Hope amid Zimbabwe's harsh reality

I tend to see myself as a realist; I call a spade a spade. I have, however, come to realize that it doesn't hurt to see life from the slightest wink of optimism there is. This is what I, in concert with my Zimbabwean friends, have resigned to do in the past months, indeed, years. You can't imagine how happy I was to read this headline from BBC website. "Hope amid Zimbabwe's harsh reality." Yes, indeed, Tsvangirai's ascendancy to power, however limited, should be see as a sign of hope.
To those who are about to lose their grip on the life-saving log of wood they chanced upon in that great pond I say, hang on, please. Hang on, tempus omnia vincit. Time conquers everything. That sounds idiotic, I know. But look, Mugabe is 85 years old. 85! Good Lord. Well, there will surely be another election soon. That's all I can say.
Oh, did I give a link to the original article? Here it is, friends. ENJOY

Lessons of Zimbabwe - A Response

Lessons of Zimbabwe
Courtesy of LRB

From Timothy Scarnecchia, Jocelyn Alexander and 33 others

For a number of scholars, Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’ requires a further response, given Mamdani’s stature as a scholar and public intellectual (LRB, 4 December 2008). Some aspects of his argument are uncontroversial: there was a real demand for land redistribution – even the World Bank was calling for it in the late 1990s as the best way forward in Zimbabwe – and some of the Western powers’ original pronouncements and actions were hypocritical. There is a real danger, however, in simplifying the lessons of Zimbabwe. It isn’t just a matter of stark ethnic dichotomies, the urban-rural divide, or the part played by ‘the West’.

One of the more difficult tasks for scholars working on Zimbabwe is to convince peers working on other areas of Africa to look more deeply at the crisis and not to be fooled by Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimisation. Mamdani has, unfortunately, fallen in with this rhetoric by characterising Zimbabwean history and politics as fundamentally a battle between what he sees as an urban-based opposition, supported by the West, and a peasant-based ruling party besieged by external forces. This flight of fantasy portrays Mugabe and his Zanu-PF cronies as heroes of a landless peasantry (which is how they see themselves) and the state – backed up by the paramilitary violence of war veterans and others – as the vanguard of a peasant revolution. We suggest that Mamdani acquaint himself with the large body of Zimbabwean scholarship, which is easily available, rather than selectively using the arguments of scholars such as Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros on land reform, and Gideon Gono, Mugabe’s Reserve Bank governor, as his source on sanctions. Citing Gono is rather like using Milton Obote’s writings as a source for conditions in Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s. A starting point for more informed scholarship is the recent Bulletin of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars, found at http://concerned africascholars.org.

Mamdani’s portrayal of Zimbabwe’s opposition politics is insulting to those who continue to endure so much in their struggle to build a better Zimbabwe. He argues that urban trade unions have always been marginal to the nationalist movement because of their supposed ‘Ndebele leadership’, and that the current opposition follows in this ‘weak’ trade-union tradition as well as being in thrall to Western interests. What he doesn’t mention is the trade unions’ hard-fought battle against repression before and after 1980. There were many challenges to overcome, among which ethnic politics was hardly the most prominent. That leaders such as Morgan Tsvangirai managed to reshape the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) from what had been a pro-Zanu organisation into a viable political opposition by the early 1990s reflects an Africa-wide and Africa-based phenomenon that Mamdani apparently missed. By accepting Zanu-PF’s argument that the MDC is primarily limited to urban areas and is the product of the West, Mamdani’s account loses credibility.

Mamdani has also sugar-coated his portrayal of political violence in Zimbabwe. He fails even to mention that many ‘peasants’ in Shona-speaking Zanu-PF strongholds turned against Mugabe and major Zanu-PF leaders in the March 2008 elections. It was this reversal that sparked a new round of state-sponsored violence against the same Shona peasantry that Mamdani cites as the beneficiaries of Mugabe’s benevolent dictatorship. In addition, during the months preceding the run-off election (April-June 2008), food relief was denied to rural areas, leaving the World Food Programme and other groups to scramble to re-establish supply to the Zimbabwean peasantry Mamdani suggests are at the centre of Zanu-PF’s concern. Repressive legislation and actions by Zanu-PF activists are magically transformed by Mamdani into acts of generosity to outsiders. After noting discrimination against farm workers in gaining access to land on the grounds they or ‘their elders’ came from another country, Mamdani adds that ‘some were given citizenship.’ Yet he omits the fact that just before the 2002 presidential election the Zanu-PF government removed citizenship from many farm workers and other Zimbabweans whose parents or grandparents had non-Zimbabwean citizenship rights. The disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of perceived opposition supporters disappears in Mamdani’s analysis.

