Creation and Control of Political Narratives in Zimbabwe.

By Takura Zhangazha*

Zimbabweans are familiar with the historical question that relates to “What made us?” In most cases the historical answer is the first and second liberation struggles against colonialism. The other answer is the fact of our economic suffering after the first eight years of independence when we underwent rapid economic liberalisation at the behest of global financialised capital which we refer to as the ESAP period that took at least another ten years to take hold.

Where we take it take it a step further a number of us post ESAP children ask a key question “What made ‘me’?”, and how should we remember or reflect this question’s importance for a perceived  contemporary ‘individuality?’ As assumedly conscious adults and with the baggage of our own personal experiences as informing our attitudes to our contemporary lives and its attendant materialist, comparatively competitive demands.

This can come in many forms.  But it can be generally assumed to initially and in most cases sequentially  stem from our sense of belonging to family, cultural practices/language/religion, geographical location, history and contemporary political/economic placement in the society(ies) that we live in. 

The key point however would still remain that a majority of us assume we are somewhat societally ‘created’ to have a sense of being and belonging for some of the reasons cited above.  But even more importantly based on what we not only experience but also what we desire.   Be it in the form of recognition from family, the church you attend or in more cases now, the work and company you keep.  Or the comparative, competitive wealth that you are in adulation recognised by your immediate close and personal society to have made. 

These senses of ‘belonging’ and ‘being’ in Zimbabwe are however no longer static.  It appears that they depend on the fluidity of one’s individual economic or material circumstances.

One day you can be a firm believer in orthodox religion as it relates to your everyday work/employment or tomorrow you can wake up in an African Apostolic Faith church understanding of your existential circumstances. Or you can find yourself as a rabid or even moderate political activist on behalf of one party or the other for many years only to make an abrupt u-turn for in most cases what can be mainly a livelihood reason.  And in some rare cases, you can decide to be a neutral and cynic about many things and functioning on an abstract philosophical basis that each day brings what it will. So long you follow the money.

The essence of this argument being that however as we seek to personally identify or deem we are authentically socially created, we also have, in the contemporary, what can be considered “political personas”.  These being a combination of our personal political experiences (painful or placated), our preferred political beliefs and our more realistic material ones.

In our contemporary political elections we appear to be seeking more a reflection of ourselves and the language of what we personally consider our political and economic realities.  And this is completely understandable given the general direction our political processes are taking.  Zimbabwe is enthralled in what can be considered populist electoral politics.  Even when there is no immediate pending election which is made to seem closer than it legally is. (We are due for a constitutional one in 2028.)

And this is where the argument around ‘politically created personas’ emerges.  It is a straight-jacketed approach to our national politics based on the fact of who we think we are individually and finding others on social and other mediums like-minded persons.  Or alternatively people who believe what we  as friends believe until the next electoral defeat or the next ‘democratic angst’ at some sort of electoral defeat of the political side we chose.  As based on societal influences that either relate to our personal wealth, religious affiliation or general historical stature as sons/daughters of revered nationalists/ opposition activists or religious pastors.  In the past or in the present.

In this, we get lost to the fact that for all of our emotive conundrums and angst about what a future progressive Zimbabwe can or should look like, for the moment, it is not necessarily or progressively designed by us.  Mainly because we are all over the place ideologically, emotionally and economically. And there are many  jackals ready to take advantage to shape our thinking of the way forward.  Both in our politics and our economics'.  

We take what we are given by others and accept it into our own intrinsic cultural fabric to the point of personalised argument.  Even if we do not control the narrative. 

So those that create for us, in our own popular imaginations, those that they think  should lead us, will always have tea and a hearty laugh at the fact that they can create not only celebrity style leaders for us.  But also determine what we can consider as our political personas. Or who we can be politically. That is, who we can think we are and who we can be. As sophisticated as that may appear.

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

 

 

 

 

A Needed Criticality On Narratives on Land and its Political Economy in Zimbabwe.

