was that the Party deliberately suppressed the true telling of history. Ranger (2004) posits that nationalist praise texts were enfranchised as the sole recollection of how we became Zimbabwe. This he (Professor Ranger) styles ‘‘patriotic history’’ — which in his submission was a representation of a linear and partisan biased truth of being Zimbabwean. Ranger and his legion of followers ignore the rightful entitlements of the nationalists to the nationalists memory. This selective antithesis to the footprints of the story of the nationalists is ignorant of their justified control to their own story. Would it not have been insane for them to tell a story which exalts the role of anti-decolonisation collaborators all in the interest of creating an inclusive national memory? Dare you blame them for telling their story and writing what they like as instructive of Steve Bantu Biko’s positionality of truth from the perspective and the limitations of African nationalism — I write What I Like. Let the nationalists write what they like the same way Rhodesian remnants have done. After all, it’s a struggle for truth and a struggle to belong — all couched in sanitising and de-sanitising the truth. The idea is to find a common point to belonging and appreciate that our memory is born out of truths at war with each other.
In her lecture at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare last week, Panashe Chigumadzi fit into lens of the Ranger narrative. While touching much on the need for us to archive our past and rethinking the given of the Zimbabwean story, Panashe emphasised the need to disentangle, explode and challenge the establishment’s appropriation of the ‘‘Chimurenga philo-praxis’’. In her submission, like Vambe (2004), Panashe acknowledges that the Chimurenga is an organic philosophy which personifies the tenets of Zimbabwe’s decolonisation and continuity of the anti-colonial praxis. Panashe argues that the ‘‘born-free’’ are a marginalised, but an integral part of the intergenerational (Black) struggle to build a memory of the future — one which is not state-centric.
Contrary to the normative limits of her lecture, throughout all civilisations the state has always been at the centre of giving meaning to nationhood. In our case, Zanu-PF has been a centrifugal and paternal force to the birth and rebirth of the nation. The birth of the modern nation can be historically located between 1980 and 2017. However, this does not erase the monumental foundation of national aspiration which can be traced to the iconic pre-independence anti-colonial resistance. 2017 marked the genesis of the rebirth of Zimbabwe which was effected through the 15 November, Operation Restore Legacy. In her analytical reading of Zimbabwe’s 2017 civil-military transition, Panashe advances the view that those who initiated Operation Restore Legacy were re-establishing the Chimurenga path to the future. She criticises this transitional process for recasting a military-centric future of our politics and perpetuating the retrogressive phallus-centric competitive space to power in Zimbabwe. In her view this is automatically marginalises the “born-free” whom she sympathises with as protagonists in the war of binaries of belonging.
While this proposition can be justified to some extent, the truth of the matter is that the so-called old generation has got a space to protect. Delegitimising their locus standi on the basis of their run in an old race is violence to the institutional memory of the liberation struggle.
Likewise, there is no way we can exclude the military from the contemporary power dynamics. Therefore, the military-centric facet to our politics remains pivotal in weaving our narrative of the nation and the broader question of belonging.
Ndiro gidi muZimbabwe
The long disparage of the nationalists and the military in our political discourse is part of a long concerted framework to dislodge the ruling Zanu-PF. This has been profoundly used to label our systems of governance as toughly militarised. The criminalisation of the civil-military relations has been a key feature of the post land-reform literary attacks on the ruling. To this day, the same opposition which pushed for the removal of Mugabe from power and is equally complacent in the execution of Operation Restore Legacy and selectively criminalises the military for violating the Constitution in November, 2017. The historical mistake of this anti-narrative is that it omits the lived reality of the intravenous relationship of the armed forces with the people. The indelible mark of that relationship is better substantiated by the place of war collaborators in the liberation struggle. Their role in recognisance and various forms of aid to the armed men and women is substantial to bring into account that the Chimurenga is a militaristic praxis of our decolonial positionality.
Unmasking the intergenerational rift
There is a seemingly innocent presupposed claim to include the youth in political spaces and uproot the old from power. This approach is popularised as a strategic way of enhancing the democratic steps required to fracture old guard exclusionary politics. It is seemingly innocent to encourage youth inclusion in the political affairs of any normal state to encourage the continuity of ideas which safeguard enduring national interests. In all truth the agenda is much bigger than the micro democracy masquerade to further youth participation. There has been a deliberate cosmetic discursive deployment of ‘‘youth’’ and ‘‘born-free’’ to manipulate the youth demographic dividend to exert a longevity limit to the nationalist generation. Clearly, colonial forces have been at work since the fall of apartheid to revenge for their lost control of power in the hands of the pan-Africanist-nationalist movement.
Epistemic Traps
The paradigm of the colonial continues to effect its agenda through superficially sane and progressive penchants to question ideas of African liberation movements. This is why it is seemingly easy and fashionable to challenge the very core elements of African philosophy as retrogressive. This is why the continued castigation of the militaristic frame of the Chimurenga ideology seems more sensible. We are made to unconsciously rethink the Chimurenga outside its military paraphernalia because we have been schooled to view the African militarism as savage with no predisposition to civility. On the contrary, we are made to believe that Western militarism epitomises a fight against escalating global terrorism. We are entangled in ideological wars which have no solution to the pressing concerns affecting Africa at the moment.
We also need to question the narrow academic critique of the legitimate claim to history by the nationalists. We need to interrogate the vast alternatives which have been generated to dislodge the nationalist memory. It is not entirely true that history has been presented through the linear densities of power at the expense of the story of the common men. Outside the “public commemorative text”, many stories have been written by individuals in respect of important class, ethnic and race contradictions we are presently grappling with. Too much focus has been directed towards raising anti-establishment positions to public thought at the same time crippling competent criticism to the neo-colonial agenda. Therefore, our scholars need to find a more home-centred space to reason and be more questioning to the ideas which dislocate our philosophy from our lived realities and the posterity of our liberation story.
