A Note on Being Zimbabwean in the Now.

By Takura Zhangazha*

There are many ways of viewing one’s own country.  Or sharing one’s opinion on the same with others in direct conversation or on social media.  One thing that strikes me though, and most times I wince at it, is how often people casually make the remark, ‘If I could leave this country, I would!’

Sometimes in jest, most times in anger.  And its understandable, if not tolerable.  The only question that hovers would be ‘to leave for where?’ 

Most times, again in real or virtual conversation, the most obvious answer to the question, depending on class, is to leave for South Africa. In higher circles it is to leave for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) or North America(USA or Canada). 

In the same sort of vein, there’s one conversation that quite literally struck me when I asked a former colleague how they were doing.  You know, the usual sort of banter in social circles.  The colleague, with a completely happy demeanor told me he was fine and asked if I knew that he had quit his job?  I replied that I did not know that.  To which he explained that he had finally acquired a residency visa in a country in the global north.  I asked him if he had gotten a new job in the said country to which he replied in the negative.

So I silently wondered, ‘why are you going to a country where you will have no job?’ 
I knew he didn’t mind that particular challenge and would have probably explained that he would see what to do once he got there and lived there for a while with his brother/sister, who would already be based there.

He was relatively young (early 30s probably) and he saw greater hope in going to another country, across oceans, to initially do nothing but find work. I wished him well but I was left astounded and in a little bit of an identity crisis.

I asked myself (again), what does it mean to be Zimbabwean?  Not just for myself but for all of us who would still call ourselves Zimbabwean.

In our difficult economic times it sadly may mean departure or migration for many of our younger comrades. To be Zimbabwean may also mean to be a person who wants to leave or at least always has the intention to leave at the back of their minds.  It also sadly implies that departure is always an integral aspect of being Zimbabwean.  Almost like a forlorn testament to the realization that there is nothing at home and may never be.

I am however a perpetual optimist and also a pragmatic realist.  The estimated figure that there are over three million Zimbabweans living and trying to find work in the Diaspora is however still one that gives me the chills.   But I do not miss out on the realism that the figure portends. 
As Zimbabweans we do indeed desire to leave our own country for many reasons.  The main one being an assumption that there are better ‘worlds’ out there.  Better economies that will give us a chance at some form of decent work and livelihood beyond the rural and increasingly urbanized backwaters that we are living or have lived in. 

Of course we don’t ask many historical questions about the countries we wish to be part of. Questions such as ‘who are they?’ ‘How did they get to be who they are?’  ‘Why would they treat me as an equal anyway if we arrive where they are, albeit temporarily?’ 

We are motivated to go or to at least try and go there because we envy the made in the image of the global north ‘good life’ that we learn from television or our limited understanding of Africa’s historicity. Even if we are not wanted there . 

Yet still wanting, by some miracle, to be valued as equals in societies that we may by default have helped to physically construct via our exploitation during colonialism or our participation in liberation struggles against the same.

In an age where nationalisms are running rampant across the globe and oddly so accompanied by a rise in commitment to the God that is the free market, we need to reflect deeply on who we think we are and how we should present ourselves to the rest of an unforgiving world.

And in the wake of the recent xenophobic attacks on mainly African migrants in the Gauteng province of South Africa, we probably need to learn to understand that as deplorable as that violence of Africans against other Africans is, we remain burdened by the very real legacy of colonialism in two respects.

First as a result of assumptions that proximity to private capital and its wealth would make us exclusive breadcrumb pickers as they fall from its high table.  Almost as though we were fighting to be deemed the ablest, the smartest or the cleanest to sup with it while treading down on our brothers and sisters solely because of proximity to it.

Secondly, in relation to our naiveté to accept the colonial legacy Lugardian (even Bantustan) mentality of dividing the ‘natives’ against each other and eventually ruling over whatever identity related factions they may come to have.  When Africans fight against each other, particularly gruesomely even it be in foreign aided direct wars, proxy ones or as of late in South Africa via assumptions of greater proximity to the infrastructure of the hopefully former colonial state or global private capital’s recognition, then we are definitively simplistic in our own historicity.  Almost as though we never learn from the past and how it perpetually informs the present while at the same time repeating the latter and the former as an assumedly ‘progressive’  future.
  
Being African in modern times is as historical as it is a contemporary geo-political and economic construct of neo-liberal capitalism.  It is also increasingly represented, again in the contemporary, as being a return to a regressive and salvation motivated past where the nationalists of the global north save the neoliberals of the global south.  While the masses, as dictated by blind consumerism/hedonism and envy kill each other needlessly in assumedly ‘domestic conflicts’.  And in most cases hegemonically motivated by capitalism and its own contradictions. A fact that we still refuse to see.

But either way, we must progressively solve our own problems, even if with progressive allies, so long we are democractically organic about it.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)