There is a definitional anti-establishment and ethos-battering iconoclasm built into Alfred Nobel’s thing. This is why the whole prize which Alfred Nobel founded so many years ago, has become an institution of incitement in the non-western world, a clear statement of past, present and futuristic condemnation of non-western governments, a condemning verdict that humanity cannot be helped or benefit from them, their structures or personages, both in the present and forever. Indeed it has to be so definitionally, for the Nobel Prize is about instigating subversive change, about challenging status quo that do not cohere with the West’s global agenda.
Rewarded dissent
But a challenge only to non-Western statuses quo. Never to Western statuses quo. I fail to grasp why and how a person like Noam Chomsky has not won the Prize. I fail to grasp why Edward Said, the late Palestinian-born American citizen, could not merit a Nobel Prize ever at all. Maybe I do understand. Both represent or represented dissident thought vis-a-vis mainstream thinking.
They were expansive in their research, vast in their iconoclastic scholarship which spanned disciplines. They dared question the empire. Questioned the Western empire in more dramatic ways, in more influential ways, than Shirin can ever hope to do in a double lifetime. Frankly, until a few days ago, I did not know Shirin. And did not care. She was some old flower withering in the Iranian desert, one among many. She barely left Iran, much as she now lives in exile in the West. Barely left Iran as an influential idea fated to drive global thinking.
I wonder if she should not be grateful to Ahmadinejad, America’s made-monster that needed a Shirin Ebadi to reinvent it as an out and out threat, both at home and abroad. But Chomsky and Said exist in the world, will exist long after their lives on this planet. They have influenced a generation, are set to influence a century.
Indeed have made a mark in hallways of knowledge, including those of the establishments which reject them. Great scholars denied imprimatur by officialdom. How does a person who rises against a mere country, a mere government, a mere theocracy, beat two persons who each rise against continents, who each enjoy support across continents, to win the much vaunted global Prize ran from Sweden? Two people who never left their “countries” in spite of rejection and revilement, in spite of their human rights struggles for millions in the Third World and inside America, a duo that stuck it out against all manner of blandishments?
Dissent and NGO
Typically, Shirin lives in exile. In the West. Hers is a sob tale which upholds and justifies the West’s stereotype of the non-western world: a world inherently tyrannical, anti-freethinkers, and deserving of endless changes until a Karzai or San Suu Kyi — a Western-interned leader — is found and ascended to power, willy-nilly vis-a-vis the sovereign voter.
It matters little that the systems that are impliedly condemned by such awards may themselves have come about as a reaction to the excesses of such a pro-West breed of ruling gorgons. Such as Shah in Shirin’s Iran. Batista in Cuba. Typically, Shirin bemoans the close-down and arrest of her non-governmental organisation, NGO. And that is the point. You can’t be a Nobel Laureate and be governmental. You have to be non-governmental for the simple reason that your award repudiates government as a positive force in Third World or non-Western human affairs. You must be a counter State, but one propped by outside State.
A State in miniature challenging the real, governing one. But there is a chink in her armour. Her inspired dissent is not appreciated by her hubby who wants her to leave her Nobel ways, come back home and work like any other lawyer in Iran, like any other housewife in an Iranian home. And as with the State, so the Nobel Prize must be in the home: a call to rebellion. ‘’He (Shirin’s husband) said my work was ruining our family life. And it was not going to result in bringing democracy to Iran, so how long did I want to continue doing it?
My response was that this is the path I have chosen and I’m not going backwards”. You hear an invisible yet loud cheer, all of it western. But flying fragments from a broken marriage, an orphaned home. Again typical of traits of all those in such a career: educated rejects on the fringes; bed-hopping single parents; maritally exogamous, or simply bitter divorcees.
Give us an elected Ayatollah
Shirin has to remain current. Great changes have happened, changes between Iran and the West, much of it traceable to President Rouhani of Iran, and Barack Obama, the US president. While not on an even keel, the relationship is now at least workable. And with Putin having intervened decisively in Syria, Iran’s perceived threat to US interests in the Middle East (read Israel), a threat enacted through Iranian combat support for the Syrian government, and of course through support to battle-hardened Hezbollah of Lebanon, has largely lessened.
