Memory, History and Truth [Vol 2. Edition 6]

Submitted by Editor on Fri, 02/05/2010 - 19:33

Published in

Zimbabwe in Pictures newsletter

5 February 2010

IT HAS been a depressing week. The headlines captured in the few newspapers that still survive in Zimbabwe said it all:

“GNU hangs by thread” and “No more concessions, says ZANU-PF”.

But this editorial is not going to reflect on this. Two events this week made an impression on me. Firstly, it was the Nehanda commemoration of February 1990 when then President FW De Klerk unbanned the political parties and movements in South Africa. A talking nation, South Africa went into full gear on radio and television and in newspapers analyzing what that moment, two decades ago, meant. The opinions ranged from those celebrating Nelson Mandela’s release, to complaints over the marginalizing of small groups like AZAPO, to Professor Dan Roodt complaining about how De Klerk had betrayed Books Afrikaners and other whites.

Secondly, a few days earlier I attended a launch of an assessment report on the Government of National Unity (GNU) and had to endure listening to a ZANU PF supporter saying “General Constantine Chiwenga can never separate his ZANLA heart from his position in the army…We can’t let this country be taken by members of the Rhodesian Rifles...” There was now nothing new here. The Herald and Zimbabwe Television will give you that line 24/7. You have to give it to ZANU PF – they are serious when it comes to disciplining their message – no matter how ridiculous. And of course it helps when you control all television and radio and also run the sole national daily.

One other thing has given ZANU PF a distinct advantage. In a country where scholars and those that know have evacuated the public sphere you have a younger population that is not Musodzi au fait with the history of the country. ZANU PF can distort as much as they like - and they will. Civil society professionals can sing the usual mantra of “Free and Fair Elec Chitepo tions”, “Free the Airwaves”, “Democracy Now” etc. These are fair and valid calls and I could teach my parrot to say the same. But you can’t win a war without three key allies: memory, history and truth.

Some argue that memory is the collective remembrance of our past and history is, at its worst, a fictional narrative of ourselves. ZANU PF has ensured that it expunges all memory except of its glory: Nehanda and 1963 become the key milestones. The fact that Nehanda has no direct relation to ZANU PF is immaterial. She is now re-appropriated after 1980 to legitimize thuggery and, behold, history is messily re-written. Maybe I should sue ZANU PF for the theft of a national hero and privatizing her to the extent that a whole population is unable to reclaim her?

It is time we distilled the truth from memory and history and confronted the meta-narrative that drips from the tongues of rogues that have plundered, maimed, raped and killed. Watch this space.

Photo Credit: Picture of Nehanda in custody courtesy of the National Archives of Zimbabwe.

Chris Kabwato

Publisher

Important Note:

Next week we begin our Zimbabwe book review and we will also have interviews with the authors. Our first review will be Becoming Zimbabwe – A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo.