OFTEN, I have quoted this life incident. I will not hesitate to quote it again. To me it is so incredibly important, incredibly timeless by way of its lessons to all peoples of the world. A little potent book called "Clandestine in Chile" by one Gabriel Marquez, recounts an encounter between Chile’s late President Allende, and an irate citizen on a solo demonstration.
In a calculated walk-about, Allende, himself a popular socialist politician-president, comes face-to -face with this unhappy citizen projecting his anger through a rag-tag placard hoarsely wailing: "Chile is shitty country, but my country!"
Breaking free from a security cordon sanitaire, Allende walks to the angry citizen and congratulates him for the placard and its incandescent anger. For beneath the remonstrance lay anxious love, deep attachment to Chile, the demonstrator’s country. Lovely and loving indignation, which we call patriotism in everyday political parlance, itself part of the vocabulary of politics of patriarchy. We call it "pa-triotism", isn’t, never "ma-triotism", the same way that it is always "his-tory", never "her-story", as Umberto Eco would quip. We need to overthrow this language of patriarchy, with its silent vote for male dominance.
The man who grew in his tomb
Deeply sensitive to the condition of the underclass, Allende sought to respond to this class displeasure through a raft of leftwing social programmes outlined for his government. Washington was immediately upset and pronounced an instant death sentence on this South American president. Before long, Allende was dead, thanks to the deadly wiles of Washington. But the horror, the horror! Allende grew better and bigger in his tomb, rising and rising, and getting canonised beyond his fallibility as a mere President of an impatient Chile which could not wait for time-honoured delivery by his socialist Government.
Equally the lump of fresh but shabby red earth beneath which he lay buried, in the company of Chile’s poor and unsung, quickly transformed into a shrine where political Chile trooped under cover of darkness for homage, inspiration and renewal. The tomb transformed yet again. It became a newspaper carrying potent message for the poor. One day, an angry citizen decided to speak in strange tones. This nameless citizen stole into the cemetery one evening, and planted a placard on one end of Allende’s grave, giving it an instant headstone it never had. The paper headstone read: "Here lies Allende, the future President of Chile". Gentle reader, I leave you to extract the meaning you please from this epitaph (if you think Allende died) or prophecy (if you think the writer saw a womb, not a tomb).
The British-Protected Child
As I write this piece, I have just finished reading Achebe’s latest, a collection of essays under an unassuming title of "The Education of a British-Protected Child". It is a must-read for you gentle reader. It has the hallmark of Achebe: simple, readable but devastatingly witty and mordant. This is one writer who has a knack for savaging his subject in a style so admirable, so irresistible. Like pepe, you eat the book from the margins, all the time blowing wind to cool down your burning lips. Ndiwo manakiro ayo mhiripiri, Oliver Mtukudzi would sing.
What is Nigeria to me?
Achebe has an essay titled "What is Nigeria to me?" Expectedly, the veteran writer wastes no time in sinking his sharp paws into his quarry, Nigeria. A country which is itself grotesque outcome of British imperial greed playing cartographer, "Nigeria nationality was for me [Achebe] and my generation an acquired taste — like cheese. Or better still, like ballroom dancing. Not dancing per se, for that came naturally; but this titillating version of slow-slow-quick-quick-slow performed in close body contact with a female against a strange, elusive beat."
Achebe recounts how Nigeria got her first independence anthem from a British housewife, "as a parting gift". The anthem called Nigeria "our sovereign motherland". Appropriately, this piece of borrowed identity/aesthetics soon made way to another, decidedly worse in Achebe’s view, composed by a committee of intellectuals, which re-imaged Nigeria as some patriarch. "But it has occurred to me," continues the writer, "that Nigeria is neither my mother nor my father. Nigeria is a child. Gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed, and incredibly wayward. Being Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting.
"I have said somewhere that in my next reincarnation I want to be a Nigerian again; but I have also, in a rather angry book called "The trouble with Nigeria", dismissed Nigerian travel advertisement with the suggestion that only a tourist with a kinky addiction to self-flagellation would pick Nigeria for a holiday. And I mean both."
Typical stylistic exquisiteness of Achebe, with its brand of savage bathos. Nigeria is gentle raised to aerial pedestal, only to be undercut to beneath the dust, but in furious love. A shitty country, but Achebe’s only country and first love.
Cartooning self-hate
Two or so weeks ago, July 4 to be exact, the Standard ran a cartoon of a distraught coach of the defeated Brazilian team hitting a moment of sudden realisation: his team had been defeated because of "this" accursed country it had played against in a pre-World Cup friendly. Needless to say, the guilty country the cartoon poured scorn on, was Zimbabwe whose Warriors team played Brazil. This was a major coup for the country, one which saw her detractors scurrying for cover. But not so for the Standard.