Helped by the current stalemate in Yemen where the Sunni-led campaign against Shiite influence in the Middle East seems to be going nowhere, whether forwards or backwards. How to deal with this positive re-admission of the current Iranian leadership so as to remain deserving of the Nobel pin, that seems to be Shirin’s challenge. One which she handles with admirable simplicity, if not humour tinged with frivolity. About the current Iranian government, she says: “Nothing has changed.
The President has very limited power. All the power rests with the Supreme Leader, who is there for life. Rouhani is like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, except he’s a little better-looking and he smiles more!” She has no problem with Popes or Archbishops in the West. With the British Queen even, a political figure. She wants or implies an electoral Ayatollah!
Challenging a cosmos
She cannot endorse what has happened in Iran without abridging her career as a Nobel Laureate. The beautiful ones can’t and shouldn’t be born, ever, lest her appeal diminishes, lest her career is abridged. Such apostasy befits a Laureate, forever Camus’ outsider. And by dismissing Rouhani as a handsome effete, and by locating all power in the Supreme Leader, she has widened the remit of the attack, thereby assuring herself of a life-long struggle challenge and goal. Even the Iranian President needs to be liberated by her, liberated from the stranglehold of a theocracy. She aims for the pith of the Iranian society, and that way she does not lose currency.
After all, her children must deserve the Nobel Prize as her bequest to the broken family. Or win new Nobel Prizes. Not in the sense you read me to mean, gentle reader. Rather in the sense that her younger daughter — a PhD in human rights — symbolises her search for continuity beyond her prize, person, time and career. Dissent has to be sustainably cultivated in our societies, and the surest way of doing that is to challenge the pillars of a civilisation, to challenge a cosmos.
The weapon Obama never needed
A key, all-weather grievance Barack Obama carried to Havana at the beginning of his visit marking an end to decades of mutual ostracism was that of imprisonment of human rights dissenters by the Government of that small, great island of Jose Marti, the legendary poet-nationalist of the Americas. Obama needed this both as a weapon and as a salve.
A salve to free his conscience from the charge that he had sacrificed principle to expediency by re-engaging an unrepentant Cuba without an accompanying positive scorecard on its human rights record. Gentle reader, don’t forget it is America — not Cubans — who over decades of mutual ostracism raised the human rights charge against Cuba. A charge which another western nation nearer the Americas — Canada — never saw or echoed. In fact subverted by retaining and even expanding relations with Cuba under both Castros.
An all-weather grievance Obama needed as a weapon with which to beat domestic dissent against his landmark policy to re-engage Cuba after inveterate animosities traceable to the 1959 defeat of America’s dictator Batista by the revolution which the Castros led from the Sierra Maestra. With the defeat of Cruz by Trump in Florida, a Cruz who attacked Obama’s change of policy towards Cuba in the hope of improving his appeal among Cuban-Americans hugely concentrated in Florida, one gets the sense Obama did not really need the weapon, much as he might have wanted it. There has been a massive shift in Cuban-American attitudes towards their homeland, a shift for the positive.
All the media are American
One then assumes it was a weapon Barack needed to ensure the Cuban government is not too comfortable in this new tango. Cuba might have mastered the steps in the dance; but its shoes had to be torn, had to show poking toes in order to subdue its ego, in order to diminish the mastery. And quite high on the agenda was a human rights line of questioning by a well-primed White House press corps which Obama propped when Raul sought to rebuff it at a joint press conference.
Gentle reader, you have to understand the cosy relationship between this privileged press corps and the American establishment, to grasp how American power pans out at home and abroad. It takes a lot to be a White House correspondent, not professionally. Also quite high on the agenda was Obama’s meeting with Shirin Ebadi’s Cuban brothers and sisters in the other hemisphere, Cuban dissidents.
Interestingly, none walked to the venue of the meeting straight from Cuban prisons! They all came from society, walked from home to the venue of the meeting with the American president. How so, given an inspired question that demanded that Castro frees imprisoned human rights activists languishing in Cuban jails? You mean it’s possible to love America in Cuba, possible for one to be critical of Castro and still be at home? Possible to meet with Obama, without having to be airlifted to Florida soon after?