 By Takura Zhangazha*

There is what should be a relatively urgent and revived “national interest” debate about land tenure/ ownership in rural, peri-urban and also former agricultural farms in Zimbabwe.  This is based on the recent central government's official policy announcing and effecting the eviction of what it considers illegal settlers on land that was allegedly distributed by village headmen with or without the approval of chiefs and rural district councils.  This also includes urban councils who have also been accused of allegedly distributing land in either wetlands or former urban farms for insidious profit or political patronage. 

In all of these there is reference to a common denominator called a ‘land baron’.  This term did not exist in ordinary Zimbabwean political parlance before the official Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000.  It also took its time to take effect in our local lingo until perhaps 2010. 

It doesn’t quite have an official definition but would be generally assumed to mean that a ‘land baron’ after the FTLRP is someone with either access to political patronage within the ruling party, access to financial capital to lease or purchase state land, can or is selling and partitioning original land acquired for different uses. As acquired from the state or former white commercial farmers who were either forced off the land or sold it for a pittance at the height of the FTLRP.

 Which in some cases relates to urban residential land use even if it is in a rural or peri-urban setting.  Hence emergent cases of forced evictions on the outskirts of Harare, Bulawayo, Masvingo, Chipinge, Mutare, Gweru and Gutu. 

The key element to bear in mind is that the centre of all these newfound evictions is based on central government proclaiming illegality of settlements after the FTLRP. Not just as a political, historical, and liberation struggle based radical nationalist policy.  But as one that relates to the political economy of land and belonging in contemporary Zimbabwe.   

This is a somewhat complicated argument to make.  The meaning of land and land ownership (especially as capital) appears to have shifted from its historical connotations that related to historical identity and arguments about dispossession.

What has been happening since the FTLRP began and was assumedly completed is that ‘land’ has become a ‘business’.  In a holistic sense.  Particularly land acquired with or without government approval after 2000 to present.

If you go to any major city or emergent town, land ownership is key to urban development.  Add to this either emergent agricultural mechanization programmes as led by government and related agricultural and mining entrepreneurship, you may come to conclude that ‘land’ in Zimbabwe is now essentially viewed as short and long term “capital”.  In a post-colonial and newer economic neo-liberal sense. 

Whereas before the FTLRP we decried white monopoly capital ownership of land, now we have a replacement but highly politicized system of ownership of the same.  Admittedly it has a sense of “black empowerment’ but one that is complicated by assumptions of mimicry of its predecessor. And again because it is mainly based on a system of capitalist accumulation, it appears to be leading toward a system of displacement coupled with an asymmetric control of the majority poor and their urbanized material desires.  Even if they are in rural areas.

That’s why when we are witnessing destruction of houses or evictions of comrades who have lived in certain areas for the last twenty years and are now being forcibly evicted for allegedly legal reasons we have to re-ask the ideological meaning of the initial FTLRP.

It would appear on the face of it that while benefitting and fulfilling a liberation struggle expectation it is now more complicated for our political economy.   This is because the ‘open for business’ policy of government has now meant that land ownership and in particular as ‘capital’ cannot be open sesame or simply related to the liberation struggle values and objectives.

The courting of mining, agricultural and ‘private city investors’ means that those that were initial beneficiaries of the FTLRP face greater insecurity of tenure on the land that they had initially assumed they ‘deserved’. Historically or by way of political or economic patronage.

Especially where and when it concerns the ‘infrastructure development’ thrust of the current government.  Even if they are war veterans or ruling party supporters or just ordinary people that really needed a place to call ‘home’. Hence the continually unfished story of Chiadzwa in Manicaland or Lupane as examples.

I will end with an anecdotal conversation I once had with my brother about the future of our rural homes in Bikita, Masvingo when we were much younger.  The issue was whether it would be preferable to ‘urbanise’ Bikita or modernize it while retaining the communal system of land tenure.  We sort of agreed on modernization while retaining traditional values and ethos of what we knew was essentially a ‘reserve area’ as the Rhodesian government deliberately designated it. Our ancestors had been displaced from the Save Valley, Chipinge and Chimanimani.  Others were eventually forcibly displaced further to Gokwe.   

