“We are What We Are Not!” The Ironies of Zimbabwe’s Political Economy.

By Takura Zhangazha*

So back in my youthful days I used to read Wole Soyinka.  Particularly the biography that was titled ‘The Man Died’. 

Reading such a book was as fashionable as it did not get you girls.  I remember telling an amazing heart crush female cde that I had read such a book and she was completely blank.  With the benefit of hindsight I should never have mentioned it.  That was not how courtship was done.  Unless one wanted to do the impressionability of TK Tsodzo’s “Pafunge” satirical narrative on love and its meaning.   Or even Shimmer Chinodya’s ‘Harvest of Thorns’ character who wrote one of Zimbabwe’s most humorous love letters.  Almost as though to confirm how love between a man and a woman was arrived at in courtship. 

It appears to be as abstract as it remains a reality based question.  In post Covid 19, does ‘love’ mean the same?   In our African contexts? And no, this is not a self-righteousness individual question.  But one that asks of us “ Are we still the same people. Post Covid19?”

The easy answer is ‘yes’. Including a perspective that we can easily revert to what obtained.  With or without relatives that we lost due to the Covi19 pandemic.

This is something that would be fair and if only memories did not come back to haunt us.  We died and many of us almost died as Africans.  That it spoke of us who survived Corona does not mean we remember it as an integral part of our lives.  Instead we choose to forget.  Because of our own personal helplessness. And our continued admiration of the global north that reflects more an inferiority complex than it does an existential reality.

But essentially this is who we are.  We consider ourselves as lesser people in a desire for perpetually inferiority motivated recognition from elsewhere. 

With our current government, we know it has the challenge of confronting itself in the mirror.  A task that it ambiguously does and contradicts itself on social media.

One of Dambudzo Marechera’s most contradictory statements based on one of his underrated lines  his novella “Black Insider”is, “We are what we are not.  That is the paradox of Fiction.”

There are many ways to translate or view this. We either believe our own lies or we believe in ourselves. 

Its as simple as that.  Unfortunately a majority of us have chosen to believe in our own lies.  To ourselves.  In the images and expectation or the other.  It sort of works but it again unfortunately remains hollow. 

But I sort of get it.  A majority of urban Zimbabweans live almost as an urban performance gallery.  Its as tiring as it is abstract.  A recognition that means no more no less beyond the ghetto gate and street you grew up in.  Almost like an escapism that you have to prove eventually worked. Mainly because you left for the Diaspora or Diaspimbi. And there is no way you should allow anyone back home to consider you a failure.   If they would even consider it, it would remain better never to  return home altogether.     

 

But let us think about it. We live and we die.  We try to make the most of our existence as given by societal norms.  But we have no option but to believe in an organic progressive future. And to be stubborn about it. 

It does not matter that you were founder of one party or the other.  We can only ask you what do you believe in? And what does your belief mean for the rest of us.

Because we understand the passage of time. That things at some point will never be the same. And it is this passage of rime that makes remember who we are and who we can be.

That’s why I initially quoted from Soyinka’s “The Man Died”. Because African intellectualism died.  Wjhat happens next I do not know. But I am not tired. We suffer, we continue.

By Takura Zhangazha (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)*