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The Other side Nathaniel Manheru
The heading for this instalment is not mine. I owe it to one Dr Augustine Tirivangana. I understand he is with the Open University, but he writes for The Patriot.

I hope Alexander Kanengoni will not sue for this pilferage. Or pick beefs with The Herald editor. The headline was just too good to be left alone. And the goodness of it all lay in its simplicity and straightforwardness, something The Patriot does so inimitably.

And I always blame that goodness on Kanengoni and his editor, Professor Pfukwa. Both are writers. Both have this amazing style whose poignancy resides in remarkable, matter-of-fact simplicity. A style that readily yields to the reader, one shorn of opaqueness, yet addressing, even disentangling, very complex matters, complex issues.

It is a rare attribute, one I have no pretensions to having or acquiring. But that is a small, deserved digression. I have decided to borrow, and that unfortunate decision puts me in an invidious position: I am borrowing, something sure to boomerang given the drift of this piece. Clearly borrowing makes me a tragedy, and one which is incorrigible, irreversible.

From Willie Musarurwa

And I borrow again, unashamedly, this time from my model columnist: Willie Musarurwa the late. A national hero who lies at Heroes Acre, Willie was Zapu’s Publicity Secretary; he was the editor of The Sunday Mail soon after Independence, editor for a while until the political fallout of parties in the early eighties led to his dismissal.

He ran a column he called “Gono Goto”. I am still to be educated on the origins of the column’s name, but it carried profound thoughts, all of them forcefully expressed, often clothed in local trope.

He it was who taught me that the local idiom could be turned into a punchy carrier of complex thought. Since then, I have tried to be faithful to that stylistic credo, all to infinite good. If it was Willie in my position, in my mood, he would have started thus: “So far so good, said the tortoise after crossing half of Samora Machel Avenue without being run over by a car.”

One day — a Sunday — in the early eighties, he started his piece that way, prepossessing his readers into opening up for a complete suck-in. May his soul rest in eternal peace, this mighty writer!

Situating Ranger

The latest issue of The Patriot is a collector’s item. Its focus is on Terence Ranger, the British-born historian who passed on a few days ago. He researched and wrote on the colonial question, principally focusing on Rhodesia, its history.

What made him stand out, stand above the likes of L H Gann, Beach and some such white historians, was his iconoclastic vantage point which sought to challenge and overturn the colonial narrative, with all its encrusted myths (oh, that word!). He hated Rhodesia, especially its post-UDI version.

And this is where the greatness of Pfukwa, Kanengoni and their team becomes apparent. The dominant trend is to view any white man who hated or opposed his peers and the UDI project as, by that fact alone, pro-Africans, pro-African majority rule, pro-Independence.

To regard him as progressive. To regard him as not discriminatory, as pro-blacks. The praise is gratuitous, the benefit of doubt unqualified. That weakness of judgment persists to this day, often clouding our vision. Ibbo Mandaza’s eulogy on Ranger typified it. He lamented the fallout between Ranger and the ruling nationalists after Independence. He inferred betrayal of Ranger. How wrong.

And Doris Lessing too

Between intra-white hatred and the genuine love of the African was more than a gap; there was a chasm, one often unbridgeable. Hatred of Ian Smith, UDI and Rhodesia, did not mean love of the Patriotic Front, African Empowerment and Zimbabwe. It takes a well-nuanced mind to bring that out, something The Patriot did so remarkably.

I particularly liked Kanengoni’s reminiscences: how the liberal Ranger’s books often inspired youngsters to go to war, to animate a radical process which far exceeded Ranger’s parameters for “acceptable” change.

Liked the fact that even that paradoxical impact and result did not diminish his critical respect for the late departed. He could have added Doris Lessing, also late, to very good measure. As contradictions in colonial Zimbabwe stiffened, a middle-of-the-road white political sensibility kicked in, deeply rooted in white church personages for a start, then taking on the form of the Capricorn Society before settling permanently as the viscous liberal movement which sought to temper the inevitable change for a moderate settlement.

In the early part of nationalist movement when success looked doubtful, this sensibility sought to reform Rhodesia’s right-wing politics. Much later when the struggle looked unstoppable and poised to win, that sensibility sought to blow down leaping African tempers so the outcome would not be one too radical, one in which the white man would be hunted out of the country.

To humanise settler colonialism, to de-radicalise African Independence, that was the movement. As long as nationalist politics obeyed that template, no problem with white liberalism. Once a radical agenda was proposed, conflict started, which is why Ranger died insisting the struggle was never about land, but about one-man-one-vote.