In that University conversation, we argued and agreed in part that privatizing communal rural land was never going to be a good idea.  Based on the experiences of what we had read about Nigeria and Kenya after their independence and what had happened with attempts at giving title for what was originally communally owned land.  Even if it had been originally been designated by British and/or settler state governments.

In any event, as Zimbabweans must debate the full and realistic political economic meaning of what was the FTLRP.  It took away what was once private capital and nationalized it. Many celebrated this.   It is however now in a state of flux wherein the state/government is approaching it in a hybrid private/public format and outsourcing it as domestic capital for mines, carbon credits and eventual trickle down agricultural investments.   

What is increasingly self-evident is that we still do not have an organic sense of what the land we took must be used for except where and when it is part of mimicry of what we overcame/ overthrew and assume to be land use success. 

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

 

Revisiting “ Educate An African Woman, You Liberate A Nation”

 By Takura Zhangazha*

One of the most complex and limitedly explored subjects in Zimbabwe is Feminism.  If you want a definition from me of the same, I will easily reply that I have only read texts on it as my claim to understanding it.  But my view of it is that I have no wherewithal to argue its case to broader society even as I support it as a liberatory ideology. Mainly because I am not a woman. Even if I am born of a woman. I can only support feminist struggles on the basis of human equality struggles but I have to be cautious of the anecdotal fact that I cannot cry more than the bereaved. 

And I will start from my own beginning in interacting with feminist ideology.  At least from a liberatory political level.  

I once wore a Mbuya Nehanda t-shirt that I had purchased from an African curio shop in Kwame Nkrumah Avenue in Harare, Zimbabwe.  It had on it inscribed the words, “ Educate An African Woman, You Liberate A Nation.” With an iconic image of our legendary national hero Mbuya Nehanda and based on a quote from Kwame Nkrumah.

I innocently wore this t-shirt in the departure lounge of the newly refurbished and renamed OR Tambo International Airport in South Africa.

Because of the financial crisis in Zimbabwe at that time (2007-8), a lot of comrades were shopping in South Africa for basic commodities such as cooking oil, rice, pampers and alcoholic beverages. 

One iconic female comrade asked me to add her luggage to mine for the flight back home.  And there I was with my Nehanda t-shirt.  In the queue behind us was a middle aged white Zimbabwean woman who could read and understand Shona, my own tongue. 

She did not know that we were together with the comrade who just wanted to push her commodities beyond the borders with my assistance.  But she asked what she considered a pertinent question about my t-shirt logo concerning why and how ‘educating an African Woman would liberate a Nation?”

I replied that she should crosscheck her knowledge of Nkrumah’s speeches. She got slightly upset and sort of replied that “All Women should be free”. 

With hindsight she was correct.  Except for her desired appropriation of black women’s rights and struggles to equate these with those of white women in post-colonial Southern Africa. 

The key point however is how educating a black woman is quite literally the equivalent of liberating a nation in an African context.  Nkrumah was correct. 

It is Zimbabwean women, mothers that shape the national consciousness. Even in the most conservative of senses.  They teach our children/offspring how to react to society, what to value and what to believe.  With or without our permission.  And this is not just within our children’s infancy but through to which schools they go to and what religious beliefs they eventually ascribe to as adults. 

These days, we are in a dilemma.  We have to deal with emergent forms of feminism that are contradictory. 

Even if you are in support of feminism you have to consider ‘agency’.  The key issue being arguing on behalf of the bereaved. 

I once asked a very critical comrade about Simone de Bouvouire and the latter’s arguments about the ‘Second Sex’.  She drew a blank.  And then I asked about the import of Bell Hooks and her impact on contemporary civil/social activism.  Again I drew blanks.

A key lesson that was learnt in the process was that ‘feminism’ and women’s equality across the board is an existential struggle. It means more than what it appears to mean. But you sometimes have to realise that you cannot own the struggle.  Except to support it.    

