The Sunday News
It is March 18, and nothing is there to celebrate about on this mild and miserable day. Our country, the struggle, the nation’s academia were raided of one of the radiant wits to ever walk on the face of earth.
Forty-seven years ago on that day, the erudite Herbert Chitepo fell. As my day unfolded on this very same cheerless day 47 years from then, I thought to myself, what would have Chitepo done to write the wrongs the masses are believing? Yes, I say write, because like many others who confront discourses that are negated and let grown to be normalised yet perilous, Chitepo is a beacon to young people who aspire to craft challenging narratives which relentlessly subject them as enemies of their anti-establishment peers. He represents that which re-organises a wrong dominant order in societies which comfort themselves with self aggrandised caricature to self suit. Amongst the lawyers I know, I am yet to find one to compare to his intellectual dexterity which should not be mistaken for our mass present regurgitating law interpreters. We know a lot of them who are studying law just to think they can be close to Chitepo, we see you. I stoutly doubt you will be anything close to him in his freshman year.
1979: Memories back then; questions with no answers today
As I pen this article, I am reading President Robert Mugabe’s 1979 memorial speech on the Chitepo Day. I am asking myself if we still have such politicians. What would our politics be like had he been still alive? How did he sound like? What would he say about miscalculated politics, factionalism, disenchanted nationalists, misrepresented semantics and the growing but misdirected secession mantra? All these simple sounding but hard to answer questions clogged my mind until I thought of how articulate he was if he were to write about propaganda and how it has been misrepresented by disenfranchised political groups.
This has become the most flattering word in opposition in reference to the establishments’ political messaging. My people, words are like wine, continuous dosage of the same quantity gets you drunk. The “propaganda” drunkenness you see even in those who have no grasp of the etymology of the word, its idea, the history and its intended use flaunting and assuming to use it as a tool of literature analysis is abysmal. One thing they don’t know is that a word is the easily abused entity on earth, particularly English words. Some of you as you are reading you are thinking of words, phrases whose meanings you thought you knew for so long until one day someone corrected you. I know one esteemed lad who misunderstood “suffrage”, to him it was an adjective and I bet for the past entirety of his life he carried that meaning until that fateful day when we corrected him.
I bet he shall never forget that day because linguistic corrections when one is so confident are worse off than stripping a man of his manhood in public.
You intellectually undress a person when you simply prove their morphological inadequacies, when they display syntactical poverty in language use, it’s only then when we decide to put on our linguistic stethoscopes to detect your error especially when you want to negotiate boundaries using terms you have no idea of. To some of us, linguistics is our forte, we simply choose to tone down for our lovely readers who incessantly request that we should speak to them in that awesome, chilled language because they appreciate our ideas which have changed their worldviews. Uzasala wedwa ulokhe usithi yipropaganda yodwa leyi .Tshintsha!
Propaganda: Opposition is feeding us more of it these days
If Chitepo were alive, he would tell us to call out hypocrites and political misogynists. Society and idea consumers have been dogmatised that propaganda is referral to Zanu-PF only yet the largest production of it is in opposition politics. To those who have no history of media, language and politics let me notify you that propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda. It’s often by presenting facts selectively-sometimes lying by omission to encourage a particular synthesis or perception. They calculatingly use loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented. It’s not surprising that just before reading this passage you have had a dosage of “How Zanu-PF wants to rig elections using the BVR, so let’s demonstrate and bring back the UNDP”.
There is absolutely no reasoning except that the system has been re-elected into power for 37 years hence its justification for our lamentations and suspicions.
No one thinks about how many times the regime is demonised without probable reasoning; we silently gulp loads of information which are said to be challenging an establishment narrative. The moment we don’t sieve information and fabricated challenging discourses we cease to be thinkers in and out of ourselves. When opposition creates even the worst of reasons why the regime should be ousted and negate their massive flaw that is propaganda. The process of subconscious nudging we are subjected to daily through images depicting police brutality, Zanu-PF thuggery, photoshoped starving people, unconfirmed statistics, and heathenised expert analysis on noble government policies we are subjected to multiple overdoses of propaganda. We think less about that because opposition is semantically notorious, their disrespect for lexicography to suit them is uncontested, even Zanu-PF which they artistically brush with the guilt cannot compete on the same hypocrisy terrain.
When Zanu- PF introduces a policy, promotes its ideas, gathers support from scribes, its selectively called propaganda, when opposition does the same, it’s called awareness and political education. Such hypocrisy has descended on the public who now subscribe to the same noun references but different classifications for reasons not even known to them. How better are you from the others you bedevil?
You shall call to Lazarus like the rich man
If politics is the ticket into heaven, many shall remember the parable of Lazarus and the rich man; you shall not taste the kingdom of heaven because of your resistant hypocrisy. Our keenness to make informed choices should drive us to avoid selective criticism. Some of you have forgotten to remember that Joyce Mujuru suddenly becomes one who is poor like us and lies to our face that she owns nothing, what kind of clumsiness would we be to let that slide and assume it’s not propaganda?
Colouring of bad ideas is synonymous with propaganda. Zimbabweans are quickly forgetting who Joyce Mujuru really is. I am not saying hate her, my humble submission is call her out the same way you are quick to gather at Africa square and march in Hillbrow (sic).
When she claims that Zanu-PF is evil, call her out, she has been in the system for too long to suddenly not to be evil in such a short space of time. As I said, propaganda is a perfect lying tool, it’s important to filter messages and analyse the encoder, bitter ones often slur in their wailings, remember William Mutumanje?
Mayebizw’ amagam’ angcwele
Our heaven entrance is blocked when we keep quiet and forget how Morgan Tsvangirayi treated women immediately after the sad passing on of his respectable wife. In a space of three years the man had married twice and divorced the other with a dollar in a midst of spiral courtships in South Africa, I don’t know how you feel about that but I think it’s abject disrespect of women and such chauvinistic behaviour deserves a call out any day. Well, MDC-T doesn’t tell you that, they deliberately keep quiet when they lie and parade as champions of gender empowerment. They selectively omit that their 2005 split was tribal because they hated the late Gibson Sibanda and Welshman Ncube to the point of hiring thugs to beat up even the janitor at Harvest House. You are not told that because in propaganda, you have to be politically correct. To those who know, why have you not called them out? Are you immune to conviction that your objectivity is sublimed when its critical matters?
Phantom sins create ghostly shadows
There is a lot of propaganda crafted and dispensed by opposition, too much for me to write here, but this piece is meant to trigger your thoughts to look at things objectively. Do not allow your mind to be a monochrome lest you be subjected to worse abuse than you are made to believe you are in today. When you are told that the command agriculture is wrong because the world today does not operate on commandism, have you asked “if not command agriculture, then what?” when you are told that “Zanu-PF has failed us, we need change” have you ever asked “How do you intend to bring the change?” when you are continuously fed with a confusing analysis of how electoral fraud will unfold next year, have you ever asked if dispossessing Zec of its constitutional mandate and allocating that duty to UNDP makes any sense?. A myriad of questions arise on the level of political hypocrisy and lack of identifying worse propaganda in opposition cahoots.
I am reminded of what President RG Mugabe said on 18 March 1979: “ Our main task today as we remind ourselves that the sad death of Comrade Chitepo and Comrade Shamiso is no other than to strengthen ourselves in our affirmed stand to move in their footsteps and refuse to be enticed into betraying the revolution.” #sibonguChitepo
Feedback can be sent to [email protected]/ @mhlanga_micheal