As if after the voting booth, all would be happy ever after! That is why Doris grew very bitter, hostile, once Mugabe embarked on land reforms. The colonial edifice had been attacked and Mugabe had failed to be a faithful steward of the farm of the Turners, so the grass continued to sing: Britannia Rule, Rule Britannia. Many miss this key point about white liberalism.

Thank you The Patriot.

Ontological hegemony

I borrowed from Dr Tirivangani. His piece was epistemological. It looked at well-packaged foreign knowledge which then gets vended to eager Africans, in the process annihilating the African’s capacity to think independently, or to think at all.

He writes: “The West has gone a long way in setting the false ideal for Africa and indeed the rest of the world. You can describe the condition weighting down (sic) the world as epistemological or ontological hegemony. Everything is defined in terms of how the West defines reality, and yet what the West preaches or rather prescribes for its injudicious admirers, is not what it practices.”

And the don gets angrier, irreverent: “They preach hollow and limiting education for Africa, an education that teaches Africans to shy away from producing anything let alone beneficiating the natural materials available to them in abundance for their own needs; rather they are taught to fold their arms or put on suits made elsewhere, in someone else’s design, and sit on a table made by someone else using wood from Africa then proceed to eat using the white man’s cutlery of the Chinese sticks or any other such stuff as long as it is exotic . . . Filled in the tummy with things foreign, African family members part ways for either the school or the church or the bar. At the school they imbibe the white man’s ideas that galvanise their alienation from home.”

What follows is sure to offend my religious readers and I shall not cite it. But it is still valid.

Taking stock

I said I am happy like a tortoise that survives a highway crossing. So far so good. I am referring to the raging debate on the issue of conflict which embroiled the southern part of Zimbabwe in the early eighties.

As already indicated, lots of emotions are being generated, and I have been on the receiving end. Many of my friends have been pitying me, fearing for me even. Well, they need not fret. It is part of the price. For their benefit, I recall words of Montserrat Guibernau, a student on belongingness in a globalised environment.

He says that underpinning or even driving all rituals of belonging, is a certain dose of emotion: “Emotions are intrinsic to social and political attachments and, as such, are essential to an understanding of belonging.”

We are no different. So far I have drawn intellectuals and activists, with some of them denying they are debating me, only to drop my name in the next sentence. They end up debating me in spite of themselves. Some have not liked the platform, The Herald, whose claim to national status they contest.

Only to accuse me in the next sentence of abusing a “national platform”! A new phenomenon imported into the whole debate is that of chain submissions, akin to chain letters, to editors who care to receive them. The format is to put time and a date before a country code, something like “12:10, 4 Jan +27 7* *** ****”.

Usually the country code is South Africa. Or simply writing as “Gukurahundi victim”, “Concerned citizen”, or some such. In such formats, anonymity is then used as a license to paint lurid accounts of torture encounters with “Fifth Brigade”, all of them visited on abstract relatives or contacts like classmate, fellow villager, uncle, grandmother, etc, etc.

But in all such reports, one finds a streak of disarming honesty. None of the writer claims to have been involved, to have suffered, to have witnessed or to have been old enough to understand the world about him or her. There is an abiding hearsay copy, and this helps situate an argument.

Never a part of Zimbabwe

An amusing one came in the form of an open letter to President Mugabe — my supposed boss — by a group that signs off as “People in Diaspora Matabeleland/Mthwakazi”.

They plead with President Mugabe to reign me in, proceed to give themselves a negative answer as one from President Mugabe, and then “secede”’ adding “ . . . our country has never been Zimbabwe, but Matabeleland/Mthwakazi and . . . we don’t have a Shona national in our country and never will we”. I have already noted the inevitability of emotions in a debate on identity and belongingness, so I don’t need to deal with this. The one I do not particularly appreciate was the various responses given to a “Nemane Resident” who professed not to understand “all this Gukurahundi frenzy”.

He was denounced as a traitor, a coward, a . . . oh! It is not nice to be coercive with fellow readers when they respond.

But it does show not just the emotional nature of this subject matter, but the totalising discourse driving it: it is about Ndebeles versus Shonas, as if all these groups are a monolith; it is about people from Matabeleland and Midlands, as if there is proof of wielding delegated power, or of unanimity even.

