Pitfalls of National Consciousness in Zim
By Dr. Sabelo J. Ndlovu- Gatsheni.
The signing of the Global Political Agreement in September 2008 and the installation of the Inclusive Government in February 2009 provided hope to the poor and underprivileged in Zimbabwe, who had experienced not only violence but numerous problems ranging from shortage of basic commodities, endless electricity cuts, water shortages, devastating cholera outbreak and endured a bizarre situation of having to buy the few available goods in foreign currency while being paid in worthless Zimbabwe dollars. Indeed there is no doubt that the Inclusive Government has made commendable strides towards restoration of normalcy in Zimbabwe.
While money is still in short supply, basic commodities are now available, violence has subsided, schools have opened and the national economy is showing signs of revival albeit a painstaking one. In spite of all these positives, Zimbabweans must be cautious not to engage in pre-mature celebrations. We still need to know why our country reached such low ebb. We cannot expect a brighter future beyond this crisis, without clearly understanding why we experienced an unprecedented crisis in the first place.
Our leaders must know and accept that critics are not necessarily enemies of the nation but concerned citizens who want to see right things being done for the sake of the nation. It is in this spirit that I still feel as a nation we have not given ourselves time to do a thorough, deeper, sober and honest explanation of why Zimbabwe plunged into crisis at the beginning of 2000. This is not a mere intellectual exercise, but is necessary if the nation has to avoid a similar crisis in future.
This exercise is pertinent because within the Inclusive Government there is no consensus on the causes of the crisis leading inevitably to a lack of consensus on what is to be done to transcend the crisis. The former ruling party (ZANU-PF) still insists that the crisis was caused by imperialist sanctions. The MDC factions insist on the culpability if not responsibility of ZANU-PF for the political and economic melt-down that left Zimbabwe a shell of its former stature. In short, as a nation we are not yet beyond the simplistic politics of denials and blaming each other. The full implementation of GPA is hostage to this retrogressive politics.
The key question is what went wrong in Zimbabwe? Unless our leaders look beyond the useless politics of denials and blaming one another, they will miss the big picture. The Zimbabwe crisis is largely an African crisis. A crisis emanating from what Frantz Fanon termed ‘the pitfalls of national consciousness’ that leads to national tragedy. Its roots are traceable to the limits of decolonisation and the poverty of the social basis of African nationalism as an emancipatory project. In order to simplify things, I will call it the crisis of the Zimbabwe national project.
It is a crisis that emerges from unresolved modes of accumulation; unresolved definition of the authentic subject of liberation; unresolved problems of belonging; unresolved racial nationalism and contested teleology of decolonisation. Academics like Brian Raftopoulos and others are clear on these issues but I am not sure that our leaders and citizens realise the salience of these issues. ZANU-PF reduced these complex issues to the land question and their solution was a confused one of ‘conquest of conquest’ in which those defined as natives had to be allowed to re-conquer those considered settlers. It is from this understanding of the Zimbabwean situation that some people see the country progressing through a series of Zvimurenga from 1896 to 2010.
This wrong methodology plunged Zimbabwe into what Fanon described as the nightmare of repetition without difference. In this case, Zimbabwe found itself repeating and practising the cannons of racial nationalism (reverse racism) as a solution to the problems rooted in white settler racial colonialism. This went hand in hand with the politics of destruction of people in the name of things particularly in the former white owned commercial farms.
The Black Nationalist bourgeoisie found themselves organising themselves in the same manner in which white settler bourgeoisie did into what I would call ‘loot committees.’ All this was covered under the noble gloss of either Africanisation of civil service, nationalisation of means of production or indigenisation of the economy. The colonialists called it pacification of barbarous tribes and civilising mission. The nationalists call it Chimurenga and liberation.
While the colonialist did not conquer Africa to be poor, the nationalist did not fight for liberation of Africa to be poor! What a paradox? Is this not manifest in the way the land reform programme was hijacked by ‘native bourgeoisie’? Are we not witnessing this in the manner in which Chiadzwa diamonds are being extracted and sold? Is clinging to state power at whatever cost not linked to the politics of accumulation?
