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(HERALD ZW) Zimbabwe: Denying ourselves the lifting gift of laughter

Zimbabwe: Denying ourselves the lifting gift of laughter
Sunday, 23 September 2012 00:00

We apologise to our valued readers for not carrying your favourite column, The Other Side, by Nathaniel Manheru in The Saturday Herald. This was due to a technical problem. — Editor.

As a columnist, I have travelled a fairly long road, much of it quite bumpy. It is the price one has to pay. After all, I give quite a lot, with butts of my acerbic attacks bearing bleeding furrows from my burrowing lashes. I am the village cynic so adept at seeing warts hidden and trampled upon by the chorus of herd praise-singing. It is an expensive role to play, one that invites brickbats.

You come across as a slaughterer of obvious, communal joy, an unconditional cynic given to dwelling on the small unseemly, amidst abundant cheer and goodness. But a role that must be played if the nation has to retain its balance, if the nation still has to remember its smelly armpit, disguised by its majestic, groomed tread on the beauty ramp, a tread accompanied by a cacophony of lewd cheers. Yes, a nation is most fallible, most susceptible, when there is communal cheers, complacent accolades over today’s big achievements that remain small when measured against undone challenges, when set against its timeless destiny.

And being a small people, young nation still craving for greatness, still hungry to post loud victory in this hierarchised world, it is very easy to perch a happy destiny on a fragile branch of small achievements so exaggerated.
That is why we need some needle-wielding cynic, masochistically ready and prepared to prick our swelling bums so we still remember that however big we think they are, they still cannot sit us on thistles.

Soft tissue on a giant elephant
I don’t like Europeans. I don’t like Americans. And to me there is no Atlantic Ocean between these human types. They are horrible, have been throughout human history. They seek conquest; they have achieved it across millennia, causing untold grief to the rest of mankind, principally the kind of colour. I vow to fight them, at the very least with my pen which dutifully pokes them, gratuitously hoping for a hurtful bleed. I know I am the little, angry ant biting the hind of a giant, scaly elephant.

I hope I make it beyond its scaly rind, to reach its softer tissue, closer to its rectum. Nature is always even. It posts small, lethal weakness on giant strength so we, the small axe, can cut you down.

Whoever knew that the giant that felled Gaddafi, erroneously granted Al Qaeda some foothold on the Libyan State? See now who has been felled!

The so-called Arab Spring, so celebrated in the West, has become a deadly night for those vaunting themselves for launching a global war on terror. Like chishambwe, the small stubborn tick, Arab insurgency has tactfully lurked and advanced under cover of volleys from those executing the war on terror.

From within the belly of that war machinery, these wily actors were able to mark their future targets, daub them with blood as in the night of the biblical Passover. From Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain right through to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring has become America’s Arab terror, and Gaddafi, sleeps happily, feeling well avenged.

One strength I grant my enemy

But I admire one thing about these Westerners of my revilement. They have this unique attribute of laughter, ringing laughter. They are able to laugh at themselves, thereby being able to lift themselves through that self-laughter. It was such laughter that gave literature a bundle of devices that endure to the point of being synonymous with the discipline.

Such laughter gave us irony, gave us sarcasm, gave us wit, gave us parody, gave us bathos, gave us pun — in short — many of those devices that provoke remedial laughter in mankind.

Or plain humorous contempt that allows us to adjust to the unpalatable that we cannot help, or change. Before writing this piece, I have just been reading Jose Saramago’s collection of essays. For the benefit of those from a different background, Saramago is a Portuguese Nobel Laureate for literature.

He died in June 2010, itself the month and year of his second coming as a famed writer. Of course the first coming was when he won the Nobel Prize. In September 2008, he did a savage piece on George Bush, like him, a westerner. It is an essay on errant power and leadership, an essay that kicked off on a note of wonder.

Great power, small president

His pen asked: “I wonder why it is that the United States, a country so great in all things, has so often had such small presidents.” Noting that George Bush was the smallest of all American presidents that have ever lived, he described him as wielding “abysmal ignorance . . . and constant(ly) succumbing to the irresistible temptation of pure nonsense . . .”

Then came the finisher so immaculately dressed in devastating humour: “This man . . . has presented himself to humanity in the grotesque pose of a cowboy who has inherited the world and mistaken it for a herd of cattle.

“We don’t know what he really thinks, we don’t even know if he does think (in the noble sense of the word), we don’t even know whether he might not be just a badly programmed robot that constantly confuses and switches around the messages it carries around inside it.”

But to give the man some credit for once in his life, there is one programme in the robot George Bush, president of the United States, that works to perfection: lying.