The cartoon drew stout reactions from irate readers who included my good writer-friend, Alexander Kanengoni, and some white reader whose abrupt name is given as McCaw, as if to mean "son of ca (o) w", assuming of course that he is Irish. I will ignore Kanengoni who made the points I expected him to make as the soul of our Nation.
The cartoon bites McCaw
I excerpt McCaw: "Your cartoon… digs new depths in self-hate. So we "cursed" Brazil, did we? The only thing funny about this attempt at humour is the sheer scale of the ignorance on display…. It is easy to understand self-hate among Zimbabweans; our decay is an utter disgrace and it can be hard not to be bitter. But you expect a newspaper to be part of an enlightened community able to tell the difference between despising the leadership of one’s country, and despising the country itself, sentiment reflected only in the plague of self-hate that dominates our national debate, and newspaper pages, today."
The immediate reaction of any reader is to doff to the editor of the Standard for being fair-minded enough to publish this dig at his work, at his paper. But not so with Nevanji Madanhire, the editor. Like a poor host, he turns on the writer, savaging him cryptically: "Many readers saw the cartoon differently. Editor". Haa-a, what is this? So the editor published the letter in order to set McCaw up for a savage comeback? What is McCaw supposed to do, write back yet again? Anyway, if "many" readers saw it differently, why not publish the views of the "many readers" in countermand to McCaw? Here is an editor who chose when to publish McCaw’s reaction.
If he had many readers who saw the cartoon differently, surely he would have juxtaposed these to the McCaw letter in order to contain him soundly. Or is he the "many" readers he invokes to silence McCaw? But all this is only a small point on the profession of journalism and how it’s failed by our professional wordsmiths. In any case the Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe has already made the point, albeit lumping it disproportionately on NewsDay, which is only the latest worse instalment in a very bad stable. Let us get back to the nub of the altercation: self-hate.
Rekindling Rhodesian ethos
It will be fatally wrong to treat the cartoon as aberrational self-hate. Rather, the cartoon is the latest manifestation of a baffling editorial ethos on which Trevor Ncube and his white partners have chosen to launch themselves. It is a Rhodesian ethos projecting itself in post-independence. That ethos cannot take on the form of "Property and Finance", a right-of-right wing publication which thrived before the rise of the Rhodesia Front under Ian Smith. That would be utter folly given the new post-independence circumstances. Nor can that ethos take the form of the Rhodesian Financial Gazette, itself a Rhodesia Front mouthpiece associated with some of Ncube’s current partners, launched then to initially curb and then sink the ultra-right ethos of Property and Finance. Still that would be insupportable under the times where Rhodesia Front politics can only survive with some dignity and acceptability as liberalism, as mouthpiece for the human rights lobby, or better still as Movement for Democratic Change paraded as an African political construct. That way, matters will not boomerang.
Mutant Rhodesia
That way the Rhodesia Front ethos sells itself as human rights advocacy, as sound macroeconomic advice or as pro-Morgan Tsvangirai (a black leader’s) politics. Or better still as the censorious American Government, the British Government, some Nordic Government or the unimpressed European Union. In between, you have a rich belt of nuances: it can be an academic like Tony Hawkins; some South African investor; a black cleric like Tutu or Sentamu; some disgruntled ex-Zanu (PF) like Simba Makoni (Dabengwa’s braai stick), some militant tribalist, or like a fascist scholar called Robert Rotberg who is repackaged as "a prominent academic who has published extensively on Zimbabwe."
Resurgent Rhodesia Front politics need Trojan Horses by way of a third-party voice, persons, outlooks, states, institutions, classes and interests. Once you understand that, then you understand why ZimInd, the Standard and NewsDay are structured the way they are, indeed why dominant whites have to appear peripheral while, marginal blacks are dressed in the garb of false consequence. That is why you have associate editors with full charge and Editors-in-chief enjoying the grief of paid idleness.
Cursing sores, crushing soul
Trevor Ncube was a year behind me, Nevanji Madanhire a year ahead. Both are educated, well educated: the one in Economic History, the other in the Arts (with a literature major). You cannot tell me men of such education and exposure find it unfathomable that Zimbabwe can be "a wayward child" without being "a curse"; that you can call Zimbabwe "shitty country", while oozing your love for it at every pore, indeed that you can curse its sores without crushing its soul. Why would it be so easy for ZimInd to propagate Cranswick’s lie that ACR is an indigenous company when they know or should know that it is not, and will never be?
