Independence and mental colonisation
Zimbabwe is possibly the only country where other races also wish they were black. Zimbabwe is the only country where it is economically beneficial to be a person of colour. It is the only country where one does not feel that their race is an impediment t
NEXT week Zimbabwe will be celebrating 36 years of Uhuru. This is 36 years which are worthy celebrating, about that there is no doubt. Granted, some have become apologists for colonialism and imperialism. One of the worst things about the Rhodesian era is killing of the sentiment to esteem one’s blackness. Blacks were meant to feel inferior. It became hard wired in the psyche that other races were better than them.
But that was then. One would want to believe that now is different. Sadly, not. This mental colonisation is not going away. How many times do we hear someone bragging that they were the only black person in their class? How many times do we hear someone boasting that they are the only or were the only blacks on their street?
This does not apply only to Zimbabwe. It applies to South Africa and funny enough in England such statements can still be heard. If this was only a statement of fact, then there would be no problem. But the glee and verve with which such statements (which in many cases imply lack of black progress) are said is astounding.
For starters, let us assume that this school or suburb is the best around. If that is correct then why should it make someone proud that they are the only ones that have made it and the rest of the people in their race or sub-culture have not been able to make the social mobility? Somebody has called this type of thinking conceptual incarceration.
As if that is not enough, one gets a job and the next question is whether the company is owned by a black person or white person. If their answer is that they are black, then one sees an underwhelmed countenance on the face of the inquisitor, and if one says it’s a white man then spontaneous exhilaration and adulation follows.
One wonders what this is. Self-loathing or blacks are letting the race down? Are black people living up to very low standards or the mental colonisation is going to be very difficult to eradicate? The most objective and introspective individual is likely to say both of those notions are correct.
Slave trade was a trade because some blacks sold their folks, there are always those that will sell out in favour of the other side. Without embedding a sense of inferiority in an African, there would have been no subjugation. The most dangerous African to them is one who had a sense of self-worth. That one had to be broken. And by breaking it meant to break the African spirit in him.
Once this sense of self-worth was stripped then the African was subjected to decades of reconstruction of the mindset. Negative stereotypes were encultured into the psyche of the black man.
Amnesia of the disaster that was Rhodesia has afflicted some among us. For when one sells their birthright for a plate of potage it is because they are focusing on their immediate troubles (hunger) and forget the long term gains. So if we decide to find nothing positive in independent Zimbabwe, let us find this; Zimbabwe is possibly the only country where other races also wish they were black.
Zimbabwe is the only country where it is economically beneficial to be a person of colour. It is the only country where one does not feel that their race is an impediment to progress. It feels good to be black. The country might be going through economic challenges, experiencing devastating graft and corruption but all that aside one can say, “it is good to be black”.
That feeling is worth all the gold in the world. It is for that emotion if nothing else that we have to celebrate our hard-fought Independence. For with this emotion all negative feelings from all the years of negative obedience and indoctrination unravel and come to naught. That is mental decolonisation. When blacks have the same opportunities or even better as the next race.
The tragedy is when other black folks have the same prestige and privilege and they treat workers worse than the last autocratic white employer. When they would buy their next luxury when the workers are unpaid, that is what the other blacks see. This is what lets down and feeds on our own negative stereotypes. That is a negation of Independence.
When we see corruption but will only fight if there is a real political point to be scored. Not because it is the right thing to do but the expedient thing to do. That also needs mental decolonisation. For the colonial mind says self is more important than the collective. But the African sense of community is that the community is more important than the individual.
The problem with mental colonisation is that the same segregationist social systems that were used to make black feel inferior can be adopted by the new ruling class to maintain a social divide between themselves and the rest of the people. There is always a debate among Zimbabwean folks on whether housemaids whom we pejoratively call “house girls” should really wear uniforms. Are these uniforms meant to save their own clothes or to put these helpful ladies in their place? Are they meant to be psychologically reminded of their social station and status within this family?
Only the person giving the uniform can introspect and conclude why they are issuing that piece of funny coloured and funny designed garment. As if that is not enough, we have also joined calling that old man who helps with our garden the “garden boy”. When black people call each other “mabhoyi” isn’t this where it came from?
Our forerunners would never achieve any other status regardless of their age or roles in their families as they would always be considered and called “boy” by the “baas”. We continue to call each other this not in self-deprecating dry humour but to bring them down a peg or two. This is a colonisation of the mind that needs to be eradicated. Once she has put that uniform on or called “boy” that person would never feel to be anything else but the lowest of the low in this family. Once the children see her in this uniform if they are equally not colonially deculturised, they will also view themselves as pikinini baas.
At State level, in principle policies to redress past fundamental injustices cannot be wrong can they? Should an independent country ignore all past marginalisation and just say, the dispossessed should keep their nothing while the dispossessor keeps their everything? The answer to this question seems quite obvious enough. Why then are some people having a problem with the restorative justice that has been called land reform and the other one called Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment?
Are these programmes not meant to create opportunities for self-sufficiency and economic autonomy to the masses? Why then is there such a blight attached to these noble programmes? Is this indicative of serious flaws in psychological wiring? Not necessarily so. It is because when the programmes are hijacked by those with colonised minds who want to replace a person of a different colour with themselves and be what the other person was by living in their house, driving their car or better and send their own children to the very schools but treat those employees with worse disdain, it undermines the programmes.
How do you expect people to embrace them? Who has mental colonisation here? Well, if empowerment incidentally create show-off oligarchs the population has the right to be hostile to it because their own situations are not made any better by the programme. It becomes an elitistic socio-political agenda with no direct relevance to them. That is why many people identified with the Community Share Ownership Schemes when they were being rolled out. Here Independence was bringing tangible fruits. Asi muti wacho wakakuva usati waibva (But the eagerly awaited fruits never came to fruition).
Colonisation of the mind would be considered to be at the highest level of our polity if the former colonised walk the same pathway of the coloniser, live by the principle of the coloniser and treat those lower in social station worse than than the coloniser. People are then forced to ask the very painful question of whether the ruling class really hated the coloniser or they envied them.
The coloniser by their repressions, snobbery and subjugation had a distinctive primitive behaviour and mindset. If those who run the noble national programmes and those who benefit from them behave in a symmetrical way to the said coloniser’s then they are the ones who are mentally colonised, right? We treat the waiters and bartenders worse than our former colonisers and our wives are tyrannical madams aren’t we also in need of mental decolonisation?
As we celebrate our hard-fought Independence next week it would help the nation to progress if everyone stops everything that we are doing that justifies the colonisers privileged position. The nation cannot have some who have adopted or even inherited the coloniser’s way of thinking. Treating workers and others of lesser means unfairly is a relic of colonial attitude. It is some form of mental colonialism.
Emancipation of oneself from colonial slavery is not about just saying blacks are equal to whites. It should also involve setting standards and way of doing things equal or better than our former colonisers. It is about giving the people more opportunities than they could ever dream of under the old system. Only then will our people stop the flawed reminiscence about “the good old days”.