He knows he’s lying, he knows we know he is lying, but being a compulsive liar, he will keep on lying even when he has the most naked truth right there before his eyes — he will keep on lying even after the truth has exploded in his face . . . With Bush, the lies come from very deep down; they are in his blood.
A liar emeritus, he is the high priest of all the other liars who have surrounded him, applauded him, and served him over the past few years.”

Saramago digs at forgiven sex excesses

But that was Saramago on Bush in the aftermath of US aggression on Iraq. I don’t want to simplify Saramago. More matters than war would trigger his savage laughter, his scalding indignation, as Silvio Berlusconi was later to see.

A leader of remarkable peccadilloes, Berlusconi’s sexual excesses soon drew the attention of Saramago whose knowledge of the Italian leader’s immense riches did not blind him to his swelling foibles. But his sharpest barbs were reserved for the Italian people. Of them he paid a rare tribute in the following words: “I don’t know very much myself about the life and miracles of Silvio Berlusconi, il Cavaliere.

The Italian people, who have sat him (Berlusconi) once, twice, three times in the Prime Minister’s chair, must know far more than I do. Well, as we often hear it said, the people are sovereign, and they are not only sovereign, they are also wise and prudent . . .”

The power of irony, the irony of power
You can’t miss Saramago’s imprint of savage sarcasm. A principal weapon against the mighty whose conduct or misconduct he judges to fall short of the rudiments of public morality and high leadership.

He wields words and sarcasm as his only weaponry against awesome power made more dangerous by the absence of restraining sense of responsibility.
Measured against such stupendous power, his sarcasm underlines his overwhelming impotence, if the measure of effective resistance is toppling such reviled power.

However corrosive, mere literary irony cannot change bad governments, topple bad rulers.
It is proper to bring in Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher who has written so copiously on modernity, and the weapon of irony. Noting the powerlessness of writers and their irony in situations of unfair and immoral exercise of power, he nevertheless credits irony with enormous social power: “Aware of its own weakness, it (irony) is always on the defensive.”

This does not stop it becoming aggressive whenever the opportunity arises. It can irritate giants. It risks their wrath. The ironist is not afraid of setting himself up as a universal agitator — in other words, as an agitator of the universal. His irony is an act of defiance: weakness defying the powers that be, which are never more than specific powers localised in the hands of specific individuals.

We might call irony the protest of an insecure subjectivity and consciousness, thus protest by thought in search of itself.”

Great lotus-eaters
Last week I raised a prickly issue regarding the susceptibility of the national mind to mindless distraction. I noted our proneness to inordinate fascination with the petty, amidst giant issues requiring our urgent attention. Much worse, our inattention to serious matters threatening our collective well as they get smuggled in by our enemies in our hour of distraction.

The issue of the Prime Minister’s sexuality was one giant binge to a nation long craving for a delightful diversion, hungry for cathartic ecstasy, for a lotus-induced escape from itself. Much worse, even in that Elysium, we still bickered, stood deeply divided, ill-focused and totally misreading the cast and drama before us. And judging by the intensity of reader comments on the matter, the lotus-eating continues.

Unlike our European counterparts, our response to the excesses of power have been most uninventive, even surprising and hurtful to ourselves, without lifting us by a single inch to higher morality.

The saving myth of filial virtue
Yet the issue of the Prime Minister and his women has allowed the ant to look at the elephant. Admittedly a look of impotence, but one from a commanding vantage point that allows and exposes an unflattering view all along so ornately hidden from the public.

Power, like a loose father gnawed by venereal illness, has in the past two weeks walked with an embarrassing limp, indeed has revealed the blot from a diseased discharge, all in front of its grown up children who now know, who now can recognise and interpret smudges of sin. If any debate on the Prime Minister’s sexuality was permissible at all, it needed to be on what light it throws on his leadership qualities, themselves the only thing that touch and matter to all of us as Zimbabweans.

Beyond that, I maintain at the pain of death, that nothing else matters to me and you.
We have decided to be fascinated by a potentially useful matter, without knowing where and when to draw boundaries, where and when to draw lessons that matter to us as a nation. What scars the mind of grown-up children after they have peeped and seen their father’s excesses is not so much the soiled underwear.

That can be washed clean the next day. It is the realisation of their father’s sexual physiognomy, the realisation that such a physiognomy gets used outside orthodoxy. Our parents’ physiognomy remain unacknowledged, in spite of its evident presence.

It is called a saving lie. We all need it. That is what underpins moral order, what gives a father who has several children outside wedlock the moral power to still whip hard and call to order a daughter who has come back home late at night, on suspicion of seeing a lover before ripe age. Parenthood rests on a false assumption of filial virtue.

Power as an efficient cheat
Same with power. We construct it and allow its possession and use on some assumption of moral flawlessness we know we are incapable of as humans.
Be it needs that illusion. But we need that lie — a saving lie — that whoever wields that power which is exercised over us, is infallible, must be incapable of sinning.

And the word is “sinning”. It is not “mistakes”. With the exercise of power, we expect mistakes.
But not venality. Not sins. Of course sins must be committed, in fact do get committed by those in power. But they should never be seen, should never be a public tracks, cover its sinful footprints perfectly, indeed to cover its front and hind. Or where its covering act is not well executed, to leave us in doubt and suspicion, to allow us some comfortable retreat into the zone of disputed righteousness. Maybe it is true, maybe not.

We must remain in the zone of unresolved limbo, in our judgment of the moral conduct of those in power. Power must face allegations of sinful conduct. It must never be convicted conclusively, compulsively. Power must never prove against itself, must never provide indubitable evidence of its own moral culpability. We expect power to be an efficient cheat. This is where Morgan failed.

Culpable incompetence
He sailed along the blue shoreline on a desert day, and forgot the children were out to play. Now they have seen their father’s nakedness. Do they laugh, do they remain silent for fear of the dark curse? Do they deploy Saramago’s savage irony of laughter? But that is not the issue. The issue is what we did when power failed us by denying us room to form any illusion about its own righteousness. And this is where I start faulting the national mind.

The Prime Minister’s misdeeds raise existential questions which the national debate is either not raising at all, or sufficiently. Or has aborted for fear of immediate electoral consequences. Our fear of deserved electoral consequences which the Prime Minister must face has got us to sidestep key moral issues he must answer or else stumble. We seem so anxious to grant him power unconditionally, and thus have suspended standard moral questions all power must answer.

We have rigged our own minds, gagged our mouths amidst a brazen show of sinning power too incompetent even to mind let alone cover its own tracks. It is not the sexuality of the Prime Minister which is at issue; it is what that sexuality has revealed about a man wielding position and power, a man who therefore must be both careful and competent.

Immoral, Amoral?
What I have seen in these two fateful weeks clearly shows the Prime Minister has many enemies. In Zanu-PF, and that is to be expected. In MDC-T, and that was to be suspected. In both, which was to be feared. Yet against all, our Prime Minister strutted naked, wagging his sexuality like there was no tomorrow, no enemies to extract maximum advantage. We all watched the drama, wondering what had entered the mind of a man who aspires to be our “father”.

Is the man incapable of self-judgment, incapable of protecting himself against his own enemies? If he lacks that most basic instinct — self-preservation — can he protect us? Or is he amoral, a doer who cannot compute his actions on a moral scale? What leadership type arises from such sensibility, such total lack of a sense of personal danger?

Infantalising our leaders
How has the national debate evolved? Shamefully, very shamefully. Instead of getting our man to account for his amazing conduct, for his incompetence after performing a naked sin, we seek to invent scapegoats. The Central Intelligence Organisation foremost. Aah! Locardia second-most. A gold-digger, we dare call her!

Whose gold? Ever since Tsvangirai became our Prime Minister, all the “gold” he pretends to have, comes from you and me, the taxpayers.
So whose gold, except the little we mandatorily forego by way of taxes?

And the problem is Locardia we think intends to dig it, never our Prime Minister who is ready to spend it, away from the search of our collective welfare as leaders should? How does the Prime Minister of a country which cannot afford allowances for census enumerators, still afford a cruise on high seas? How do you and me whose children daily grow spectre-thin from sparse food, afford funding such gargantuan appetites for pleasure so displayed by our leaders?

Much worse, how do we invent so many scapegoats for our leaders if we wish to grow them as responsible and accountable actors in a democracy? How do we accept them to be such easy victims of elementary honey-traps without infantalising them, without accepting that they are so grossly incompetent as not even to be capable of hiding their own sins? What do we seek in leadership? Childlike naïveté or competence?

Makumbe and his touts
I go a little further. I have said Tsvangirai has enemies across parties, including in his own party. What astounded me in the last two weeks was the growing boldness of enemies from within his own party. Their derisive laughter grows open and louder by the day.

They are scornful, clearly stating before friend and foe that this man who has so hurt the MDC brand must now find his way home, his way to retirement, away from the world of politics. There is an open questioning of the man’s leadership credentials from his peers in ambition, and his juniors in the party who are too low to rival him.

It’s running through now. One party supporter in the UK has written to the Prime Minister, imploring him to resign and save the party. She is now threatened with having “a lid put above her”, whatever that means. Even Makumbe, himself an aspiring Buhera West MP on the MDC-T ticket, says the MDC-T party has been left to the whims of vanahwindi, left to the leadership of touts. Where does the count of touts begin?

Makumbe uses the euphemism of participation in the Inclusive Government, to explain away this unfitness to govern. We know the extent of the problem he broaches, the pain that forces him to go that far. We know what he really means. He means the MDC-T president is on high seas, enjoying the legendary carnal pleasures of sailors. He lives for the day, unaware of dangers to his party, to himself. It is the bane of an unreflexive leadership.

More hilarious is the piece from Eddie Cross. It is on the Marikana massacres in far away South Africa. He calls this tragedy a “game changer”.
That it is, no doubt. Except Cross can never get us to rivet on Marikana when there is a bigger game changer at home, in the Prime Minister’s bedroom. In fact his decision to go on a diaspora — he and his pen — beckons him back to home politics so loudly. The Prime Minister — his own leader — has shot and killed our sense of morality, our sense of leadership. Who speaks about that? A very revealing trait of the national mind — avoidance of the unpalatable. That way our erring leaders get away with it. Need we wonder when worse outrages follow?

When writers succumb to dogmatism, forget irony
Then you have another amazing side-track brewed to save errant power. The national debate has recorded an inventory of national morality, more accurately an inventory of the moral stature of the Prime Minister’s perceived adversaries.

All the perceived sexual misdemeanors of persons in Zanu-PF — from the President right down to the smallest minion — have been held up and high for anemic scrutiny. It is a very strange discourse, a strange way of defending erring power. See who else has sinned, the argument goes, with writers and bloggers slanderously spewing names and situations. Let’s grant those claims for a moment. What is the upshot to all that? To say that the errant Prime Minister is in good Zanu-PF sinful company? And we have all along been pushing Tsvangirai up, up and up so he ends up like the Zanu-PF we daily condemn and discount as too sinful to govern us? I see even the writer — Petina Gappah — herself our supposed moral compass, succumbs to this kind of reasoning too? Who shall use irony then?

When shall it be used? She must find time to read Vladimir Jankelevitch who says throughout history, dogmatism provokes irony. We have a problem when writers who constitute the most sensitive part of the national mind, become so enchanted with erring leadership as to be so dogmatic.-

Holy men’s benedictions
Lastly, we have a compounded moral question. As the Prime Minister hovered butterfly-like, from flower to flower, seemingly in endless carnal flight, also in sight were at least two holy men in prayer. Or were they? We have one Muriritirwa and a Father Makaka. Muriritirwa initiated courtship for the Prime Minister. He facilitated consummation of that courtship in his own house. A holy house, or is it a holy man’s house? Father Makaka claims that he was misled by the Prime Minister. It is hard to believe that the holy man does not read newspapers, nay did not read them up to the last day of the wedding.

Why did he go to Raintree? The wedding went against all the homilies of catholicism? Viewed collectively, what exactly is the relationship of these two holy men and this man of power, and by extrapolation, the nature of the State-church relations which the political dispensation which Tsvangirai implies suggests? Shall the false benediction only begin and end with amorous affairs? Won’t we see this extending to sins of governance? Why is the Christian Alliance of Zimbabwe so quiet, when a part of its retinue is implicated? Is this the quality of the national prayer campaign which TB Joshua was meant to crown?

Arise Saramago, arise!
Let me round up my article. I have no problem with a questioning deficit arising from the fear of power. Power is and can be dangerous. Fear or it is expected, understandable. Fear of it can muzzle questions which must be asked. But to skip interrogating power because one is enamoured of it, to my mind, is downright dishonesty, downright irresponsibility on the part of a people. Tsvangirai wields trappings of power, not real power itself. He need not be feared. But he seeks to wield real power, full power above the current one so trammeled by the sharing arrangement. He wants to govern all of us. Yet he already sins enormously with that little power, meeting all of us the morning after with a brazen face.

He tramples on women rights, to cheers! On his wedding day, we expected a man “with a skin”, to use a Shona parlance, a man ashamed and sorry for himself. A man who would atone for his misdeeds, indeed a man in deep remorse. We did not expect a charging bull, a sinner who brags, shouts and repudiates the world, however censorious. Much worse, we did not expect a part of us to cheer, let alone cheer him on. If we cannot loathe the misdeeds of our leaders, the very least we can do is to laugh. Laugh, laugh and laugh. Or don’t we know lifting laughter? Saramago, arise. Arise Saramago. — Icho!

* nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw

Labels: MDC, MORGAN TSVANGIRAI

posted by MrK @ 5:45 PM