It is about victims of Gukurahundi, as if any of the concerned writers can produce torture marks. It has been a debate involving extended patients, hearsay patients in some cases, which is why it gets so visceral. And when a contributions seems to challenge this imaginary monolith, seems to suggest shades of views in what is supposed to be a homogeneous group, all hell breaks loose.

When a reader puts you down

I am happy. Yes, I am. Happy because the debate has aroused sprite reader responses which have been putting all of us writers in our proper place. Bigots have been told off as such, narrow nationalists castigated and urged to grow up, bigger. Verbose writers like me have been excoriated soundly.

Visionless critics have been told to go home. Above all, markers of national signification have been redrawn to encompass our troubled history, often taking us as far back as inter-group relations from the 1840s, inter-race relations in the 1900s; and of course the post-colonial era and its seemingly new and emerging divides. And from reader posts, it is clear the subject is fraught, deeply emotional on all divides, with a greater appreciation that left unmanaged, it can tear the nation apart.

Go-back visionaries

One key revelation to emerge from this whole exchange so far is the unmistakably elite nature of the whole debate on the so-called Gukurahundi issue. I have been debating political activists and/or academics, many of them in the Diaspora. Or I have been meeting Zapu supporters, all of them angry. Or Mugabe haters, all of them elitist. Maybe the medium has something to do with it, except our level of literacy discounts this, more so when you follow reader responses. There you meet a cross-section of sensibilities, indeed a microcosm of the national feeling. Outside that you meet a frustrated political and economic middle class, much of it embittered by personal reverses and disappointments. Or actuated by deep strains of living in the diaspora, more so given the likelihood of expulsions from South Africa. You also get MDC formation supporters who, having been disappointed by their going-nowhere parties, believe they have now found a new site of opposing Zanu-PF by way of this whole issue. One cannot discount the larger economic pressures facing the country, itself generating an anti-establishment sentiment which seek form and symbol in an occurrence in the past. By the way, post-1896, right up to the 1920s and ‘30s, native politics took various forms, and in the case of Matabeleland, took the form of looking back towards re-creating a second Ndebele Kingdom. Often, this retrogressive movement assumed very violent tribal forms, with any Shona-speaking people in Bulawayo coming under savage attack. Those interested in this phase can read the late Terence Ranger, especially his “Bulawayo Burning”. A buffeted people will always be tempted to go back, look back for succor. That is why we had the idea of a “noble savage”, the Romantic Movement and in our case, Negritude. There is nothing new about the “Mthwakazi” and it’s go-back vision, except only in that it is coming from a well educated cabal which one expects to know better that history moves forward, never backwards.

 

————–One Jethro Mpofu, “hero” of Radio Dialogue———-

My interest at this stage is in keeping the debate focused by pruning out charlatans donning academic garb in the hope of extorting a listenership. These confuse the debate and must be kept far away. A sample of such unhelpful charlatanism is some fraud writing as Dinizulu Mbiko Macaphulana, real name Jethro Mpofu. I happen to know him personally and can go to very uncomfortable lengths to expose him for his misdeeds which got him to flee the country, which turned him into a reading fugitive, not a scholar that he wishes to project. I am sure he remembers Radio Dialogue, hoping Father Nigel has since forgiven him, more so that all the kombis are off road now! But that is unimportant for now. What is important is to situate his response epistemologically, which is what brings in The Patriot and Dr Tirivangana. Since Macaphulana, or Gumbura in Shona, has paraded and presented himself as a scholar “who circulate(s) in universities and other institutions”, a man paid “to read, think, write and teach”, we shall treat and judge him as such. Firstly, he would readily know minds which seek to prevail by arguing through quotations, expletives and turgid repetitions, are not really scholarly. I hope that is not what he teaches his class. He calls himself “a semiotician”. He should know then that Frantz Fanon is not, by any stretch of definition, a linguist, let alone a semiotician. He may have made an observation which finds an echo in semiotics, but that does not make him a student of semiotics. Nor does Fanon’s banal comments on language highlighted by Gumbura situate themselves in semiotics. In a branch of language studies called sociolinguistics yes, but not semiotics. And I can cite a dozen other writers who make the same point you seek to ascribe exclusively to Fanon, as if a rare, esoteric thesis. Anyone who has studied linguistics would never seek to add glory and refulgence to such a trite point. It is a “eureka” on sunrise, the wonderment of an overly impressed undergraduate. I am not deriding Fanon, a revered revolutionary. Only excoriating who read him so shallowly.

