Experiencing Zimbabwean Politics Versus Being Conscious of It.

By Takura Zhangazha*

Many of us in Zimbabwe are talking about the state of our national politics and economy.  Albeit in short word stanzas, two minute promotional or real time videos or what I understand to be voice notes on social media.  In real time conversation you then ask yourself, “So what motivates these sometimes literally animated conversations?”

Especially those that exhibit, even via technological mediums such as your mobile phone and its attendant social media access, such raw human emotion.   

You follow a thread and you recognize an immediate political emotion from multitudes of online and offline supporters (some real, some false) and you take a quick pause to ask yourself, is this simply the human behavioural modification role of the internet and social media? A debate that is dissipating in the public domain because arguably, we now have short attention spans about our common good as a society beyond our virulent individualism. 

I only mention the latter point in order to point out the key characteristics of Zimbabwe’s national politics. And what is evidently informing it. 

And there are two elements here.  Both based on important intellectual conversations that I have had with comrades as well as personally thought through for a while. 

The first being the question of the meaning of politics in Zimbabwe as being “experienced” or  “experiential”. 

Most of us in the country understand politics by way of an ‘experience’.  I do not mean this in a religious way.  This is more by way of what we know to be our initial political realities and lived, again, experiences.  It is what we witnessed, felt or emotionally got angry about that informs our most basic understanding of politics and in tandem our contemporary political economy.  Be it on behalf of self, family, friends but rarely workmates.

And there are many historical examples of this.  The cdes that fought in the first Chimurenga wars were dispossessed of their livelihoods by the colonial settlers and took to arms against them from various regions and ethnic groups.  They quite literally ‘experienced’ dispossession of their livelihoods.  There was no modern ideology except direct emotive resistance based on the fact of what had unjustly occurred.  

By the time the Rhodesian settler colony had established a racist hegemony over the majority, again the “experiential moment” re-emerged. We formed, as learnt from our regional migratory labour experiences in the then Egoli (South Africa), the then Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to form trade unions, country of origin associations and also with the enablement of various missionary societies that had the contradictory zeal to educate ourselves with zeal even though they then considered us “natives”.

By the time of the Second Chimurenga, with our ‘experiential moments” of pain and anguish at racial and economic discrimination we tried to go the Ghana route of immediate electorally negotiated power agreements from white settler minority rule in the 1960s.  A strategy that failed and eventually led us to a painful liberation struggle that again would be motivated by the fact of what our now war veterans, peasants and urban workers ‘experienced’ via the brutality of a white settler minority regime. 

We eventually combined the reality of our political experiences with a global ideological outlook that learnt from the then USSR (Russia), Eastern Europe and the Chinese revolution to give our lived realities or “experiential moments” the visionary term of “socialism”/ “gutsaruzhinji”.  And many suffered and died for this particular vision of our society while at the same time embracing it as fundamental to the future of a progressive and revolutionary Zimbabwe.  As it linked to progressive global anti-colonial liberation movements and governments.

With the acquisition of national liberation and within this historical ambit, we assumed our ‘experiential politics’ had reached its peak.  Post-independence, we misunderstood both the global economic vagaries of the end of the Cold War and the ascendancy of capitalism, now neoliberalism, as a global economic system.  Again we sought to fight against the latter via our own labour unions in Zimbabwe. 

This was the new ‘consciousness phase’ of our national politics.  We knew and know those that fought the liberation struggle.  But we also then experienced Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes (ESAPs) and a rampant economic liberalism that put the market before the people. 

And by 1997 we had come back full circle to “experiential politics”.  Our urban and rural poverty in the decade that followed were not abstract but lived realities that led to the formation of the largest labour backed party in Zimbabwe’s post-independence history, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) at the turn of the millennium. Even as there was a counter narrative by Zanu Pf toward a return to the language and praxis of “Chimurenga”.  In the midst of economic hardship and sanctions.

While almost repeating history, the MDC was grounded in both the ‘experiential” and the “ideological“ consciousness dilemma.  This is because after the 2008 global and domestic national financial crisis we resorted back to what we “experienced” as a primary source of political loyalty and affiliation.

This is perhaps the most difficult point to make for this blog.   Because what we experience politically, and in a particularly negative sense such as political violence, loss of income and livelihood, we will never easily forget and therefore we will pick an almost eternal side for our political views.  No matter how irrational it may seem to outsiders.   More so if we experience this when we are young.    It will be a mixed bag of not only the remembered experiences but also the search for a new beginning via a culturally (religiously/spiritually) predetermined leader or group of leaders.  With the naïve ambition of some arrival at a comparative ideal society that mimics what we see on television and on social media. 

Is there a way out of this sort of ‘experienced consciousness’ in Zimbabwe?  In the short term the answer is “No”.  Our society has lost an organic national consciousness. Elections are more of populist events than they are about posterity and the common societal good. Either side of our now many political party divides.  And they are determined by a stubborn “experiential” process as outlined above. 

To be conscious of a progressive Zimbabwean political future we need to grasp a deeper reality that whatever you experienced in the past, the present cannot be isolated from a desired progressive future. It is always about posterity.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangzha.blogspot.com)