The Sunday News
Talent Moyo
THE book On the Shoulders of Struggle: Memoirs of a Political Insider by Dr Obert Mpofu offers an in-depth understanding of the African epistemic question — how do we arrive at African narratives informed by African subjective realities? This is a question that many academics and leaders have tried to grapple with ever since the African continent undertook the road to colonial emancipation. However, Dr Mpofu’s memoir responds to this question through the use of autoethnography to engage his subjective realities of the struggle and the broader experiences of those ones involved in the struggle up to the present day.
As a point of departure, autoethnography entails a “qualitative research method that allows the author to write in a highly personalised style, drawing on his or her experiences to extend understanding about a societal phenomenon” (Wall, 2006: 146). As such, Dr Mpofu’s memoir is rooted on autoethnography to highlight his personal narratives of the struggle since he joined till the present day.
Autoethnography locates Mpofu’s memoir within the postmodern philosophy which takes into account the notion of reflexivity and voice within research. As Wall (2006: 146) submits that “the intent of autoethnography is to acknowledge the inextricable link between the personal and the cultural and to make room for non traditional forms of enquiry.” This adoption of autoethnography establishes African epistemologies that are informed by first-hand experiences and narratives by African scholars. The ultimate result as evidenced by Dr Mpofu’s memoir is the creation of an African epistemology in presenting the African experiences.
The memoir should be credited for the use of reflexivity to address issues of representation in writing African narratives. Dr Mpofu’s memoir responds to Clough (2000: 283) observation that “the question (has been) raised about political and cultural representation — not only about who should represent whom but what should be the forms of representation in relationship to hegemonic practices.” The question is addressed by Dr Mpofu’s assertion that:
“When our families were dumped in Jambezi, sl detained in Gweru, some without trial. My father died in 1957, having failed to recover from excessive torture that he had endured under incarceration. Technically, I lost my father to colonial apparatuses and from then my anger towards the colonial system became relentless. It was from this position that I sympathised with the many nationalists who were detained for Zimbabwe freedom (page 17).”
The above quotation underscores the technical use of reflexivity as an aspect of social research in a quest to respond to the question of representation in writing African narratives particularly liberation war biographies. Dr Mpofu unwittingly addresses political and cultural representation through his subjective narration of the struggle which directly touches his personal life and ultimately shaping his trajectories of the struggle and his political ideology. Despite being subjective, Dr Mpofu’s story represents the African masses who found themselves at the heart of the struggle due to the interaction with colonial systems.
Dr Mpofu’s autoethnographic memoir raises important points about the issue of authorship in writing African narratives. Authorship is a vital aspect in recording lived experiences. On reading any literature seeking to represent a particular issue or notion it is imperative to pose questions like “who is the author?”, “what is the relationship between the researched and author?”, and “what is the (ideological) position of the author?”
These often taken for granted questions tend to raise important points on questions of representation and knowledge production. In this particular instance, we have Dr Mpofu representing himself in the same process symbolising the African within the struggle. Unlike other biographies authored by “professional biographers” that tend to represent the position of the “biographer”, Dr Mpofu’s memoir stands as a representation of his lived experiences which symbolizes the position of Africans. As such, authorship and positionality are important aspects in producing evocative narratives.
Therefore, the memoir makes an important contribution to the African epistemologies that are rooted on decolonial approaches to knowledge production.
Dr Mpofu’s biography employs a heuristic inquiry to attend to deep-seated personal questions regarding the struggle. As suggested by Douglas and Moustakas (1990: 40) heuristic inquiry tends to “awaken and inspire researchers to make contact with and respect their own questions and problems, to suggest a process that affirms imagination, intuition, self-reflection, and the tacit dimension as valid ways in the search for knowledge and understanding.” In this view, Mpofu tends to self-reflect and use intuition to develop important questions that ultimately shape the understanding of the struggle. This self-reflection and intuition appears in many parts of biography and an example can be extracted from page 55 where Dr Mpofu narrates that:
“At the time, I was going through an evolutionary phase which entailed graduating into civilian life from the previous life. The painful reality of undoing the psychological traumas of war which I had borne since the age of sixteen was inevitable.”
The above quotation highlights how Dr Mpofu tacitly employs heuristic self-inquiry to rethink and frame the struggle through the African perspective. Here he appeals to the subjective realities that tend to symbolise the position of Africans during and after the struggle. This approach makes a valid contribution to the creation and sustenance of African epistemologies.
To conclude, like any other biography, the memoir’s weakness lies on the writer’s reliance on individualised subjective self. As Sparkes (2000: 22) has argued that “the emergence of autoethnography and narratives of self . . . has not been trouble-free, and their status as a proper research remains problematic”, Dr Mpofu’s memoir falls within the trap too.
The memoir should have incorporated more conversations with the people who were within the struggle through the use of artefacts such as letters or documents that he and his social circle exchanged. However, this weakness is transcended by the postmodern philosophy and praxis which emphasises on the existence of multiple realities to understanding social phenomena. Overall, it must be noted that Dr Mpofu’s memoir makes an important contribution to Zimbabwean history and African epistemologies.
-Talent Moyo is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology at Midlands State University. He teaches Social Policy and Social Administration, Sociology of Organisations, and Urban Sociology. His research interests are Political Sociology, Youth Studies, and Social Policy.
