Age, Conversation and Changing Consciousness in Zimbabwe.

By Takura Zhangazha*

I have a couple of friends that like to remember what they refer to as the good old Zimbabwe days.

Be it when they were in primary or secondary school. Or undertaking one or the other state sponsored tertiary education.  They talk of getting milk at school, eating well, getting student payouts/loans and how everyone was generally happy in Zimbabwe.

They debate this broadly until you broach the subject of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) of the late 1980s.  While we were too young to understand this then new neoliberal policy thrust of the Zimbabwean government at the time, our contemporary conversations immediately depart from nostalgic reminiscence to anger at what then befell us by the time we arrived at adulthood.  

And this is largely toward the turn of the century when not only ESAP was in full flight but the ruling Zanu PF party was now trying to re-discover some sort of its revolutionary ethos via a now hurried Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in the year 2000. 

While at the same time using state and no-state orchestrated violence on supporters of the newer opposition political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as then led by trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai. 

Some of us still remember those terrible years and in particular the calamitous periods of cholera, hyper-inflation and poverty that were stark between 2005 through to 2010 when the then Global Political Agreement  and government of national unity as mediated by SADC had sort of got a foothold on our economic predicament. 

In this, a decent number of us who were political and civil society activists at the time assumed we were in some sort of progressive revolutionary struggle to challenge the ruling Zanu Pf party’s hegemony.  And a lot of suffered and are still suffering for this.   Be it here at home or in the global Zimbabwean Diaspora. 

What we may have missed however is the passage of time and the fact that there are others that while having been young in they year 2000, are now adults.  And they have a different experience of what they consider their priority realities and ambitions.  They are also referred to as ‘ama 2000’. 

These and other younger comrades have a different consciousness template from many that have nostalgia for a previous Zimbabwe prior to for example ESAP.  Theirs remains an immediacy of material consciousness.  Be they male or female. 

Based on not only the fact that they have greater access to multiple nodes of information and lifestyles but also because they experienced the worst of our longstanding economic challenges since the early 2000s. 

And their politics and political activism are also more immediate.  Based on both religious perception as well as celebrity dynamics as motivated by both mainstream and social media. 

They are definitely not going to read Marx, Cabral, Luxembourg, Nyerere, Nkrumah, Gramsci or de Beauvoir unless its for an academic examination.    

And this a reality that we now have to accept across class, geographical location and even claims at ethnicity.  

Age, conversations and consciousness have come full circle in Zimbabwe.  With the latter being the least relevant.  Mainly because consciousness in and of itself is not only less fashionable but it is challenged by the hegemonic and behavioural moderation media that we can no longer avoid consuming.  Be it via social media or streaming platforms that are carried over to the mainstream television and radio stations such as Tik-tok, Netflix, Youtube and Whatsapp (in no particular order). 

So when I am in some sort of debate (online or offline) with people younger than me I am aware that if I overdo any sort of intellectualism I will be met with an equally resistant counter-intellectualism that focuses on everyday realities as opposed to any sort of idealism. Or one that emphasizes one celebrity over another or one faith in challenge to others. And a derisive turn of phrase about age and no knowing whats really going on in the world

This is something I first experienced in a radio interview in 2010. I had prepared well for it, crosschecked my facts, re-read on the relevant ideological contexts of how to challenge neo-liberalism  for a progressive new social contract. Lo and behold the interviewer, young as she was didn’t care about that.  She just wanted to know about the significance of the celebrity like infighting in the then inclusive Zimbabwe government and its constitutional reform process.

I then realized that perhaps because of age, experience and also being more ideologically oriented, I was beginning to miss new realities about how young Zimbabweans are beginning to think about their country and their lives.

As a final example, I once interacted with a young artists group who vociferously laid claim to being a network of progressive young minds seeking out new ways of expressing their challenges in the public interest.  This was assumedly in relation to unemployment, poverty and ambitions to go to the Diaspora. 

It turned out that most of them found their best spaces in quoting the bible and relying heavily on the Christian Gospel for their own consciousness. 

It struck me that we (my nostalgic comrades and I) had been brought up on Ngugi, Marechera, Mungoshi, Vera, Soyinka and many others but these ones I was interacting with at that time, mainly had the Bible and very business focused motivational writers and speakers from the global north. 

This is still something I still cannot shrug off.  And I am not sure who’s fault it is. But it is a fault.  WE need to talk consciousness age.  More-so where we have imperial presidents like Donald Trump talking about racist ‘Golden Ages’ for their own countries and controlling social and mainstream media narratives. 

