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(TALKZIMBABWE) Mutambara, Another example of a shocking lack of self-respect

Mutambara, Another example of a shocking lack of self-respect
Tafataona Mahoso: Mutambara, Another example of a shocking lack of self-respect
Sun, 02 Aug 2009 06:42:00 +0000

ON July 28 2009 at the Global 2009 Dialogue meeting held in Uganda, Deputy Prime Minister Professor Arthur Guseni Oliver Mutambara presented a paper on rebranding Zimbabwe in which he made the following claims: “What is Mugabe’s brand, what is Museveni’s brand, what is Kikwete’s brand?

If a brand is to succeed it should be endorsed by the outsiders. Africa cannot endorse her own brand, Mugabe cannot endorse his own brand, Museveni cannot endorse his own brand, Kikwete cannot endorse his own brand. We need BBC, you need CNN, you need Sky News to do it.”

These claims shocked the veteran heads of state and government at the conference and caused many Zimbabweans to wonder what went wrong. Does the Deputy Prime Minister believe the claims he made or did he make them in order to appeal to certain publics in the Anglo-Saxon world who insist on interfering in Zimbabwe's internal affairs?

Even if the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe believes what he said, why did he choose to say it at such a meeting where he knew it would cause maximum offence? A conference to develop strategies for smart partnerships in business and development is by its nature a meeting driven by the pursuit of solidarity, mutual respect, comparative advantage, and originality.

Such a forum cannot be used to reinforce Western imperialist veto power over African visions, aspirations and plans.

Even in terms of the actual history and experience of the countries present at the conference, Prof Mutambara's claims did not seem to make sense because they suggested that he would reverse the direction these countries were taking toward more sovereignty, more autonomy and more independence in all their affairs. These claims seemed to suggest that the professor would also reverse the direction which his own delegation, his own country, had been pursuing since independence in 1980.

In fact, the opposite of what Mutambara said happens to be true. The success of the Anglo-Saxon demonisation of Zimbabwe in the last 12 years has been fed by Zimbabwean's lost generation, those who grew up after independence and even got the first “free education” ever offered in our history.

This lost generation is marked by a shocking lack of self-respect and self-confidence but they are excellent at modelling themselves after others; they are excellent at managing and administering structures and institutions created, left behind or organised by white people.

Where the father of Western narcissism, Rene Descartes, said “I think; therefore I am” our lost generation will say; “I always think of where I am not (in the West); therefore I am stuck (in Africa) where I cannot think”.

After independence in 1980, we were supposed to give our children education as homecoming:

“Mauya, mauya, Comrade;
Zvamauya hamuchadzoki."
Mauya, mauya, Comrade;
Zvamauya tongai Zimbabwe.”

But instead we continued to give the youngsters education as escape. This education as escape was explained precisely back in 1947.

According to the white settler magazine East Africa and Rhodesia for September 18
1947, Miss Mabel Shaw, a Briton, had the privilege of meeting the first six African women to attend Makerere College, now Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. This is part of Miss Shaw's report of the encounter and it states clearly the colonial purpose in African Higher Education in 1947. She said:

In reply to a word of mine, one (of the six African women) leaned forward and in a very moving manner said: “But you cannot know what all this that we are now learning and reading means to us . . . (British) history, literature, poetry, child psychology. These things have been yours all your life. You have never been without knowledge of them. We have been imprisoned in ignorance, knowing nothing, seeing nothing, and now the doors are opening for us and taking us into worlds which we had not dreamed, worlds whose existence we did not know . . . We have been in prison; now the doors are opening: what lies before us?”

Notice that the white woman, in fact, put her words into the mouths of the young African women. She did not quote them. She interpreted their attitude or what their attitude should have been for them to be accepted by Mable Shaw.

What we are saying is that Prof Mutambara is the product of a higher education system which has been run by perfect imitators, perfect managers, perfect headmasters adhering to the model implied in Mabel Shaw’s representation of the six Ugandan women in 1947.

By the time Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, the university as an institutional model had been revolutionised by changed capitalist relations of production, but Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa did not take the changes into consideration. Zimbabwe assumed that the university was still what it had always been. Zimbabwe invested in expansion of the university system without posing the strategic questions arising from its recent transformation.

At the onset of Zimbabwe's armed liberation struggle, Bettina Aptheker and Angela Y. Davis collaborated on a book called The Academic Rebellion in the United States. The two women made a startling finding on the US University which becomes even more startling for a country such as Zimbabwe because of the new Government’s lack of control on the capitalist economy. The authors found that:

“The politicised university (in the West in the 1960s and 1970s), however, is primarily a consequence of the new functions the university must assume as a constituent part of the productive process, and as an essential instrument for the practical, political, economic and ideological consolidation of the (imperialist-capitalist) system. The university, as an institution, has become a direct productive social force. It has thus lost its institutional neutrality to an unprecedented degree in the present period . . .”