 

——————Our fake Macaphulana ———

Much worse, any student of literature and communication will tell you that theories which emphasize social contexts in the interpretation of texts, signs and symbols, amount to just one tiny branch in hermeneutics. I could cite a dozen other counter-theories, each of which has merit. A scholarly mind does not lionize any one theory, projecting it as the only one around. Or Gumbura’s bald claim that the socio-linguistic theory of power semantics is the be-all and end-all of language studies. It’s plain folly. Language does more than point to code and class, an area developed by Bernstein. What I found most objectionable and unforgivable about our Gumbura is his having to draw copiously from a Wikipedia summary on semiotics to shoot down M.A.K. Halliday. That’s not too scholarly? He was a colonialist linguist, Gumbura says, hoping that fells “my” argument. My crime is just importing Halliday in the argument, not to what end! But that is a small point. Except to expose his fakeness, how does a man comfortable with referring decolonized, post-colonial readers to Timothy Scarnecchia and, worse, Kevin Woods, make any negative point about Halliday and his colonial intelligent tradition? Halliday was in China; Kevin Woods was a Rhodesian agent! And do you refer readers to Scarnecchia, for them to access South Africa’s declassified documents? What kind of citation is that? And of course to an overweening undergraduate, the latest book he has just discovered and read, becomes a measure of world literacy! Gumbura refers me to Walter Mignolo. Which of his books, Sir? The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Future, Decolonial Options; Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking? Or the many others he co-authored? I hope Gumbura knows Mignolo is at Duke University, one of the oldest universities steeped in colonial ethos he pretends to hate.

 

———————–Epistemological integument——–

But all this is to overly indulge this charlatan. The key thing is to oust him from the debate, all to protect it from epistemological confusion. As the debate unfolds, I am slowly realising that Gukurahundi is a tribe, an area, a region, above all, an epistemology. And I am using the word in the sense that Mahmood Mamdani uses it in one of his key publications. In the course of one of his research projects, he discovered that colonial boundaries which yielded the new states of independent Africa were much more than political constructs; they had become knowledge or epistemological boundaries. There is a way in which hailing from Southern Zimbabwe is supposed to be a marker of one’s thinking! So the geographical place becomes a natural metaphor of one’s knowledge bearings. And you must conform, or else like “Nemane Resident”, “you are not true to yourself and the Ndebele people at large”, as Sabelo Njini says, or deserving to be called “a confused victim. Uligwala futhi uyathengisa”. The tribe, the place, the region becomes the thinking, both descriptively and normatively! And the thinking’s hallmark is an overriding sense of collective claustrophobia. That conceptual lie and integument must be broken as we move forward with this debate.

 

——————-Divesting ourselves of nationality—–

Secondly, there is key conceptual problem in balancing the dialectic between local identities and the overarching national identity which unites us all as Zimbabweans. Gumbura talks about “Ndebele nationalism”, a postulate which got one of the readers to ask: “What is that?” And of course Mthwakazi repudiates Zimbabwe and any other tribe. Key western texts lionizing pre-industrial forms of socio-political foci, are summoned to give this narrow argument some patina of respectability. It is interesting that the assault on native identities of this country by colonialists at the time of invasion of Zimbabwe was on grounds of being an atavistic, pre-industrial culture. In post-colonial Zimbabwe, the new argument, again led by the West, is to romanticize those same primordial structures that were used to make us deserve to be ruled from outside, used to deny us nationality, used to measure and condemn us as backward. And when Macaphulana adopts such arguments, he feels exceptionally erudite. Except one should never create the impression this is a problem of Ndebele-speaking Zimbabweans residing in the southern part of the country. It is a problem of Ndebele-speaking elites who seek to improve their political appeal by exciting politically motivated colonial identities which contradict the larger identity we wield as Zimbabweans. It does not need any extraordinary wisdom to know that putting forward claims of Ndebele nationalism triggers countermanding insecurities in other cultural groupings, thereby undermining the greater polity we constitute as a whole. Or that raising arguments based on origins has the automatic effect of stripping some citizens of their deserved citizenry, of locating them outside Zimbabwe on the basis of where their founding patriarch originated. And of course that is what is intended by authors of this knowledge we borrow: to weaken the rich polity that binds us, weaken it through internecine warring. And the irony of it all is that those elites resting on primordial loyalties wish and hope to govern Zimbabwe, not some narrow tribal construct.

