Dambudzo Marechera: 30 years of reflecting a timeless intellectual legacy
THE last two instalments have been focused on celebrating the life of Marcus Garvey with particular remembrance of his birth on 17 August in 1887.
From the outset when I launched the Marcus Garvey series I declared August a Marcus Garvey month. I hope the two articles I wrote to that effect were adequately elaborative of that commemorative fundamental in explaining how Garveyism galvanizes emotions of pan-African fraternity to all Africans — those home and abroad.
On the same note, I would like to take this opportunity to engage Dambudzo Marechera’s heroic contribution to our quest for the cognitive equality of our people against a background of Africa’s epistemic victimhood as a result of colonialism.
Moreover, celebrating Dambudzo Marechera in this particular month of remembering our heroes and defenders of political-economy sovereignty is important as it also well entrenches the philosophical essence of our heroes celebrations in Zimbabwe. Marechera is one hero worth celebrating.
Friday the 18th marked Marechera’s three decades of being promoted to glory. This makes it imperative for this article to reflect on how his contribution to knowledge has sharped the idea of being African.
Thirty years down the line Marechera’s work remains enigmatic in terms of articulating the idea of Africa and the consciousness thereof as a result of identity bastardisation which was a product of Africa’s colonial experience.
This was the outgrowth of education in coloniality or the mere neo-colonial liberal trajectory revolving around falsehoods of “free-thinking” and exploring the fluidity of identities.
This exposition comes out clearly in the writing of Dambudzo Marechera who defied the traditionalised idea of being an African writer as depicted in the works of other combats of the pen like Ngugi, Achebe, Soyinka, Ayikwei Armah to mention, but a few.
In an observation by Marechera’s ex-lover and Germany Professor, Flora Veit Wild (1987: 113): “Dambudzo Marechera is an outsider. He cannot be included in any of the categories into which modern African literature is currently divided: his writings have nothing in common with the various forms of anti-coionial or anti-neocolonial protest literature, nor can they be interpreted as being an expression of the identity crisis suffered by an African exiled in Europe.”
Marechera’s brutal contact with Europe made him feel cultureless. Instead of humanising him, Marechera’s contact with the West made him less of a humanised African.
Marechera is a clear template of Europe’s failure to create wholeness for members of its erstwhile oppressed classes human-beings. Marechera’s intellectual uniqueness could be better retraced to denialism of the self and rejection of his humble African socialisation which he began to deconstruct after his contact with Europe. Flora Veit Wild (1987: 113) further notes:
“Marechera refuses to identify himself with any particular race, culture or nation; he is an extreme individualist, an anarchistic thinker. He rejects social and state regimentation — be it in colonial Rhodesia, in England, or in independent Zimbabwe; the freedom of the individual is of the utmost importance. In this he is uncompromising, and this is how he tries to live.”
The above characterisation of Marechera clearly demonstrates that the man had gone beyond what W.E.B DuBois referred to as “double-consciousness” — a state of an individual’s identity fragmentation into numerous fragments. Double-consciousness makes it difficult or impossible for the individual to have one integrated identity.
This internal conflict experienced by subordinated individuals like Marechera and all the colonised manifests as a psychological deficit of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of coloniality” while battling with reconciling with African socialisation.
In other words double-consciousness is a spiritual striving and in local terms doubleconsciousness is equivalent to mamhepo/ imimoya.
It is a search for the dismembered soul of the oppressed, the dehumanised, vanquished and all the bottom clustered members of the coloniality human hierarchies.
The effect of internal strivings and personality multiplicities is evident in the above description of Marechera.
He is said to have been an “individualist” which may loosely refer to one who places the self before the rest and cares not about others.
This attribute places Marechera in the periphery of the “I am because we are” African social order. This description denies him the fundamental attribute of being African, since we are a people whose role is to replicate values of our society and not the self. This is proverbially echoed in Ndebele philosophy: “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”. This Ndebele adage simply explains that individual’s character is shaped by maxims of their society and likewise, Shona wisdom proclaims the same “Munhu, munhu pavanhu”.
On the other hand, the concept of “individualism” is synonymous with Eurocentric perspectives of capitalism which dismembered Africa. Moreover, Marechera’s description as an “anarchistic thinker” dismantles the ubuntu/unhu values which are expected of every African and most importantly African pen heroes in grappling with colonialism as a primordial anarchical order.
The consciousness of “being” within categories of nationalism and pan-Africanism are said to have been absent in Marechera’s epistemic wholeness “— be it in colonial Rhodesia, in England, or in independent Zimbabwe” Flora Veit Wild (1987: 113). Therefore, comprehending his contribution to literature through lenses of decoloniality becomes a problem though he remains a hero in his own right.
