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'Could somebody please respond to Mahoso'
By Blessing-Miles
Tendi
IBBO Mandaza,
Claude Mararike, Vimbai G Chivaura, Sheunesu Mpepereki, Godfrey Chikowore
and Ngugi wa Mirii are key nationalist public intellectuals who have
legitimised Zanu PF authoritarianism at one point or another since 2000.
They are or once were part of a cabal of nationalist public intellectuals aligned with Zanu PF that pontificated on current politics and liberation history, on various ZTV talk shows and prime time news, as ‘analysts’ and ‘experts’.
They resurface in the government-owned press episodically, penning a superfluity of articles about Zimbabwean and African history, national elections, and hero worshipping Robert Mugabe.
However, Tafataona Mahoso has loomed larger than any other public intellectual supportive of Zanu PF. Through the Sunday Mail, Mahoso manufactures a weekly outflow of theories of Western conspiracy and political siege against Zimbabwe.
Mahoso depicts Zimbabwe’s sovereignty as under threat from America and Britain. In order to defend Zimbabwe’s sovereignty, Zimbabweans are encouraged to be ‘patriotic’. To be ‘patriotic’ means supporting Zanu PF because it ‘delivered independence’. Anything short of this is ‘unpatriotic’ and renders one a ‘sell-out’ to the imperialists.
Mahoso’s intention is to herd Zimbabweans under the umbrella of eternal Zanu PF authoritarianism. His arguments are nothing more than a convenient apparatus for absolving Zanu PF of any responsibility for Zimbabwe’s economic, social and political decay.
When I interviewed MDC parliamentarian Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga in 2005, she recounted the following interesting encounter: “I remember visiting my Glen Norah constituency in 2003 to keep abreast with needs there and a very old man came to see me. He had a copy of the Sunday Mail. I thought he had come to ask for food relief or health care assistance. I got a shock when he started waving his copy of the Sunday Mail in frustration and asked me, ‘could somebody please respond to Mahoso’.”
Disturbingly, that old man’s plea remains unmet because we have continued to allow Zanu PF and the nationalist public intellectuals to privatise and re-narrate our liberation history to suit their authoritarian ends. We have allowed them to define what it means to be a patriotic Zimbabwean and what it means to be a ‘sell-out’. We have stood by while the likes of Mahoso have portrayed human rights and democracy as unimportant yet the liberation struggle was as much about land as it was about human rights and democracy.
Mahoso’s contention that human rights is Western imperialism -- as if human rights has had no significance in Zimbabwe, independent of Western-based human rights campaigners -- is divorced from Zimbabwe’s historical and contemporary political and historical experience. Human rights are not rented from the West.
It is an offshoot from the Zimbabwean people’s resistance to colonial oppression. The West does not have a monopoly on the history of human rights being born out of struggles against oppression.
“Without the experience of sickness there can be no idea of health. And without the fact of oppression; there can be no practice of resistance and no notion of rights,” Mahmood Mamdani once said.
The Second Chimurenga was a struggle by majority black Zimbabweans for human rights in the civic sphere and for self-determination. Self-determination is one of the central facets of the human rights doctrine, hence human rights is engraved in Zimbabwe’s historical trajectory.
Mahoso’s writings habitually demonstrate how Western governments invoke human rights erratically and hypocritically. He is not concerned with the extent of human rights observance in Zimbabwe because his principal point of concern is the genuineness of Western governments championing human rights.
Consequently, Mahoso pays little attention to the human rights doctrine itself, the universal strivings for equality and freedom that have spurred its proliferation globally, and to the reasons why ordinary Zimbabwean citizens, the local human rights community and the MDC, resort to human rights language.
In making the unmasking of Western double standards on human rights a central pursuit, Mahoso implies that uncovering Western double standards is of greater good than lifting the veil on the Zanu PF government’s human rights abuses. Nothing could be further from the truth than this.
Struggles for human rights have had and continue to have a local history. Zimbabwe’s local human rights community, opposition and citizens have their own particular and legitimate reasons for believing in and invoking human rights language. They have legitimate reasons particular to the Zimbabwean historical and political context - the emergence of Zanu PF’s authoritarian nationalism, for instance - for resorting to human rights language and appealing to external human rights promoters for support, no matter how selective or hypocritical that support may be.
Zimbabweans must reclaim their history from Zanu PF and its intellectuals. We ought to speak strongly of the true values of Zimbabwe’s liberation history in the independent media. Is the state of affairs in Zimbabwe today a reflection of the liberation values that we fought for?
Are we articulating a compelling defence of the validity of human rights and democracy in Zimbabwe? Does sovereignty lie with Zanu PF elites or Zimbabwean citizens? Who are the REAL ‘sell-outs’ standing in contradiction to Chimurenga ideals – Zanu PF, MDC or civil society?
Zanu PF and its intellectuals have manipulated ideas and our history to legitimise their undemocratic practices since 2000 while many of us have been ensconced in the false sense of security that we are ‘right’. Civil society and the opposition need to absolve themselves of the misguided belief that because they are ‘right’ they do not need to confront the likes of Mahoso.
Any public intellectual who argues, as Mahoso did in the Sunday Mail, that “President Mugabe is the future” when Mugabe has presided over unprecedented economic and social decline is an irresponsible intellectual whose ideas should be challenged robustly.
It is tempting to
state that Mahoso’s writings must be quarantined in an asylum
for deranged ideas but, instead, they ought to be challenged and discredited
for being the threat to national security that they are!
Blessing-Miles
Tendi is a researcher at Oxford University. Email:
tendimiles@operamail.com
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