While as men we can consider ourselves as feminists, we would do well to understand that we are only both intermediaries and contradictorily perpetrators of gender inequalities. 

If you ask me why does this matter, I would easily ask you in return, “Do you have a daughter?”

And finally back to the Nkrumahist issue of “You Educate a Black Woman, You Liberate a Nation”.  He was correct.  Our national consciousness and liberation resides in what our mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers teach their children. Everyday. They are the harbingers of initial societal and historical knowledge for young Zimbabweans.

If they are in Africa, based on colonial history, despite arguments of cleanliness via the missionaries, and with the relevant liberation struggle consciousness, then they will liberate us.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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)  

 

 

Returning to the Source^: The Equality Promise of Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle.

 By Takura Zhangazha*

Its always awkward how many of us often discuss Zimbabwe’s political economy and never have any ideological outlook on it.  Its either we have a narrative of arrival, another of pitying those worse off than us or in even more instances, a religion based explanation as to why ‘economic’ things are the way they are. 

Or alternatively how we separate our ‘politics’ from a collective ‘economy’.  Or are simply dismissive of the idea of a common ground economic equality of all Zimbabweans. 

The latter point is perhaps the most difficult to explain.  It is astounding how a country whose liberation struggle was intentionally about establishing a relatively basic economic equality for all society has turned out the way it has.   But, again, it is still historically and somewhat intellectually explainable.  

As Zimbabweans it is relatively clear that we have, particularly sine the 2008 financial/ economic national crisis lost a sense of shared responsibility for helping each other out.  At least economically.  As is now common knowledge family economic/social and state welfare systems support broke down. And so did the initial national value of what we then referred to officially in the 1980s as “Gutsaruzhinji” . A term that we interchangeably mixed for ‘socialism’ as well as ‘everybody’s happiness and freedom from hunger, access to education, health and upward economic mobility.  Except that the latter ‘upward economic mobility’ principle was unfortunately predicated on a mimicry of ‘white’ lifestyle competitive urge that took over any assumptions of broader equality. 

Admittedly, we pursued the mantra of education as being a key issue to acquiring wealth until we had to deal with seismic global political changes such as the end of the Cold War that brought ona very rampant neoliberalism through the World Bank and IMF sponsored Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes commonly referred to by the acronym ESAP’s. 

And that is when everything about our political economy really changed.   Particularly socially.  This is when we had amazing protest songs from our musicians at the state of the political economy  Including the late Edwin Hama’s “Today’s Paper”, Thomas Mapfumo’s Mamvemve or even Leonard Zhakata’s timeless ‘Mugove”.

And also the emergence of a more radical labour movement that would not be cowed into submission against many odds and as led by the late Morgan Tsvangirai and Gibson Sibanda.  As informed by not only subsidiary unions but also the Association of Women’s Clubs, the Zimbabwe National Students Union and left leaning intellectuals and eventually the recalcitrant white farmers and emergent civil society organizations. 

What remains important is the fact that those neoliberal years have created an increasingly false national consciousness.  A development that is firmly at the ruling Zanu Pf’s doorstep. But aided by an opposition that unfortunately seeks similar affirmation which is the equivalent of moving from a rural area to an urban ghetto and then eventually to a leafy suburb.   

But how did we lose an initial national consciousness that sought equality for all.  An immediate pointer is how our national education system was structured after independence to mimic the Rhodesian one.  Including what was considered educational or material success based on the same. 

The second was the fact that we did not understand that with a political economy comes political culture.  We prioritized cultural products that promoted not only capitalist/neoliberal lifestyles based on both colonial legacies and also our own desires at being part of narratives of material arrival. 

This also led us into being enraptured by Western cultural productions via their media, including something as abstract as false competitive wrestling on television (many of us thought it was real). Or movies that in effect represented American and United Kingdom foreign policy via Hollywood and allegedly funded  by their Military Industrial Complex agencies (Rambo or James Bond anyone?)

