Re-imagining Zimbabwe, seated under the shade of a toxic tree

The year is 2000 and we have just survived Y2K. Fears of an apocalyptic, extinction-level event ushering us into the new millennium have been proven untrue. We are gathered at the sports ground of a school somewhere in rural Zimbabwe, and some senior teachers have been given the task of dissuading the student population from engaging in any party political activity. Unbeknownst to us then, a calamity that will turn out to have devastating consequences for the country is brewing. We are, in my class, mostly 14- and 15-year-olds who think they have missed Y2K, and can now revel in the fictions of Mungoshi, Ngugi, Achebe and many of our ‘setbooks’, as they are called. A draft constitution gets a no vote. By the end of the year, we are in the midst of what are variously being called land occupations, invasions, resettlement and reform.

At the beginning of a new term, some teachers and classmates do not return to school. We are told they left for Canada, or New Zealand. Some leave in the middle of term, for the United Kingdom, United States of America; all we are left with are names and memories. Zimbabwe makes international headlines, and we suddenly realise, as we come of age, reading Paulo Freire, Othello and Death of a Salesman, and The Colour Purple, in the midst of the vibrancy and sometimes squalor of the township of Dzivarasekwa, that we have never really removed the shackles of oppression, that the post-colony is a fiction, that we are acting in a tragedy, dreams wilting like a raisin in the sun, and that we might write letters to God, yet our fate and future lies in a past and present that is human, all too human.

By the time I got to the University of Zimbabwe, the country was reeling in the midst of an economic and political quagmire. Thinking about thinking became a luxury. From the uncomfortable chairs of high school in Dzivarasekwa, one friend, who had a good head between his shoulders, walked the corridors of the university for a few months, and decided that his own and his family’s welfare lay more in trading foreign currency on the streets of central Harare, not in studying economics in the classroom. Economics was not doing anything to help him make sense of, or survive in, the Zimbabwean economy. His name was Lewis. Pronounced cheekbones, a limp in his step and a sly smile. We would often pass by his spot in town because we knew he would have a few notes to spare to get us a drink. Those of us who soldiered on in these corridors did so not because we knew better. That is what was there to be done, despite crisis.

Doctors left. Engineers flew out. Nurses were wanted in other places. Skilled and unskilled likewise voted with their feet, because they felt their vote did not count when families were starving. It is fanciful for politicians to both blame those who left for lacking whatever blind version of patriotism they assume must be had, and to expect them to just return or put their money into an economy that crushed them, lost them investments, pensions, savings. Robbed of dignity by those erstwhile liberators, it is absurd to expect support for a revolution that eats its own children. They can luxuriate in conspicuous wealth whilst the rest of us wallow in offending poverty. The exodus will not stop.

I use we, us, ours, these collective references, not because I know. I have fragments of experiences, and some hope that a collective conscience exists. Who am I, anyway, to want to tell fellow Zimbabweans how to think and which way to go? I just express here desires, questions, troubling the sites of stable and morally superior nauseating meta- narratives about a complex history and present. I want to ramble on, and hope that many other young Zimbabweans ramble on in re-imagining Zimbabwe.

Demise, like growth or success, is not something that can be summarised, that of Zimbabwe included. The complexity of the experience, the feelings and emotions that accompany witnessing the decimation of human dignity and the ushering in of a consistent suffering are overwhelming. We are not a generation raised on hope, not at least as far as I look at Zimbabwe, no. We saw a sliver of light for a minute and thereafter were plunged into a darkness in which we are groping for a way out. We were raised on crisis and dashed prospects of recovery, our dreams hammered against the anvil of a local kleptocracy in cahoots with a pretentious and self-interested international morality. That generation of hope is the one that left schools and universities to join the liberation movement. Hope was the hearts and wombs of mothers, twisting and turning in pain as their children lay down their lives for a promise that one day, the rule of an oppressive white minority would give way to an inclusive Zimbabwe of milk and honey, huchi nemukaka.

There was an imagination then of a Zimbabwe that this generation wanted to see. I remember, as a young boy, watching the videos of people celebrating independence at Rufaro Stadium, Bob Marley singing Zimbabwe, and the euphoria that was transferred from a past event to me. After I shook the hand of Robert Mugabe at a 21 February movement event at the City Sports Centre in the early 90s, when I was in primary school, I did not want to wash my hand for days. We all wanted to be Robert Mugabe, playing with plastic balls with friends in the roads, being told by those whose mothers were domestic servants in the suburbs that white people did not go to the toilet! I vowed that when I become president, I would find out! How laughable it is now, to have young Zimbabweans imagining being president!

As some say, what is amazing is how these (black) bodies have survived, even in unwelcoming exile. Unfortunately, Chenjerai Hove did not, and Zimbabwe is shamed. They make a good story. A fantastic source of raw material. The sensational and hegemonic story of overcoming adversity is attractive and fascinating to many. We make, as a country, good fodder for the narrative of crisis. News, articles, books, talks. Thinking Zimbabwe, like many crises offer, has been as hegemonic as the interests that shape the directions of the narratives that dominate. Are we a generation that will be able to think ourselves and for ourselves? What does it even mean to think ourselves into existence? Have we even had time to think, in the midst of trying to eke out a basic existence? Or are we supposed to sit under the shade of a toxic tree, ride on the shoulders of giants, as they say, when we know too well that these giants are not ours, and even though, for a while, it might seem like they are carrying us somewhere, ultimately, we remain dwarfs, to be crushed and consumed as fit for the giants? It is all good to lay claim to a universality and humanity, which often turn perverse, when we say we have as much right to a dignified existence as any other. Who will give that dignity? Will we take it? What has been universal about the decades of suffering and dehumanisation?

The fissures that characterise trying to re-imagine Zimbabwe have been confronting some over the years. As Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni asked, do Zimbabweans exist? The nation building and social engineering project for what we call Zimbabwe, as a supposedly postcolonial entity, is nascent and floundering. Young black Zimbabweans are trying to figure out their place in this entity. Young white Zimbabweans have not been constantly featured as part of the hegemonic conversation of re-imagining Zimbabwe. Actually, my encounters, which may obviously be due to my social circles, with young white Zimbabweans in the spaces currently being regarded as Zimbabwean in the diaspora, have been scarce. This is not to say they are absent, but it represents, in my own imagination, an absence and invisibility that points to historically produced and enduring ways that shape how we inhabit the spaces, and the national imagination, of this place called Zimbabwe. So who then is a young Zimbabwean?

In this period of crisis, what happened in Matebeleland in the 1980s has found a prominent voice. One then wonders, if it wasn’t for the expulsion of white farmers, whose story would be making headlines about Zimbabwe? Would anyone even worry about Matebeleland? We are trapped in being Shona or Ndebele, in the politics of exclusion, in the being of things that are limitations, not enablers. It seems those hierarchies of being and belonging hold sway. Some have a relationship to the land, the wildlife, the minerals (disguised as concern for the economy of Zimbabwe), not the people. They are prepared to see millions of Zimbabweans suffer unless their relationship to power is restored. Some have a relationship to a historical idea of conquest and domination, a privilege that allows them to imagine that people should hold hands and dance kumbaya, because history is, well, history. They belong to the ‘move on, it’s all in the past’ school. I know some genocides to which we cannot say ‘it’s the past’.

In some conversations I have had (with mostly older men), they have referred to Rhodesia, not Zimbabwe, as a temporal reference to when it was, as well as an understanding, it seems, of the present. Rhodesia. 36 years ago an official proclamation should have put Rhodesia to rest, but it did not. Its ghosts haunt and gourd us. For some it is now, a desired present. Are we really postcolonial, are we there yet, what is that ‘there’? Are people nostalgic about Rhodesia? Is there any merit in arguing that ‘Rhodesia was better-run’? For whom? I was surprised to be told that an esteemed colleague felt that colonialism should have lasted a bit longer to enable the African elite to understand the modes of rational government, as well as to further develop infrastructure. He argued that if British colonialism had lasted for a while longer than it did, we would have been in a better place. Who says we all want to be postcolonial? In the case of Zimbabwe, as in many of the colonised spaces of Africa, one has to admit that it is not like colonialism ended because the coloniser suddenly woke up to the realisation of the humanity of the (black) other’s body. It was never philanthropy that started, or led to, the fiction of the end of colonialism. Our tragedy today takes place as Zimbabwe shouts that out loud and clear. We do not have to give credence to those who talk of colonialism having ended aeons ago, who shudder at its mention, because they always think it is about picking at the remnants of guilt that linger somewhere in them, or evoking it. Yet we must also be careful that in centring this history, we are not held in its cusp and thrall, a time warp, a loop that we get back to again and again. The devastating effects of domination continue but they are not insurmountable.

One of the struggles for a young Zimbabwe is how to begin to attempt to even think outside the parameters set by empire, because we continue to be governed by its products in the sense of time, as well as of narrative. We are, in a sense, its products, especially those who enjoy the trappings of power. Our politics has been geared, reminiscent of the anticolonial period, toward responding to, accusing and blaming our misfortunes on this amorphous harbinger of oppression that we call ‘the West’. But who are we and when do the struggles of the vendor on the street and of the unemployed, of failing to provide health services, clean water and electricity, become attributable to moral and political bankruptcy within the higher echelons of party politics and power in Zimbabwe? What is amazing is how, within just 30 years of the idea of liberation and independence, privilege and neo-oppression have become so blinding that those in power are insensitive to the plight of those they call ‘ordinary’, whose electoral prerogative supposedly put them in power in the first place. Another illusion. Is whatever goes wrong a colonial hangover? Are our politicians, especially those drunk with the remnants, the dregs of the palm wine of a Rhodesia and still engaged in unproductive rhetoric and crusades, prepared to take responsibility for destroying hope and imagination?

The stark relationship of this fiction of the postcolonial and its bondage to materiality has been the unfortunate juxtaposition in the popular imaginary of whiteness to land and the economy. A lot continues to be said about ethnicity. The international outcry and attention that continues to be garnered by land reform has tilted more toward the emphasis on the loss of private property, not to addressing historical as well as present injustice. One does not want to be an apologist for injustice and misery visited on anyone.

Granted, the process, if it can be called that, of land reform remains problematic, and revealed the kinds of fissures I have just referred to, of imagining Zimbabwe. Are white farmers and their families any less Zimbabwean then? What is their place, like all of ours, in reimagining a Zimbabwe in this moment that is trying to revitalise the economy and attract investment? Is our liberation only skin deep? Many of us, as I have witnessed, are afraid of engaging with these fissures because we have sought ‘sanctuary’ in places that have come out in defence of white farmers and whiteness in Zimbabwe and that understand Zimbabwe in binaries and polarities; of a universal claim to understanding, but selective application, of human rights; places that are forebears of racism and empire, yet now hold the banners of anti-racism and diversity. These systems we live in are vindictive. We try to keep our heads down, to say, as James Baldwin writes, Yes suh, Mr Jesse, reminiscent of the yes baas; we are afraid of being vilified and accused of ‘stereotyping’ white Zimbabweans, as one academic referred to my attempt to engage with the idea of whiteness and invisibility in the Zimbabwean diaspora, because frankly, we know nothing much about ‘them’ as we grew up in contexts where being black was not even recognised. It was the norm. We are also afraid of being branded counterrevolutionaries and ‘agents of the West’ for asking of our governments, of those in power, to afford us dignities that are but human.

We risk being bandied with a party politics that has expelled some white Zimbabweans. Do we say the same about ethnicity? This same politics excludes many who do not feel part of this nation, Zimbabwe, because of the language they speak, where they were born. Yet to not confront these fissures would be a travesty, because they continue to shape the narratives on Zimbabwe, and belonging, and in many ways will shape the trajectory that the country takes. That is the unfortunate logic of power. We can write down, but rarely up. The tragedy of Zimbabwe seems to play a certain dominant song. A tragedy of the majority black bodies that emanates from the expulsion of the few but very productive and indispensable white bodies. No one should be dispensable. It is certainly not that simple and is an unfortunate juxtaposition and exceptionalism. When, in the popular imaginary, did Robert Mugabe lose the halo and became a monster? Not because of 1980s Matebeleland? After land reform? If the fictions of inclusive post-colonies harbour any chances of becoming the real, why not interrogate them in their multifarious complexities? Of course black bodies and tragedies can be written, simplified, attributed to some inherent evolutionary lag, narrated and spoken about by anyone, because they care, right, and because these bodies and tragedies are ‘universal and fascinating’.

The paradox of anti-imperialist party politics and rhetoric, and attempts to reinsert the nation into a global economy that remains heavily skewed and experiencing shocks, is jarring. If we appreciate how part of our crisis stems from our relationship to the global economy, why has the country spent the last decade shouting at capital and empire, only to jump back into bed with them as soon as the chance is given? It looks like this relationship never really ended but was being carried out right under our noses by local elites controlling the underground economy, which had become the economy anyway. There is a lot of shifting and shuffling behind the scenes as people, countries and institutions position themselves for the possibilities of succession and change in Zimbabwe might just bring. Soon we will find out again, as Bob Marley asked, who the real revolutionaries are, who cares about this Zimbabwe.

We dig and read into history and the present in multiple ways to bring to the fore what is convenient, hinging on our positionality in certain instances. The goose and the gander and such. If history can and has been manipulated to serve nationalist agendas and push patriotic history, then the manipulation also goes the other way, in seeking to oversimplify the tragedy of the postcolonial fiction and hide the malevolence of power, in all its guises, in the cloaks of a benevolent rhetoric. Human rights.

I want us to owe it to ourselves and to the future of Zimbabwe, in a world increasingly rearing the ugly head of racism and bigotry, to ask, ain’t I a woman? We ask, for ourselves and for those who understand and experience dehumanisation. We also owe it to the establishment of a revitalised imagination that ideas for our progress will spring from the wells of a cross section of Zimbabweans (and non-Zimbabweans, as far as the ambit of national identity takes us). People will not invest time, ideas, emotions and resources in a place that refuses to recognise them, makes them feel that they sit on the margins. They cannot call home a place that burns both their backside when they sit and their hearts when they want to open them. We will not reclaim our humanity from those who continue to, and seek to, oppress us by dehumanising them, for it is their oppression of us that has afforded them their idea of a humanity in the first place. The legitimacy of our existence should come, then, from this reimagining, of what and where we want to be, not what has been lopsidedly said and written of us or of what divides us. The difficult task is to think; to think of who we are, not of who we are not. The history of oppression has already given us enough of who we are not.

Being reared on crisis has revealed to me that there is no homogenous, linear being Zimbabwean. Like one song says, when days are dark, friends are few. The dark days of Zimbabwe continue to reveal, more than just few friends, the fragility of nationhood and the hierarchies of worth that calibrate responses to our tragedies. How do we reimagine an inclusive Zimbabwe, whatever that means, where worth and belonging are not just skin deep, but relate to the well-being of the majority?

So who has the task of re-thinking Zimbabwe? Who cares about Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans? Who sieves through what Zimbabweans want, to then make claims to knowing their desires, hopes and dreams? I for one know nothing and revel in my ignorance. I glean from the time I spend with Zimbabweans questions, a prodding of the present and the past, a being confounded with how we got here, dispersed and legitimising our presence in places, because the logic of power and bureaucracy dictates that we should be ‘elsewhere’. We comfort and joke with each other that at least we did not have to cross the Mediterranean. We laugh at death. That hollow, uncomfortable laughter that comes sometimes from loss, uncertainty, sometimes deep-seated rage, existential angst. Still, we laugh. We listen to those writing about and speaking about Zimbabwe. We ask each other, but why are you not writing about Zimbabwe, about your experience? The answers usually come in the form of ooh, I lack the intellectual legitimacy, but I am not a professor, my English is not that good, I fear the b(l)ack-lash. So do I, really, so do I. I think it is also the fear that keeps us from re-imagining Zimbabwe, from contributing to existing narratives or making new ones. For are our stories not as complex as any other, though not the meta-narratives of thinking that some cultures impose? Are we not sentient enough to build our own giants and to choose whether we want to stand on the shoulders of other people’s giants or claim ownership to ‘universal giants’?

One suffers the foible of sounding prescriptive. There are enough prescriptions already of who should do what for Zimbabweans. What is irrefutable is that despite all of this, Zimbabweans continue to be perched on the edge of precarity, of falling into some abyss that we have not yet found a term to describe. At least until it arrives. I desire a space to think and think, and ask more questions, as a way of opening up possibilities.

Much of what I would want for Zimbabwe are ideals that may remain just that. Our present predicament is a powerful reminder of the consequences of history, the hypocrisy of power, the banality of evil, and that we will have to think and think before we put our thumbprint, a blood promise, on any articles of proclaimed faith or benevolence that come our way. I am not sure that prophets and miracles, who look and sound more like the hypocrisy of politics, hold all the answers. Mana is not going to fall from heaven. Many young Zimbabweans are working in their own ways, for families, for bigger dreams. They are making new narratives and adding to old ones. We might just be set for more calamity and suffering. I am not in the business of political prediction, and cannot say where Zimbabwe will be a few months from here. What I know is that most of us young Zimbabweans want change, want better, and are trying to revitalise crushed promise and hope.

*Lennon Chido Mhishi is a Zimbabwean pursuing doctoral studies in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. His current research is on migration and diaspora.

* THE VIEWS OF THE ABOVE ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE PAMBAZUKA NEWS EDITORIAL TEAM

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