And those said to be in Cuban prisons after whom American journalists asked, of whom Castro demanded a list for immediate release, are they there? What were they convicted of in the first place, assuming they are political prisoners? And with the Cuban Five still in American prisons, are crimes against the State only a prerogative of American jurisprudence and statute books? Or was there an expectation that Cuba must run empty jails to deserve to host a US president whose prisons carry blacks in industrial quantities? Of course all these were questions which the coached, American-led global media would not be allowed to raise, all consolidate a preferred narrative, all to suppress an inconvenient counter-narrative. Indeed as Tunstall (a media researcher) would write, all the media are American!
Ungainly image for global newsrooms
But in that tense, exploratory encounter, there were comic moments, all of them fraught politically. I just want to isolate one. Elated by the encounter, President Raul Castro grabbed Obama’s hand, lifted it sky high as if to punch up what Americans would call a communist slogan. To be done with a clenched fist like we do in Zanu-PF. Acutely conscious of what such a gesture would mean back home, would mean in America’s defensive political iconography, Obama allowed his hand to be lifted, but would not nourish it with enough energy to clench a communist fist!
In the end, the US president gave the pictorial world a hand with a wilting endnote by way of a wobbled and drooping palm that threatened Castro’s suit with its overflowing contents of ideological reluctance. Yes, at intense moments, we see politics; we don’t read them. And since the American media wanted to use a boxing metaphor to image the whole encounter, the wilting hand did not project a victorious posture in the ring. All to America’s narrative detriment.
A Super State without a clinic!
However history is going to write about, or interpret this landmark engagement, the Cubans won the symbolic war, which is what first encounters are all about in politics. After all, with a mere handshake as its precursor, the whole visit functioned largely at a symbolic plenitude. Firstly, Castro did not receive Obama when he landed, and with his whole family.
It was a dramatic diplomatic statement, especially read against his receiving the Pope and another religious figure a few months before. Here was a planetary leader being received by officials of a geographical tiny state abutting America, but one equally planetary in its self-estimate. Trump read the diminution, even twitting Obama should have immediately put his plane into reverse gear for home, a mere 92km off. Secondly, Castro countered America’s human rights charges by murmuring about a superpower that can’t give its citizens a clinic, that can’t give its people healthcare! It wounded.
Especially to Obama who rose to presidency on universal, mandatory, state-led national healthcare. Barely in for much longer, Obama will soon bow out leaving behind an American State without a clinic, an American government that might never need one. The best chance of a health-providing America was when it invented a president from an underclass race. That chance might never repeat.
Making a winning argument combustible
But to a discerning global audience, Castro had done greater damage than simply a score against an American president. He had, in that single jab, overturned America’s human rights narrative by firing a counter-narrative founded on second generation social rights which the western world had up to now successfully outlawed in global human rights discourse, and by which it would be a supremely fitting candidate for the ICC.
It is a measure of our American-inspired and led value system that a president who has healed millions can still be an unmitigated offender in ICC eyes because his Police Force accidentally gunned down a citizen. A measure of our Americanised value system that a President who has educated millions deserves ZDERA and sanctions because a single citizen has gone missing, while a President presiding over millions who cannot go to school, millions who have no health cover, many more millions who have been declared missing but unaccounted for, indeed who presides over hundreds who are wilfully shot dead by a racist police force, walks the earth not just free, but righteously reading to the whole world passages from the human rights bible.
This is well before we talk about killings abroad, America’s wars abroad which the world today repays through globalised terrorism occasionally making grim reapings. As in Belgium only a few days ago. Cuba has ignited a powerful argument; the challenge now is for the world to make the argument combustible. Incendiary enough to burn down this false cosmos which America has constructed to make us all but herself irredeemable convicts.
Too young, too soon to meet Fidel
Third and lastly, Raul Castro would not deliver his elder brother, Fidel, to Obama. A head America for long and in many deadly attempts sought but could not have. A legendary figure Obama still won’t have, even when on Cuban soil and in rapprochement. Obama was dying to meet with the legendary Fidel who predicted in the late sixties that Cuba-American relations would only change under a coincidence of black US President, and a Latino pope. Both have come to pass in a rare conjugation of the unexpected.