Mamdani’s contention that the West, not Mugabe and the Zanu-PF government, is responsible for the current crisis is as dangerous as it is wrong. By selectively citing instances over the past eight years when the West has cancelled donor funding, Mamdani gives the impression that the West has not been involved in sustaining life in Zimbabwe. The reality is that there are whole sections of the Zimbabwean population that the Zanu-PF leadership would rather punish with starvation than allow to support the opposition. ‘We would be better off with only six million people, with our own [ruling party] people who supported the liberation struggle,’ Didymus Mutasa, one of the key insiders in Zanu-PF, said in 2002, when drought again threatened to kill thousands of rural Zimbabweans. ‘We don’t want all these extra people.’ Western food aid has been a lifeline for ‘these extra people’ – when the state has allowed access.

Sanctions cannot excuse the callous disregard for human life Mugabe and his associates have shown, dating back to the Gukurahundi between 1983 and 1986 (which Mamdani glosses over as a brief bout of violence following from the tension between Zanu-PF and the ‘Ndebele unions’ in 1986), or the repeated land seizures which have been going on since the 1980s, the forced removals, violent reprisals, and the withholding of food aid. Furthermore, Mamdani’s suggestion that the fall in direct investment in Zimbabwe is the result of sanctions is dishonest. There are no sanctions against direct investment in Zimbabwe, as shown by Anglo American’s willingness to invest $400 million in Zimbabwe during the summer of 2008 to protect access to platinum mines. There have been large investments from South Africa, India and China, as Mugabe has bartered away the nation’s resources for short-term interests. It is the kleptocracy and violence fostered by Mugabe and Co that has scared off other investors, not sanctions.

At a time when thousands of people in Zimbabwe are threatened by a cholera epidemic – in part at least as a consequence of Zanu-PF’s decision to replace MDC municipal officials with Zanu-PF ‘urban governors’ – and international donors are scrambling to help deal with the collapse of the health sector and widespread hunger, intellectuals such as Mamdani should display more responsibility and less posturing in their attempts to draw meaningful lessons from Zimbabwe.

Jocelyn Alexander, Linacre College, Oxford
Andrea Arrington, University of Arkansas
Michael Bratton, Michigan State University
Bill Derman, Michigan State University
William J. Dewey, The University of Tennessee
Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics
Linda Freeman, Carleton University
Petina Gappah, Zimbabwean writer and lawyer
Kenneth Good, RMIT University Melbourne
David Gordon, Bowdoin College Amanda Hammar, Nordic Africa Institute
David McDermott Hughes, Rutgers University
Diana Jeater, University of the West of England
Tony King, University of the West of England
Bill Kinsey, University of Zimbabwe
Norma Kriger, Cornell University
Todd Leedy, University of Florida
JoAnn McGregor, University College London
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Showers Mawowa, University of KwaZulu Natal
David Maxwell, Keele University
Donald Mead, Michigan State University
John Metzler, Michigan State University
David Moore, University of Johannesburg
Shylock Muyengwa, University of Florida
Blair Rutherford, Carleton University
John S. Saul, York University
Richard Saunders, York University
Timothy Scarnecchia, Kent State University, Ohio
Anne Schneller, Michigan State University
Marja Spierenburg, Vrije University of Amsterdam
Colin Stoneman, JSAS Editorial Coordinator
Blessing-Miles Tendi, Oxford University
Wendy Urban-Mead, Bard College
Elaine Windrich, Stanford University

The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature and the Nigerian Love of Exclusion

