37 years into Uhuru — more knowledge liberation barrages? Part 3
THE country is celebrating 37 years of selfrule and the triumphant decapitation of Rhodesian rule.
However, to this day we tragically find ourselves entangled in the coloniality of knowledge, power and being. Against that backdrop, for the past two weeks, our commemorative retrospect of Zimbabwe’s independence in this column has been dominantly focused on justifying the need for revolutionary intellectual armoring of the continent at large and Zimbabwe in particular.
This follows a traceable record of the country’s quest for defining and redefining the essence of nationhood along the lines of the liberation legacy’s interests. This is because Zimbabwe like any other country seeking post colonialism is confronted by horrors of disloyalty to the nation and exhausted national pride which has an accumulative effect on how all Africans (home and abroad) feel about their being.
At the same, Africa has to grapple with a plethora of imperial residues subjecting all Afrocentric nation-building logic to ridicule. As it stands, the 37 years of self-rule we are celebrating has been marred by parochial stigmatisation of the decolonisation mechanisms which are viewed as establishment power consolidation indemnities. This is because we have not liberated the spaces of knowledge, we have not liberated how knowledge is generated for the benefit of the continent and the aspirations of development we envisage for Zimbabwe and the rest of the Africa.
Due to a colonially guided system of promoting “knowing” and “learning” Africa has been predominantly conditioned to standardising alien expressions of loyalty to the republic and national pride. In our case there has been a normalised departure from the founding values of our struggle to be a nation. This is because we produce “learners and knowing” which does not question the parameters of socio-political and economic development. A great deal of this crisis owes much to naked failures of the national project in Africa; because nationhood has taken the posture of imperialism than it has been a true reflection of the aspirations of Africa’s collective fight against imperialism.
We have built nationhood around personality cults which replicate the Western protocols of realism, yet we have indigenous sociological guidelines of managing the polity which we have conveniently ignored from time to time. All this points to a deficit in the vogue of our political tutoring which is alien to our epistemic locality and expected countenance with the rest of the world. We celebrate borrowed ingenuity which silently exclaims the state of intellectual travesty we have as a continent. This explains the preliminary cordial link between the West and Zimbabwe which later horridly conceived the economic structural adjustments which had a long piercing effect to the political-economy of Madzimbahwe.
Likewise, there was an artificial continuation of these symbiotic relations between Zimbabwe and the West immediately after independence guided by the bondage terms of the Lancaster Agreement. During the same period, the academia dramatised embrace of national cohesion and homogeneous nationhood which was blind of the erstwhile racial marginalities. This intellectual hypocrisy was only unmasked by the war-veterans’ affirmative repossession of land which was misnamed as “farm invasions”. Consequently, there was a transition from intellectual national loyalty to agitated intellectual lobby for democracy and human-rights. This saw the rampant rise of anti-establishment reason which in turn produced a trajectory whose sole function is to eliminate the revolutionary validity of the liberation legacy and what it embodies in reclaiming nationhood.
However, outside the Zimbabwean context, the African state is to blame for its comforts in neo-colonial governance standards and limiting institutional bodies of ‘learning’ and “knowing” to Western scrutiny and validation. In return, the African state has been made susceptible to trial and judgment from Western standards — a case of no appeal!
Therefore, it is appalling to note the popularised hate of our continent’s “oughtto-be” socio and political paradigm which is derived from our colonial resistance norms and values. For instance, Zimbabwe’s multiparty system has paved way for Western standards to be the pivot of critically appraising the country’s model of state-craft and its broader governance super-structure. In the process, this has generated Western counteraction of African wisdom and consensual demonisation of Africa and her indigenous citizenry spread across the globe.
Thirty seven years after independence, the founding value of the nation, the Chimurenga is disparaged as a thought with no space in Zimbabwean political modernity. The significance of the Chimurenga ideology is pretentiously forgotten and conveniently erased in the pages of our history in the making. Thirty seven years into Uhuru, the Chimurenga is now conglomerated as an alternative discourse shunned in mainstream spaces of intellectual interaction. Surprising enough, it is as if the Chimurenga was never a fundamental force for propelling this country’s quest for political reform from colonial domination to majority rule and soliciting the rehumanisation of the dehumanized.
Today our academia is anchored Western agitated advocacy which polices and instructs the course of knowledge development with the interest of producing deliberate forgetfulness of African knowledge(s) and its counterattack on Western set hegemonic benchmarks.
However, in the face of all this national/ continental epistemic quandary and attempts to silence the past, the legacy of our liberation stands the taste of time. In fact, this year’s Uhuru commemorations give life to the past and how the institution of the Chimurenga as an African revolutionary bedrock supersedes the coloniality of power, knowledge and being. As such, there is no force that will be able to diminish the value of the Chimurenga legacy. Therefore, literature must serve as a central source of nation-building and reinforcing the idea of national loyalty. This is because the academia in Africa has been shrunk to take agency in devaluing the being of African nationalism.
Post-colonialism has been sabotaged by how the African state has been degraded to a colonial “frontier” status. This also means the citizens of the deceased African state are also degraded. Likewise, those who run away from their national devaluation are devalued in the process. Needless to mention names, many of Zimbabwe’s men and women of letters have fallen into this trap. History has taken note of how they decorated themselves as political exiles challenging systems of failure. The bottom line is that such intellectuals became products of self-devaluation and the devaluation of their nation (through their superficial patriotism). How many writers have lost to this “exile frenzy”? The deportation of Dambudzo Marechera and the death of many of our writers in the West only to be brought back to the country they fled substantiates writers’ devaluation. This is a sign that our thinkers are only honoured by the West during their lifetime to demonise the perpetuity of the anti-colonial spirit which resides in our bodies of knowledge.
Moreover, the devaluation of the nation’s ontology is also explained by the need to deconstruct its ideological embodiment and narrowing it to partisan limitations of belonging:
“Deconstruction of the national project is not about demolition or rejection of the importance of the Zimbabwean national project. ( . . . ) nationalism is read as a highly sedimented phenomenon that has operated through privileging certain features of social life while suppressing or de-emphasising others that are considered repugnant to its chosen agenda. Zimbabwean national project as represented and articulated by Zanu-PF and President Robert Mugabe is no exception to this. Zimbabwean nationalism is overlaid with ethnicity, militarism, neo-traditionalism, nativism, authoritarianism, patriarchy and violence — very negative aspects that require urgent deconstruction.” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2011; 8)
Therefore, as we are celebrating 37 years of independence we need to find ideological perspectives which will reconcile us with a liberated form of nationhood.
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