Rhodesians Never Die: Dis-covering the indignity of the hierarchies of coloniality
THIS week’s article takes an interesting turn following the previous episodes of reason on Literature and the “idea of Zimbabwe” in search of the “Zimbabwean idea”. However, this piece offers a duo analytical contemplation of coloniality at global level and the Zimbabwean context — with high-pitched attention on the country’s background of colonial power as physical domination which is currently marred by coloniality which can be understood as colonial hang-overs in institutions of the country’s political-economy, governance, its intellectual and innovational factories in the form of tertiary institutions dotted across its boundaries.
As such, the article is underpinned by the epistemic margins of decoloniality as a model of “dis-covering” the indignity of the hierarchies of coloniality in Zimbabwe and how the outside world informs consciousness of being Zimbabwean.
The supreme logic for this position being decoloniality’s current relevant intellectual reciprocation to the inadequacy of Africa’s decolonisation processes as attainment territories deodorised by flag independence. It’s an established fact, decolonisation gave birth to African states which are still grappling with finding the essence of being post-colonial and at elementary state are struggling to become real nations as prescribed in European political philosophy.
As such, decolonisation can be best credited for its par-excellent prosperity in dismantling the physical colonial boundaries and leverage of imperial expansionism.
The triumph of decolonisation and its façades of pseudo nationalism inspired by the West remains problematised as Africa remains disintegrated, dismembered and crumbled in compliance to the agenda set at the infamous Berlin Conference which to this date has been an assault to the unitary terms of pan-Africanism.
This reprehensible and appalling Berlin confederal declaration of interests in Africa by Western states was an open expression of the West’s devaluation of the Africans’ humanity to serve their accumulation of capital, raw material extraction and industrial expansionist interests which manifested through the commodification of Africans and the availing of Africa’s land and water-bodies for imperial penetration and degradation by Europe.
The Berlin assembly of 1887-88 was a prestigious occasion for re-ascertaining the inhuman civilisation by the haters of Africa. In fact, this had been a long procrastinated project in terms of its formalisation. Prior to Berlin, there was need to dismantle Africa’s contact with the Ancient Near East and the Chinese of course.
There, the imperialists and plunders of the continent sat down to craft a consensual modus operandi — a blueprint for a modernised approach instituting the slavery of mother Africa for human and material resources.
This project was guised as a Western outstanding strategy to civilise the barbarians. Outstanding indeed, as barbarity — punctuated by murder of existing African kingdoms, assault of African cultures and dehumanisation became the new code of civilising Africa.
What a shame! Enough of the conceptual issues though they could not be avoided on a subject of this kind.
The inaugural submission of this new series is inspired by the current global political pandemonium. Indeed the global political culture is in a state of hubbub as the empire has taken to the gallery the grotesque, wrinkled, withered nudity of its antiqued fleshed skeleton. The children and grandchildren of the empire — the wretched of the earth have been left in a traumatic state of astonishment — having seen the coloniality reclaiming its realist blatancy which has concealed its hatred of those in the zone of non-being through the veneer of global homogeneity. They are shocked by the reverse of the values and claims of human equality and upholding of human rights peddled by the Western world’s neo-liberal fallacy. The recent USA election outcome is an open indication of how much coloniality of power is still resident in global politics. It is an indication for all to see that the West cannot love those it deprived humanity yesterday. Now with the aid of its detaining some African leaders into the dungeon. What a world of madness!
It’s clear, Trump has foregone the centuries-old deceit of his country by exposing that America “the great” is not so different from apartheid Rhodesia. It is a racist republican. His term will do more in expressing the “American dream” and its premise on high degrees of establishment violence, global hegemony and centrality of capital in dominating other state actors in the international system. Trump epitomises the American dream’s prejudices against minorities especially Blacks whose lives have never mattered in the eyes of White supremacy. It is from these lens of global coloniality that we are able to capture the meaning of what Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock refer to as the immortality of the Rhodesian spirit.
I wish I could go further with this discussion, but there is always next week for me to go deeper. Next week, I will do more to critically appreciate the authorship of this book by Godwin and Hancock. However, reading this book just reminded of some old poem I wrote a long time ago and probably sharing it here will give a glimpse of the themes which are contained in this book which will be subject to further review next week. This piece from my achieve is titled, He won’t go and it reads:
Rhodesia is a dead man, but the living summon his soul to sojourn among them.
He is not only a ghost by night, his evoked spirit is a shadow that meets our eyes in broad day light. His voice, an echoing sound haunting our ears.
