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Richard Runyararo Mahomva Correspondent
When Ghana attained her freedom from colonial bondage, Dr Kwame Nkrumah noted that: “The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa”.

True to this creed, Nkrumah accelerated Ghana’s input in championing extensive pan-African solidarities of all countries in the continent confronted by the scourge of colonialism.

Ghana’s freedom was the triumphant insignia of the decolonisation agenda. Likewise, other African countries followed suit in breaking the colonial yoke.

As such, Zambia, Tanzania, Algeria, Angola and Mozambique became significant benefactors of our struggle for liberation which was already spearheaded by nationalist liberation movements.

The military build-up to the Second Chimurenga was heightened courtesy of the resonating liberation focus across the entire continent.

In the midst of this triumphant stage of this pan-African/anti-colonial wave which was collapsing imperialism to its knees, Frantz Fanon already diagnosed the post-colonial entrapments of the independent African states in waiting.

While everyone was gripped with the euphoria of the liberation movement, Fanon cited the neo-colonially sponsored impediments to the continuity of the liberation agenda.

The writing and publishing of his seminal book, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) was on the sidelines of the Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa’s decolonisation project.

Fanon projected that post-independence would only deliver the narrow-sided side to democracy, socio-economic justice and equality.

The Fanonian thesis indicated that the post-colonial state will be snared in ideological contradictions which will precipitate the demise of the unequivocal morality of the liberation cause.

Fanon pointed the inevitable reality of post-colonial dependency on former imperialist powers.

Further to his diagnostic glance to the complexities of the imperial designs of political transition, Africa was destined to be remote-controlled from the capitals of Western Europe.

To this day, the fate of African economies is still determined in Paris, London, New York, Lisbon and other global centres of imperial hegemony.

Fanon refers to this tragedy as the “Pitfalls of National Consciousness”.

In this context, decolonisation is simply a cloaked form of the former colonialism.

Prior to decolonisation, the “mother country” realises the inevitability of “freedom,” and thus drains most of the “capital and technicians and encircling the young nation with an apparatus of economic pressure”.

The young, supposedly independent nation, therefore, is forced to preserve the economic conduits recognised by the colonial regime.

In our case, the Structural Adjustment Programme of the early 90s signified that pitfall of national consciousness.

Our attempt to reclaim land ownership was punctuated by imperial vengeance in the form of the sanctions by the US and the EU.

It then became clear that the Lancaster negotiated framework of independence did not provide us with the means to generate capital.

It became apparent that the colonial design to post-independence transition customised our policy-making to “have faith in colonial bankers” loans and counsel, which all aim at forcing the new nation to remain hooked on its former coloniser just as it was during the colonial period.

Therefore, as we celebrate the four-decade milestone of Zimbabwe’s freedom from colonialism we need to go further and assess how much we have liberated ourselves from the hands of imperial control.

We cannot afford to ignore the reality of neo-colonial supremacy — at the same time the celebration of our 40th anniversary as a sovereign must strengthen our resolve to contribute to the “total liberation of Africa” — lest we are complicit of contributing to the demise of the anti-colonial movement.

This is an opportunity to re-strategise or we perish!

As we celebrate this freedom which was won through the barrel of the gun and mass sacrifice of human life, we must be cognisant and vigilant of the unfinished business of neo-colonialism. The nationalist generation played its part in delivering the prize of freedom from colonialism.

Now the assignment is to protect that freedom and legacy from the present-day machinery and ideas opposed what Nkrumah defined as the ‘total liberation of Africa.

As Fanon put it: “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.”

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’.

Perhaps instead of narrowly focusing our attention on our 40th sovereign anti-colonial milestone, we need to interrogate how much our independence has significantly contributed in protecting Africa from neo-colonialism.

We need to acquit how much our post-colonial sovereign status has reciprocated the benevolence of other countries who assisted in the fight for our freedom.

In other words, this 40th independence anniversary must be introspective of the extent to which Zimbabwe is leading in consolidating the broad-based pan-Africanist agenda.

At the centre of Zimbabwe’s concerns and Africa as a whole resides the exigent need to fight against neo-colonialism, poverty eradication, corruption. Beyond the commemorative incline, revisiting Fanon’s wisdom at this point must redirect us towards reconstructing Africa’s total freedom.

As we reflect on our arduously earned liberation, we need to scale up the practicality of decolonisation at all costs.

There is need for a radical insurrection aimed at destroying everything touched by colonialism so that a new species of new (decolonial) beings will be produced.

We need to obliterate every force sustaining the logic of self-aggrandisement, tribalism, corruption, political intolerance, patrimonialism and administrative incompetence.

The depreciation of these divisive vices will facilitate urgency of harmony to be realised for the good of the land.

Only then shall we have statecraft which dovetails the aspirations of those who sacrificed their lives for the freedom we enjoy.

While Fanon’s theorisation of the African post-colonial experience is confined to the ideological corruption of the nationalist post-colonial governments as victims of neo-imperialism, his predictions lack a comprehensive outline about the rise of neo-liberal sponsored oppositions in Africa.

The colonialists’ preoccupation to interfere in African politics has been perpetuated through the mass proliferation of opposition parties whose existence is materially and ideologically funded by erstwhile colonisers.

After the land reform programme, the MDC was strategically formed to secure the defeated desires of colonial economic monopoly.

Beyond the mandate of conventional power contestation, MDC has risen to be a post-colonial watchdog of prescribed democracy, property and human-rights.

To the ahistorical follower of Zimbabwean politics, it is as if property and human rights only started to “exist” after the land-reform programme.

It is clear that the notion of democracy and human rights as superficially peddled by the opposition and its non-governmental organisation proxies is a smoke-scream for imperialist interferences in our politics.

It is for this reason that MDC would centre its rhetoric on the rule of law, political reforms, media freedoms and a confetti of other freedoms, but dares not to emphasise breaking colonial economic hegemony.

Instead, MDC is always on the forefront of calling for the West to exert it punitive illegal sanctions to press Zanu PF hard out of power.

As such, this requires a multifaceted approach to dealing with nationalist and neo liberal binaries and their respective inputs to the pitfalls of national consciousness if the total liberation of Zimbabwe is to be achieved.

This should be the defining decade of locating the core values of the armed struggle in consolidating the liberation ambitions of the living and departed revolutionaries.

Pamberi neZimbabwe!