Reason Wafawarova On Thursday
We have all been in one way or the other socialised to have heroes, and we often look up to them and admire them, just as we also want to emulate them. The media remains the main tool through which we learn of and about our heroes, and these heroes come in all shapes and forms; from actors, musicians, athletes, writers, politicians, e-famous bloggers, to iconised religious leaders, like the famous-in-notoriety prophets of today.

Like all people everywhere else in the world, we Africans have a culture that creates the idea that we need heroes in our lives, and that is why we are so much obsessed with the idea of celebrities.

Our media creates the concept that it is the expected norm that we put some complete stranger on a pedestal of excellence and then tell everyone else not only to admire him or her, but also to emulate them. While it will remain noble to acknowledge and admire exemplary behaviour and good traits in those around us, we have to come to a point we realise that time is far too important to be wasted on someone’s personal shenanigans, and this is precisely why the media must stop this nauseating habit of creating news out of tweeted personal opinions of iconised individuals. The infatuation with opinionated social-media mavericks does not speak well of the role of a responsible media.

I am not so sure if anybody has a right to the pedestal of heroism, and I write this as purely a matter of personal opinion. I realise that the concept of heroism has created for us more problems than solutions, more headaches than achievements, and more confusion than progress.

Societies have often looked up to individual people, and these people have many times let their admirers down, or disappointed, one way or the other. When this happens people naturally get hurt, and they start to look for yet another person they can look up to, only to be let down again, and the cycle never ends.

We have heard a lot about our political leaders in Zimbabwe, like being told that someone is the “face of democracy,” or “the only one who can” do certain things within a political party. These are abstract constructions we make in our minds so we can deify characters we believe to be the answers to all our aspirations.

What we must be doing as societies is to essentially focus on traits, not people; on specific actions and achievements, not persons. It is the traits, actions and achievements we should be admiring and looking up to, not the human being behind them. Once we focus on the person, we cannot escape the absurdity of investing ego and emotion into these imaginary constructs we often make. We are of course obliged by sheer human decency to respect people’s talents, to honour people’s good work, or their inspiring words, but to do so we do not have to resort to hero-worship.

When one invests ego and emotion into an imaginary construct the mind will start fighting to defend the imagined construct. So we make this huge mind construction of a supernaturally gifted religious leader among us, and we endorse some high sounding title around him, and we create this impenetrable wall of infallibility around that person. Once we are in that mindset, we begin to provide the deified personality unmitigated blind defence to the point we begin to believe the hero cannot sin or falter. We can maim and kill in the hero’s name, and we can even die in defence of that imaginary construction.

We have seen this with our political and religious leaders, and so on and so forth. The mind begins to lie to itself and to others so they can also defend the imaginary constructs. That is the essentiality of propaganda in the spectrum of politics, as well as extremist dogma in religion.

The danger of this meme is that it elevates deified characters to some pedestal above not only the admirers, but everyone else. So in our collectivity we are all placed below the perceived hero, never to be able to surpass their feat, regardless of whether we actually do better than them or not.

It is not healthy for society to entertain unrealistic expectations about iconised personalities. It often does not end well. It ends in tragic hostilities and toxic environments, and the examples are far too many to mention.

Let us acknowledge and agree that it is difficult and hard to have faith in oneself when everything in one’s life is not working. It cannot be any easier when you cannot find a job, or you lose the one you have; when you feel sidelined or marginalised, when you feel neglected, or you simply are not happy with who you are, or with how you look.

It is tragic when you cannot date, when you dropped out of school, you are hungry and homeless, or when you are hopeless. Let us agree, life can be hell, and when we face these hardships we find it easy to look up to a figurehead, or to someone we believe we can emulate, or who can make us feel better.

But often the people we look up to are just as damned no-hopers as ourselves, just probably in different or less visible ways. Just about everyone is just as lost and confused as everybody else, and not one person has everything around himself or herself all knit together in a seamless fashion. Anyone that may claim otherwise is either delusional or plain stupid.

The problem with creating heroes is that the iconised will often falter or fall, or may fail us or disappoint us. When that happens we begin to see the flip side of hero-worshipping.

We begin to see the demonising of fallen heroes. Everything they ever touched is turned upside down, and they are made to look like monsters. We have often invented around fallen heroes this life trope that is really tragic. When an iconised church leader fails the moral uprightness expected of his office, it is often the once fanatical admirer that fails the forgiveness and tolerance test, especially if the hero’s failure happens to express itself through such dramatic sin like adultery.

The truth of life is we are all monsters inside, and we are all saints inside too, whether we are religious or not. We have the same potential to do both good and evil, and as such we have all done regrettable things in the past, much as we have all done good somewhere along the tracks of our lives. As people we are capable of a wide range of behaviour, to an extent that some of us can do both good and evil simultaneously. The evil we do does not take away the good we have done in the past, nor does the good we do balance out the evil in us. Our good and our evil are two separate piles, and we just have to deal with it that way.

The fact that we all have the potential to do evil does not negate our responsibilities when we fail to live up them, and that is why we must all be prepared to carry the burden of criticism.

When we iconise individuals in our midst, we must always remember that no hero can live up to our collective expectations, even in the best of times. We have been inundated with all manner of hero-worshipping superlatives coming in the name of Nelson Mandela for example, but the man hardly achieved anything close to the expectations of South Africans. That prognosis pretty much applies to any deified hero we may choose to identify, living or dead.

In remembering the legacy of people we hero-worship, what we must focus on is respect for their skills, admiration for their good traits, and indeed we must, without fail, spread their great ideas.

What we must desist from doing is assigning personality to the achievements of people we only come to know through the power of the media. A person with a brilliant idea might have a terrible personality, or they might not. We cannot get away with making assumptions.

What our hero-worshipping and villain demonising media must understand is that the philosophies of hero-worship and villain demonisation are products of armchair psychology.

When we override traits to focus on personalities we often run into the temptation of making unqualified judgments. Zimbabwe is a polarised society, and that is precisely because the country runs on the politics of hero-worship and villain demonisation. We can hardly separate personalities from policy, and often we see supporters of our political leaders investing immeasurable amounts of ego and emotion into defending their heroes.

Yes, we must of necessity praise those among us who show exemplary behaviour, just like we must hail every good achievement and trait coming from our leaders across the entire spectrum of society. Indeed, we must equally condemn wrong behaviour.

What we must always remember is that the human being behind what we admire might just murder someone tomorrow, or someone we deride and despise may have something useful to say.

People have this inclination and hankering for heroism, and they really enjoy it when they see crowds hero-worshiping them. Last week one reader of this column just told me that I was the best thing that ever happened to Africa in terms of political writing. That was naturally flattering, but absolutely baseless, and also unhelpful to the art of writing itself. Hopefully the reader will one day identify the positive trait in me that he for now mistakes for my wholesome person.

I am not a big fan of e-famous bloggers who sell the idea of hero-worship for page-views. They go on social media to act like they are perfect, that way creating a glorious but vacuous brand out of themselves, and then selling that brand to the gullible.

It is sickening to see people selling the idea of hero-worship just for the satisfaction of looking at page-views and Facebook likes. The vanity is repulsive.

For as long as we believe in the world of heroes and villains, we will never be able to identify the goodness of merit, and we will continue to perpetuate the rule of mediocrity. We have a country seemingly caught between the antagonism of independent nationalism and liberal democracy, but strangely our leadership from across the political divide suffers immense policy deficit when it comes to backing any of the two ideologies.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

REASON WAFAWAROVA is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.

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