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

A Not So New Meaning to Being White and (South) African in Africa and the World.

By Takura Zhangazha*

USA president Donald Trump recently issued an executive order about South African domestic politics.  In it he was basically protecting white South Africans and in particular those of Afrikaner (Dutch) origin. This was after one of his infamous and closest political advisors, Elon Musk had warned via his social media platform X, that there would be consequences for South Africa’s new Land Expropriation Act.

It would appear that this executive order suspending USA aid to South Africa by Trump is the immediate consequence. And one which has had ripple effects within South Africa’s white community.  To the extent that they held a weekend press conference to explain their reactions to this mainly via the again infamous AfriForum group that is assumed to represent a lot of Afrikaner or Boer individual and collective economic and social interests.

In this they stated, via their website,

“The civil rights organisation AfriForum is going to write an official letter to the United States government and request that the punitive measures that President Donald Trump wants to introduce against South Africa should rather target senior ANC leaders directly and not South Africa’s residents. AfriForum’s request follows in response to an entry that Trump made on his social media last night, around 18:00 Eastern Standard Time (EST) in America.

AfriForum is also going to make an urgent request to the South African government to, in an attempt to avert this crisis, table an amendment to the Expropriation Act that will ensure the protection of property rights in South Africa.”

I have quoted this at length in order to demonstrate what can be viewed as not only a sense of gratitude for Trump’s executive order (EO) but also a strange sense of entitlement to still be able to live in a land that their new benefactor, the USA government, perceives to be a threat to their Afrikaner (also read as white) livelihoods.

I refer to this entitlement in a particular historic respect that the AfriForum is likely to be quite clear that based on Trump’s EO, they are now quite literally untouchable in the short and probable long (4 year term of his presidential tenure).  Or as long as Musk is still his right hand man.  Not only in South Africa but also other parts of Africa such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where they have major economic, mining and attendant military interests.

While I am not South African by birth my Pan Africanism cannot let this matter simply be drowned away in abstract notions of what current and former settler states and their outpost communities deem to be preferable.  

Especially with either the threat of implementing economic sanctions and in some cases (as in the previous Trump administration) that of military intervention on the basis of a false pretext of neo-colonial liberalized property rights to land and minerals.

More-so because I am also a Zimbabwean and we have a direct experience and long standing history  of what former colonial and neo-colonial global superpowers can and will do to stop attempts to redress colonial injustices of land dispossession.

This despite the efforts we had made since the expiry of what was then our Lancaster House Constitution through to many other conferences and bilateral agreements we entered into with our former colonial power, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK).  And now politically and technically under the aegis of USA and EU sanctions for what was then our Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP).

One which regrettably has now shifted into more of state capitalism than equitable distribution of our natural resources.

But back to the matter of the South African white community and its newfound, by default racial/ racist relationship with the new American administration.  Beyond being Afrikaner, English, Scottish, Australian or French in origin or ancestry.

It is either you value the country of your birth, with all its baggage of having fought a liberation struggle to emancipate a majority based on the principles of democracy racial and economic equity or you decide to purposefully undermine them.  

Directly as Afriforum is doing. 

Or even in liberal white complicit silence (Biko anyone?)  Or you stand up to what was the then rainbow nation that we all applauded Nelson Mandela and his struggle stalwarts for undertaking. 

What Trump has done however is not a social media fad. Or an opportunity for South Africans, particularly a white minority to prove a false consciousness on still Chinese owned Tik-tok.  

Instead it is a racist maneuver aimed at proving that it is not only global but in particular ‘white capital’ that can control the economy of South Africa.  And by default Southern Africa. 

Well we, as Africans, do not have nuclear weapons or any other military capacity to stand up to the USA, the UK or even the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).  But we have progressive and revolutionary anti-colonial history on our side. 

Where we assumed a global progressive humanity via the United Nations, we were mistaken.  Especially because of the globalized wars that we are seeing or experiencing directly. 

The Trump executive orders we are witnessing in various forms mean that we may have to revert to remembering what Africa is and who we are as Africans.  We reject racism, global inequality and we believe in a shared progressive future for all of humanity. And that at some point despite as Cabral said, “the struggles against our own weaknesses” we will have to defend this vision of a progressive humanity for all as Africans.  Beyond who owns X or what an exeuctive order from the USA can mean. 

And that there is no such thing as a return to an ahistorical former or current colonial center of power to prove a false importance of whiteness in Africa or elsewhere in the Global South.  