Since when are indigenous Zimbabweans found on London’s Alternative Markets? Why is it difficult to attack Zanu (PF) and its alleged venality without prejudicing the country’s rightful claim to selling its diamonds? Why not attack Zimbabwe’s waywardness without undermining her prodigious endowments? Or is this ZimInd’s vote of confidence in Zanu (PF), namely that Zanu (PF) is Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe is Zanu (PF)?
Voting with hostile foreigners
Why would it be so difficult for ZimInd to make a case for the democratisation of Zimbabwe (whatever that means) without shoring up the lost case for sanctions by hostile foreign states? Why propose an asymmetrical relationship between your country and the West which, colonial headmaster-like, must stand in judgement over your affairs as a people, as a nation? Why help America in her threadbare choreography of no-sanctions-against-Zimbabwe lie when the first illustration of the devastating effect of those sanctions is at ZimInd itself?
Why endorse Rotberg’s call for an American-led invasion of Zimbabwe as if such an invasion
will be some gigantic smart bomb calibrated to selectively kill this one deserving target called Mugabe a.k.a. Zanu (PF), while leaving Zimbabwe and the rest green and verdurous? Is there something called patriotism deficit? Who hath it? He that died a-Wednesday?
Peeing on our fontanel
To simple readers all this would be baffling. Except its not. That is exactly how the project is supposed to work. You create a psychosis of defeat and paralysis, a psychosis of unrelieved doom and hopelessness, of ever burgeoning, enveloping crisis until an independent people begin to regret their freedom, begin to believe their freedom and sovereignty was undeserved, a horrible mistake, indeed a curse whose repair and lasting cure is a speedy return to colonial bondage. And will it matter whether it’s the British, their Rhodesians, Americans, the Dutch, the Germans or the lesser small Danes sitting over us, peeing on our fontanel, itself the seat of intellect? It is all an extra stripe. What does it matter to a tiger? Why indulge such conscious, gratuitous fatal self-hate? And do so to levels which begin to elicit criticism and outrage even from those for whose benefit the endgame of this cynical indulgence is calculated?
Rhodesians never die
And it’s not just ZimInd and its siblings. ZimDaily is yet another. Designed for exactly the same project, funded by the same forces, the site exceeded its paymaster’s expectation by suggesting the First Family had been put on the American list of funders of terrorism. Dutifully, NewsDay picks up the lie and runs with it, without worrying about the most basic journalistic duties. The American ambassador, himself one of the beneficiaries of this project, is both embarrassed and livid, and is all over corridors tendering profuse apologies. No word from NewsDay. None! Mugabe is fair game for any lie, any calumny. ZimDaily? Well, they publish a home-page filling picture featuring Mugabe and Ray, the American ambassador, with a caption: "Too Close?" Simply correcting a falsehood against President Mugabe is culpable. He must be left to stew in their lie and anyone who intervenes, never mind that he provides the dollar, becomes the enemy. Now, from whose and which standpoint is ZimDaily attacking the American ambassador? Indeed, Rhodesians never die!
To a Europe without love
The re-engagement team went to Europe and came back. Empty-handed, critics would allege. Let us get the facts laid on the table. The team met with Lady Ashton, representing the European Union. She was very gracious, reportedly, and used a tight racket to pummel the ball back to Harare. The next and future dialogues will be held in Harare, she said, graciously. Except no one will come from Brussels. Brussels’ man here is what Zimbabwe will dialogue with. The reader may remember this was the original recommendation of EU ambassadors resident here, a proposal which Zimbabwe flatly rejected. If the EU wanted to pitch re-engagement at the level of its ambassador, retorted Zimbabwe, then Foreign Affairs officials, not ministers of Government, would meet the EU.
Amidst such trash, the talks stalemated. Europe went a step further; it spewed hot volcanic ash, thereby putting matters in the freezer. Still Europe went furthest by getting both water and snow to douse its ash to the utter delight of the Zimbabwean delegation which thought the way was now clear for re-engagement. They left for Europe to temporarily run into a visa roadblock laid by old European thinking. That overcome, they arrived, met and conferred, only to be told to go back home to exactly the same.
French fries, Gallic truths
But there was another meeting – more important in my view – involving the French. The French are no longer Europe’s public relations face they were under Chirac. They are the rough diamond of Europe, quite unkempt but admirably honest. They made two short points, devastating to their immediate interlocutors but crucial to national planners. One, it is not about democracy, the MDC or some such nebulous ideal that we have sanctions against Zimbabwe. It is about our interests, individually as countries, collectively as the European bloc. Two, it is not about the progress you make under GPA or the inclusive Government. It is about our reading of it, in relation to our interests, singly and collectively. Only when these two points are satisfied, proceeded the French, will sanctions go. Full stop. MDC-T’s Mangoma, himself head of the delegation, heard it and reported as much to Government. Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga of MDC heard it too. So did Chinamasa of Zanu (PF). These are the two hard facts which Lady Ashton, true to British tradition of civility, hid behind effusive sweetness which a gracious language always enable.
