Terence Ranger and the Jagged Geometry of Zimbabwe

Percy Zvomuya, The Con

In 2004, after Terence Ranger had delivered a paper at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), I went up to him to greet him, make a few comments about his lecture and introduce myself as Zimbabwean. I know, he responded.

Ranger’s paper, “Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the struggle over the past in Zimbabwe,” was one in which he critiqued the use of history by Zanu PF. The lecture came at the moment when the arc of the social and economic crisis had taken a sharp, jagged turn into the unknown and Zimbabwe’s history, and Zanu PF’s principal role in it, had become handy and expedient.

Eusébio: “Portugal’s best player ever was an African from Mozambique”

by Percy Zvomuya, The Con

On the day that Mozambique-born football legend Eusébio set forth for the other world, it’s likely a sieve-like dingy rowed from north Africa sardine-packed with African immigrants headed for Europe.

The fate of thousands of African migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean is varied but uniformly bleak. Some, never making it to European shores, drown – up to 20 000 have died in the last two decades; others end up in detention centres in Europe to be scrubbed with detergents to cleanse “scum” off their black backs.

Nomboniso Gasa: Long and short of the gender issue

by Percy Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian

Gender activist Nomboniso Gasa has been on Twitter for most of this year, although she hasn't yet memorised the social medium's first commandment: brevity. Her tweets, as a result, are often numbered 1 to 10.

"I was always intrigued by the power attributed to social media, the role it played in the Arab Spring, its power to report things as they happen," she said at her home in Observatory, Johannes­burg, on why she joined Twitter. "But I have always wondered about the depth of the platform. I didn't understand how you could communicate substantial issues in 140 characters. I still haven't mastered it. That's why I do the lists."

Zimbabwe is a Victim of Outsiders’ Fantasies

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.

Chinua Achebe: Without the story we are blind

Chinua Achebe

The ‘father’ of African literature set the template for the darker peoples of the world to tell their own stories, writes Percy Zvomuya. Mail & Guardian

Anthills of the Savannah (1987), the last novel the late Chinua Achebe wrote, has a chapter with the title Impetuous Son. The impetuous son is Ikem Osodi, poet and newspaperman, a character drawn from the skeleton of Achebe’s friend, the poet Christopher Okigbo, a victim of the Biafran War for independence.

Tweeting with a conscience

by Percy Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian

Nomalanga Mkhize

It is appropriate that historian, educator and television presenter Nomalanga Mkhize’s Twitter tagline comes from ­Brazilian educator, philosopher and influential theorist of critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire.

The Brazilian wrote that “the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption” and Mkhize’s activism and Twitter discussions attest to that.

Refuge for the wretched

by Percy Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian

The tiny Caribbean island of Martinique has bequeathed to the world great thinkers and writers. Most prominent, at least in Africa, is Frantz Fanon, one of the most important thinkers of the past century, whose text The Wretched of the Earth is routinely described as the “bible of decolonisation”. Then there is poet and politician Aimé Césaire, who, with the late Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor, is a cornerstone of the black movement Négritude.