Reclaiming youth space
Part 3
TODAY I desire to share an epiphany I encountered during the week. Since it has become fashionable to dream and convene people in the name of an illumination sent from above, I find it equally prudent that I share with my readers, particularly the young Zimbabweans.
I recount how the week was loaded with street talk of how one man, contestably has anointed himself as a King, oh Hail! the leader of fantasists, who woke up and proclaimed his conversation with Jesus, that the son of man prefaced the famous Isaiah 61, the verse we sang at the seminary every morning to remind ourselves that our vocation was heavenly ordained. We crooned: “inkosi ingithumile-ee Ukuba ngishumayeli’vangeli Ithi yona!, akusini elingikhethileyo Kodwa ngomusa wami-i Yimi engilikhethileyo-o” (The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; because he has anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek. He says, you are not the ones who chose me, but through his benevolence and mercy, he is the one who chose me). This is a stint denunciation of any human challenge.
It is those words that made me envision myself delivering a sermon on a Sunday.
Certainly, he sends all of us, just not to be clerics in a Sunday Mass, of course in different ways, and this is mine. Differently though, a Tshuma suddenly is a Khumalo and throngs believe him, even in his treasonous cantankerous pronouncement, they are keen to follow him to purgatory. We shall patiently wait for the 12th of September when he “brushes his teeth with a black mamba”. Amehlo silawo!
Who is still buttering the bread? to come such that we challenge existing knowledge hegemonies which are still colonial in nature, structure and practice.
This led me to have a weeklong interaction with the great thinker, Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe.
This was a challenge from a decoloniality disciple who is keen to proselytise me into one. I was dazzled by the academic intercourse I had with the two.
e missing Fanon in all of us The great Martinican thinker and Algerian veteran, Frantz Fanon wrote, “The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon . . . or too late.”(1973:7) Fanon wrote these words after having participated with the French resistance in World War II, and before arriving in Algeria and joining the National Liberation Front.
His participation in both wars shared something in common: his opposition to racism, imperialism, colonialism, and to the dehumanisation of some peoples and subjects by others.
Explosions could be found everywhere during these wars, yet even so, the persistence of the problems Fanon confronted thus indicates that the “explosion” that sought to bring them to an end has yet to arrive and it is uncertain if it will.
It is in these same existential and historical conditions, in a sense, in which we still find ourselves today, ages after his death.
Although it is true that formal colonial relationships are no longer as prevalent or explicit as they once were, I think we must recognise the existence of a global matrix of power and a universe of symbolic representations firmly rooted in the long history of modern colonial relations, including among others, modern racism, slavery and intellectual hegemony.
Very much in line with Fanon, the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano has referred to this as the “coloniality of power” and Jamaican thinker Sylvia Wynter has termed it the new “propter nos” or civilisational discourse of modernity.
In his classic work, “The Wretched of the Earth”, Fanon himself advises us to avoid approaches that reduce the problems of colonialism and racism to solely a matter of class: “In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure.
The cause is effect: you are rich because you are white; you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to deal with the colonial problem” (1977:34).
Ages after his death, there is still a great deal for us to understand and learn from all the dimensions of this Fanonian verdict, above all how to challenge education systems which are still producing inferiority complexed citizens. Zimbabwe’s university and the
silence of the student Delivering a lecture last year in South Africa, renowned critical theorist, Achille Mbembe spoke extensively about how young people in South Africa have worked hard to demythologise “whiteness” using the university as a tool of challenging knowledge hegemony.
He said “One such issue has just been dealt with — and successfully — at the University of Cape Town. To those who are still in denial, it might be worth reiterating that Cecil Rhodes belonged to the race of men who were convinced that to be black is a liability.
During his time and life in Southern Africa, he used his considerable power; political and financial to make black people all over Southern Africa pay a bloody price for his beliefs.”
In this account, Mbembe highlighted how the image and the name Rhodes is a classical representation of oppression and anyone who benefits from it is an accomplice of our suffering.
It then dawned that the university demands Harvard citation as if we are students in Boston, so I wonder why we have universities in Zimbabwe which act like distant learning institutions of our colonial masters?
Have our student leaders challenged that monopoly of knowledge and resistance by our institutions to stick to that monologue?
Why do we celebrate being a Rhodes Scholars as if we cannot have Chaminuka or Lobhengula Scholars?
How long will the university in Zimbabwe produce student leaders who care much about the politics of the stomach and ignore the massive effects of coloniality in our education?
Think about it. Mayibuye!!