The Real enemy
So why attack ZimInd, I hear you ask, gentle reader. For deriving perverse delight in all this, indeed for eulogising Europe for its stance while beating down own side. But also for not grasping issues. Clearly it is not about "democracy deficit", whatever that means. It is about the interests of European countries in relation to us, which interests we seem to undermine by our own assertiveness and the grave mistake of looking elsewhere for friendships. It is about interests hurt when the native discovers that he too needs diamonds which he should own and from which he must derive some benefit beyond the low wage. Now, you help Europe and her ignoble motives when you dress all this up as "democracy deficit". In effect you are making this masked rapacity and pillage deserved, the continued occupation and exploitation of Zimbabwe’s resources righteous.
Weaning the MDC
The trip by the re-engagement team was both necessary and timely. Far more important than securing a positive answer from Europe at this stage, is to forge a national consensus against sanctions. And the starting point is in the Inclusive Government. All parties must be convinced sanctions are real and a threat to the national interest and well-being. An act of hostility, not charity, by foreign powers with ulterior motives here. We must be at one on that one. Secondly, it must become clear to everyone that these sanctions were never meant to benefit Zimbabweans – singly or organised as a political party. They were meant to push for European interests, with the MDC being a morally dignifying pretext. This is why these measures do not attempt to adjust themselves in order to match the changing interests, status and role of the MDC formations, both in Government and in the country. But for as long as either of the formations argue for the retention of sanctions – whether wholly or in graduated fashion – Europe and America have a serpent, however, thin, to clutch at. The MDC must be weaned from the whole discourse that legitimise sanctions so Europe and America admit to the real reasons for their imposition in the first place.
Winning the people over
But also the people must be convinced that indeed sanctions are not meant for their benefit. It is not difficult to fathom the perplexity of a thinking MDC supporter who sees Europe refusing to remove sanctions to a delegation led by one of his leaders. Or to hear the Americans telling his president that the MDC has no power to end sanctions because they do not own them in the first place. Of course Zanu (PF) will cut in to say MDC deservedly owns the consequences of those sanctions on Zimbabweans. This is so, so important both in deepening understanding of the provenance of these illegal sanctions and in mobilising the country to offset them. When the Independent takes the infamous line it does, you begin to understand how it is in fact playing high politics for blocs of hostile states against its own country and people. That is my point.
Flip-flopping Biti
But a lot more is happening. Biti is embarrassed by NGOs who propose him as the preferred alternative monitor, to Chikane. He has to dispel that for his own local political survival. The MDC-T itself is playing double on the matter: telling Europe and America not to let Zimbabwe sell its diamonds before regime change, while joining forces with Zanu (PF) in demanding an end to the abuse of the Kimberley Process. So Biti tells the world Zimbabwe must be allowed to sell her diamonds. But in the same vein, he is also telling the world US$30m from a diamond parcel already sold by Government, cannot be accounted for. And he makes this disclosure on a crucial day for the Kimberley Process. What was that in aid of? He has the answer to the so-called missing amount. But he had to make the point to complicate matters for Zimbabwe at St Petersburg. And he also roots for ACR, urging for a win-win outcome in the litigation on the matter. What is the Minister, himself a lawyer, saying to the Bench, saying about ACR and its current European cast? It is this ambivalence which defines the trajectory of the politics of the country.
Incredible imbroglios
It was clear to the MDC-T that Russia would deliver to Zimbabwe the right to sell its diamonds. It is also clear to the MDC that once that right is granted, diamonds will transform this country, presumably at the expense of MDC-T politics. The party sought to be with the hounds, while running with the hares. But step by step, inch by inch, the whole inclusive body politic is moving towards convergence, thanks to "incredible imbroglios" which history throws into the affairs of man, as Milan Kundera would say. Today Biti takes on European mining magnates with the venom of Robert Mugabe. Is that not interesting? Such are the sea-changes which go unnoticed by ZimInd. That stable continues to serve a reader who is either by-gone or too far ahead and so full to mind the aroma behind. The psyche has changed; the playful messenger is still on the way, carrying, not the message, but the stench of Rhodesian staleness. Yet I staunchly defend ZimInd’s right to publish. Shitty ZimInd.
Icho!
Nathaniel Manheru is a columnist for the Saturday Herald. E-mail him: nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw