Globally Entrenched Narratives In and About Zimbabwe.

By Takura Zhangazha*

I remember being interviewed by a journalist for a global media house some time ago during the November 2017 “coup-not- a coup” in Zimbabwe.  In the pre-recorded interview it appeared he preferred an editorial slant that would respond to the general popular view and ‘relief’ that the long duree president, Robert Mugabe had finally been removed from power.  And how of course as with news journalism the public mood as seen via army mediated demonstrations in the capital Harare should be reflected in analyzing events as they occurred.

Given the fact that he considered me an analyst, I went out of my way to break down what I considered the complexities of events.  These included my own perspective that the November events were primarily a direct result of the ruling Zanu PF’s party lack of an internally acceptable succession plan. As opposed to any popular uprising. And that where he considered the military factor as decisive he would probably need to view the latter within the context of divisions among war veterans of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and not in a typical ‘army simply takes over’ perspective.  Inclusive of the fact that SADC as the primary regional oversight body on Zimbabwe was likely to be a bit more nuanced in its approach to the events depending on how they panned out. 

My perspective on the matter did not make the final cut of the story that eventually appeared on the news channel.  I did not follow up with the journalist colleague as to why this was the case.  But I understood the probable reasons.  My views did not probably suit three criteria. Firstly, the editorial position of the global media house. And secondly the target audience (especially in the global north) of the story and their own pre-conceived understanding of the prism through which political events in Zimbabwe must be understood. That is, a basket case of a country. And the very real possibility that the journalist if he failed to file a story that suited the editorial slant of the media house, he was probably not going to get paid.

The same is possibly true for local state media controlled narratives. Though I must confess to not being interviewed by them in a long while on any major events in Zimbabwe.  But judging from their own content, again there is a predisposition toward pushing specific editorial lines that are sympathetic to the ruling establishment or alternatively seeking out audiences with empathy for the same. 

In the three years after November 2017 these narratives has again shifted due to a number of factors.  While the global media and its target audiences sought a Zimbabwean success story made in their own image, the leaders of what is now referred to as the second republic presumably failed to meet these standards. Especially after the 2018 general elections and every subsequent major international meeting where Zimbabwe came under some sort of global scrutiny.  The ruling establishment has however been trying its damned hardest to still fit into this entrenched narrative that it is still in the short term, least likely to win.  Not only via its embrace of global neoliberalism but also by way of insisting on ‘re-engaging’ those that would sooner see the back of it.

On the other hand, the mainstream opposition has sought to also harness the same said global narratives because these are backed by powerful countries in the global west.  While also claiming greater proximity to the leaders of these same said global powerhouses and the singular ability to ‘unlock’ immeasurable wealth.

In either of the aforementioned cases, what becomes clear is that the entrenched narratives about what Zimbabwe is or can be are not necessarily about the people of Zimbabwe.  By default they will reflect sentiments that are to be found on the ground in relation to popular or populist opinion but in the final analysis, it would appear that the approval of them will be found elsewhere.

This is an existential dilemma for Zimbabwe. There can be more serious conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan or an escalation of Covid 19 cases in western Europe but Zimbabwe will always hog a news headline or two.  This does not just stem from journalism but more significantly from entrenched narratives.  Even when the neo-liberal IMF projects economic growth in our country, this is less significant and not in merit of follow up stories and analysis in the immediate. 

We are a country that is assumed to basically always be on the brink of catastrophe. Globally.  And in some cases internally as a result of the former.  Unless there is a globally anticipated and accepted narrative of change as viewed and accepted by others. 

In all of this, we lose track of values, principles and in some cases, facts about our own country. Instead we seek more what we want to hear and from whom we want to hear it than what we should pragmatically know and come to understand. 

What should occur is that we own our own Zimbabwean narratives more. And that we come to understand issues, events in the fullness of our own national contexts and our general placement in global politics. Were we do not own our narratives others will gladly step in and casually decide, in ephemeral moments, what suits their own interests.

I will end on an ambiguous anecdotal note. In an interview with a journalist the late Tanzanian leader and Pan-African luminary Julius Nyerere was asked about the African proverb  ‘When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers” He laughed and said that he had once used that same proverb with the late Singaporean founding leader Lee Kuan Yew who retorted, “ When elephants make love, the grass also suffers, no?”. Nyerere also laughed at the counter narrative.  But the African proverb has never changed.

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

Re-Inventing Zimbabwe Public Libraries for a Post Covid-19 Conscious Future.

 By Takura Zhangazha*

A struggle cde recently reminded me, via social media, of the importance of libraries. He had tagged me in his own reflections on the importance of Walter Rodney’s epic book “ How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.”  And I remembered how I first encountered the same said book via initially the Waterfalls and eventually the Dzivaresekwa District Council library as an emerging teenager straight out of boarding  high school.  With a specific curiosity that queried why anyone would write a book with that title when a decent number of my relatives and friends were lauding the same said ‘Europe’ as the promised land.

More so in the context of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the partial re-opening of education classes for primary and secondary school examination classes in Zimbabwe.  Or even higher up in the education food chain, the partial re-opening of universities and technical colleges. 

In this reminder one gets slightly overwhelmed with a little bit of nostalgia.  This would be mainly as a result of the fact that in growing up in urban Zimbabwe, the library, was a place of knowledge acquisition and socializing during school holidays.  It quite ably, at that time, competed with the television or radio station because it was a permanent fixture and not reliant on electricity or your parents' black and white  occasionally functional television set. Or in contemporary times, your Wi-Fi internet receptor.  Or if the radio, as hogged by elder relatives, had enough battery power or was broadcasting educational content (also referred to as edutainment) gave you time to learn about the world around you.

So the library was a physically safe educational and social space.  You could quite literally go and grind out your Ordinary Level Mathematics there. (I know a number of cdes that eventually came to hate the library because of failing their exams after spending months if not years there.)

Or read some non-syllabus literature while keeping a lookout or writing a letter for a teenage love interest from high school. 

In the process and incidentally you would wander past bookshelves of various literatures and other subject matters that would draw your attention in many different ways. 

Because education in Zimbabwe has been/was always portrayed as sacrosanct and the only way out of black poverty, we tended to take it all very seriously.  Except that the library would always offer a couple of aberrations to the official education ‘pass or lose’ syllabus.  It was a place and space for discovering and learning new things by way of reading that which you were not taught at formal school or at church Sunday school.

Nostalgia aside, key questions that are now emerging around the role of libraries in our education system are multi-fold.  The first and most urgent one being that well, there are not really that many books that are still available to libraries in the contemporary.  This is as a direct result of the closure of publishing houses and the end effect of us having less diversity in published written/printed knowledge. 

And I could list the publishing houses/companies  that have either shut down or have taken on a strict profit motivated ‘educational syllabus’ approach to their print bottom lines.  The Zimbabwe Publishing House (ZPH) is barely functional. College Press and Longman are now focused largely on syllabus publishing. While Weaver Press still holds a candle for creative writing and publishing, it is without a doubt struggling. 

Add to this the proliferation of the ephemerality of knowledge acquisition via the internet/ social media, the 'book' is slowly being phased out of our education system and historical social anthropology in Zimbabwe.  That is to say, the book, as an emblem of knowledge acquisition and enlightenment is now being replaced by the mobile phone, laptop or depending on your class, the shared desktop computer. 

What emerges as a result of this is regrettably a probable false-materialist consciousness among young Zimbabweans.  We move from one thing to the next as it emerges via #hashtags or temporary and highly sexualized Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook photos of our black bodies. As accepted and allowed via specifically controlled algorithms by the owners of these latter platforms.

But it is not a train smash if it can be balanced somehow in the era of Covid 19. 

The library in both urban and rural settings is key to online and offline knowledge acquisition for young Zimbabweans in the contemporary despite Covid19.  Policy makers at both national and local government level have an obligation to review the nature of the library infrastructure that already exists and how to enhance it to contribute to socially distanced learning and knowledge acquisition in these Covid19 pandemic times.

Not only in the short term but more importantly for the long term.  While schools have places they call libraries on their premises, we know that the long term library is to be found in the lived urban and rural communities where every child has access to knowledge that depending on the class character of their school they would not have been able to acquire. Especially in-between school holidays or Covid-19 motivated breaks or disruptions to education calendars.  

So the public library remains not only important but fundamental to the progressive future of our Zimbabwean society as a safe, conscious and physical space for young Zimbabweans. 

To conclude, I am personally aware that the fact or even specter of death via pandemics in the contemporary always looms large in the minds of young Zimbabweans. 

The experience of the passing of my father in 1991 made the library a sanctuary of new possibilities and new ideas. Albeit in a different time context.  And I learnt to understand the fortitude of my mother via reading and understanding lived African post-colonial experiences about materially recognized success and failure of an adult single/widowed mother.

What I do know and came to realise, while playing basketball for the Dzvivareskwa Raiders is that even though books and libraries do not come to fully define us. They help us to understand ourselves better. Even at young ages.  That would be why, the library in Zimbabwe needs to be reinvented as relevant and important to our national consciousness. For posterity and not just our own nostalgia. Let the young cdes read at will. For free.

