The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
That the world has been globalised and technologised into an information society can no longer be disputed.
What remains in question is if the quantities of data and information around us have been translated and nuanced into knowledge that can help us survive the world. We live in a planet of textuality, sound, graphics and symbols. It is such a thick forest of messages that have not been processed into meanings and signs that have not been interpreted into visions.
We are powerless in the abundance of tools of empowerment. The political and economic powers that rule the present world have successfully done so by controlling information, signs and symbols that dominate the global information landscape. It is with the grip of the many handed octopus that the Euro-American Empire controls from the narrative of the creation story to stories that predict how exactly the planet will one day come to an end. Simply, it is through narrativity, manipulation and management of memory that the world is run.
The French exiled Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera put it well that “the struggle of man against power” in the world “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Presently all knowledge and memory of the world that circulates as truth is that from the vantage point of Empire.
In the vocation to decolonise power, knowledge and being, decoloniality cannot excuse itself from confronting the way history, memory and knowledge have been distributed in the world. Those who seek to participate in liberation struggles in thought and in deeds must engage in radical remembering and aggressive unmasking of concealed histories and suppressed narratives.
The Imfazwe Impi Enkulu
In IsiZulu, Ndebele and Xhosa traditions Imfazwe is a big war in defence of the nation. It is the equivalent of the biblical Armagedon. Normally this war of the end of the world, for the salvation of fellow man and country is fought through arms and weapons of massive destruction. On Facebook, Cont Mhlanga is forcefully leading an Imfazwe of memory and remembering of buried histories and silenced traditions. Recently, in the appropriately named Facebook page, Imfazwe Imp’enkulu, Cont Mhlanga disputed the story of the succession of King Mzilikazi as it has been passed down in colonialist historiography. In the colonialist narrative King Lobhengula is supposed to have triumphed through ambition and brute force. In the alternative and decolonial narrative that Cont Mhlanga draws from oral indigenous history, Lobhengula had become NgwaloNgwalo, the bookish and reluctant Prince.
In dress and manner, Prince Thulwana, as Lobhengula was originally named after the dust of wars of colonial conquest, had become equipped with modern literacy and numeracy of a measure and had been convinced of the liberating magic of formal education. Further to what Cont Mhlanga notes, the colonialist narrative falsely claims that in a blood thirsty rage, King Mzilikazi killed his own son Nkulumane together with the many chiefs that had prematurely installed Nkulumane as king.
That fraudulent colonialist history has since been proven to be the lie that it was as Nkulumane lies buried in the Phokeng area of Rusternburg in North Western South Africa. Colonialist narratives of African ancestral rulers as having been bloodthirsty savages have sadly found themselves in school textbooks and consumed by the young as gospel truths. To declare an Imfazwe against the silencing of African ancestral narratives and distortion of history that Cont Mhlanga and others are doing is serious decolonial and liberatory business.
The indaba my children
In 1964, Zulu sangoma and historian, Credo Mutwa published Indaba My Children, close to seven hundred pages of stubborn indigenous narratives that confront and dispute colonialist narratives of African history. In the present universities and high schools, for instance, students are told the ghoulish story that a bloodythirsty and cowardly King Dingane invited one Piet Retief, a Voortrekker leader for a feast in his royal kraal. When Piet Retief and his companions were relaxed and probably drunk, Dingane is said to have commanded, “Bulala abathakathi!” and his warriors massacred the innocent white visitors.
Credo Mutwa authoritatively demolishes this colonialist narrative and proves that Piet Retief and his party committed what was equal to witchcraft that warranted the death sentence by royal decree. On that fateful day of 6 February 1838 Piet Retief had been honoured with an invitation to a military parade and feast, amid negotiations over land and territories between Boer Trekkers and the Zulu Kingdom.
The King’s Inhlolis, spies, noticed that some of the companions of Retief, probably some journalists and impression artists, were busy peeping into an enclosure where the king’s wives were bathing, and the curious visitors were making drawings of the naked bodies of royal wives. In the grammar of the times the bodies and shadows of royal women were being stolen by white wizards. The act of peeping into the nakedness of royalty was enough witchcraft.
Capturing the naked bodies on paper became too much intrusion into and theft of royal details. The fate of the visitors was sealed in blood. It was colonialist journalism gone too wrong, and colonialist historiography will not have us know, except of the cruelty and savagery of King Dingane who slaughtered his own guests.
Of the death of King Tshaka we are taught that Dingane conspired with other royal Zulu insiders to assassinate Tshaka who had become a millennium menace. Credo Mutwa brings forward, instead, a story of a King Tshaka that was executed after being found in offence and threat to the future of the Zulu nation.
Out of national interest, the king was found to be in error and out of rhyme with where the nation wanted to go. A council of elders agreed that Tshaka must die and his own bodyguards were instructed to let executioners do their national duty. Colonialist historiography will not credit a so called primitive African society with such law and order that Credo Mutwa describes. What colonialist historiography will have us remember is that Zulus lived in a state of nature where life was “nasty, brutish and short” as Thomas Hobbes memorably described.
Decolonising history and memory
In light of the heavy weight of colonialist history and colonialist memory that still circulate an image of ancestral Africans as having been savages that were caught in the long night of primitivism an Imfazwe of decolonial memory and narrative is necessary. What native intellectuals, organic intellectuals and story tellers such as Credo Mutwa and Cont Mhlanga are doing is to recover stolen and hidden histories and against the weight of colonialist narrative, bring them into circulation and currency.
The power of coloniality and the life of Empire and its enduring conquest of peripherised societies relies on our lack of decolonial memory and our blind acceptance of the story about ourselves that the colonialist has told us, a story that we continue to magnify and amplify and pass on to future generations. It is a traumatising story of our own ancestors as unthinking lawless and blood thirsty savages that killed for sport.
That the Pioneer Column that invaded our ancestral territories and turned communal lands into private property was a bunch of mercenaries and armed robbers is a truism that is not in the syllabus but must be aggressively recovered and circulated. By calling it “Imfazwe” and “imp’enkulu” Cont Mhlanga signifies the gravity of the intellectual and cultural war for remembering stolen ancestral truths. Decoloniality has the burden to painfully remember histories and cultural narratives that have been systematically and carefully concealed in colonialist narratives.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa: mailto:[email protected].
