Individual Life Experience as National Consciousness in Zimbabwe.

By Takura Zhangazha*

Our Zimbabwean national consciousness is a debate we continuously need to engage and debate upon.  Even if a decent number of us may consider it relatively abstract. But it must be had all the same.  With the key question being “What really informs contemporary Zimbabwean national consciousness?” By way of history, generational interactions and the multiplicity of its progenitors in the present. And as a result in the future.

I am also aware that this is a Fanonian question and that a decent number of comrades may imagine this to be part of the past than it is of the present.  Let alone the future.

What is increasingly in vogue however about this national consciousness question in our post independence era is that initially it is no longer popularly considered to be an urgent one.  At least not universally. We have sections of our society that may still hold it dear in their own recollections of it during the liberation struggle. Others still who consider it within the context of the first decade of independence with feelings of exclusion.  And those who at the turn of the first independence decade largely frame it within the context of economic failure.

Moreso in the present day where the latter perceptions of pessimistic perceptions affect organic  national consciousness. And I will return to the issue of organic national consciousness toward the end of this brief write up.

As is historically appreciated, at the occurrence of our national independence ‘national consciousness’  was popularly collective. Both by way of struggle and life experiences. Almost every adult Zimbabwean was clear on the reality of the necessity of national independence and its long term collective goals. 

This became somewhat ethnically charged with the tragic occurrence of  Gukurahundi which was eventually temporarily calmed with the signing of the Unity Accord between our then two main former liberation movements, PF Zapu and Zanu Pf. A development that surprisingly remains underplayed in the contemporary.

What was clear in the first decade of independence was the fact of former liberation movements actively leading the narrative on what would be considered progressive national consciousness.  In this, regrettably they failed even before the end of the decade that was the 1980s.   Their one party state endeavor floundered at the hands of not only the trade and student unions but more significantly because the Zimbabwean population had no particular interest in it. 

And this lack of public interest was based on downturns in the national economy after the introduction of the IMF and World Bank inspired Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP).  With the latter it became clear to the Zimbabwean public that there was an ‘us’ versus the ‘political elite’ situation in the country.  Hence there were so many hit protest songs during the 1990s.  From Thomas Mapfumo’s ‘Mamvemve’ and also Leonard Zhakata’s “Mugove” and many other songs that came to reflect a shift away from a collective understanding of what can be a progressive national consciousness.

Or by the time the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions  (ZCTU) escalated questions of what can be the newer national consciousness through its performance legitimacy questions beyond the combined ruling Zanu Pf party’s nationalist ethos.  And going one further by founding a working peoples party in the form of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) with the deliberate intention of changing the discourse on national being and national consciousness from focusing solely on liberation but also national economic wellbeing. Initially for the collective national good.

What has happened in the interceding years after the turn of the first decade of the millennium has been completely astounding.  Based on both the expansion of economic globalization and austerity or Fanonian desires for recognition by the Global North. And as fundamentally personally experienced. 

And this is the key point to consider that Zimbabwe’s contemporary national consciousness is now derived as a result of the foregoing on the basis of what it is that we have individually experienced. Whether as we grew up or fell from material favour.  We have a very angry national consciousness and sentiment.  And as with such emotive perceptions of who we may think we are, this emotion is generally easy to take advantage of.  Or to hold onto.

If you lost an urban shelter during Operation Murambatsvina or were a victim of politically motivated violence and survived, it is least likely you will ever forget about it. Let alone change your mind about the ruling party. 

Or if you suffered the end effects of the 2008 inflation while growing up and are now an adult it is within your memory to refuse to accept those that you have been told all along caused it.

Even after the 2017 coup-not-a-coup, assumptions individual Zimbabweans may have had of what change meant forgot that national consciousness essentially is always collective and not individual.

In our contemporary context it is now clearly individualistic and not collective.  Even as we seek the comfort and acceptance of those that appear to be more collectively conscious than we could ever wish for in the global north. To the extent that they create fortresses around their continents and generally have no qualms about deportations and setting up asylum bases on our own African continent.

What I have however learnt is that we need to regain a more organic sense of national consciousness that cuts across generations of Zimbabweans.  We cannot wish away our own history as at the same time we cannot forget our own lived realities. But even our personal life experiences should never defeat the collective well-being of our society.  After all, geographically, politically, economically and generationally, it is one country.