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

 

Populist Contradictions in Zimbabwe’s Political Opposition.

By Takura Zhangazha*

Zimbabwe’s mainstream political opposition in its current divided formations, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Alliance or MDC-Tsvangirai is evidently in crisis.  The MDC-Alliance which brought other opposition parties, including its own splinter groups, together for the 2018 general/harmonized elections has found itself in a split that has sought to distinguish the original MDC-Tsvangirai from the then electoral alliance. 

Based on a Supreme Court judgment that gave the then first vice president, Thokozani Khupe of the MDC- Tsvangirai (before the Alliance was formed) control of the party, there have now been recalls of opposition members of Parliament and also elected local government councilors.  It has not ended there.  There have also been battles for the control of the headquarters of the opposition in Harare. A development that means either this will not end well or will not end soon. 

It is an interesting if not tragic conundrum.  One which has had the characteristics of not only being personal but also populist. 

The personal has been mainly found in the leaders of these opposition factions taking potshots at each other’s integrity or intentions.  As well as their partisan supporters taking to social media and occasionally to their Harvest House headquarters to claim some sort of ownership of being the ‘authentic’ opposition leadership. Or argue on behalf of those that they deem best placed to lead a now very disunited opposition. 

I am however more interested in the populist dimensions of the state of the opposition and the attendant contradictions thereto.  I also use the term populist because to all intents and purposes that is the current approach of the  leadership of the opposition to what it considers its democratic change mandate.  It is a populism that has at least three main elements. 

The first being that it is Manichean.  It really does not matter who you are as long as you are against the ruling Zanu Pf party.  That is the tie that sort of binds.  Hence the formation of the MDC-Alliance while strategic forgot that the members of the same were only bound together by the same said Manichean view of Zimbabwean politics.   Attention to ideological detail was not high on the list of priorities as it was assumed that was already taken care of by supportive domestic or international ‘think-tanks’ in one form or the other. 

The second being that in either case of the MDC-Alliance or the MDC-T, there is the leveraging of the charisma of the founding leader, Morgan Tsvangirai. From arguments about his chosen successors through to quite literally claiming him for legitimacy (even though a majority of the current leaders were at loggerheads with him.) But even if they were to push it to its populist ends, it eventually wears off.  These leaders will need to stand on their own, even if they claim to be standing on Tsvangirai’s shoulders.

The third is that it’s a populism that seeks recognition from the global west.  A development that is understandable given the general Zimbabwean mindset of admiration of everything that occurs in the global north.  Opposition and also ruling Zanu Pf party leaders appear to need to be popularly recognized by Zimbabweans as being close to leaders of the United States of America, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or the European Union. As opposed to taking more time to understand the Southern African Development Community (SADC) or the African Union’s (AU) historical and liberation struggle based international relations dynamics.  In their regional, continental and global elements.  This may be understandable given the legacies of colonialism as well as our overt admiration of those global north societies and neoliberal consumerism, but it unfortunately is not enough to cross Rubicons.

A frequent question however, and I am sure it will be asked in social media threads to this blog, is “What would you do better?” And it is an easy one to answer if I was an opposition political party leader.  In at least four parts.

With number one being that I would be ideologically clear.  No ambiguities.  To the extent of for example, not lauding current American President Trump’s xenophobic nationalism and neoliberalism.  Or Chinese President Xi Jinping’s version of state capitalism.  And always remembering Amilcar Cabral’s words at the first Tri-Continental continent in Havana, Cuba in 1966 where he advised delegates of the ‘the struggle against our own weaknesses.’

And also, “that however great the similarity between our various cases and however identical our enemies, national liberation and social revolution are not exportable commodities; they are, and increasingly so every day, the outcome of local and national elaboration, more or less influenced by external factors (be they favorable or unfavorable) but essentially determined and formed by the historical reality of each people, and carried to success by the overcoming or correct solution of the internal contradictions between the various categories characterising this reality.”

Secondly, it would be important to understand that it is internal political processes that give meaning to external ones.  No matter how unpopular or against the trends they may be.  Intra-party democracy matters as much as national democratic practice.  Even in the most populist of moments.

Thirdly, it remains important that we lead for posterity. Not just ourselves and our moment in the sun.  We must always lead for the future. While the past and present remain important, they are more relevant to an envisioned future if leadership is designed to perpetuate long-duree equality in our society.

Finally, in all of the aforementioned three points, it is important to have ‘praxis’.  To combine both ideological theory and practice. That is to create progressive counter-hegemonic frameworks that last beyond the moment.  All with an understanding of other existent hegemonies and how best to try and navigate a path toward the peoples’ progress going forward.

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