The Sunday News
Well, after last week when I wrote of a fusion of generations, a colleague, Professor Dingilizwe Zvavanhu challenged me to extend that issue with a substantiation of generation differences, to which I share with you today. I for one think there are four generations to be fused in our struggle as Zimbabwe, the pan African generation which my colleague on Page 4 of this publication, Richard Mahomva sacredly belongs to with his oceanic decoloniality thought framework, the nationalist generation which our war veterans and current crop of leaders subscribe to, the globalist generation which is full of socialites parading in politics and the renascent generation which most young people, with the majority being misled belong to. This is the where the KEY voter belongs to, and some of them have emerged as cosmo-nationalists.
The Pan-African Generation
The struggles against colonialism and apartheid in Africa were successful as far as they led to political independence. A specific generation of Africans, with many pre- and post-variations spearheaded the anti-colonial struggles by providing a global critique to colonialism in general and racism in particular. This was the Pan-African Generation. This generation was internationalist in its content and character. It was not limited to Africans in Africa; it was about and for blacks everywhere.
Indeed, the notable luminaries who provided the intellectual basis of this generation were not Africans in the geographical sense or in national and citizenship terms. They were such figures as W E B Du Bois and Marcus Garvey who influenced the political thought of African exiles some of whom like Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, and Jomo Kenyatta, who later returned to Africa to spearhead the independence movements in their homelands. The vision of this generation was defined more by the concerns of black people in the Diaspora than by African power struggles in Africa.
A deeper examination of this generation is a result of numerous conversations on Pan Africanism I have had with Richard Mahomva, a rebellious Christian who is now a Rastafarian; quite an intriguing hub of decoloniality, Pan Africanism, African philosophy and of course politics as his trained skill. I have come to note that the major social objective of the Pan-African generation was the construction of an African identity to counteract the colonial mind set. Imperial ideology sought to denigrate, exclude, or marginalise black people from international and national public life under the pretext that blacks were not part of civilised humanity and that they did not have a civilised pre-colonial history of their own and thus did not have a future of civilisation. Pan-Africanism was therefore neither continental nor national; it was a global intellectual and political movement. This is partly the reason why it did not touch the hearts and minds of ordinary Africans in Africa, although it certainly influenced some notable African elite and, by extension, the social movements they led. I have told my colleague many times that the legacy of this generation should be creatively profiled and critically analysed, balancing the strengths and weaknesses of its leaders and social movements to recapture its history and to plot its future, to which he constantly refers me to his 2014 monologue “Pan Africanism: The cradle the present and the future” in which I do not find how that generation created a palatable prescription of its continuity, we now have to devise and extension for it to fit today.
For example, the struggles against colonialism were successful as far as they promoted and established a Pan-African bond between and among Africans, or more accurately among black people, across the diversity of geography, history, gender, language, and culture. Through the struggles against colonialism, the Pan-African bond engendered a shared spirit of Africanness, which has survived some narrow minded nationalist and commercial prejudices throughout the continent and all over the world.
The Nationalist Generation
While the struggles against colonialism affected the superstructures of colonial states, they did not, however, affect the deep structures of ordinary people nor did they fundamentally challenge the deep structures of the international economic system.
In addition, the anti-colonial struggles did not bring about a professional culture among Africans nor did they inspire efficient and effective economies in Africa. There is an important lesson here: political independence and the end of colonialism in Zimbabwe neither led to the enjoyment liberation privileges. A Zimbabwean has been continuously subjected to economic struggles massively misrepresented as a total making of the nationalist generation. I am not an authority to deny that but I am in the best position to say that the intensity of our problems which have been arrogated to the nationalist generation have been heightened by external forces. Yes, I said that, little do we know about it because we are not at the helm of politics and those who have been there won’t say the truth for fear of losing the votes of the misled. Joyce Mujuru knows that, Nkosana Moyo knows it, even Morgan Tsvangirai is well aware of it. While the social history of the nationalist generation took an exacting toll on Africans, it did not kill the human spirit in Africa. Indeed, the nationalist generation had its own moments of triumph. For instance, the nationalists gave Zimbabweans a sense of pride in things African. In addition, nationalism enabled Zimbabweans to construct a clear sense of self-identity.
The Globalist Generation
Globalism in Zimbabwe has brought about new challenges and opportunities for the country in the next century, partly due to the fact that the end of the Cold War now seen as the triumph of globalisation in the commercial sense has opened up new vistas for political and economic reforms in Zimbabwe and Africa at large. Whereas the independence movement was exclusively led by nationalists, schooled in the politics of anti-colonial struggles but not entirely sold on Pan-Africanism, the multiparty movement has been led by a new breed of globalist Africans. It is made up of people from all walks of life across racial, gender, religious, political, class, professional and ethnic boundaries. The globalist generation is not sold on the notion that nation building should be the essence of politics in Zimbabwe. Globalists do not believe in nationalism, if anything, they are swayed or even confused by the vagaries of the political economy of globalism to a point of being against the national interest of their own country.
Globalists see themselves as internationalised and modernised Zimbabweans, but only with reference to political and economic issues of governance and only at the level of rhetoric about these issues. Otherwise, globalist Zimbabweans are as traditional as their nationalist counterparts are when it comes to their attitudes to death and burial, family responsibilities, sexual relations, courtship and marriage, witchcraft, sports and recreation, even animal slaughter and eating habits. The worldview of globalists is, at the very least, precarious partly because it is driven by a conflicting heritage from local, national, and international social forces. The kind of globalism claimed by the globalist generation is based on ephemeral commercial and political interests which have sought to appropriate the grammar of human rights, democracy and good governance, without acknowledging that diversity is still a problem and that what for some is a global village is for others a global pillage.
In this sense, and like the Pan-African and nationalist generations before it, the globalist generation’s claim to globalism masks diversity and creates false problems which invite false solutions which are often based on imitations of western political and economic systems. The globalist generation tends to deal with local problems by appealing to international authorities and forces. It is for this reason that globalists have produced a critique of incumbent nationalists and their governments which smacks of opposition to African nations because globalists have failed to make meaningful distinctions between “the ruling party,” “government,” “the head of state,” “the nation,” and “the world”.
The Renascent Generation
While the voices of the globalist generation are increasingly being heard, with all the contradictions of that generation, a new Zimbabwe is in the making with a renascent generation of leaders poised to take over the mantle of public opinion making at the dawn of the next century and millennium. To appreciate the challenges and opportunities in our country, in the next century and millennium, one must have a historical perspective of the unfolding of social events on the country. The history, told from the point of view of the success and failure of four generations of Zimbabweans who are still competing for hegemony in this century of which one of which is certain to be a dominant social force in the next century. How they have experienced suffering, how they have overcome adversity, how they have celebrated their lives and how they have seen their future in a world that increasingly asserts itself as a global village connected by an information superhighway; and how Zimbabweans are becoming a new people, the renascent generation of Zimbabwean nationalists.
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