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(HERALD) Manheru: Independence: Mungoshi’s so many questions?

Manheru: Independence: Mungoshi’s so many questions?
Saturday, 16 April 2011 10:17

As I sit down to write this piece, my mind temporarily refocuses on the SADC Troika meeting recently held in the Zambian border town of Livingstone. It has turned out to be a meeting for vile tongues as commentators of all manner and gradation fall over each and one another to sound very knowing.

The raucous home chatter aside, more cacophony came from the British House of Lords. Still more noise came from European parliamentarians. Not to forget the menacing noise America's Africa Command, bellowing from Germany. Then another - again American - coming from one Johnnie Carson, America's black Assistant Secretary for African Affairs.

All these noises are calculated to browbeat little Zimbabwe, something of a pastime in the West.

Triggering humourous imagination

But it is the debate home - ironically much of it instigated and thus hardly home-grown - which engages my humorous imagination.

As I ploughed through the maze of that debate, occasionally blinded by flashes and spasms of its mindless anger and gratuitous spite, I was reminded of a little Yoruba tale which the great Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, adapted for a speech he delivered at Harvard University, way back in 1972. I will allow the great writer to tell it himself.

Eshu, the god of mischief and confusion

"Once upon a time . . . two farmers were working their farms on either side of the road. As they worked they made friendly conversation across the road. The Eshu, god of fate and lover of confusion, decided to upset the state of peace between them.
A god with a sharp and nimble imagination he took his decision as quickly as lightning. He rubbed one side of his body with white chalk and the other side with charcoal and walked up the road with considerable flourish between the farmers.

As soon as he passed beyond earshot the two men jumped from their work at the same time. And one said: "Did you notice that extraordinary white man who just gone up the road?" In the same breath the other asked: "Did you see that incredible black man I have just seen?" In no time at all the friendly questions turned into a violent argument and quarrel, and finally into a fight. As they fought they screamed: "He was white!|" "He was black!"

After they had belaboured themselves to their hearts' content they went back to their farms and resumed their work in gloomy and hostile silence.

The return of Eshu

"But no sooner had they settled down than Eshu returned and passed with even greater flourish between them down the road. Immediately the two men sprang up again. And one said: "I am sorry, my good friend, you were right; the fellow is white."

And in the same breath the other farmer was saying: "I do apologise for my blindness. The man is indeed black, just as you said." And in no time again the two were quarrelling and then fighting. As they fought this time, they shouted: "I was wrong!" "No, I was wrong!"

Thus ends the little story of naughty Eshu, or is it the story of the two foolish farmers working their little farms across the mighty Zambezi, across the mighty Limpopo, or across the sandy Save, whichever natural divide you choose! I swear they bear no resemblance to anyone or anything we have in Southern Africa or Zimbabwe!

The midnight crowing riddle

Soon the cock will crow, marking the nightly midpoint between April 17 and 18 , 2011. Those with the gift of memory will immediately attach commemorative significance to that evanescent moment. It is a moment that recalls the re-birth of our country, which was the birth of our nation, Zimbabwe, on that hard-to-date midnight moment so trapped between those two dates and two black nights in 1980.

Quite what date this country was born is itself a question of inconclusive debate which no one prefers to answer. What is beyond debate is that Zimbabwe was born, born from the shackles of Britain's Rhodesia. That consigns the time debate to those who chase nuances, to those who want to split hairs.

What mind was born that day?

My preoccupation is reading that national mind which has been evolving for the past 31 years. How old is it now? How has time and circumstances constituted it? Whither tends that mind? On that one, I have the time and energy to split hairs and propose to do just that in this piece. It is going to be an exercise of mixed emotions, one that allows for both peels of laughter and spurts of raw anger. I shall endeavour, gentle reader, to give you both in equal measure.

Same time, many names

The national mind whose 31 years of evolution we are set to mark on Monday did not come into being on that dateless moment of midnight in 1980. Its roots lay elsewhere in another time, in another ethos, in another regimen. By any measure, that mind was not one of Rushdie's "midnight children". It could not have been, since I am not talking about minds of wonder babies delivered in that hour of national birth, babies formed by lovers who knew when to mate for mathematically exact outcomes.

I am talking about minds of conscious, living beings who could count that moment of national birth within a given time continuum, and thus could mark it off, give it a name even.

For those that were coming home from a long war, that midnight moment had a different meaning, a different name. For those like me who had spent the war in rural areas, playing courier to the revolution, we let out an offloading sigh, the sigh of a loaded traveler upon hitting his destination, finally. I sat under the cool muchakata shade, regaining breath, reminiscing on little battles survived.

Evaristo who did not come

For those like my aunt - Tete Mai Febi - whose son Evaristo had gone to war in the early 70s, that midnight moment marked the beginning of a long, painful search that yielded no result. To this day! "Which liberation army would he have joined, Zanla or Zipra?" "Which Assembly Point might he be?" "What look has long, brutal war given him?" "What name did he operate under?" "Which part of the country did he fight in?" "Is he well?" "Or could he be d . . . , ooh no?" A midnight moment of so many questions, so many fears, all from so mute war, a war of many riddles. Tete still asks today, will ask in her quiet, stoical way on the midnight that separates this Sunday from this Monday. Evaristo never showed up from that war, as also never did thousands others whose fate we cannot continue to debate, but whose fate's circumstances we continue to wonder. Of course Pemberai came back and we all celebrated. For a few more years we besieged her with many questions of what it meant to be, and to survive that long, brutal war. She answered and was able to assuage our curiosity. But there was this one question she could not answer: had she seen Evaristo in those years of war?

I pray she did not!

Tete is old, too old to see or read newspapers. But her only other surviving son - Chimota, now married and working very hard to redeem the family from extinct-ing its male line - bought her a small radio from his small harvests. Through this small, talking box, the old girl follows news. As I sit here, working on this piece, I prayerfully hope she missed the news on the bones of Chibondo, a painful place I have been. At Chibondo, I went through the pain of listening to a narrative from a woman - then a small girl - who miraculously escaped a massacre that had eaten seven of her family members, all of them that fateful night. And all that she narrated, she had got from her elder cousin brother and her late grandmother who had survived the massacre, all to live through the horror of these corpse-less deaths. The Rhodesians had rounded up all the corpses, carted them into their army vehicles, to take them to Mt Darwin.

The latter-day Golgotha

Of course with each massacre, Mt Darwin became less and less physical, more and more of a mythical place akin to the biblical Golgotha, the place of skull. Whilst no victim elder quite knew where at Mt Darwin the Rhodesians were offloading this grisly kill, most elders began to use Mt Darwin as that spatial "painkiller" for orphaned children who asked so many needling questions. "Ko mai vangu varipi?" "Vari kuDaruweni," came the soothing, elderly reply. "Ko vanouya riini," persisted the youthful, innocent enquiry. "Manje-manje," came the tearful, elderly response, emitted from between lips fastened on a face that looked away in infectious agony from bitter memories.

This particular lady had just rediscovered the remains of her mother, through tattered, dank clothes, and bracelets, both of which had hung tenaciously on a skeletal frame over all these years.

Chasing a ghost's spoor

I prayerfully hope that tete missed the news. The other year - soon after the war - the family went to Belingwe, now Mberengwa, chasing what appeared to be a spoor for the elusive chimera that Evaristo has now become. It came back empty-handed, hearts filled with fresher, mounting agony. I dread her asking us to go to Chibondo, to find Evaristo. Should that request come, I will have no reason or means to deny or deflect it, without appearing inhuman to my aunt. I would be forced to go back to Chobondo, to meet and inspect her many hideous bones, once more. Let it not come to that, please! For apart from reliving the horror of Chibondo on my part, the sight of so many bones, none of which might be Evaristo, any of which might be Evaristo, is sure to rip the old girl apart, straight to her grave.

Through the eyes of our writers

Her agonised mind, too, constitutes the national mind or thought I trace today. As does many more such minds, shaped by tragedies of that war that sired Zimbabwe. There is no better way to reconstruct that part of the national mind spanning across the two epochs than to turn to our writers, one in particular who captured riveting contrasting temperaments of the tempestuous mid-seventies, the same seventies of Chibondo.

I am referring to Charles Mungoshi - now ailing - whose bequest to all of us comes in the form of "Waiting for the Rain", the novel he published in 1975. I chose to make it my starting point for this psycho-delving into who we are, more accurately, why we are who we are mentally. Working within the dominant Zimbabwean literary motif of drought and the expectation of plenty, Waiting for the Rain, draws a remarkable contrast between an urban and outward oriented character significantly named Lucifer, and his rustically spiritual but wayward and itinerant brother called Garabha.
In between these two antipodes lies a throng of characters, mostly rural, each representing a shifting and nuanced shade in a composite whole of national consciousness.

Uncle Kuruku and angry one

From this bustling, idiosyncratic multitude, I isolate Kuruku, Lucifer's uncle embodying an angry generation of nationalist peasants whose sons are serving indefinite detention terms in far-away prisons. With time, these incarcerated activist sons can no longer communicate with those they left at home, who also become both angry and restless, often using the cover and license of drunkenness to rail at settler colonialism. The butt of such frequent raillery are the minions of the colonial government, especially headmen and chiefs who are within earshot of these angry fathers.

The story of Ham

Uncle Kuruku's bitterness festers, often exploding into philosophical diatribes which few in the village can follow, let alone appreciate, given the apparent dangers of informers and arrests. But coming through this overflowing anger is a clear ideology of anti-colonial resistance, particularly its cultural strand of authenticity as developed by the first generation nationalists.

For me, one fascinating episode in Waiting for the Rain is the encounter between Lucifer who is about to leave drought-stricken, rural and impoverished Manyene and Rhodesia, for a far-away white country, thanks to a benevolent white missionary. His angry, drunken uncle Kuruku is also a lay preacher. He asks Lucifer if he knows the story of Ham in the Bible. "Do you know (the story of Ham), Lucifer - you are going overseas you should know - do you know why you are black?"

"No, Uncle."

"Well, well. What are you going overseas for then if you don't know why you are black, a beggar and a laughing stock?"
"I haven't thought about it."

"You ought to think about it, boy. That's the only reason you were made for. To keep in your head every single minute of your life your blackness and to contemplate your blackness with every breath you take."

The black that won't change

Uncle Kuruku expounds on the dishonourable circumstances that created a Ham and his children who won themselves the colour of curse, contempt and revilement. He concludes: "So remember that. Remember that you are black and no soap on earth will wash that colour away. And out there, where you are going, your heart is just the colour of your face: murky, dirty. And no amount of sleeping with the whitest of their womenfolk nor any amount of eating at the same table with them will ever make you clean enough in their eyes. So, go there, see everything and envy nothing. Hear everything and reveal nothing. Come back to us here and true's God we will send them looking for shelter in the underbrush like so many rats. By Those-Long-Gone, we will make them have a taste of their own medicine, the thankless grabbers. They have given us enough hell - a few more years of waiting won't make the slightest difference from what we have seen of them. Only a few more years and then we will show them. Go sonny. I wait for your coming back."

Split personality of Lucifer

For mudhara Kuruku, Lucifer becomes another rain, much awaited by the stricken community. But all that turns out to be vain, pathetic hope. Lucifer is just that, the rain that betrays an expectant, desperate community. He personifies the rain that wont come. He is the rain that fails, choosing to shower "the thankless grabbers" of far away lands.

It is interesting that this great betrayal (not in the sense of Ian Smith) begins well before Lucifer is taken away from Manyene and then Rhodesia by the fawning white priest. Well before his departure, still in the village, Lucifer becomes agonisingly schizophrenic, until his betraying, individualistic, self-contemptuous, pro-white half finally carriers the day.

It is this part of the novel which for me has searing intensity and lasting lessons for all of us as Zimbabweans. What ironically challenges Lucifer into an existential introspection is not his exchange with uncle Kuruku the nationalist. Rather, it is the inert, drought and poverty-stricken milieu of rural Manyene with its menacing and forlorn nights.

Against this arid backdrop, Lucifer explores his life and place in the vast scheme of existential things: "I am Lucifer Mandengu. I was born here against my will. I should have been born elsewhere - of some other parents. I have never liked it here, and I never shall and if ever I leave this place, I am not going to come back. It is the failure's junk heap. Those who go to the towns only come back here to die."

Home, the biological, geographical error

His ascetic and self-contemptuous philosophical reasoning leads him into renouncing and rejecting self, parent, community, cause and country: "Home is where you come back to die, having lived all your life elsewhere. Home is a cluster of termite-eaten huts clinging on the stony slope of a sun-baked hill. What is there that's worth loving? What is here - in this scrub, in this arid flatness, in this sun-bleached dust to love? You go for mile after mile in this swelter and not here, not there, not anywhere is there a tree big enough to sit under.

"And when you look everywhere all you see is the naked white earth criss-crossed by the eternal shadow of the restless vulture. I have been born here but is that a crime? That is only a biological and geographical error. I can change that. Or can I? Can't I change anything here if I want to? Must I live with what I no longer believe in? Because I have been born here and here is home where everyone is and the roots of the Family are - is that the only reason why I must come back to die in this desert?"

Curse on twisted lips

After this riveting repudiation of home, family and country, Lucifer no longer belongs, and treads the soils of "home" completely "blind to the country and everything". For him the word "Home" evokes "childhood nightmares in the deep of the night, witches as tall as ghosts who come when the world is covered in rain-night darkness riding on hyenas, the crack of an ox-hide whip on bare flesh and the distorted face of a mother in pain. Unknown figures flit in the dusky bush to pounce on stray children at home".

The horror image of home which he conjures drive him into restating his rejection of it, this time more emphatically, with greater vehemence: "And until you die you don't know who you are at home. Except occasionally when you realise you are a bundle of hate, fears, hunger, suspicions and superstitions all tangled together. At home, the worms set to work on you on the very day you are conceived. And home is where the rains come late, if it does come at all, and the animals simply drop dead and the old folk are abandoned to await the black messiah with a curse on their twisted lips. Home? No, no, no, no."

The lure of neon

Against such a sordid background, both the white priest and the car that comes to fetch him become vehicles of a great escape from the agonizing horrors of home, an escaped from a "paralytic's inertia that his home country is wont to induce in him", towards "neon images" "another country, more dynamic, home far away across the seas" so full of "neo images", of "plastic palm trees darkly etched against a dusky, purple-tinted blue, blue sea, their broom heads sweeping the distant skyline of his frenzied imagination."

The many rains of Uhuru

Zimbabwe thirty one years after Uhuru is a country of both uncle Kuruku and Lucifer. It is a land of binary thoughts. However drunk uncle Kuruku was, his prediction that "the thankless grabbers" would be sent scurrying in a few years time came true, in fact came true a mere five years later, on 18th April 1980. Zimbabwe became free and her incarcerated or exiled children came back home. Of course what we got on that day was an injured country, a fractured country: physically, culturally and spiritually.

It was also a country of drought that has largely remained so for the greater part of its 31 years, both literally and figuratively. We celebrate education, itself the first rains to happily beat us after Uhuru. Today we are torch bearers and I am sure uncle Kuruku is happy with us. We celebrate the expanded social services whose infrastructure we so painstakingly put, only to be checkmated by sanctions. But there is a lot that remains. Again I am sure the Old Man rejoices. Above all, we celebrate the land that has come -so belatedly yet so always welcome - itself a huge rain that chased away hunger for many. We still dance in its giant drops that nourish our people, our long-reviled race. Additionally today, we catch a glimpse of a dark, pregnant cloud on the horizon, admittedly still far off and approaching slowly, against a dissuading rainbow. We call it indigenisation and economic empowerment. Will it reach us, rain on us, we the expectant? Maybe and a lot can be said for either conclusion.

The rain we have not got

Yet there is one rain we have not got. We look in vain for nubial clouds for this one rain, we cannot find them. Ironically the first rains we should have long got, indeed the first questions from history we should have found answers to. Did the white man who departed on 18th April, leave us? Did he leave our country? Did he abandon his ways? Did he leave us alone to found a new destination, indeed to play our own drum? I am afraid not. At 31, Zimbabwe remains a country still to understand that it is black in the first instance. Zimbabwe is a country still to find out why it is black and has to remain so. Much worse, Zimbabwe is that country still to find out how to become black and African. Today everyone seems on a mad stampede to find his or her own white man. "Ndine murungu wangu," that seems to be the national refrain. In politics, in farming, in industry, in commerce, except only in love since none or very few want to marry us, what with our dank blackness! We boast about having whites as company, even though we play lapdog, we grown up men and women. That way we have become a nation of fronts, black fronts masking white interests. What an inglorious fate!

Beating another man's drum

Mungoshi's Old Man - himself the repository of culture and identity, the keeper of Armah's "the way" - blasts us with the same questions. As in the book, he asks: "Where are we? Who are we? What wrong did we do? How many stories do we hear of the white men humiliating our people? Again and again and again. We hear it, but do we see it? We might be blind. We hear it, but do we listen? We might be deaf. And why? Playing the enemy's drum, that's why. Making so much noise with the enemy's drum that we can't even hear the beating of our own gullible little miserable hearts. Each time you drink tea, to whose god do you give praise? Each time you listen to that talking box, on whose altar are you making sacrifices? And if the children grow up with such promises as we have just heard here - sweets and biscuits - what other god will they know and bow to besides that?"

Afraid of becoming owners

These are existential questions we have not addressed, which is why we are in a bit of a quandary. Or much worse, they are questions we have answered like another Lucifer: in a self-deprecatory and self-abasing manner that crushes all of us as meaningful actors able to shape our destiny. Is it not a fact that freedom in our colonial circumstances is measured by how far we go in overturning the enthralling white colonial legacy? There is a certain poignant lack of inner confidence and self-possession which I find most despairing, most baffling for a society with the level of literacy that is boastfully ours, for a society that went to war against the same white man. Or could that be the problem? That like Lucifer, we ate the wrong book which ended up gnawing our being, destroying it to the core and then to nothingness? Could that be why we have been left hollow, reverberating from a nasty wind of many ills? There is a marked deficiency in the national mind and personality of Zimbabwe, a gradual consuming sense of inadequacy and inner doubt.

Augustan quiz

This is why the mention of empowerment frightens us. What will we become without the white man? Nobodies? Just a bit of national boastfulness - just a fraction of what Nigerians have in surfeit - is probably what we need. A bit of firm national identity and commitment - a sizeable fraction of what Cubans have in remarkable measure - is probably what we lack. Much more, western self-knowledge multiplied a thousand times is what we badly need. Europe grappled with this issue as far back as the Augustan Age when the prime existential question was: Know Thy Self. We are still to go through this Augustan quiz which is so fundamental to our overall make-up.

Bending the brittle

We self-devalue because we do not know our worth. Dr Stan Mudenge will tell you we are Southern Africa's Rome which does not seem to know the extend of its boundaries, both spatially and by way of sphere of influence. We found great kingdoms, mastered the art of bending and defeating the brittle will of iron and copper. We conquered rock, darning it into aesthetic shapes we dreamed and envisioned. That is how the Great Zimbabwe was built. We knew the art of trading, the science of gainful exchange, itself the foundation of commerce and civilizations. We knew the Chinese; we knew the Arabs; we knew the Portuguese. We knew all these great nationalities before all else, through trade. We fought great wars, in remote history and in recent history. We also knew defeat, knew how to manage setbacks. In the end we won, which is why 18th April is such an important date. So why this national quiescence, this wilting self-doubting national ego?

The riches of home

More important, we are rich. We should be powerful? Home is not Lucifer's "diseased skin", or that cursed place you come to die, after you have spent a better life elsewhere. Home is not a biological and geographical error. It is where we belong; home is what many nations and nationalities have perished trying to wrestle from us. Home is the world's prized gift, the much sought after mine of King Solomon. Home is the myth that is real: home is gold; home is platinum. Home is diamonds, uranium, copper, tin, iron, vanadium, chrome ... home is where the whole world is turning to for natural resources. It is the rich soils, the salubrious, mosquito-free climate that has been our curse in history. If Ham's children got cursed dark for reckless laughter, we got cursed through shackles for our fabulous endowments. Is that not what the President is trying to get us to see and cherish, indeed to own and leverage?

The great tsunami from Zimbabwe.

Why are those telling us home is such a bad country looking for the first flight to Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe, know thyself! Something happened two weeks ago. Minister Kasukuwere ratcheted up pressure for indigenisation on mining conglomerates who have been extracting our resources. He gave them a 52-day deadline within which to say how they will comply with the 51/49 ownership equation, all in favour of Zimbabweans. Immediately after, in that same week, resource companies listed on both the Johannesburg and Australian Stock Exchanges saw their shares tumbling in a manner that reverberated world-wide. It was a tsunami. At the end of it all, USD$960million was lost, a mere US$40million shy of a billion. Just a small gazetting step by Zimbabwe's mining minister transmits such a huge shock, so far away from home? What awesome power! Does this tell us something about our worth? Or we still are Lucifers consumed in self-contempt?

When indigenisation shall shape Southern Africa

Which takes me to a very sensitive point. For all the furore over the Livingstone Troika Summit, commentators seem to be taking too long to grasp that the real shaping dynamic between Zimbabwe and her neighbours in Southern Africa is not the GPA. Or some such claims to democracy deficit. Who cares what ounces of democracy we lack? Who, dear Lucifer? Yet it is easier to tell you who will not care a hoot what ounces of gold, what carats of diamonds, we claim for ourselves through empowerment. Only we Zimbabweans will not care. The rest of mankind will care, led by westerners. We may be 31 politically; we are hardly one year old by way of economic consciousness.

The white interests that moved Southern Africa
Is it conceivable that some bloody capitalists may have approached some SADC president or presidents to warn that if that nationalist madman across the great rivers is not stopped, all of you run the risk of presiding over collapsing economies, against your angry demons? And this because of a recognition that the rising resource nationalism here in Zimbabwe is likely to lead to a spectacular collapse of capital in Southern Africa and beyond? Is it not a fact that most of the resource-based listings in our region count on Zimbabwe's deposits? Who is likely to catch a cold if Zimbabwe merely sniffs? Who wields the power in Southern Africa? Know thyself Zimbabwe!

Mbeki the seer

But that precisely where our danger comes from. This month on 7th in 2003, against the fog of the war in Iraq, Mbeki warned: "The prospect facing the people of Iraq should serve as sufficient warning that in future we too might have others descend on us, guns in hand, to force-feed us with their democracy" He added: "If the UN does not matter, why should we, the little countries of Africa that make up the African Union, think that we matter and will not be punished if we get out of line?" Mbeki was projecting an African fear against the ensuing oil war which the West waged against Saddam. During that time the United Nations still retained and kept the conscience of the world. But the world has since become worse, with Ban Ki Moon at the helm. Worse with Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy in power. They have just published a joint declaration on Libya and Gaddafi, the first ever such writ against a sitting head of State by outside aggressors acting on a UN mandate. The UN which Mbeki thought could be some delaying inconvenience to western aggression, today declares war, goes to war and abducts nationalist leaders to douse the fires that threaten imperialism and its global interests. That means Mbeki's fears have multiplied a thousand times. The world has become perilous.

Giving the village its rainmakers

But the solution cannot be to acquiesce. It was not a solution in the early 1960s when the Belgians killed Lumumba; when the Americans and the British ousted Nkrumah. Or a solution in the seventies during which imperialism took out the likes of Modlane and Cabral. Or the eighties when we buried Samora Machel. Or much later in the early two thousands when President Kabila went. The solution was never to crown the Lucifers of this world. Rather, it was to find unity and self-belief in ourselves. The solution was unity and struggle, was beating our own drum thereby ensuring our village had its own rainmaker, its own God!

Putting away complexes

Independence Day is a day of great introspection, a day we should scrub the floor of debilitating complexes. I hope this piece challenges you, gentle reader, to do just that. If it does, or even just provokes you into thinking about, I will walk back to the village a contented man. For, taking after the inimitable Achebe, I will have fulfilled what for me amounts to an adequate revolution. Let me allow Achebe to disclose what that "adequate revolution" is: "to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of years of denigration and self-abasement." Emphasizing that we are not a failed civilization, a place of death or carrion, Achebe declared he "would be quite satisfied if [he] did no more than teach [his] readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first European acting on God's behalf delivered them." I seek no less. Icho!

-End-

Labels: COLONIALISM, MDC, NATHANIEL MANHERU, NEOCOLONIALISM

posted by MrK @ 2:24 PM