The Sunday News
Tapinda tapinda
It’s the first Sunday of the year. It is definite — the day will be all merry for everyone. Some will spend the day in some pub, some at church and others will be in the comfort of their homes with family and friends as they celebrate their confirmed crossover to 2017.
Even those who hate noisy music will have nochoice but to endure the loud dingdongs of assorted music genres from their neighbours. Akulalwa lamuhlanje.
It has been a unique year punctuated by our various successes and pitfalls attained at both personal and national level. What matters is that we have made it through. What happened then now belongs in the past and I am sure we had our lessons. As we move on; 2017 must be a better year as we must reap all the earnings of our labour.
However, I wish you all a Happy New Year, but most importantly I wish all the diligent readers of this column a progressively decolonial 2017 and a spectacular self-actualisation phase in the 2017 aspirations of continuing the journey to pan-African self-determination.
In introducing this series last week, I made a recollection of the Black Motion show I attended and this week I will be reflecting on a book launch I attended on Thursday, the 29th of December, 2016.
The prestigious event took place at the Indaba Book Café. The book launch was graced by many literature enthusiasts from the lovely City of Kings. Apart from the venue being perfectly spacious for housing small audiences; I was happy to see an addition in terms of the city membership as far as the religion of words is concerned.
The new baby welcomed to the world of decolonial dialogue that day is titled, Nqobile: The Story of Becoming and it was penned by Mandla Mugijima. To a reader who knows the author of this book at a personal level it’s as if the book is a memoir and the author’s encounter with the decolonial philosophical paradigm.
Apart from an intriguing plot revolving around the text’s protagonist Nqobile, the book offers the path traversed by one in an attempt to relocate from coloniality to decoloniality. But why this relocation?
This is because we are educated in the ways of the coloniser and the path to find ourselves is always violent — as described in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. “We are in a constant state of schizophrenia and contradictions,” said one brother who was in the audience.
This contradiction is a clear representation of what Homi Bhabha (1987; 1994) refers as self-fragmentation which in post-colonial thought is referred to as dismemberment. Therefore, this means that the burden of every 21st century writer is to remember Africa’s inclination to colonial residues. The African writer must reflect the path of escaping the flaws of Eurocentricity. Period!
Mugijima, the author of the new book in concern clearly demonstrates the validity of this view as he attributes his academic well-being to his proximity to Whiteness stemming from his elementary education at the Bulawayo Christian Brothers College (CBC) right up to his tertiary learning in the United States of America as a student of numbers now telling his decolonial and epistemic disobedience to Eurocentricty through the mighty sword of words.
Throughout the book Blackness is not just a race symbol, but it is a representation of ontological otherness. Blackness is a site of struggle, self-determination and every justification to castigate the prejudice of Whiteness as a system.
Can Afrocentricity be found in Eurocentricity?
Therefore, this particular book serves a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge as it entails Blackness as a “becoming”.
In this case, becoming must be understood as a philosophical concept of a defeated people’s attempt to actualise from a point of otheredness to a point of “being”. From the same philosophical premise; being refers to a process whereby one reaches an overall state of humanness/personhood. This entirety of the self stands to prove its wholeness by interfacing with its macroscopic likeness which we call “humanity”.
This means that the aspect of assuming being happens at a personal level and the success of this process is measured by how one fits into the human family. Therefore, Africans have a unique path in assuming the place of being. This is against a history of the race’s denial of being and thus explaining the complexity of our evolution as a “becoming” which is articulated as a central theme in Mugijima’s new book.
However, the aspect of “becoming” in relation to the ontological density of Blackness has been problematised because our daily subjection to Eurocentricty makes our “becoming” that which never arrives. It is for this reason that we claim to be free and we still find ourselves negotiating for our human spaces in terrains of institutional racism as chronicled in Mugijima’s inaugural publication, Nqobile: The Story of Becoming. However, I further argue that instead of “becoming” we need to “become”. Only then shall the reality of equilibrium global citizenship be a truth.