Blame him not for his wandering soul, but the living.
This wretched soul is the legion that possessed the shepherds.
None has the power to exorcise the shepherds. Sheep are led by demons.
Daily they are holocausted and the aspiring good shepherd is slaughtered.
Yes, we put the Union-jack in the box, yet his roaming spirit mocks us.
We have failed to pull down the walls of poverty. We dislodged him from the Parliament yet his spirit still lives in our law books, dispossessed him of
power but not the skill to run our resources as he did.
He laughs at us when we celebrate walking on pavements he still owns, going to pubs that were
no go zones for Black skins and drink our minds out.
While wearing out the strength in us and prostituting our sisters he is giving his seed to the virtuous remnant.
These bear his scions and even after his body ceases to roam among the living, his tongue and faith will not die.
His bastards call the ways of their mothers’ land evil and pagan.
The living won’t let him go. He is their partner in crime. Rhodesia is here to stay!
Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network (LAN). Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on rasmkhonto@gmail.com IN AS much as the nation applauds the official recognition of 16 languages as enshrined in the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (NO 20) ACT 2013, it still has to confront the generations old social fallacy of the alleged inferior status of indigenous languages, as informed by the colonial legacy, when pitted against the world’s dominant languages such as the English Language and the French, arguably enjoying a Lingua Franca status.
Of course the native language speakers cannot continue to blame it on colonial history as they continue to envy the colonial legacy and often times find solace in identifying with foreign values and statuses earned out of being foreign copy cats. It is the native indigenous language speakers who afford their languages limited operational spaces not in terms of the geographic space but by reserving it for the expression on insignificant social matters, equating them to pidgin languages, and in essence they ignorantly mastermind the indigenous languages’ road to extinction and surprisingly absolve themselves of the blame by nonaction to remedy the situation.
Languages are not taken at their intrinsic value, only as media of communication, but are made yardsticks against which the person’s level of education, social status and intelligent quotient level is measured. It is these socially conceived barometers, informed by a number of social fallacies that place indigenous languages at the lower end of the scale.
It is against this background that people have, out of misinformation or ignorance, fought to prove their incompetence to be themselves, taking pride in their failure to command eloquence in IsiNdebele or in ChiShona, trying to prove a foreign identity, a gross denial of their mother language, their roots.
It has become a daily commitment by people to distance themselves from their identity and their values embodied in their mother language. It is regrettable for people to have internalised the fallacy that indigenous languages are less equal than foreign languages, implying that the cultures embedded in such languages are less accomplished and not compatible with modern life trends.
All these falsehoods have claimed identity casualties among citizens, with many adopting foreign taste, fashioning their speech to identify more foreign than native, affording unlimited commitment in perfecting the art of nasalising the foreign language denying any influence of the mother language. Of course there is nothing wrong in being competent in a foreign language, it is quite commendable, as long as it is not meant to deny native identity.
Language, as a living entity, can be transformed as informed by the obtaining socio-cultural experiences and it becomes illogical to measure the competences of languages by basing on their ability to express cultural experiences unfolding in environments outside their operational space. There are numerous cases when false logic has informed the unfortunate placement of languages into statuses. It has become a normal tendency that if a foreign language fails to express an African experience, that inefficiency of the language is blamed on the African experience being labelled as primitive, superstitious, barbaric, quite a flawed analysis.
The indigenous languages have often times been judged to be less accomplished as they have remained reluctant to fully express foreign experiences, and this has seen people disassociating themselves from them.
Language misconception has not even spared the religious folk that exhibit a strong conviction that an expression of faith in a foreign language is more divine than an expression of faith in an indigenous language such as in IsiNdebele. It evokes a thunderous applause when a preacher thunders: you are “Jehovah Jireh” than to say, you are “God the provider”, worse to express it in IsiNdebele saying, “unguNkulunkulu oselelayo”.
The frenzy for foreign identity lives on, if not challenged, if native language speakers continue to assume a passive role, abandoning future generations to foreign language expressions, pregnant in their cultural values in pursuit of a certain worldview, to shape their worldview, a reliable recipe for the death of a nation as its heartbeat, its language, remains neglected.
This is made worse when independent states continue only to reward competence in foreign languages silent about competence in indigenous languages.
Of course in Zimbabwe there is UMthunywa newspaper as an outlet for IsiNdebele expressions and others like Indonsakusa newspaper fighting for recognition among English Language publications with a very wide readership.
I do not mourn the death of indigenous languages but I mourn the death of indigenous language speakers who have bartered their identity for foreign association.