The two women found that the university had become an intellectual and ideological combat zone between those who owned and controlled the means of production and those who were marginalised.

But Zimbabwe was not the only country where universities were corrupted or used to corrupt society for the benefit of neoliberalism.

In a feature entitled “Harvard boys do Russia” (The Nation magazine, June 1998), Janine R. Wedel summed the role of USAID and Harvard University's Institute for International Development (HIID) in the following words:

“The US Agency for International Development (USAID), without experience in the former Soviet Union, was readily persuaded to hand over the responsibility for reshaping the Russian economy to HIID . . .”

The results were devastating for the Russian national interest and for the people of Russia in general.

It should be clear to our readers that Prof Mutambara is not in any way alone in holding the ideas such as those he voiced at the Global 2009 Dialogue in Uganda.

Prof Ali Mazrui, a celebrated Kenyan educated at Oxford University in the UK and now living in the US, wrote a shocking paper in 1999 which is worth quoting at length, especially at Page 2. He said: “The power of skills arises because at the end of the twentieth century international stratification and influence are based not on who owns what, but on who knows what.

In apartheid South Africa, a relatively few whites reduced a continent of five hundred million people to political impotence for nearly 50 years. The skills of whites kept blacks in subjugation for decades. In the Middle East, Israelis have out-skilled the Arabs; they are out-spaced; out-wealthed; and out-incomed. But, because Israelis have out-skilled the Arabs, the Jewish state has been supreme. The Israelis have won virtually every Arab-Israeli war since 1948, not because 80 percent of Israelis are Jews but because over 40 percent are European Jews — with the skills of European culture.”

Mazrui is presenting here a refined version of the myth of ethnicity in order to mystify the role of imperialism. He is arguing that, of all the Jewish ethnic strands living in Israel, only those Jews who have acquired European culture, those who have become essentially an ethnic part of global European society, are responsible for the supremacy of the Jewish state.

The Kenyan professor is making many assumptions which cannot be exhausted in a short column. But at least three of the assumptions are relevant to our subject of the day:

-First is the assumption that superiority or supremacy, whatever that means, should be inherent in European culture or the culture and skills of those who have come so close to the European as to become a sub-group of European society.

-Second is the assumption that this superiority or superior quality can only prove itself as violence and conquest, as in apartheid South Africa and occupied Palestine. Superior qualities and skills can show or prove themselves only through conflict, conquest and subjugation, not co-operation, equality, solidarity or co-existence.

-Third is the assumption that technical knowledge and skills have nothing to do with ownership of resources.

This is a great alibi for imperialism. Yet Israel's alleged ethnic superiority is in fact in doubt. As Kenya, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon were burning in 2008, imperialism was very active in its racist defence of Israel. US President George W. Bush, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and former British prime minister Tony Blair were all in the Middle East. All of them were defending and reassuring Israel while threatening Iran and the Palestinians.

These imperialist activities are not demonstrations of Jewish skills but clear machinations of Western imperialism.

What Prof Mazrui is covering up by glorifying the European civilisation of the Jew has been stated in terms of real history by a progressive professor, Noam Chomsky. He writes:

“See, the United States supports a policy which former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called ‘stalemate’; that was his word for it back in 1970. At that time, there was kind of a split in the American government as to whether we should join the broad international consensus on a political settlement or block political settlement. And in that internal struggle, the US hardliners prevailed; Kissinger was the main spokesman.

The policy that won out (using US imperial power) was what he called: ‘stalemate’: Maintain the system of Israeli oppression. And there was a good reason for that (from the point of view of the empire). Having an embattled, (well-armed) militaristic Israel is an important part of how we rule the world.”

In other words, there is no need to explain the dominance of Israel in terms of a mystical European civilisation, as Prof Mazrui tries to do. What is our point? Our point is also that there is no need to allow Prof Mutambara to mystify the role of the Anglo-Saxon world and its media. But as long as our education system remains in the template articulated by Mabel Shaw in 1947, there will be millions of professors like Mazrui and Mutambara all over Africa.

To rectify the problem, Zimbabwe made an effort to create what was called a national strategic studies programme for colleges and universities. It has not solved the problem because it was highjacked and neutralised by the “headmasters” in our education bureaucracy. A curriculum still exists but it is neither strategic nor strategically used.

In other words, the liberation movement temporarily stopped the internal settlement in politics in 1980. The internal settlement has continued through education; and now it is established again in politics. -- The Sunday Mail

Labels: ARTHUR MUTAMBARA, COLONIALISM, EDUCATION, NEOCOLONIALISM

posted by MrK @ 11:59 PM