Permeating the ‘Conceptual Blockages’ to Being and Memory

irstly that the notion of postcolonialism is a falsehood both conceptually and concretely when it comes to governance on the African continent. We remain steeped in colonial times minus colonial governments, enduring long colonialism! Second, that after Independence, we need radical conceptual tools to break blockages which give us an illusion of inhabiting a different epoch from the one before our Independence, thus inducing us to create a false and self-defeating and paralyzing psychosis of failure. Third, that correct tools of analysis should help us gather and deploy correct tools of genuine decolonization, including acquiring the correct interpretation of what may appear setbacks by standards of minority supremacists of colonial times. Simply, there has to be creative destruction and even setbacks such as we experienced from Zimbabwe’s iconic Land Reform Programme. The issue is not to rue a dying colonialism and its illusion of excellence; rather, the point is to realize we are rebuilding a new African national economy, brick by brick!!

George Charamba Deputy Chief Secretary in the Office of the President and Cabinet

The above submission points out to the reality of the imperial monolithic predisposition to power, knowledge and being. As such, various arms and institutions have been created the worldover to promote systemic conformity to the dictates of the colonial. Consequently, this has generated a normalised weakwill to unpack logics of epistemology, as well as the relationship between power and society. Generally, this castrates the possibilities of re-imagining the world outside the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. In the process, ignorance and self-hate are exalted as benchmarks to global citizenship. To deal with this crisis Charamba asserts the need to ‘’… resist divisive chauvinisms or defeatism inspired and cultivate by our erstwhile colonial masters which are meant to divide us through false hierarchies or even ILLUSIONS of subcontracted superpower statuses against fellow Africans’’.

As Charamba rightly puts it across, ours has been curated through the divisive penchant of the colonial reproduction of being and thus limiting the utmost potential to national belonging and becoming. To this end, the being of the African is defined along with the limited and primordial characteristics of the tribe, savage, bloody and doomed. This is the reason why regionalism remains a pivot of marginalisation, patrimonialism and blood-shed all over the GlobalSouth. Self-hate and the failure to grow out of imagined superficial inferiority complexes and imagined boundaries continue to embargo the epistemic freedom, self-realisation and selfactualisation of Africa and her people.

The will to unearth the barricade of pedagogies, myths and legends which repress the ontological expressions and actualisation of Africa and the future of Africans is critical. This calls for farreaching commitments in revolutionaryorganic intellectualism to decide Africa’s future. The submission by Charamba got me reflecting on Amb Cain Mathema’s book, -I Worship King Mzilikazi published at a time efforts are being made to write and rewrite our history at a time the need to characterise the evolution of Zimbabwe’s socio-political modernity is critical. This follows the present concern for Zimbabwe and Africa to rise above dismemberment. The evolution narrative explored in Mathema’s book supplies the reader with the centrifugal role of the precolonial traditional political ordering of society. This social strata embedded on the values of our ancient political acumen has conceived the present-day ethnic plural realities in Zimbabwe. As a result, the book memorialises the Mzilikazi the nation builder. It carries an emphatic message on his political stewardship which brought to life the co-habitation of the Nguni, Sotho, Tswana and other ethnic groups which Mzilikazi found here in Madzimbabwe. Through the iconic attributes of Mzilikazi, a nation in unity is epitomised. Respect to dissent and social cohesion is broadly illustrated. This book demystifies the popularised violence(s) of our pre-colonial kingdoms.

In this publication, Ambassador Mathema projects a significant panAfricanist dimension to how the modern African nation ‘became’ and how in the process a people of Africa are naturally consolidated to unity by diversity. Basing on Matshazi (2008)’s account, the key point of departure is Mathema’s highlight of Mzilikazi’s historical background which has a strong rooting from the South of the Limpopo:

King Mzilikazi was born in 1790 in Zululand, South Africa, intoday’s KwaZulu Natal province in that country. King Shaka Zulu of the Zulu nation where Mzilikazi was born in 17871 in Zululand too. Shaka belonged to the Zulu clan. The clan was made up of descendants of Zulu, one of the four sons of Mnguni, “the great forefather of the Nguni people, who had four sons: Xhosa, Luzumane (Zulu), Swazi and Ndebele”. Therefore, Mzilikazi and Shaka were born and grew up at the same time really, Shaka being just three years older than Mzilikazi (Mathema 2018:1).

