George Charamba: Mugabe's backward front man

George Charamba: Mugabe's backward front man

• To be liberated from the liberators

• Just what is the meaning of change?

(READ MTHULISI'S PREVIOUS ARTICLES)
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe's Press Secretary, George Charamba, is generally a nice rural fellow given to chatting with journalists during both local and international presidential visits.

Those who have known him for a long time talk of a man who is naturally very nearly cordial and jocose and of a man, who despite his known CIO connection, had remained reserved, until 2000 when he began to work with Professor Jonathan Moyo under the 'Third Chimurenga' project.

From then on, they say, he began to want to sound like a tough Presidential megaphone with no time for 'ignorant' and 'unpatriotic' journalists; a busy man who was always engrossed in profitable work.

With time he easily degenerated into an irascible, fiery and motor-mouthed fellow given to writing vitriolic articles or issuing out libellous statements to his cohorts in the state media. He began to pen horrible and poisonous articles under pseudonyms with elusive malice. (Nathaniel Manheru for example).

The same Charamba is today suing a leading business newspaper for alleged defamation. Under scrutiny, this type of Charamba naturally disintegrates like a wet tissue.

Reading through his works, one still detects that same old Charamba who is a gullible and backward front man of an unyielding tyrant, a victim of the syllabus.

Never mind that he is painfully seeking to project himself as an effective stone throwing type of a modern spin doctor -- a leave no stone unturned type of a
man. His works reveal an unchanging student whose library today still resembles that of a 1978 freshman.

"Charamba's performance on the intellectual front is sharply symbolic and richly telling. Generally, tyrants want navigable front men who hardly question
anything"

MTHULISI MATHUTHU

It is difficult to imagine that he reads or knows writers like Arundathi Roy, Salman Rushdie, Lizeka Mda, J. M. Cotzee, Uvarshi Bhutalia, Eduardo Galeano and a host of others who have emerged from Africa and the rest of the Third World giving insight into the injustices of the post-modern era.

Whenever he quotes, which he often does with pathetic enthusiasm, the trend has been backwards to Oscar Wilde, Dickens, Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce, Eliot, Hemmingway etc -- the writers of the earlier era, whom he obviously came across through the syllabus at A Level and at University.

The habit of quoting the early writers often reveals a streak of dishonesty and confusion. Dishonesty first: Whenever he quotes some of the many proverbs from Chinua Achebe's books the tendency has been to generalise that they are 'West African', which is partly true, but the intention being to hide that they are essentially Igbo proverbs lifted from such-such a book by Achebe.

One senses here a man who is evidently ashamed of his quoting rate that he will occasionally ascribe to popular West African wisdom some material lifted from known books.

Don't they say you shall judge their intellectual potency (never mind their college education) by the rate at which they quote other writers without direct
acknowledgement?

Like a grasshopper, this supposed learned person jumps from the Imperial well of knowledge to the African liberation literature (or vice versa) without noticing how tainted he is so as not to be convincing even as he tries to project himself as an African patriot. The globetrotting, which widens the credibility gap, has more to do with confusion than it has with being a liberated intellectual firmly able to marshal the facts from anywhere to make a formidable point.

At least he is not alone. There are many writers today in Zimbabwe (sports journalists especially) who resort to meaningless statistics and books to bury their own prejudice and sheer ignorance with the aim of coming out as intellectually sound and consequently invincible.

Other books that have a common influence on Charamba's world-view are Mass Communication Theory textbooks that he read when he was doing his Masters.

Here is a guy whose writing comes out like a laboured effort. You will imagine that he packs large volumes of the Victorian literature, a dictionary and
communication textbooks on his desk to pen an article larded with bombastic words for a whole week.

It will be interesting to know when he last bought a book. Here is a man who is a clear victim of the syllabus mentality -- the type who went to university to
read books given to him by his lecturers. None of the books he quotes sounds like a personal discovery. It's all from the tutor's library.

A couple of years ago Charamba had an interview with the Zanu PF editor Lovemore Mataire (then a Herald reporter) in which he projected himself as an astute consumer of African literature who was proud of his university education.

This sought image explains to us today why he is forever dragging in Achebe to his arguments. Here is a kleptocrat whose literary appreciation is so low that he hardly recognises the irony loaded in his writings.

One wonders if he has ever read Home and Exile which succinctly demonstrates that Achebe's writings have nothing to do with justifying African tyranny.

Achebe's essays are a direct assault on the spirit of authoritarianism such as exhibited in Charamba's AIPPA and his meddling at the ZBH.

Achebe's writing is about letting other people tell their own stories. He reiterated this a couple of years ago at the annual Steve Biko Memorial lectures when he, as the guest of honour, advocated for the opening up of spaces for unfettered scholarship and frankly disapproved of Mugabe's type of African patriotism.

Ironically, the writings of Mugabe's spokesperson are the other side of The Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) and Mister Johnson (Joyce Cary) the books which were served on the African people as their story yet they were essentially about shutting the genuine stories from coming out.

This is perhaps the reason why a supposed zealot of an imagined African revolution in Harare has become a publicist for the early writers of the Empire whose writings were not about the universally accepted notion of the freedom of the soul but essentially about the expansion of the frontiers.

Why, for instance, doesn't Charamba quote Dr Chivaura, Dr. Tafataona Mahoso and Prof. Claude Mararike as much as he quotes the imperial writers? Could this be an indicator to the fallacy of overflowing intellectual abundance on the domestic front peddled day and night in the captive press?

Charamba's performance on the intellectual front is sharply symbolic and richly telling. Generally, tyrants want navigable front men who hardly question
anything. The type of service people who never bother to prowl for other ideas outside the dictates or the syllabus of the leader.

Mugabe is a teacher who wants students who listen to what he has taught. He teaches Victorian literature to his wife and Charamba is therefore not lost. He has to remain where his master is still stationed.

While the literature of the earlier era is interesting it however fails frequently to address the times. Quoting a 16th Century book from a 1978 library hardly
announces wisdom and knowledge. It is interesting to witness how, symbolically though, archaic arguments are proffered in supported by quotations from books written during the days of 'Oliver Twist' and 'Okonkwo'.

Just as he refuses to read beyond his college syllabus, Charamba effectively symbolises the 'locust class' bureaucracy which is a hermetically sealed body of people with frozen minds with no time to rise and smell the coffee; a phalanx of kleptocrats who are forever raising the banner of being unnecessary.

This is a lowbrow fellow who apparently represents a whole retinue that is hostage to an archaic Victorian character who resents new things and is as irascible and malevolent as the Kings of that time.

Just as he dishonestly quotes from Achebe, Charamba is a spokesperson of a people who will brazenly plunder the war victims compensation fund and go on to dishonestly acquire fuel from NOCZM to sell in the black market.

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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