Finally there is a book published in 2007 by Gerald Le-Ange titled the ‘White Africans. From Colonisation to Liberation’.   It would help if cdes re-read it to understand that we too, as black Africans can talk back about belonging in a globally progressive and inclusive historical way.  Because we know what was done to us historically by colonialism and its offshoots of neo and post colinialism.  We will never forget. And we will resist.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Changing Character of Pan Africanism (Fighting Among Ourselves)

 By Takura Zhangazha*

 As an African you will regularly reflect on your being, your othered ‘blackness’ and also your material standing in a now highly globalized perception of what can be the ‘good life’.  And in all of its mimicry of the colonial legacy of global north societies.  Or if we were to be a little bit more academic, in the ambit of what the Ugandan professor Mahmoud Mamdani referred to as the “legacy of late colonialism’. 

A colonial legacy that we are living today in multiple facets of our everyday existence.  From our politics, our religious and cultural norms and how they inform the futures of subsequent young Africans going forward.

And it is something that we cannot historically wish away.  We were once colonized as Africans.  A decent number of us fought liberation struggles or negotiated political settlements to become independent.  We also, via the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU) now the African Union (AU) accepted the historical reality of the Berlin Conference borders as drawn by the then European colonial powers.  

Borders which were largely defined by either rivers, mountains and also last minute negotiations for territory because of assumptions of minerals or colonially strategic positioning of their military outposts. With one such example being the Caprivi Strip (named after a German general at the turn of the 19^th century).

The catch however is that we have a composite history of struggling against colonialism, winning these struggles but at the same time, in the contemporary, sort of seeking by default to repeat the same said history. 

And this is a complicated argument to make.  Particularly if we consider the current Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda 2025 conflict as recognized by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the East African Community (EAC). 

On social media there have been historical references as to why this conflict persists.  From issues to do with the recognized Rwandan genocide through to the role that SADC played in the toppling of Mobutu Seseseko Wazo Wabanga from power in the DRC. And the retention of Laurent Desire Kabila as president of the same country in the years that followed.  An issue that is not historically explained and understood by many Zimbabweans or Congolese to this day.

The key issue however is the fact that the DRC is not a simple country.  It is etched in the historical cauldrons of the full meaning of what colonialism was in Africa.  Particularly where we consider South of the Sahara Africa and the role of King Leopold the second of Belgium and what his government did to us. 

Further, beyond arguments about borders and their coloniality, the DRC is representative of what colonial capitalism and extraction is and can be.  Including the fact that capitalism comes with war against people who do not even understand what they are fighting against or for what cause they should be fighting for we now have a global reconfiguration of the meaning of Africa.  One which is pointing to a repetitive historical narrative of ‘extract and control’.  On either side of the West or East global divide. 

This is a development that begs the question of what is Pan Africanism in the contemporary? Who imagines or re-imagines it?

If you are African you have to remember Kwame Nkrumah’s eternal slogan of how “Africa Must Unite!” And Julius Nyerere’s pivotal role in making African political unity a reality with the OAU and its liberation committee.

But now we are at a crossroads. Albeit an easily populist one after the emergent changes in the United States of America (USA) foreign policy about its interactions with our continent. From the closures of the USA Agency for International Development Aid (USAID) through to its own foreign diplomatic missions and how we react to the same. More so beyond social media and mainstream media posts about what all of this means.   

We are in desperate need of a new Pan Africanism.  One that contends with new global political economy realities of China versus the USA but also recognizes the history of colonialism and post-neocolonialism. 

This is a difficult ask because as post liberation Africans we are sort of embedded in false realities that we are never able to handle. Not only for our internal but external conflicts without being ‘hand-held’ by either side of the global political divide.

So what does a new Pan Africanism look like? It is one that understands the historical reality of the fact that as black people from the African continent we know our past. And we also know our present.  And we can envision our future.  Never mind the slave trade, colonialism, or neo-colonialism, we simply remember our realities in the present. 

So major traditional donor agencies can and will close from the global north due to an increasing racist political culture but we have been there before.  We know who we are and who we can be.  `

For all the wars that are happening globally and affecting Africa in variegated ways, as Africans, we will need to learn that we are between a rock and a hard place.  But we have options.  One of them being a proper, “Return to the Source” as argued by Aime Cesaire. 

Almost like a return to the river.  Except for the fact that the river was always as Ngugi wrote in his novella and explained it metaphorically, a river that was always going to be put it ‘In between”.

The form and character of our new Pan Africanism can only be historically grounded without the abstract populism of 'velvet' or 'carpet' revolutions'.  

It has to be about what we can believe in as liberatory beyond the global preferable moment.  Even in abstract mimicry we also need to put Africa First. And make it Great Again. 

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his peronsal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com) 

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