Such a favour would have lifted US-Cuba relations above the statal, indeed would have made Obama a soulmate of the Cuban Revolution, a position so far only enjoyed by former US President Jimmy Carter. In high school parlance, this snub means Obama has more corrections to do. If the anti-American sanctions global coalition was launched and consolidated under Fidel Castro, himself the unyielding face of Cuban resistance to American high-handedness, this gesture means American diplomacy has failed to demobilise this global movement with acolytes even in US itself.
Whatever vicissitudes in Cuba-American diplomatic relations from now onwards, Cuba can still resume its anti-American posture, or even assert it above the current dalliance, in the name of the unyielding Fidel. And of course America has to factor this show of calibrated embrace as Cuban pressure to be appeased only through complete removal of sanctions, something for now unlikely given Congressional obduracy.
Permanent agitation and revolutions
Let me now dock the piece on home waters. I have neglected the woman, Shirin Ebadi. I need to get back to her. True, my piece may have delineated her so closely as to make her an individual. Yet in reality she is a type, a stock character or a vignette as the French would say, of the opposition which the West routinely invents for our societies. You see her parodies in the likes of Jestina Mukoko and the Woza lady (what’s her name?).
But there is an attempt at inventing more Shirins for our societies, to birth them. And to arrange a foolproof succession plan as each one of them stumble and fall. And they always do, which is why Woza has given way to Mukoko’s thing. In the case of Shirin, she dismisses the Arab Spring as a non-event in order to re-valorise Arab dissent for more rebellions, for better outcomes by way of western geo-political calculations. The Spring was a huge miscarriage, a new one might be wanted.
By dismissing the Arab Spring as “a suppressed rising of the people”, she makes a case for a new one while helping the West retract the foreclosing myth of the Arab Spring in order to sponsor another. Otherwise they have to declare closure, to declare beauty that must never be born and granted to Third World statuses quo, thereby making western, people-led subversions needless.
There has to be permanent dissent, permanent quests, permanent agitation and permanent revolution. That, too, requires permanent Shirins. Shirin ensured this by condemning husband, Rouhani, the Supreme Leader, the theocratic state and the Arab Spring, in that rising order. In the case of Cuba, the institution of the dissident must be retained, cultivated even, in order to favour America with timeless leverage. And Cuba has retorted by lining up Castro, a history of defiance, a strong social rights tradition and a positive global rating as a counter-narrative to American hegemony.
Sanctioning fertiliser
In the case of Zimbabwe, political detainees must be invented as tried Mai Clinton recently, as part of American electoral rhetoric. American template needs political detainees, and where these cannot be found, they must be invented. In the case of Zimbabwe again, the resolved constitutional, electoral and human rights issues have to be replaced by a foregrounding of the land issue (always there but deliberately de-emphasised for tactical reasons), raising economic policy and management issues, and even succession issues to ensure a state of permanent dissent and agitation.
The suspicious disappearance of an overrated, so-called human rights activist, one Itai Dzamara, is meant to control the phasing out of the human rights issue on the Zimbabwe story by touting this “development” as suggesting the threat of recidivism from human right observance unless ‘reforms’ are deepened. Reforms America prescribes for us.
America’s retention of sanctions on the basis of its criticism of our economic policies, sanctions which the rest of Europe are now reconsidering, imply that America now believes in the second generation social rights. Does this validate Cuba’s human rights redefinition? Someone must raise that with Americans, wondering loudly how sanctioning fertiliser companies upholds such a socially conscious global stance.
Where change does not touch
We have a thing or two to learn from both Iran and Cuba. From both the foremost lesson to draw is steadfastness on principle, but flexibility on tactics. For Iran that continuity of principle is symbolised by the Supreme Leader who plays custodian to core values and beliefs that hold the Iranian society together, that uphold Iran’s 1979 revolution.