However, there is need for Marechera to be read from a decolonial perspective to locate whether his legacy belongs to Africans or the White society.
This is because Dambudzo Marechera is celebrated in institutions which under-valued Black ideas and knowledge(s). His education at Oxford University clearly substantiates that fact not to mention that he was the only African writer to win the Guardian Fiction Prize. The same applies with other writers who have resorted to denial of the African struggles to find belonging in spaces where Africans are unwanted.
A new Wretched of the Earth Marechera represents a lost-generation of Africa’s intelligentsia. He is a representation of the mythical “born-free” whose education has failed to make them decolonial beings. Their education has further exiled them from their African socialisation which they perceive as highly denigrating. Unlike, the first version of the “Wretched of the Earth” pronounced in Fanon’s decolonial meditations, Marechera’s life through the pen replicates the worst.
His work speaks clearly to a physically “born-free” generation which has a colonially devalued intellect.
This generation’s devalued acknowledgement of “being” is a result of grappling with internalised coloniality while at the same time trying to reconcile with one’s aspirations to be truly free.
These are the “liberated African” with little — if not any recall of armed struggles of their respective mother countries and it’s not their fault that they arrived late in the world to be the children of the oppressed. Some of them were born during the transitional periods across the entire continent when their nations were preparing themselves for independence. While others like me were born many years after their respective countries’ struggles for freedom.
These half and full “born-frees” are the new wretched who happen to be beneficiaries of bankrupt Western knowledge which has failed to humanize them to be “real” African intellectuals.
They are caught up in the entrapments of coloniality and are well-defined in terms of aspiring to be global citizens than they are Africans.
They have nothing to lose, but the Africa identity which they don’t care about. For them being African is carrying the yoke of the “oppressive” post-colonial state which they vilify left, right and centre. As a result, from time to time whenever opportunities are availed they swap national patriotism for writers’ residences in Western universities.
These great minds lost in the trap of double-consciousness find themselves in Western institutions which denigrate African political values and the post-colonial state.
In return the West gives them high accolades which give them credentials to lambast African states for poor governance. These become the voice of polarisation which deodorizes Western governance styles and denigrates African leaders for failing the masses.
This is the reason why most of our writers in the continent have failed to stand firm in defending African economic development oriented policies.
For instance, the launch of the Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe made way for demonised misrepresentation of Zimbabwe’s political environment. As a result, much of the literature that has been produced since the outbreak of land repossession from colonial ownership has portrayed the country’s political systems as barbaric and undemocratic simply because those we have entrusted with the mandate to tell our story are not one of us though they look like us.
They are mercenaries produced out of the school of double consciousness. THE Government should look for some funding to upgrade our infrastructure which is in bad state.
We heard India has agreed to come up with some funding especially for developing countries and I think this is the right opportunity for Zimbabwe to get that money to upgrade our infrastructure which include our roads schools, bridges, hospitals and our railway system which is almost a complete write-off.
It surprises me that we still have some dust roads in almost all our provinces and our local road fund has failed to repair some bridges which were destroyed by cycloneinduced floods as far back as the year 2001 and if the Government can also go for that funding from friendly rich countries like India then the standards of living for many Zimbabweans can be improved. There is no meaningful investor who can be prepared to start a business in a country whose road network is poor.
Most schools, especially in the rural areas are in dilapidated conditions, especially those located in former white commercial farms because they were never repaired or even painted ever since locals moved into those farms after they were allocated land.
This has forced many teachers to run away from those satellite schools which are far from the main roads.
Teachers cannot afford to work at a place where even water is very scarce. Some of these teachers openly admitted that they are not prepared to spend all their lives drinking as well as bathing using dirty water and in the past we have heard some teachers’ unions complaining that their members are working under very bad conditions in the rural areas.
Most clinics, hospitals and even some referral hospitals are also being affected by the lack of financial resources the country is facing at the moment.
Many hospitals are facing a serious shortage of drugs and on many occasions patients are being asked to bring their own medicines from pharmacies and many patients die at home after failing to raise the required amount of money to buy these lifesaving medicines.
If the Government fails to secure funding from other countries it means many lives will be lost because most ordinary Zimbabweans are suffering because they are unemployed following the closure of the majority of manufacturing companies in Zimbabwe.
For example the National Railways of Zimbabwe is now operating at a very low and disappointing level and if nothing is done as a matter of urgency then we are going to have a total disaster as a country.
Eddious Masundire Shumba, Mnene Mission Hospital, Mberengwa.