Only then shall no man be judged by the colour of his skin. Here we are, reading a book penned by a young man embraced by Eurocentricity and later jilted by it when he exits college. This is a clear reflection of how Westernisation is there to make and unmake our quest to “become” and yet we never come to “be”. This is even crystalised in the life of Dambudzo Marechera who was embraced and later jilted by Eurocentricity.
In the same manner, our other searches to “become” through the pen have proved that we are in a state of a “becoming” which never arrives.
For instance, Dangarembgwa tackles the story of “becoming” from a feminist point of view. In her books the female protagonists are victims of education and a misnamed Eurocentric order of patriarchy called marriage.
Instead of enlightening the girl-child, the Eurocentric education makes them toxic to themselves as they fall out of Christian expectations of womanhood.
This therefore becomes indicative of how the Eurocentric order is less liberating in seeking “becoming” as a model of liberating the self from encountering Western domination. In the same light, the struggle to “become” is also noted in Ericah Gwetai’s 2015 offering, More Than A Woman.
Her main character and protagonist is caught up in the wave of finding the self in religion; at the climax the character is stripped out of her embracement of the African religious facet and she is reconstructed to a Christian evangelist — away from being an African spiritualist and a medium.
However, it is writers like Cynthia Marangwanda (2014) who try and use the seemingly radical depiction of womanhood to openly demolish the superiority order of Eurocentricity through religion, politics and gendering of “being”.
Marangwanda goes to the extremes and writes about vomiting nationhood — which in its self stands as a post-independence triumph of coloniality:
“The bathroom looks so clean and sanitised I have no choice but to promptly vomit on its sparkling floor.
“I purposely avoid the toilet chamber. My intention is to mar. I notice a piece of the national flag in my vomit. I wonder if I’ll also pass out a section of my citizenship the next time I move my bowels”(Marangwanda 2014: 6)
This is substantial enough to explain that we need not only to “become” in order to be decolonial, but we must unashamedly assume the ugly excreting process of all resides of imperialism in us. Only then, shall we assume a rightful and conscious state of “being” as Africans and never long to “become”, but “be” for we have been long coming and not arriving.
Now the Black writer has to locate the lost “being” and anticipate less the “becoming” to being from the “zone of none being”. This is because the grandfathers of African literature from Ngugi to Mungoshi have paid that price.
Our debt as 21st century writers is to write beyond the crude articulations of “becoming” as presented in the erstwhile generation’s literary weaponry whose central focus was a “becoming” which never came as lamented by Ayi kwei Amar (1968) — The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born.
Now back to Fanon!
In Black Skin, White Masks — Fanon (1952) complements the psychological effects of racial hierarchies as explained above. Fanon’s thesis is hinged on his intimate life experiences among the black middle class in the French Caribbean.
From this position, he demonstrates how the dominant colonial culture categorises blackness with impurity; and the Antilleans accept this association and so come to despise themselves.
Women of the colony personify whiteness as the only precedent and tutor of beauty, for example, by attempting neurotically to avoid black men and to get close to (and ultimately cohabit with) white men; a process Fanon dubbed “lactification.”
This self-loathing and disgust manifests itself in other ways: as dread and lack of self-assurance replaced by self-pity, in the presence of whites, about revealing one’s “natural” Black inferiority; in a pathological hypersensitivity that Fanon dubbed “affective erethism”; in an existential dread; and in a neurotic refusal to face up to the fact of one’s own identity.
Black children raised within the racist cultural assumptions of the colonial system, can incompletely resolve the rigidity between contempt for blackness and their own dark skins by coming to think of themselves, in some sense, as white. (Hence the “white masks” of the title). Fanon’s methodology Black Skin, White Masks focuses on the problems of identity created for the colonial subject by colonial racism; and on the consequent need to escape.
However, there seems to be no escape from this dungeon of emotional, spiritual and ontological injury imposed on colonial remains. Therefore, should we strive to become? Once again, a progressively decolonial 2017 to you all.
Mayibuye!