The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, awarded biennially, is, to many, the most prestigious prize of the fiction genre in Africa. Touted as “Africa’s NOBEL prize,” it is supposed to earn the recipient the much treasured recognition among his/her peers globally. The activities constructed around the prize giving ceremony make it an envy of every writer and connoisseur of African culture. This is a prize that, given the name of the patron and targeted excellence, has the potential of becoming one of the ten culturally relevant literary prizes in the world.
Like the Nigerian (NLNG) literature prize, Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature is though not without a genetically debilitating snag. While the Nigerian national prize in literature is open to only Nigerians resident in the country, a condition that has attracted considerable controversy, the Wole Soyinka prize excludes books “that have won any other awards.” This is a major pitfall that will deny the prize the grandeur and global relevance that it deserves.
To understand the contradictory logic inherent in the prize, it is helpful to ponder that it is established to reward excellence, but systematically excludes any book whose excellence has already been recognized by other agencies. What the exclusionary clause suggests, put in a very simple language, runs thus: This is a prize for excellence; if your book is excellent, please do not apply.
It is important to note that I am not particularly against the books that have won the prize (indeed the two books rewarded so far have their individual merits). I am worried by the spirit of exclusion that has accompanied it. It is just difficult to believe that the prize that is awarded to books that haven’t won any prize at all, is, or will ever be, a trailblazer. Nor can it be an ultimate confirmer of the literary value inherent in a work in the manner of Nobel Prize, which it ironically emulates. It will forever be known as the prize for “the best of the rest.”
This being said, it is mind-boggling that a continent that has still a lot of spaces to make up for in excellence, smuggles through the backdoor silly exclusionary clauses that end up making parts of its constituencies feel unwanted.
At the inception of the Nigerian Prize in Literature, (NLNG Prize), in 2004, many Nigerians abroad protested their being excluded from the prize. Some even termed it outright disenfranchisement. To be sure, one of the entry requirements states that Nigerian authors must be “resident in the country.” It goes on to define residency as “minimum of three of the four years covered by the competition” (Website). Given the name of the prize, Nigerian Prize in Literature, it is no surprise that Nigerian writers living abroad, be it in Ghana or Germany, in Canada or Cameroon, feel excluded and reduced to aliens in their homeland. The truth though is that there is an unwarranted anxiety that those who reside outside the country would dominate the prize because they are said to have better opportunity to write and publish. The thought that merely being outside of Nigeria regardless of where one is or what one does already puts one at an advantage is not only empty, it is also unfair.
But the calculated tactic of exclusion in the two major literary awards held in Nigeria is only symptomatic of the moral workings of the culture we inherited from our ancestors whose world was largely characterized by sharp binary oppositions. The world of our ancestors was one guided by a form of “Us” and “Them,” a world where the meaning or the sanctity of “Us” is guaranteed by the mere fact that the other group, the “Them” is excluded. That world, however much we embrace it as part of our heritage, entertained no grey area, no in-betweens, no threshold. That, of course, means that reality is already molded, and cannot be negotiated. There cannot be discussions and compromises; you either accept what is given or you just walk away. Any society that operates in this way has very little chance for growth from within. This is because exclusions cement its realities into unshakable essences. Perhaps a few examples could help us understand my thinking here.
Growing up in my village a relatively weak boy, I was made to feel important when I was finally initiated into my village’s masquerade cult. From that point on I lived with the belief that I was superior to some people: women; I was superior to my mother and my sisters and all those girls who might have laughed at me as a weakling. I was superior to women because they have been excluded from something special, from the cult of men.
As a son of the soil of my village, (a few Kilometers from the city) I was also made to feel superior because I knew that a particular group of people we called foreigners (never mind that most of them had been living there before I was born) was excluded from certain claims to the reality of that part of the world. These people were not sons of the soil; they couldn’t lay claims to any aspect of our reality. In short, they were inferior. Their putative inferiority made me superior. It should surprise no one to know that this is an essential pillar of every racist, feudal and oppressive society. Their logic is that of exclusion. Just exclude and feel comfortable with the rest. Wasn’t this what actually brought about the falling apart of the Umuofia community?
Our twenty-first Nigerian society is also a direct progeny of military culture whose mentality is branded by exclusions. Nigeria experienced more than thirty years of brutal military regimes which notoriously ruled by fiat edicts calculated to suppress reason and dissenting voices and above all kill excellence. The army uniform confers on the wearer the feeling that he is more valuable than the rest who are excluded from the club.
With exclusionary clauses appended to most of our otherwise modern and universal activities, and in our thinking, we, unfortunately, demonstrate our affection for the traditional, oppositionary categories even when our times and cultural idioms have changed. In so doing we reveal our inability to expand our moral imaginations and to really make room for excellence and democratic spirit.
At this stage of our history, we need excellence from any part of the world as long as it bears even the remotest hint or link to Nigeria. Wole Soyinka stands among other things, for global world outlook. Any prize bearing his name must entertain no exclusionary clause or measure.