To be liberated from the liberators

To be liberated from the liberators

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THE most distressing reality facing Zimbabwe today is not the demise of the leading opposition and President Mugabe’s disappointing rule per se.

What is most disappointing is the narrow definition or understanding of the whole noble concept of liberation.

For those seeking the root cause to the chasm that the MDC has slipped into the answer lies in the running definitions of liberation in Zimbabwe, most of which are instinctively myopic and parsimonious.

Since 2000 we have seen how the ruling party has resorted to total blackmail with some in the Civil Society and the opposition being trapped into defining their cause within the premise prescribed by the oppressors who want to be known as liberators.

The tendency has been for those who are opposed to the march of evil in Zimbabwe to want to define the way forward within the mode of denying the accusations coming from the riders.

For instance all those who have purchased wholesale into Mugabe’s thinking believe that some of us who don’t want to recognise him as a hero but see him as a politician whom we hear fought the war but know for sure to have contributed towards our misery today are sell-outs.

It will be folly for us then to want to define our existence and worldview in a manner that denies the false accusation that we are “sell-outs” because it helps the propagandist’s cause.

"I am not proud of Mugabe. Instead I am afraid of him. His passionate language, his insults, the evident hate trapped in every of his word and other threats he has issued since 1980"

MTHULISI MATHUTHU

We should see ourselves as people seeking liberation from an albatross of other people’s malevolent cause they want us to believe is liberation.

Often times many Civil Society leaders, opposition leaders, journalists and business people have spelled out their idea of a better future by wanting to announce that they shared the same views with war heroes and that they were Zimbabweans.

This is done as means to shackle off the pathetic tag of “selling out” first before saying what one really wants to say.

The trouble with that thinking is that it sounds as if anybody (even the accusers don’t really mean it) ever doubted that one was a Zimbabwean. Being a Zimbabwean does not mean we should not write to share with our
friends that Zimbabwe is boiling and is burning its people. Such thinking is of the earlier era when people lived in caves and did not have computers,
newspapers and telephones.

Being dangerous to Zimbabwe to me means betraying the trust bestowed upon oneself to lead wisely, uplift one’s people and provide them with opportunities to access the basic needs by plonking oneself in their
memory and every facet of life without allowing them to see the other way.

It certainly entails the abuse of the collective spirit of the collective liberation sought years gone by into personal property and certainly not writing in
a newspaper or in a computer the fact that basic rights are being broken with impunity in Zimbabwe.

I am an independent journalist with a personal opinion, which I should be free to share with others who share with me their own problems across the world.
Therefore the sort of patriotism being fostered here will not deter me from writing.

I feel obliged to turn away this sort of patriotism because it is boring and dictatorial standing directly on the way of the spirit of the concept of freedom.
For example it has destroyed the sense and urge for choice and that for unfettered reasoning. People have to define their tastes, desires and wishes within the premise of the “Third Chimurenga”. The whole concept
of ‘principle”, ‘birth right” and “Zimbabwean” or “African Patriotism” is now understood from that fundamentally flawed and laughable premise.

Criticism of one’s own country and leaders (Who don’t want dialogue or to listen to anybody for that matter) is taken to mean selling one’s birth right. We are told that the Americans are so blindly patriotic as not to criticise their leaders yet what we are not told is that America allows its radicals and
newspapers to lampoon their leaders.

The evidence is there at the US Public Affairs department library, which displays books by the likes of Aldridge Cleaver, Richard Wright and company.

Rather than become a source of pride for some of us the heroes of the past wars' shadows haunt the young people. They instil a sense of fear. They don’t allow the young folk to choose their own heroes without being cajoled like they were left alone to choose their Nehandas.

For example I am not proud of Mugabe. Instead I am afraid of him. His passionate language, his insults, the evident hate trapped in every of his word and other threats he has issued since 1980 send shivers down my spine.

I don’t want to have such a hero or to be associated with his story. I don’t want to be associated with Nehanda because I can’t see how she can rise and help me out of my own problems. Whenever I want to have anything to do with dead people, I just think about my grandmother.

I find it abominable that there should be a form of straight-line patriotism embodied in the memory of Mugabe, Takawira and Nehanda. That sort of liberation which, resents democratic pressure.

Instead it is comfortable to refuse to be heaped together with the people whom one doesn’t want to be associated with, detest efforts to be blackmailed and to expose a tissue of lies placed on young people’s minds like a concrete block.

People seek liberation in different spaces, scopes, and definitions and for different ends. If Mugabe’s definition of liberation and the improvement of people’s lives entail fighting against Smith and the taking away of land from Whites mine is a different one.

I want to live in a society where those who waged their liberations should not be allowed to cajole and pester or blackmail others into accepting their own interpretations of the world.

In this definition of liberation heroes are those who allow others to dissent, those who allow others to question them and those who don’t get angry when asked to account. Heroism is about the enhancement of a people’s existence, expansion of freedoms, the provision of space for choice, diversity and free
competition. It is about decreasing injustice.

I define my liberation in terms of total detachment or unwilling minimal attachment to undemocratic systems of control and in terms of my ability to access the world and other thoughts without fearing reprisal from the reified gods of the “liberation”.

“To respect the sacred,” writes Salman Rushdie, “ is to be paralysed by it. The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- Uncertainty, Progress, Change -- into crimes.”

There it is in a nutshell.

When my freedom is swept away or is threatened I make noise through my computer because I am not a negotiator and neither am I a diplomat. I am a writer and writing is one of the means of protecting freedom.

Unfortunately the written word sparks emotional reaction but I am not responsible.

If anybody is offended by my writing, sorry but I will not willingly stop.

It is soothing to live among a people who want to hear your word always and yet still have the courage to tell you plainly why they cant buy it than to live among those who will bludgeon your word and go on to forcibly feed you with their own brazen falsehoods, a cluster of prejudices perpetrated in the name of principle, democracy and national pride.

As Saul Bellow wrote: “There is no fineness or accuracy of suppression. If you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining”.

Now, just a question: Isn’t this PRECISE and UNQUESTIONABLE?

Answer: It is.

So, writers of the world, lets spill the ink.
Mthulisi Mathuthu is a Zimbabwean journalist and New Zimbabwe.com columnist. He is currently on leave writing a book. Views expressed here are his own. He can be contacted at: thuthuma@yahoo.com
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