Who then can deny Frantz Fanon’s critique of decolonisation as resulting in ‘repetition without difference’? Are we not repeating the crude ways of primitive accumulation that has its roots in the unfolding of Western modernity which eventually resulted in imperialism and colonialism? Indeed we have not escaped the laws of repetition and have failed the test of ethical based notions of being free and empowered.
Like Fanon, I think the key failure of decolonisation lay in the hands of the class that led the nationalist revolutions in Africa. The bourgeoisie class that led nationalist movements suffered terribly from what Fanon termed ‘intellectual laziness.’ It is a disease of failure to transcend the immanent logic of colonialism together with its re-production of racism and ethnicity. It is a failure in the bourgeois class to commit class suicide and be truly representative of workers and peasants.
Just think of the Lancaster House Conference. Just visualise Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe and Abel Muzorewa, squabbling over decolonisation of Zimbabwe with the British and Americans as moderators. Then one would see the limits of the elites that led us to where we are today. One would easily see where the revolution lost its way. At least Nkomo and Mugabe pretended to be together only to plunge the country into crisis barely two years into independence.
The colonially produced bourgeoisie were and are a liability to the African emancipatory project. Either they degenerate into open tribalism and plunge young African nation into ethnic cleansing or they fall headlong into embarrassing compromises with the colonialists and again plunge the workers and peasants into non-freedom. At another level, they degenerate into narcissism and victimhood and die railing against imperialism and colonialism while butchering their citizens and looting national resources ahead of peasants and workers.
Indeed the crisis of Africa is that ‘the beautiful ones are not yet born.’ The ‘other of bourgeoisie’ that is currently contesting power from the nationalist bourgeoisie produced by colonialism also suffers terribly from ideological confusion. They tend to imbibe lock, stock and barrel, notions of good governance, democracy, human rights and even life-style audits unquestioningly. They find themselves being blamed for being lackey of imperialism and colonialism.
The recent example of life-style audits being debated in South Africa for instance does not take into account the hidden hand of those focused on criminalisation of black accumulation of wealth and deflection of popular focus from real causes of inequality bedevilling post-apartheid period. The worst level is when black people engage in what is termed ‘black-on-black’ violence as part of the struggle to achieve freedom. Xenophobia that rocked South Africa is a case in point. ‘Election cleansing’ that engulfed Zimbabwe between April and May is the second example. That level of degeneration of consciousness is not forgivable.
The challenge is how to renew the African national project without necessarily falling into the tragedy of trying to turn our backs on the world and trying to go it alone. Hatred of the world is not the answer. Militarisation of state institutions is not the answer. Violence is not the answer. Tribalism is not the answer. Racism is not the answer. We need to guard against the pitfall of imagining the nation in racial terms and fragmenting postcolonial states into tribal fiefdom(s).
We still need to think hard about terms of peaceful co-existence founded on ethical politics of fair and just distribution of available resources. If we think broader, they questions of the day revolve around three pre-occupations: the search for freedom development and material welfare; acceptance, belonging and citizenship; and finding ethical conditions of human peaceful coexistence where diversity and difference does not result into inequality and exclusion.
Not only Zimbabwe had to rethink what it means to be free in the first place. South Africa is experiencing a similar challenge. The current debates in South Africa about ‘life-style’ audits and the Zimbabwean debates of indigenisation and empowerment are all reflective of the African search for a language to articulate pathologies of inequalities and quest for ethical founded politics of fair distribution of wealth. A recent presentation by Achille Mbembe on Fanon and decolonisation held at the University of Witwatersrand set me thinking harder about the trajectory of the African national project in general.
Mbembe’s presentation touched on key current debates on wealth and property; and rights and entitlements in Africa that translates into idioms of relations between people and things; opulence and hunger, and manipulation of state control as an avenue to accumulation versus pathologies of distribution. This is the challenge of our time and we need to think carefully on these issues and thread cautiously over the pitfalls of national consciousness that breed such tragedies as xenophobia, racism, tribalism and genocides that have disunited the masses of our people and limited our quest for universal emancipation.
We long for a new humanity where African hatred of the self dies. It is African hatred of the self induced by colonialism that enable the thirsty to ‘annihilate’ and ‘de-capacitate’ one another easily whenever we are hungry and whenever there are elections.
*Dr. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a Zimbabwean academic writing from Johannesburg in South Africa. He can be contacted by email: [email protected]
[newsletter]
