by Percy
Zvomuya, The Con
In
2008 or so, I registered for a Masters degree at Wits University with
a rather interesting research component that I never got to finish.
My thesis was to be an examination of the coverage of Zimbabwe in
South Africa’s Sunday
Times;
the use of the prism of Zimbabwe to debate local issues. The idea was
to look at opinion and comment pieces on the Times’ pages
and show these as not really looking at Zimbabwe but, rather, using
the country to the north as a touchstone to critique the local.
Words like
“Zanufication” and “Zimbabwe”; phrases like “go the way of
Zimbabwe” and even stock ones such as “bread basket to basket
case” are handy tools in this exercise. They are, in fact, not
meant to shoot down whatever is wrong about Zimbabwe but, instead, to
bend the barrel of the gun and target it at the self, right at South
Africa.
When I
conducted some of this research, Thabo Mbeki was president and his
battle with Jacob Zuma couldn’t have been more toxic. Among other
issues, Mbeki, it was argued, was too soft on Zimbabwe; he was
stifling debate in the liberation movement; he was even about to
commit a cardinal Mugabeism by seeking a third term as ANC president.
(If Mugabe finishes his term, he would have been in power for 38
years).
Fast forward
this debate to 2013 and we don’t seem to have moved an inch. Voted
into office for another term, Mugabe will remain in South Africa’s
firmament for a while.
The Mugabe
ogre inches ever closer towards the Limpopo river and, for this
reason, Zimbabwe continues to occupy a fantastical space in South
Africa’s imaginary. Or rather, South Africa’s own problems
increasingly make a Mugabe-style approach to social justice ever more
appealing for a segment of South Africa’s citizenry.
The agent of
the “Mugabefication” of South Africa is, of course, Julius
Malema. It’s not helped by the fact that Malema, cast away by his
biological parents, the ANC, has found a home in Mugabe’s Zanu-PF.
Like a good
adoptive child, Malema spouts the doctrine of his new family.
Mugabe -after
taking away land and giving it to black farmers who have generally
made a success of it- is now moving on foreign owned companies. The
doctrine of nationalization is, of course, one that scares vast
swathes of South Africa. Nationalisation of companies, the
culmination of Mugabe’s lifetime work, is a sermon that Malema has
been preaching for years now.
Zimbabwe (or
Rhodesia, its antecedent) has always occupied a mythical space in the
imagination of outsiders.
In fact, much
of the myths originated from the majestic stone walls from which the
name Zimbabwe itself comes from. “Dzimba dza mabwe” (houses of
stone) came to be the rallying metaphor for the nationalist struggle
that began in the 1950s. Coined by nationalist Michael Mawema, the
name of this future country wasn’t universally accepted by the
various factions when it came into being.
Decades
earlier, in 1891, the British South Africa Company (Cecil John
Rhodes’ vehicle of imperialism) partnered with a research institute
led by one J.T. Bent to “research” the origin of the stone walls.
One of their
conclusions was, “the authors of these ruins were a northern race
coming from Arabia”. Some even thought that Zimbabwe was the Ophir
referenced in the Bible. “Zimbabwe is an old Phoenician residence,”
Rhodes himself wrote.
Rhodes,
like many other British invaders, refused to believe that this was
the work of native Zimbabweans. In the book Great
Zimbabwe,
archaeologist Peter S Garlake writes that, to the white settlers,
“the African had not got the energy, will, organisation, foresight
or skill to build these walls. Indeed, he appeared so backward that
it seemed that his entire race could never have accomplished the task
at any period.”
Most of the
early settlers had gone to Zimbabwe on the basis of what proved to be
a false alarm, a myth, if you like. After the vast mineral riches of
the Rand and Kimberley, fortune seekers were told by Rhodes and his
people that Zimbabwe was blessed with even more gold deposits.
Delirious
with the myths that the gold used by King Solomon had come from
Zimbabwe, it wasn’t difficult to convince the men who would soon
trek up to Zimbabwe as part of the Pioneer Column.
When they got
to Zimbabwe, they realised the myth of the gold was just that: a
myth. There was gold, but not to rival that on the Reef.
There was a
lot of land, though, plenty of well-watered and fertile soil. So it
was that natives were dispossessed of their land; the same land that
is central to Zimbabwe’s economic and political struggle.
The myth of
Rhodesia not just occupied the imagination of those near. It was
equally bewitching to those afield.
From the
United States, the expression of this imagination would assume a form
that anyone aware of the Civil Rights movement would instantly
recognise. In 1968, James Earl Ray, the man who is thought to have
assassinated Martin Luther King, was caught in London on his way to
Rhodesia.
A year before
the assassination, he had expressed his desire for “immigrating to
Rhodesia” so that he could be in the land of Ian Smith who was
“doing a good job”.
According
to “Hellhound
on His Trail:” The Stalking of Martin Luther King (Jr) and the
International Hunt for His Assassin (Double
Day), a book about Ray by Hampton Sides, “the idea of Rhodesia
burned in his imagination, the promise of sanctuary and refuge, the
possibility of living in a society where people understood”.
Rhodesia was
then a renegade republic ruled by Smith who had unilaterally declared
independence from Britain in 1965. By denying the black majority a
vote and stripping them of rights in their own land, Smith made sure
that only an armed solution would break the impasse. Mugabe’s
refrain “we fought for this country” was made possible by Smith.
Even to this
day Zimbabwe remains, for many, just a metaphor not an actual,
physical terrain whose people have hopes, ambitions and fears. On
their territory, the fears and anxieties that, sometimes, have
nothing to do with them at all, are projected.
Some
Zimbabweans will tell you that the suffering of the last decade that
manifested itself as food shortages and lack of forex, was not really
about Zimbabwe. When the West imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, what
they were really doing was warning South Africa that a Zimbabwe-style
turn wouldn’t be accepted.
Let us face
it, Zimbabwe is quite insignificant in terms of global capital. The
suffering Zimbabweans endured was a vicarious warning to South
Africa, Africa’s economic giant, a country whose social injustices
dwarf Zimbabwe’s.
Try what
Zimbabwe did and see if you can get away with it, so the warning
emblazoned on some virtual banner is supposed to read.
Much in the
coverage of the last elections still betray that Zimbabwe remains an
abstraction for many, a place that is still host to the fantasies,
anxieties and fears of many South Africans.
But Zimbabwe
is its own self, its own country, not some echo chamber from which
people hope to catch reverberated strains of their own discourse.
