Challenging The Zhuwao Brief

By Professor Ken Mufuka

I am beginning to warm up to Brother Patrick Zhuwao. Zhuwao runs his own development think-tank and is much learned in information technology management, with at least four masters degrees, one of them with distinction.

The brother has been making himself to be somebody, even in Judea and the surrounding areas.

What prompts me to address the Zhuwao case is my impression that the brother has swallowed the Ubuntu theory hook, line and sinker. This unfortunately is a phenomenon I found prevalent among the younger Zimbabwe intelligentsia.

Further, because the philosophy seems to please the rulers that be, glaring errors are left unchallenged. To challenge them is to be unpatriotic. While I too, am Afrocentric, having been mentored by Professor Stanlake Samkange himself, I wish readers to challenge the shyboleths that are being proposed as gospel truth.

Brother Zhuwao’s brief and thesis is an assertion that “the concept of Hunhu/Ubuntu formed the basis of a specifically African kind of socialism that was found in black people but not in whites.”

Zhuwao further affirms that “to be human is to affirm one’s humanity by recognising the humanity of others, and on that basis, establish respectful human relations with them.”

The second maxim, according to Zhuwao, is that if there is a choice between wealth and the preservation of life, the preservation is primary. In his brief, the brother advances another theory, that the king is king because “he owed his status, including the powers associated with it, to the people under him.”

While these three precepts are correct, there is nothing in them that a good Christian would not agree with. If that is so then, the precepts are universal and can only be African in the sense that Europeans have, because of the industrial revolution, abandoned them.

Further, my contention with Zhuwao and the new generation of Zimbabwean fundi is their failure to recognise that development itself changes the realities and old practices are modified.

If Zhuwao can take into account this reality, then his research can become a practical guide to development, rather than an apologia for political policies that have been tried elsewhere and failed.

I attribute this gap between theory and practice to the loss of older professors during the Third Chimurenga and the overwhelming influence of polemical rhetoric since 2000. Ubuntu was accepted without question and no attention was drawn to its weaknesses.

Nor is the idea of socialism new. Apparently the brother has ignored the fact that early Christians, Ananias and Sapphira, at first agreed to share everything in common with their brothers and sisters in the faith. Then they realised that they had nothing left for their retirement, and they kept something back.

Without critical scrutiny, Zhuwao has missed Julius Nyerere’s assertion in his book, Ujamaa, that a man who lives according to the ubuntu precepts, caring and sharing his wealth with his brothers needs not worry about his old age. His siblings are honour bound to take care of him.

That idea is not practical in today’s world. If I came home from the United States, even though I spent the better part of my income educating my brothers and sisters, it is a certainty that I would die soon after my retirement from neglect. Nyerere does not know my less than righteous brothers and their spouses. Ndingazvitaure ndakamira pai kuti ndakakufundisai vanin’ina, nhamo yandiwana.

Since it was assumed that holding property, especially God-given land in common, was virtuous, Zhuwao says that this “explains the reluctance by ZANU–PF to issue title deeds for land in a manner that dispossess the community.”

While we agree that that position is ideal, universal experience in Russia and in India shows that such land, held in common, was never developed. The Kulaks in Russia became a target of envy by the Communist Party because their land yielded 10 times more crops that similar acreage under commonage.

Similarly, in India, the Zamindaris, always regained the land that was once expropriated from them because they were better farmers than the Ryotwari.

The brother is too busy defending government action, which history has shown to be worse than impractical.

Zhuwao makes an idealistic suggestion about ruler-ship in a Bantu society that has no backing of historical evidence. A king has a symbiotic relationship with his people. This is an ideal, and has been found among all races in the world.

African chieftainship in particular was predicated by the law of “till death doth us part.” The council of elders was supposed to moderate the personal wishes of the chief. While this is true, there was no procedure by which a bad chief could be removed from office.

That is why there are so many tribes. Mzilikazi left Zululand because there were no checks and balances that could restrain the wishes and atrocities committed by Chaka the Zulu.

A possible way of removing a bad chief was through poisoning his food or murder in the case of Chaka. A very interesting development is the bombastic projection by these new fundi.

Here is an example. “I notice that the empowered society is placed first followed by a growing economy meaning that the empowerment of people is paramount, and that an empowered society should be supported by a growing economy.”

Apart from the tautology of the sentence, the sentence is probably meaningless.  Is a society empowered prior to economic development? If so, how, and by what means can a poverty stricken society be empowered? Financial Gazette

………………….(To be continued)