1. Background: The Seeds of Self-destruction?
The inception of the colonial State in Zimbabwe heralded the birth of two conflicting national legacies of domination and Resistance
1 The contestation between these two legacies assumed various forms in subsequent struggles between settler and indigenous populations. The indigenous peoples' struggles were in pursuit of Freedom of a material, psychological and socio-cultural nature. It was a freedom from both settlerism
2 and settlerisation 3. Settlerisation and settlerism were institutionally entrenched and legally protected realities of every day existence under colonialism. African peoples struggled for their freedom from within the precincts prescribed by these vices.
4
Resistance to un-freedoms outlived the event of political independence, as indeed did the twin vices of settlerism and settlerisation. For instance the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the emergence of poorly co-ordinated opposition political parties, labour, students and women's movements. Opposition politics of the 1980s was, by and large, an outgrowth of Zanuism
5 and therefore unwittingly expressive of the internal contradictions within the Nationalist project.
6 Such politics inherently lacked the capacity to formulate new conceptions of change, leadership and a different society.
This was partly due to the fact that it perceived its main mission as the replacement of ZANU PF as opposed to the constitution of a democratic Zimbabwe founded on freedom for everybody.
7 This new opposition politics was a space constructed by the same political culture that it sought to unseat.
Zanuism as a political culture became a pervasive feature in all spheres of Zimbabwean life. Civic, economic and social spaces became captive to the hegemonic politics of absolutised perceptions and positions. Perceptions and positions, which made difference and innovation an intolerable and very often risky enterprise.
8 Herein lay the foundations of the despotism that now plagues Zimbabwe. A despotism that seeks to homogenise national opinion, conduct, perception and thus turning Zimbabwe into a nation of accomplice and patronage governance. The social forces that advocate this system claim the liberation struggle as their private sector. The criterion of admission into this sector is, first the tribe, then the region and last but not least "war veterancy".
It is a system with a clear reward and punishment mechanism.9 This is how the seeds for Zimbabwe's self-destruction were planted.
Footnotes:
- Resistance simply refers to the various means by which the dominated contested settlerism and settlerisation .It also refers to the politics of identity formation within the vocation of freedom fighting.
- Settlerism refers to the discourse that posited the settler as the knower, enlightened, powerful, civilised and the African as inferior, un-enlightened, uncivilised, ignorant, brutish (savage), etc. Settlerism sought to characterise African past (pre-colony) as a wasteland of non achievement governed by irrational animalistic instincts .On this premise, the white settler assumed a burden to civilise the native through, amongst other things, commerce and Christianity. White rule was motivated by these three C's, namely Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation. The paradoxical notion of violence as Christian civilisation was manifest in colonial rule's other three C's, namely Courts, Codes and Constables. I have argued elsewhere that the rule of law under these circumstances was inconceivable outside the reign of terror.
- Settlerisation was the process by which some pockets of Africans became converts to the myth of their own inferiority thereby accepting as given the 'hewers of wood, drawers of water ' designation of settler fundamentalism. Settler de-humanisation of the black race as well as the plunder of Africa was embraced as the pre-ordained will of God or the prerogative of the superior. Accepting the logic of oppression or denouncing the imperative of resistance is what I call settlerisation . The corollary of settlerisation was the acceptance of the fact that black people are not deserving of human rights, recognition or respect. A further outgrowth of this has been black-on-black violence either perpetrated by the state or groups of black criminals in their homes or under the guise of advancing some political objective.
- This may explain the redundant talk of equality with whites. Redundant in the sense that such talk assumed and accepted the white myth of superiority whilst advocating black liberation. Its departure and arrival points were white standards, institutions, culture, psychology, knowledge and spirituality. This further explains the obsession with capturing rather than the transforming the colonial state.
- Zanuism refers to a number of things. First, it describes the absolutisation of the idea of the revolution as the exclusive property of the liberation movement's political leadership. Second, it refers to the logic that the liberators have a divine right to rule or mis-rule the liberated. Third, it justifies the use of force and fraud to repress dissent as the only means to preserve liberation and the revolution. Violence becomes a tool for mobilisation and forging consent. Lastly, it refers to substitutionalism and displacement models referred later on in the paper.
- The nationalist project purported to include and speak for everybody and yet it excluded women, youth, children and minority groups. Its idea of the nation was as tribalist, racialist and patriarchal as the colonial state.
- It is a politics that under-theorised its real mission and thus under-performed in its execution of the self-assigned task of bringing about change. It saw the main problem as personalities as opposed to systems and the political culture .No sooner than it had emerged it fell victim to same vices as its nemesis .The press began reporting on internal feuding, centralisation of power, ethnic divisions, and misappropriation of resources within the opposition. This opposition was an infantile shadow of Zanuism.
- The most outstanding example is the ECONET SAGA.
- Two cases in point are the treatment of Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole by Robert Mugabe, albeit a different points in time in the national history.
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