In 2024 there are new realities that obtain that we are now confronted with in Zimbabwe.  We are more religious.  We are more individualistic.  We are more materialistic and ‘departure’ oriented as a result thereof.  We have a majority younger population of women. We have highly opinionated and ‘un-listening’ political, business and religious leaders with in some cases, messianic complexes.

But we remain a people with a legacy of a painful liberation struggle predicated on the pursuit of an equitable society.  One in which, despite what happens in the global political economy, we must always remember that every Zimbabwean has the right to health, education, fair employment, land and every other human right recognized by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

We need to return to the source

^The title of this blog is borrowed from Amilcar Cabral's Collected Speeches and Essays book 'Return to the Source' https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1392450 

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

 

 

Contradictions of Wealth and Capital in Zimbabwe.

By Takura Zhangazha *

No, this is not a motivational blog about how to make money, keep it or even how to ‘scramble’ for it.  Instead it is about a basic understanding of two things.  The first being what we in Zimbabwe perceive as ‘wealth’ and secondly about what we also think is ‘capital’. 

“Wealth” in Zimbabwe generally tends to be observationally comparative.  It relates to where you stay, the lifestyle you lead, cars you drive or are driven in, where your children go to school and something as ridiculous as how many parties you hold for relatives and friends.  

It all comes off as normal Zimbabwean cultural behavior. Except that it has connotations of how we regard each other.  Including assumptions of either continuity of these demonstrations of wealth and sadly also those of when it will all end for those that hold this wealth.  Or when it will start for those that do not have it. 

On the face of it, it is not a class issue.  Though it is driven by middle class/ white collar job social and cultural material desires. Both in urban and rural areas. It’s a lifestyle and recognition of ‘success’ or wealth crisis. 

One that essentially remains materially ephemeral because in the final analysis, if the money runs out, the lifestyle also changes. Something that many of us are guilty of the misunderstanding that this invariably affects our immediate families, children and where we still have them, friends. 

At the risk of sounding slightly self-righteous, what we probably need to stop doing is ‘exhibitionism’. While the welfare of our children, families matter, we should embrace more of a material realism than a worry about what the next person thinks about the life you are living. 

I have mentioned ‘exhibitionism’ because it relates the issue of “Capital” in Zimbabwe.  The latter being something we rarely dig deep into.  While wealth can be exhibited as outlined above, the ownership of its almost perpetual physical component tends to be off our social and intellectual radars.   

Exhibiting wealth is very different from owning capital. And for most of us know primary capital as either owning land, house/urban properties, vehicles or cattle. All in what can be considered competitive isolation. It is capital to either be gazed at or flaunted while its owner is still alive. While at the same time not being part of either a system of a national ‘means of production’ that we deliberately understand or participate in. 

So there are at least two strands to the ownership of capital in Zimbabwe.   The one is the desire to quite literally acquire it through physical commodities for the purposes of exhibiting wealth or material well-being on the basis of either savings or benefits from employment and working the banking financial system to your benefit.

Then there is actual capital based on those that control the system of private property and its links to globalized financialised capital. These are the people that own (historically/colonially/ post-colonially) your mines, vast tracts of agricultural land, cities and the middle-men that run their transactions. They also own a majority of your national and international conglomerates that are listed on the local stock exchanges as they are also linked to regional and international ones (Muzarabani anyone?)

Some of this capital is inherited from colonialism.  Some of it is also handed over from the colonialists to post-colonial political and other more opportunistic entrepreneurial leaders. This has been outlined in the French economist Thomas Piketty’s epic book “Capital in the 21^st Century”.

What however remains important in the Zimbabwean context is our understanding of the contradictions of what we consider wealth and what we consider capital.

And I will try to keep it slightly simple.  Purchasing cars, buying houses, affording expensive schools and universities is not a sign of success.  It is a sign of not understanding the ephemerality of what you consider comparative wealth.  It is also a sign of material culture capture by a system that you have no control over if you do not understand it. 