After all the struggle against the Shah drew its leadership from theocratic structures, which is what gave the Iranian revolution its Koran, gave it the Minaret. For Cuba, continuity inheres in Fidel and goals of the Cuban Revolution which triumphed in 1959, which is why he proved unreachable to the eager Obama. Fidel personified the sanctum of that Revolution, a place for the high priest and his acolytes.
From this we learn the value of not just harmony and continuity in succession, but also how symbols and human expressions of myths about revolutions become a key resource in global diplomacy. This is why attempts to destroy or even diminish the struggle, and stature of President Mugabe, bode ill for our Nation. Both must be the first line of myth and inspiration in moments of active national resistance; both must remain the national subconscious and reflex in moments of peaceful, unchallenged dormancy. The inner sanctum of our diplomacy in the ultimate.
This is why dissent as typified by Joice Mujuru, dissent founded on repudiating values, goals and personages of the revolution, must be rejected. Not just repudiation of goals of the struggle, but also endorsement by America (as in Ambassador Charles Ray) and her commendation by the same to the Zimbabwean voter. Unlike Raul, she has failed the test of ever wanting to succeed Mugabe while observing and meeting the straitjacket implied by that succession. This is why any politics, current or future, that is founded on new-liberal, pro-white, pro-west reforms predicated on an I-am-not-like-Mugabe mantra, must be rejected. That is one zone that any change must never touch.
Resolving a paradox
Secondly, national thresholds of lawful dissent must be worked out, so as to deny outsiders fissures into the national body-politic. Asked if she supports the lifting of sanctions against Iran, Shirin Ebadi responded: “Yes, because we can only sanction and harm the people. By placing sanctions against the government we can neither topple the government nor change its behaviour.
The best example of it would be North Korea. That government is still there, while the people are getting poorer every day.” Or Cuba itself. The answer is an amazingly articulation of a national position which would make Biti and his PDP shamefaced. Biti is angry that sanctions might be removed. Yet in this lady, for all her multitudinous faults, we have the personification of an opposition which, whilst still not national, whilst still anti-governmental, still defends the Iranian State and People.
There cannot be a political win which the opposition in any polity can construct around support for outside actions that hurt the citizen, around supporting an outsider’s hostility against the voter, which is what ZDERA is all about. It is a lesson the opposition here cannot grasp, a failure which continues to yield the paradox of worsening social conditions set against greater trust and popularity of President Mugabe, greater mistrust of the opposition and its leaders which Afrobarometer has repeatedly noted.
Know thy price to have your prize
Tactically, Zimbabwe must find its own third party diplomacy, find fillers to roles played by the Pope and by Canada in the resolution of the immemorial conflict between the US and Cuba. Cuba chose a state which is an ally of the US, as venue. A state it had favoured by way of trade, currency and friendship. To this day, you are better off with the Canadian dollar or the Euro in Cuba, than with the US dollar.
That way Canada has remained close to Cuba, and thus a resource to summon in Cuba’s third-party diplomacy. Pope Francis is a Latino, which is how Cuban diplomacy exploited the ethnocentric opportunity provided by this historical ascendency of a Latino at the Vatican. We are not a Latino nation but Pope Francis is a Third World pope.
Nor is he the only religious figure, Vatican the only theocracy, the only Church. We still trade, we still use a currency of a foreign country, the US. Has this choice paid off? Or was the choice of currency the best for our diplomatic leverage in our struggle against American sanctions? Lastly, to tackle America, Cuba invented a supportive neighbourhood, both by revolution and by diplomacy. Latin America adopted Cuba and her cause. What is our strategy in Southern Africa, beyond the loose sympathies we enjoy currently?
To get all these elements in, rework them for mutual reinforcement and for a compelling national stance that becomes a bargaining resource diplomatically, to mobilise them for diplomatic notice and influence: that is the challenge. Nations do not act for ideals, although they may act in the name of fictitious ideals. Nations act out of interest, self-interest, which is how every nation has a price, how every diplomacy a cost. In the interdependency of nations is the key to veritable diplomacy. The key is to know your price as a Nation, and then to ask it, to exact it on the market of diplomacy. The Iranians, the Cubans, have just done it. Bravo! A Jose Marti Prize to them.
Icho!
- nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw