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(HERALD) MANHERU:- Zimbabwe: Notes on the United States of America

MANHERU:- Zimbabwe: Notes on the United States of America
Saturday, 23 July 2011 02:00

FACED with a sub-region that grappled with the challenges of surviving under the shadow of a predatory empire; faced with a people who visualised their futures in terms of a powerful, rapacious northern empire they envied so unconditionally, so irrationally, Jose Marti, the founder of revolutionary Cuba, created a column in a US-based newspaper dedicated to Latino affairs. The newspaper was called "Patria".

His column was simply entitled "Notes on the United States". The column reprinted articles from early United States of America, articles clearly showing that far from enjoying innate virtue and glory, innate greatness, the United States of America - that land of invading immigrants, of "genocideres" - had in fact started off with more than a fair share of rejects, rogues and scoundrels, with more than fair share in murderers and thieves, more than ever existed or could ever exist in the Americas.

The column revealed that far from being a beneficiary of heavenly manna or Providential goodwill, America had struggled against vices, indolence, violent differences, mediocrities, conflictual identities, rapacity and backwardness, to become the mighty, united, developed and supremely unjust imperial "democracy" it later became. Against the Americas' mindless adulation and envy of this powerful and developed northern neighbour, Marti warned:

"In our America, it is vital to know the truth about the United States. We should not exaggerate its faults purposely, out of a desire to deny it all virtue, nor should these faults be concealed or proclaimed as virtues."

America's new near-abroad

Today Zimbabwe finds itself in more or less the same predicament. Far more than the United Kingdom and the rest of continental Europe, America today treats Zimbabwe as her near-abroad, as her backyard. Today America is doing uglier things against Zimbabwe than our embittered "mother" country, Britain.

The scope of her intrusive politics in the national affairs of our country far exceeds her historical links claims and interests in this part of the world.
Even the 1969/70 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM/69) done under the auspices of Henry Kissinger, while recognising Southern Africa as the "mineral Persian Gulf" of the world, devalued it as of direct strategic interest to America's national security.

But that was in 1969/70, a time of the Cold War, a time of liberation movements, a time of relative success for the American economy.

Today is 2011, a day in the unipolar age of American domination, doubtful domination at that, a decade of America's economic melt-down, one bearing down on her so inexorably, indeed a decade of acute resource shortages, set against resource nationalism, militant resource nationalism.

America is another empire, with a new set of eyes that see a different Southern Africa and within it, a marked little country called Zimbabwe which in history's yesterday, may have been a little, insignificant dot on the map.

Against America's current intense interest, one would be forgiven for thinking that Zimbabwe is a small, rich and strategic country in Latin America, geographically abutting the shores of north America in the era of another Cold War.

We have become America's Southern African Cuba. So far yet so near!

Ray, the local MDC MP

Today America's ambassador here behaves like an aspiring local MP running under an MDC-T ticket.
He is everywhere, picking disputes with little men and women of local politics, engaging small constituencies that ordinarily would hardly be visible to his most junior officer in the mission. America has gone grassroots in her hostile engagement with Zimbabwe.

It engages vendors; it engages students; it engages war veterans, it engages nannies, etc, etc. Much worse, the American Embassy has an active cell in our newsrooms here.
It is buying newsprint for the so-called private media, in some cases it has repeatedly picked staff costs for newspapers that, except for her politically calculated beneficence, would have withered on the vine.

Today these papers do not need to sell, to attract advertisements at all. In one or two cases, products are free handouts, much like Rhodesia's African Times.

Total strategy
The furious anger directed at Jonathan Moyo arises from the fact that he has revealed what should have been kept under wraps.

And what precious little revelation he has made, in relation to the scope of what America and her western allies are doing here!
There is a lot more happening which Professor Moyo does not know, may never know.
There is a lot more obvious, albeit indirect action which the good professor has not thrown up to public scrutiny.

Seemingly little, seemingly humanitarian things like using Bill Gates to fund the construction of condominiums in Mbare and other high-density suburbs.
This column shall do it's damnedest to give more tit-bits on this unfolding matter, one likely to be less and less discreet as we move towards elections.

America badly needs one outcome in that impending duel of democracy, and its ambassador here - gees he carries my pigmentation ! - is increasingly interpreting his role as taking matters beyond the hallways of diplomacy right down to Harare's hard streets where he meets vendors, paying them even.

[Professor Jonathan Moyo...revealed what should have been kept under wraps.]

Professor Jonathan Moyo...revealed what should have been kept under wraps.
He is now the shadow minister of war veterans, vendors, students, seminarians, the youth, the opposition, housing, ideology and many more things which shall unfold as the electoral tempo picks beat, this our kinsman from America!

America's intrusion has escalated, is highly mediased, and seeks to encompass total society.

Bad America is dead!
What I am addressing today is Obama's broke America with its bellicose focus on Africa, and within it, the highly mineralised but brittle Zimbabwe.

What I am addressing today is a Janus-faced America with a black president pursuing a white agenda; an America whose indefatigable black minions wave a supposedly totemless pro-democracy banner while pursuing aggressive, unenlightened self-interest. What I am addressing most is this mindless admiration of an assaulting America by sections within Zimbabwe, an irrational admiration reminiscent of Marti's Americas.

There is a genuine and even fervent belief in this country that America is a second liberator of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans, a belief that America is doing all it does with a heart that profusely bleeds kindness for us and our welfare. Indeed, there is a belief that bad America belonged to the sixties and seventies, that bad America died in the sixties and seventies - hanged by her innumerable, bloody misdeeds in the Congo, Ghana, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Grenada etc, etc.
A fatal belief that good America has been born, has come, that today we have a born-again America, one out to save us from ourselves by way of eliminating our "bad" leaders, "bad" govern-ments, "bad" economics, "bad" advice, "bad" alliances, "bad" technologies, "bad" markets, "bad" democracies,"bad" morality, "bad" colour, "bad"dreams, badder aspirations.

There is this gratuitous admiration of baddest, assaulting America by us, its victims. We are an enchanted quarry. And when our successors look back at our age and its seeming collective blindness against so brazen a danger, so blatant an intrusion, they may not understand us. We shall come across as a generation that relished, nay, ululated at its own mortal assault. For no generation can be more deserving of a guilty charge than one unmoved by so guileless an intrusion.

Teaching Zimbabwe from an anthill
If you doubt this, ask yourself as a Zimbabwean why an outsider like Charles Ray feels comfortable and confident enough to mount a red savannah anthill to tell us - his hosts - the following mouth: "I don't think removing an individual (read President Mugabe) is going to solve the problems of Zimbabwe. The problems here are too complex and what is needed is to change the whole system . . . The situation here can be resolved with an interaction among and between the country's citizens and the army, the police, the media and the private sector. Until you fix all those relationships there will be no change. There can be only minor changes if he is removed as an individual."

Addressing a fallen species
Just what gives this ambassador the guts and the locus standi to say all these things, temerity to say all this without the slightest fear of contradiction, without a presentiment of worse to follow, by way of censorious diplomatic measures?

What? For goodness' sake he is not advising us on how to cook sadza better, how to grow better tomatoes.
He is not tipping us on how to mine better. He is telling us we are a bad home, a bad culture, a bad politics, a bad society, a bad government, a bad State and ultimately, a bad people.
We have to be born anew. Everything about us simply has to be uprooted, piled and burnt for a new, better society to be born from our ashes, we thistles!

His is the verdict of Divinity, a voice from an angry, righteous God addressing a fallen species. He is not asking for the overthrow of (President) Mugabe, the overthrow of Zanu-PF.
Those are too narrow a set of objectives. He is asking for the overthrow of a Zimbabwe that has emerged over "decades".
And given that we are a mere three decades after Independence, he is repudiating us, repudiating Independent Zimbabwe, all to three cheers from us! I hope the gentle reader notices that Ray excludes

Government in the reconstruction of the system he proposes for us; he is suggesting an antediluvian beginning, albeit one happily unfolding under the auspices of a selfless America. Except for our supine nature, what gives him the balls? What?

The real meaning of regime change

The lexis is clear.
His diction connects him to a political viewpoint, a political camp here. He is connecting with the notion of change as adopted by the MDC formations.
He is exceeding it even, to give the formations a more profound manifesto. He is addressing the notion of change whose desirability and acceptance by us he takes as given.

He is warning us against the artificial change we must not want, the deep change we need. But it is all civic change, not the fundamental one people like Kasukuwere and his ZANU-PF espouse, change founded on a new place and status for the native vis-a-vis the control of his/her resources. No, no, no!

Not that kind of change. The change he says we need is that of political governance only, change that subsist in security sector reforms, media reforms etc, etc.
Such change must welcome the rise of a pro-America civil society and of course an American-guided private sector.

I hope the gentle reader recalls the numerous conferences the Americans have been having at the Celebration Centre to "re-invent" the private sector here.
The upshot is that Ray has made a bold, existential statement about us -you and me - and this on behalf of his country America which visualizes itself in loco parentis to all of us.

America is losing the information war!
Why all this frantic response by our Ray? Let us build a context.

On March 2 this year, American Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The focus was on budgetary support for America's information sector. She came across as a deeply worried woman. America was losing the information war, she told the Committee.

I quote her: "During the Cold War we did a great job in getting America's message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said, ‘Okay, fine, enough of that, we are done", and unfortunately we are paying a big price for it . . . We are in an information war and we are losing that war.

[America is losing the Information War! Al Jazeera is winning!]

America is losing the Information War! Al Jazeera is winning!
Al Jazeera is winning, the Chinese have opened a global multi-language television network, the Russians have opened up an English-language network. I've seen it in a few countries, and it is quite instructive."
She decried America's private information networks' failure to get America's messages abroad, preferring instead to sell America's unclad bodily curves by way of pornography and wrestling.

She just fell short of demanding the founding of State media, something unknown to America's mainstream media culture.
More significantly, she was talking not just of American media systems; rather, she addressed the combined reach and influence of Anglo-American media systems globally.

That tells you that on global affairs, only Africans act atomistically.
The previous year, Walter Isaacson, the man in charge of America's federal global broadcasting project within which falls Studio 7, had made the same frantic plea adding: "We can't allow ourselves to be out-communicated by our enemies."

Serving the empire
Three months down the line, in June and in Lusaka here in Southern Africa, the same lady made a landmark address to Africans.

She was attending an AGOA review meeting. Heractual words are worth recalling in extenso: "We saw that during the colonial times, it was easy to come in, take our natural resources, pay off leaders and leave. And when you leave, you do not leave much behind for the people who are there. We don't want to see a new colonialism in Africa.... We want [investors] to do well but we also want them to do good. We don't want them to undermine good governance, we don't want them to basically deal with just the top elites, and frankly too often pay for their concessions or opportunities to invest." A little while later, addressing the

Zambian Chamber of Commerce she elaborated: "We want a relationship of partnership not patronage, of sustainability, not quick fixes.... We want to establish a strong new foundation to attract new investment, open new businesses...create more paychecks, and to do so within the context of a positive ethic of corporate responsibility. We think it's essential that we have an idea going that doing well is not in any way a contradiction of doing good."

A-historical moral universe

The emperor is building a universe in which his moral pretensions rule the roost. Exploitation happened some distant time in the colonial past. It is not American, it is not contemporary, it is not AGOA. Threats of continued exploitation come from the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, the Brazilians. Not from an America cutting deals with Rhodesia for continued chrome supply in spite of racist mis-governance of the natives. It is not Union Carbide creating a horrendous chemical genocide assault on India. It is not America creating war in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya to cream off oil and other base metals. Not America propping dictators in the Middle East or Latin America. No, all evil was in the colonial past, is in futures without her restraining hand of false piety. Here begins my problems. We tend to take America's claims at face value, to assume her goodness. Her present sense of morality is a-historical and we, the forgetful ones, are only ready to say Amen!

Perpetual elections

Against this background and the fact that America has only this month to stabilise her economy or face total ruin, it is not very difficult to comprehend what the western white empire, using blacks like Charles Ray, is trying to do here. Ray's dive into the murky world of newspaper vendors is not aberrational or idiosyncratic. He is obeying the dictates of a purposeful system in search of an information-led global re-dominance.

American imperialism has to have a punchy media correlative. We are seeing the local face of it here. American money translates into an hysterical tabloid media ethos united around screaming headlines as if they are run from the same newsroom, led by Siamese editors. Same headlines, same stories, same sources, same slant, often same sizes, same advertisements. Above all, same enemy. The objective is a simple one. Apart from demonising an individual and a certain type of politics, the objective is to create a continual atmosphere of febrile political excitement and ceaseless electioneering. Zimbabwe is about elections from Monday to Monday. Zimbabwe is about GPA and outstanding issues from Monday to Monday. Zimbabwe is about Zuma and Zulu from Monday to Monday. We have become a country in continual election mode, a country therefore in continual tension, thanks to the western media project here.

The input from labour

Something else is brewing. Apart from the instrument of the media, imperialism is harnessing labour to subvert all other investments from the non-western world. Especially Chinese investments, which is why unions which have presided over callous exploitation of Zimbabweans by western capital suddenly wake up to the so-called Chinese labour malpractices! Today we see screaming headlines of so-called Chinese bosses who cannot pay workers, who poison our wildlife. Really? A deliberate attempt to use the labour centre to whip an anti-Chinese sentiment in the country. We have become the askaris of the West. Our society has become one missile America can throw at her enemies abroad. I thought Mutambara put it so well in Parliament. He said: "You should not fight the Chinese on behalf of the Europeans. Most of the criticisms of the Chinese in Africa are initiated by their competitors from Europe and America. Africans are being used to do the bidding for them."

Seeing America's warts

Marti succeeded in creating a new political ethos which was independently Cuba. Bolivar tried the same, only succeeding recently through the Chavez and his Bolivarian revolution. Both societies have etched out a new destiny simply by exorcising the ghost of model America. They have looked inward, around themselves for inspiration, reaching the conclusion that the American model is neither possible nor desirable. Many in Zimbabwe see spotless America, cradle in its sweetened evil ways even. Will we ever see its ugly warts? I wonder. Icho!

Labels: NATHANIEL MANHERU, NEOCOLONIALISM, OLIGARCHIES

posted by MrK @ 9:47 PM