Embracing our own creations
IN the early years of my secondary school education in the “locations” - now high density suburbs - of KwaBulawayo, the City of Kings and Queens, I was enamoured of science and geography. Perhaps it was the thing to be then, or at least to appear to want to be, if you wanted to impress the people around you, especially your peers who always seemed to have something to brag about. For a while, I found myself veering from what was probably more natural to me than anything else: the arts, that wonderful world of euphoric possibilities.
I let go of my fantasies and my obsession with the thrill of travel and the open skies and became somewhat preoccupied with things that most small boys never really bother about: life and death and what happens to someone in eternity after they cross over. Eastern philosophies and spiritualism took a hold on me and I spent hours looking at my finger, hoping to see my aura and wondering about nirvana. Before I began grappling with hard philosophies around life and death, I was an avid reader of socialist literature, gorging myself on the writings of Lenin and Chairman Mao. And I knew about Che Guevara at a time when small boys of my age in the ghettos could not possibly have known about him. I wasn’t even 14 then, and yet I had my own copy of the Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.What fascinated me about the communist manifesto was the possibilities that it raised. It spoke, for example, about how none of us had to go through every phase of everything that other people had to go through to arrive at what one might call their point of excellence (my interpretation). A savage deep in a jungle could throw away his bow and poisoned arrows once he was shown a gun, how to use it and had its shattering effectiveness demonstrated.
Some of the content of the Communist Manifesto came back to me the other day when I took time to listen to a clip in which a rich South African black man was waxing lyrical about the need to avoid catapulting blacks into the future. He seemed to be saying that South African blacks needed some kind of slow apprenticeship and prided himself in having built his own business from scratch. What he didn’t say was that there is no way, practically, that anyone can build anything from scratch. That is just a figure of speech! You always need some kind of start-off. And if either the Japanese or the Chinese had waited until they could duplicate Western trials and tribulations on the way to industrialisation, they would not be where they are today. To fully appreciate what I am on about here, you just need to look at how Japan after the Second World War (so-called) leap-frogged the United Kingdom in the area of car manufacture, electronics and ship-building. All we need to do my dearest brethren and sistren is come up with our own prototypes of everything that is state-of –the art.
All things are possible. We must not duplicate the wrong things, like for instance, the Zambian thing with Nkoloso. People thought him mad to even dream about Zambian space ships and space exploration. His dream died with him. We too here in Zimbabwe have had our fair share of frustrating our inventors: from the corporal at the Air Force of Zimbabwe who is said to have been able to give a longer life and more flying hours to the Chinese MiGs that were part of the country’s arsenal, to Daniel Chingoma’s helicopter and more recently, that young man who has had to take his electric car to the Americas because we mocked him here. Isn’t it time we became more appreciative of those among us who are venturesome and more enterprising?
We can even take a leaf from the life and work of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky and how the Soviet Union embraced him and his creative genius at a time when Lenin’s experiment needed an articulate voice. Mayakovsky became the voice of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. An excerpt from the foreword in Mayakovsky’s book simply titled “Innovator” observes: That he should have become the poetic spokesman for the new socialist ferment was not, however, Mayakovsky’s only claim to originality.
In creating the poetry of the Revolution, he also brought about a revolution in poetry. He extended the boundaries of poetry appreciation, taking it out of the closed literary salons into the mass auditorium. Newspapers, the radio, posters and the cinema became his favourite media. And his poetic art was not dimmed or destroyed by this: on the contrary, it gained new strength in drawing nearer to the sources of life.
If any spoken word or performance poetry artiste needed any justification for what they do, here it is. There is indeed nothing new under the sun. Everything has happened before if you really come to think of it. What we do is fine-tune and adjust whatever it is that takes our fancy and domesticate it to the extent that it seems new and unique. Africa needs a fresh start regarding how to relate to the rest of the world. My heart breaks when I think about how the Pan-African dream has more or less been allowed to become no more than just an exotic dream, a passing fancy that grabs our attention, then burns and flares into the realms of nothingness.
The founding fathers of Pan-Africanism must be turning in their graves: Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Patrice Lumumba and others. They probably cannot understand how the Pan-African Parliament remains just a sinecure today - somewhere to go in order to escape parliamentary rigour back home. People are just paying lip service to the idea. This is why only nine countries in Africa, Zimbabwe included, bother to celebrate Africa Day on May 25 each year.
You are what you eat, it is often said. So what does that make us when we go crazy about pizza and French Fries (fresh potato chips)? What happened to our own good old cuisine that kept modern diseases at bay? That brings me back to the love of geography in my younger days.
Reading about pigmies in the Congo and how they survived the elements of the jungle was for me an uplifting experience.
I could not help but admire the ingenuity of hunting with a silent dog that never barked in an environment matted with thick vegetation and liana creepers.
I was quite sure that this was the world of Tarzan and Jungle Jim, my imposed childhood heroes. My skin literally crawled just to think about someone eating crocodile meat. Let alone huge snakes like the python. In my subjugated psyche, these things were in some sense an expression of the lowest kind of degradation. But fast forward this to the 21 century, tourists and food connoisseurs come to Zimbabwe and enjoy crocodile tail in our hotels. The crocodile has become a delicacy. In the same vein, a visit to the People’s Republic of China enables one to discover the pleasures of dining on snake. That is if you are not squeamish!
In Patrick Chakaipa’s “Karikoga Gumi Remiseve” a young couple faced with death from hunger and starvation saves itself from impending death by killing and eating a hyena. But, because of the notoriety of the hyena in Zimbabwean folklore and the belief that it is one of the animals that witches use in the dead of night, the young couple agrees to never talk about how low they had had to sink to survive. Yet there is a very simple solution to all this: one man’s meat is another man’s poison. In my mind’s eye, I see a Zimbabwean scoffing at mopani worms (madora/amacimbi) without ever having tasted them. Paradoxically, that same individual will enjoy crabs and prawns and even pheasants!
It will not matter so much to him that the recipe surrounding the pheasant involves allowing the bird to decompose until it is crawling with maggots before it is marinated in wine and prepared as a delicacy for discerning palates. Any time you surf the net about healthy eating and what foods to avoid, there is nothing about the foods of Africa. Nothing about madhumbe and magogoya from the eastern parts of Zimbabwe and how these can readily replace bread. Nobody talks about the attributes of rupiza, the creative dish from cow peas (nyemba/indumba) or amasi omcaba, that delicacy from Mthwakazi that can be so very addictive once you get used to it. We need our food scientists and nutritionists to start researching into indigenous cuisines across the continent and do manuals on how to eat to avoid things like osteoarthritis and other pains and aches. We can make a difference to our lives by eating African.