According to Mathema (2018:2), the newly found state was purely military in terms of its leadership currency. The sections of the occupational domain of the Ndebele Kingdom were purely military:

“Mzilikazi was Zulu, and so were his comrades with whom he founded the Ndebele nation of Zimbabwe. These included General Somhlolo Mathema, (the commander of the Inqama Regiment, a great grandfather of mine as well as, in fact, more so, that of today’s Chief Mathema of Enqameni in Gwanda); General Mhabahaba Mkhwananzi, whose great-grandson is Senator Chief Ngungumbana of Mberengwa, General Mhabahaba was a cousin to General Somhlolo because the Mathemas are Mkhwananzis as well; General Maqhekeni Sithole, great great grandfather of today’s Senator Chief Gampu of Tsholotsho and parts of Bulilima near Plumtree Town; General Mkhithika Thebe; General Mbungwana Matshazi…”

In essence, the military characterisation of the Ndebele nation places clear prominence on the need to rethink the link between military densities of power and democracy. The Westerncentric dichotomy of military power and nationhood posits a problematic synergy of the two. On the contrary, the above account renders the reader a broad appreciation of how the military was significant in organising society towards integration. It is on the backdrop of this reality that the nationalist movement produced the present-day state. The military was at the centre of mobilising the civilians into the core pillars of the African revolutionary processes. This is why at the centre of the panAfrican nationalistic memory one finds combatant revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Che Guvera, Thomas Sankara, Jason Ziyaphapha, Josiah Tongogara, among many of our national and continental revolutionary luminaries.

On the other hand, the progression from Garveyism –which was largely philosophical to the rise of African nationalism is an elaborate expression of how our struggle African liberation –home and abroad –had to take a pragmatic shape in the form of military intervention. Therefore, the military element to the birth, advancement and longevity of national memory remains a traditional emblem to what makes us a sovereign people with the will to defend and consolidate the enduring values that bind. This is why it was not amiss that the bedrock of the Ndebele nation was the internal military influence. The extensive merit of the military-craft of our people is best displayed through our decorated fight against imperialism through the Anglo-Ndebele War of 1893 and later the 1896-97 Chimurengas/Umvukelas. During the First Chimurenga, the amalgamated strength of our people’s military dexterity was executed and colonial power was utterly demolished in 1980. Today, we continue to organise ourselves in the broad terms of the armed liberation struggle which emanate from the founding legacy of our grand political stalwarts, hence the befitting incline by Mathema to pay homage to Mzilikazi.

The book exposes the thematic assertion of human-hood/ontological subjugation roots of the African. This publication, like any other relevant African philosophy text, depicts the cruelties of the imperial repression and how it created a colonial being. Through religion, a mission to disable the function of redemptive logic of the African has been accomplished:

I take “worship” to mean “to love and admire someone or something very much’. But then, Christianity, Islam and other religions have taken the meaning of “worship” for only their religious beliefs and practices, and they arrogantly try to ban any other meaning of the word “worship”, they have removed it from the day to day real activities of real people to the world of dreams – but then all dreams are based on the day to day lives of people, not the other way round (Mathema 2018:33)

The mischievously monolithic character of the colonial religion is presented as the major reason for the demise of African spirituality. Mathema (2018) calls for freedom of conscience; which in his view has been under colonial incarceration at the agency of Christianity and Orientalism: ‘Freedom of conscience is the best solution, and no one has a right to impose their religion on others’ (Mathema 2018: 33).

To Mathema (2018), monotheism represents the static character of colonial religion which has been successfully imported to the conscience of the African. Mathema (2018) invites the reader to his subscription to the cosmos beyond the experience of spirituality to scriptures:

“For me, I worship nature, something that creates other things. All of us, individually and as groups, are nature because we create children and new things and environments to enrich our lives. Therefore, I worship everything natural, everything that creates, but then everything that is created by natural things or beings is also natural. At the end of the day, therefore, everything is natural because every new thing we create can only be created by us following the laws and substances of nature. Nature, therefore, creates itself that is why we as human beings are a phenomenon that is natural, but conscious of its surroundings, even to the extent of creating god or gods when we do not understand the causes of one phenomenon or the other.”

Having been ravished by the divisive tonics of imperialism, Africa’s quest to de-provincialize power remains a critical part of confronting the realities of our time. The first phase of decolonising Africa was achieved, now it’s the time to decapitate the rationale and institutional dynamics of the colonial heritage entrenched in our institutions. One of which is the institution of political power which has been extensively polarised such that we cannot imagine the past outside the divisive realms of regionalism. For that reason, the submission by Mathema (2018) issues a liberating perspective which contradicts the regionalisation of our national heroes –especially those linked to the land which the colonialists called Matebeleland. Through the legacy of King Mzilikazi, Mathema (2018) illustrates how a nation rose from infancy to highest levels of actualisation. It is from this premise that the aspect of celebrating diversity and the oneness of our people is encouraged. We have an agenda for the future and our destiny lies in the lessons from the past. This is why Mathema (2018) calls us to seek lessons for the present from the past, least our ‘becoming’ never arrives.