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

 

 

 

The Trouble With Local Government in Zimbabwe

By Takura Zhangazha*

The architecture and administration of local government (also referred to as city/town/municipal/ rural district councils) is very interesting in Zimbabwe. From varying perspectives.  These are namely historical (also colonial and therefore psycho-social), economic, legal and political/electoral. 

Historical or colonial because local government finds its contemporary structure still being informed by the intentions of the Rhodesian settler state. Psycho-social in how our attitudes toward this remain embedded in a preference of the city/town or what we generically refer to as the urban economy and life(style). Or what we naively referred to in high school geography or history lessons as the ‘bright lights syndrome’.  Almost as Fanon would have predicted. Even if we arrived at it in the now by way of racist and therefore discriminatory policies.  And how this continuing contemporary attitude is also predicated on mimicry of a then racist political economy.  

This latter point can be expanded by understanding that the ‘urban’ in Africa tends to be regarded as the epitome of material  and political success.  And the city is globally perceived as the most efficient form of human settlement.  Hence the tragic challenges we have of young Africans’ migration to what appear to be the best of them in the global north at the risk of life and limb.  Zimbabwe is not an exception.  Hence we are turning some of our peri-urban areas into mini-towns and cities.  Or what we considered ‘growth points’ having haphazard residential urban plans that are unsustainable. 

In the contemporary therefore we have not fundamentally changed what we have considered ‘local government’.  It regrettably has a heavy colonial hangover as informed by the principles of the protection of the private property of the privileged and the retention of an exploitative ability to retain the physical labour of the materially dispossessed.  Both in the past and in the present. 

In the third instance the legal differences in our local government systems are as cyclical as they are real.  The legal dichotomies between the urban and the rural are now well documented and argued academically.  With again the greater literature around this deferring/ more focused onto the city and not the village.  As it relates to property rights, tradition, culture and assumptions of individual or collective senses of belonging.  This even after the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) where the rural even after expanding into former commercial (urbanized) land, remains on the periphery and at the interface between what is considered tradition and modernization.  With the current government intent on reinventing the rural into industrial and private hubs for mines and large scale commodity agriculture.  A development which again closely links to the economic paradigm of local government in which the priority remains the unequal urban as of old.

Strictly spoken for this is how capitalism developed and becomes cemented.  It values its most key element, the right to private property in tandem with various forms of nationalism and assumptions of belonging to a geographical territory by elites in charge of what they consider lesser mortals. 

And this is where the contemporary politics of our local government system comes in.  We know that there are political strongholds of two main political parties that are based on who controls cities, towns and/or rural district councils.  This has been the case since 2000.  With the opposition in its still many formats controlling a majority of the major cities, some towns.  While the ruling party in turn in charge of the rural district councils and a sprinkling of towns.

What is lost in these political contestations is the fact that our local government system  structurally remains the same.  In most cases for political reasons such as a deliberate lack of the political will.  And I will give a quick example here. We are still designing our urban and rural development programmes based not only on pre-independence masterplans that exacerbate inequality and difference based on class or physical location. Even after the FTLRP.  And while many of our elites either side of the political divide think this is what works, the irony of it is lost to again our inability to reinvent a democratic form of local government beyond electoral results and populism.

While some may argue that this is work in progress because there are new processes around devolution, it is how we re-imagine local government that is more challenging. Devolution is essentially playing catch up to the urban and its specific lifestyles. Particularly for political expediency and as a result default development projects that may not be as sustainable as they appear without the politicians that are pushing for it.  But again, by default it helps stabilize migratory patterns even though it would increasingly appear we are in an age in which the rural is dying and on the verge of privatization.  Its only saving fact for now is that it remains the strongest support base for the ruling party in Zimbabwe.

Let me conclude by a brief argumentation recap.  Our local government system is not working democratically or with a functional interest in equitable development between the urban and the rural.  This is due to the factors cited above, namely, history (colonial legacies) that incorporate the legal and the economic aspects.  But also because of the political contestations as they relate to elections.  It needs to be re-imagined beyond land barons, matchbox houses and the newfound intentions of government hand in glove with local and global private capital.

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