 

———————Native, know thyself———

Thirdly, conceptually there is a revalorization of colonial categories and demarcation so they sound like new, modern conceptual and analytical categories. I am accused of seeking to overrun Ndebele nationalism but deploying the spatial notion of “southern Zimbabwe”. And the defensive scholarship is to assert Matabeleland or Mthwakazi as if these were notions invented or used by Mzilikazi or Lobengula. They were invented by colonialism to truncate common space for natives at local level, while broadening the wider same under the rubric of “Rhodesia” for purposes of occupation and governance. Does it take much to grasp that basic point, Mr Gumbura? Why are we being tantalized to get the post-colonial state to reproduce colonially defined identities and divisions, in the name of overcoming the baneful legacy of Gukurahundi? It’s utter folly for anyone to think the notion of Matabeleland to designate place or identity, comes from Mzilikazi or Lobengula, is part of our rightful heritage. Native, know thyself!

 

——————Alienation and its malcontents——

Fourthly identities are interactive and evolving. They are not vignettes or frozen quantities. They are negotiated continually, founded on reciprocal recognition and balance. Yes, they may be historically rooted, but they move all the time to retain equilibrium with interacting dynamics. Not this staid postulate we get from head-bats masquerading as scholars. The Unity Accord was a key marker of such a reshaping evolution. And going by current arguments and maybe the evolving constitutional ethos, even that is slowly getting dated. The replacement cannot be secessionism, surely? Even if we were to trace Gumbura thinking to economic, political or cultural anxieties, surely they are ways of addressing these without setting us back, or at war? It’s sheer absurdity to suggest a mistake by Chicken Slice amounts to cultural imperialism. Now that the spelling error was corrected, does that remove the threat? So why are you still raging, un-expiated?

 

——————-White MP’s, black fighters——-

Fifthly, colonialism cleanses itself by overwriting its heinous crimes and sins through the invention of new crimes, new sins. We got the figure of 20 000 fatalities related to the so-called Gukurahundi from Coltart’s report. The report itself confesses that this is just an estimate, a thump-sucked figure. Yet it has now become biblical, an article of mathematical faith. How many died before Independence? Whose cadavers were exhumed? From which war? The exhumations of Chibondo, were they from Gukurahundi? Today no one talks about the war of liberation and it’s horrendous casualties. We all transfix on Gukurahundi: this peculiar war where bullets only flew in this one direction! A killing sui generis. And as we turn and rake each other fire-ripe, injuring our collective sense of belonging, Coltart – that ex-Rhodesian policeman – is fully cleansed and now electable. You get that? This is where borrowed knowledge takes us. “Breaking Silence” creates white MPs on the one hand, angry, warring natives on the other!

 

—————-Forgetting the seven sisters———

Sixth and linked to the preceding point, a redefinition of imperialism falsely as a struggle between two neo-colonized tribes, allows the West to eat while natives bicker, does it not? Boko Harum style. Who, in Nigeria thinks about BP shell, about the exploiting Seven Sisters (another name for the seven global oil multinationals) with the fighting currently taking place? The Nigerian National Question today has been restated and comes across as ending local jihadists, not ending the exploitation of Nigerian resources which bred them. Today the Nigerian state is a distracted state. With the foiled within-Zanu regime change, we are likely to see a revisiting of the tribal rift in order to concoct a lasting distraction that puts the empowerment programme on back burner. The Zimbabwean state has been strong, much worse for imperialism, pursuing a redistributive agenda. That is anathema to the global economic order, and tricks shall be invented to stop that. And the salesmen of such an imperial agenda are scholars on borrowed knowledge who repaint a backward march as a huge, liberating step forward.

 

————————–Fix, heal, by killing it————-

Lastly, knowledge needs to be tamed, not egested like after a bad meal. Macaphulana shows the pitfalls of haughty but unstructured reading, a clear inability to know that intellect needs intelligence and both need judgement and wisdom. I am sure Thomas Sowell can help him reshape, and debate with a bit of humility. But his pitfall is a sample one for our intellectuals. In the main, they do not aid national processes, preferring instead to go on a paid incitation by foreign interests, against national processes. Our knowledge is either foreign and borrowed, or it is outlandish and divorced from national exigencies. We forget the first rule of life is survival and survivability, forget that no remedy that works well, if it works after your death. It can never be good for you. And that is what Gumbura proposes: to fix this nation by breaking it; to heal it by killing it. KuZanu-PF tinoti: Vasingazivi ke? Ngavadzidziswe! Icho!