With the oddity that it always presents many of us with a fear of going back to the ‘ghetto’ or if you are already there in the ghetto a fear of going back to your rural homes and as we jokingly say in Shona parlance ‘akadzokera kumusha’.  Even when in reality our rural political economy is the backbone of a majority of our Zimbabwean families. 

When you think about ‘wealth’ remember that even in your exhibiting it, it remains an expression of ‘capital’ that in almost all likelihood you do not control. Unless you own an actual ‘means of production’ inherited or otherwise. It will always be ephemeral. Until that day you seek economic equitability.

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

 

 

   

Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe: Love Not in the Time of Cholera-

By Takura Zhangazha*

So there is a sub-regional cholera outbreak in Zambia and Zimbabwe. There was also one in Malawi towards the end of last year. 

With the evident risk that it may spread beyond the two countries’ borders where and when it is reported. 

Cholera outbreaks are now run of the mill news stories in Southern Africa.  And there are many reasons for this.  The main one being the fact of their actual occurrence. 

The second being a false narrative of assuming that we, as Southern Africans are unhygienic and therefore will be afflicted by such diseases.

The third, which is a bit more realistically debatable, is that of our rapid regional urbanisation. Due to urban population expansions and lack of relevant water and other amenities render our cities, towns and peri-urban areas to be overwhelmed.

I am not a public health expert but it is important to note from a layman’s perspective that the continual re-emergence of Cholera outbreaks in the region point to a critical need for us to re-think our rural and urban landscapes and planning. And also our approaches to public health. 

The first thing that I have noticed, even as slightly historical as it may seem, is that Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi have very similar local government planning systems.  Each of the three countries’  have somewhat similarly designed cities dating back from the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (even if Southern Rhodesia-Zimbabwe was the ultimate beneficiary of that federation). 

Our cities are similarly designed.  We have the former white suburbs being the most privileged in relation to access to water and health amenities.  We have what we call the ‘high density areas’ having less amenities and being densely populated by rural to urban migrants.  And also migrants who historically were part of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WENELA) labour recruitment route. 

Then we have the rural areas where the majority of our people still reside, even as they age, with limited access to basic health care, communications and transport where and when related emergencies occur.

We also have to consider the fact that in our cultural practices we, be it in urban or rural areas, still have to gather for that wedding, funeral or memorial and/or church service among many newfound reasons for get-togethers.

The problem however is the fact of how our health systems do not match our lifestyles. And I will give at least one example.

This being that in many of our cities, based on again the fact of our collective historical urbanisation and rural codification history in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, we have not anticipated the explosion that would be not only rural to urban migration.  But also the necessity of planning for the important health, water, sewage and reticulation amenities that should come with it.  In many of our cities, our rapid urbanisation in which one can build a mansion without concomitant urban toilets or even rural pit latrines, even if temporarily, in an urban shack while having no running water is almost a norm.

Or even in rural areas where we still have a problem with where people openly defecate because they cannot afford to build pit latrines as advised by the World Health Organisation. So when it rains or when major gatherings are held, the likelihood of an outbreak in the remotest of rural areas increases. 

But this is not about our African inability to deal with what has been called a ‘medieval disease’.  It is a very serious matter that requires an urgent and holistic approach.  Never mind the global narratives about us as Africans from Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.  We have experienced the pain and anguish of losing loved ones to this affliction. 

There are a number of things that we therefore need to deal with.  The primary issue being the most pragmatic.  We need to manage our urban and rural amenities much better in a people-centred manner.  Even as we understand the rapid urbanisation as well as the also rapid 'lifestyle' urbanisation of our rural areas.  Clean water and safe toilets are more important than ever. 

These are things we have to remember based on our own African health wisdom about the fact that you cannot defecate in the village well.

But this is where we are.  Our people are dying of cholera, a completely preventable and curable disease. Calling it medieval may assume a superiority of your economic placement in society but we all go to the toilet, have to wash our hands and remember that you cannot, with this Cholera outbreak, assume it will never get to you.  We need to fix this. 

-Title paraphrased from Gabriel Garcia Marques’ novel “Love in the Time of Cholera”

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