By Takura Zhangazha*
When persons of my age, not necessarily generation, were growing up in the 1990s, we knew the importance of the library. In most cases, it was considered a sort of sanctuary and serious space for either studying for examinations or alternatively a place to escape whatever issues were happening at home or in the mainstream classrooms.
In this, books, or at least how we perceived their knowledge giving prowess, tended to shape our individual or even examination driven consciousness.
And we used to scramble mainly for the relevant set books. Or alternatively become friends with the colleague who had his own personal copies of the coveted same.
This also meant that the most available ‘book’, the Christian bible (at least in Zimbabwe was key to our behavioral consciousness. Never mind the role of the church and its clergy.
That is why a lot of us in our teenage years would receive our first individual letters from the Scripture Union by post. Just for the individual recognition of not only being able to answer questions and quizzes but also to actually wait for the postman to hand you a letter in your own name.
The key point however was the centrality of the ‘book’ to our consciousness in the 1990s and even before. Even before we discuss the fact that we would return opinions on what we have read via the written word, by pen, in a hardcover notebook. If your parents could afford it.
By the time we got to college or university, the issue was, again, reading books in order to pass and also protect government student grants that still sort of existed before the full privatization/outsourcing of tertiary education.
The central importance of for example the University of Zimbabwe main library was not lost to us. Or how we would wait in anticipation of the next blockbuster analysis of our society via our then at least three main publishing houses. That is the Zimbabwe Publishing House, Mambo Press and College Press.
In our then ‘youthfulness’ we were a bit more patient and almost set in our ways of thinking and perceiving of our Zimbabwean society. A decent number of us were leftists. A lot more were conservative and increasingly leaning toward Western perceptions of economic and business success. Not only because of the books they were reading but also because of the movies they were occasionally or regularly watching via video cassette recorders or at Ster Kinekor cinemas.
Then just before the turn of the millennium, the internet and Yahoo came. Instead of us queuing to a library stack room we started queuing to a computer in the corner of the library. Followed shortly after by the behemoth that was to become Google and Gmail.
And things were never the same after that. The book died (to paraphrase Soyinka) And in its place came a new fluidity to youth consciousness. One that was quick and ephemeral. Moreso by the time we had done the first decade of the 21st century with Facebook, Whatsapp and other forms of social media.
Knowledge and information, true or false could be acquired at the click of a computer mouse. Which then also became at the touchscreen button of a mobile smart phone.
Whereas in prior years our young Zimbabweans were a bit more patient about what they consumed via books, in these emerging circumstances, they became hungrier for whatever the internet and its attendant social media had to offer. Both for educational purposes but even more so for entertainment and lifestyle human behavioural change.
And this is what now obtains today or in the contemporary.
There have been multiple debates about Generations X, Y, Z or even the most confusing one the boomers. What is rarely discussed is what shapes the consciousness of contemporary young people.
Apart from the fact of their ages and assumed impatience or free market motivated ‘demographic dividend’.
One in which age is seen on the African continent as a significant numerical factor about shaping opinions and politics before we even question any ideological pretexts of why neoliberalism is so keen on young Africans?
But the reality of the matter is that in a period in which young Africans are a deliberate target of global capital especially in relation to their consumption habits and also their desires to leave the continent, it is a given that their thought or consciousness processes are increasingly more fluid.
Or susceptible to a defiance of whatever we had previously referred to as either Pan Africanism or even historic African nationalism.
This is not a specifically new thing. With the onset of new access to technologies, people and in particular, young people change their behavioral patterns in society. First came the bible and how it taught many of our forbearers how to read and write in its Christian name in the colonial Rhodesian context.
With it also came the radio, then the television, then the fixed telephone line, then satellite television (which brought us closer to Western lifestyles), then the internet, then mobile telephony and social media. All as they impacted largely various impressionable young Africans.
This historical continuation of technology and its impact on a people’s national consciousness cannot easily be dismissed.
Especially when we are discussing inter-generational interactions and progressive historical narratives that can easily be lost in the moment.
Not because we want to lose them but more because we do not own either the technologies or the mediums in which repressive narratives can be purveyed.
So we have learn how to deal with the fluidity that has come with social media in our national consciousness. Together with the egoistic, celebrity style individualism it is creating in our society. Devoid as it maybe of a critical ideological consciousness and sadly defined by a mimicry of the global west/north culture.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com
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