By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

ANY historian of African journalism will not fail to be struck by the following facts:

First, in the fight against the continuing illegal and racist sanctions on Zimbabwe which African leaders recently took all the way to the UN General Assembly, African journalists noted and praised the show of unity among politicians while suppressing a rather depressing historical fact: That the white countries, led by Britain and the US, succeeded in imposing the same sanctions, justifying them and maintaining them, with the proud help of many African journalists. 

At the foundation of the obvious economic warfare represented by these blanket sanctions against the people of Zimbabwe, one finds a relentless image war, a media war, which has enabled the Western powers to claim that their sanctions are ultimately meant to rescue the povo from their own despotic leaders.  

This lie was/is repeated over and over again throughout the 21 years until it has become a media habit and part of ‘history’ as new generations grow up not knowing any better and not having any idea what it would be like to live and work free of sanctions.

 Without naming names, we all  know that  some of the African journalists in the forefront of helping the West to impose, justify and maintain these  sanctions were first given awards for excellence in reporting by Western agencies. 

This was done so often and the publicity over the  dubious awards repeated  so routinely  that some of us  were also moved to start honouring the same journalists as human rights defenders, as media heroes and heroines, while of course giving lip service to the politicians’ UN campaign against the same economic warfare called sanctions.

So, the fight against these sanctions will not be won until the pervasive mindset cultivated  by the press to justify their imposition  is also exposed for what it is, what it has been —  a deep-seated form of moral and financial corruption of the local and global Press against Africa.

Apart from the compromised  anti-sanctions fight, we have the story of the demonisation of the African freedom fighter using the distorted image of former South African President Jacob Zuma and his dusty Nkandla Village.

Recently, Queen Elizabeth ll of the UK died. 

Many African leaders did what our culture dictates:  that  when the leader of our historical enemies  dies we keep quiet or issue polite and diplomatic messages of condolence without forgetting the brutal, racist and greedy practices perpetrated by the Empire which that monarch presided over since 1953.

But there were others, too many others, including some of ‘our media’,  who went far beyond the call of culture and diplomacy to mourn that monarch  far  more than the bereaved.

One scholar in Zimbabwe reminded me how  those whom we pay to enlighten us about the paradoxes of the African mindset in fact fail us dismally. 

He pointed out how  African  journalists  took part in the globalisation of  the false image of Jacob Zuma as the epitome  of African sleaze, African  greed and backward  African ‘tradition’ combined. 

He pointed out how it was alleged,  and it is still being alleged, that Zuma’s little harem and village  of Nkandla bankrupted the entire  South African Treasury.

Then he quipped,  pointing out that the same Queen Elizabeth whom some Africans were going to mourn for 10 days boasted over 30 palaces, each one more than 10 times more expensive and more fabulous than Zuma’s little ‘kraal’ at Nkandla! 

Our journalists mostly appear blind to  paradoxes of these image wars to which they daily subject us.   

The British are not, will not, blame their current economic decline upon Elizabeth’s 30 luxurious palaces the way we have symbolically and gleefully  adopted  and associated the dusty Nkandla Village  with South Africa’s  economic malaise.

Real target of the continuing image wars

Zimbabwe has been  at the centre of Western vilification  of the African through the media for more than 20 years because its war veterans, under the leadership of the late former President Robert Gabriel Mugabe, pioneered a new approach to the centuries old African  reparations demand and  debate.

The mindset created and maintained by imperialism and apartheid was that, when it came to Africa, only white people and white companies owned tangible value that would attract compensation or reparations if forcibly taken or lost. 

Africans were themselves as good as property and could not claim compensation for the patrimony or the people they lost to slavery, colonisation and apartheid.

 The best they could claim in return for their looted land and patrimony was Western ‘development aid’.

The few of them who acquired the Western notion of private property could be accepted as qualifying not for reparations but for a ‘willing-buyer willing-seller’ arrangement while the majority, the povo remained in ‘Bantustans’ or white-created reservations called,  in Zimbabwe,  ‘Tribal Trust Lands’.

Otherwise the liberation song claiming that ‘Tinoda Zimbabwe neupfumi hwayo hwose’, (We are fighting to reclaim the whole of Zimbabwe with all of its wealth), was just for entertainment. It was not an enforceable law until the Third Chimurenga. 

Third Chimurenga as a self-organised reparations and living law 

By calling the African land reoccupation/reclamation and revolution in tenure ‘Third Chimurenga’ Zimbabwe’s war veterans and peasants wanted to make it clear that their self-organised reparations movement was inspired by, and based on the same,  African living law which informed and inspired the primary revolution movement that confronted and repelled the first invaders and looters calling themselves ‘The Pioneer Column’.

The Third Chimurenga was not a Roman Dutch law or English common law operation nor could it appeal to the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was pronounced the very same year as the  official white State policy of apartheid in South Africa.

African living law,  taken from the days of Nehanda  (Charwe), was to be the inspiration  and bedrock of the Third Chimurenga.

This departure from the conventional reparations debate and from the rules of  ‘development aid’ scared the imperialists because,  if allowed to spread its influence,  it would inflame all the continents on which there were dispossessed indigenous nations.

To complete the white nightmare, those African war veterans remaining active in the armed forces of Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia intervened to rescue  the  land of Patrice Lumumba, the DRC,  from proxy armies of the very same imperialist forces scared of the Third Chimurenga.

In this way, Zimbabwe’s war veterans committed two cardinal sins against white imperialism. They violated two cardinal rules  given to all ‘natives’ by slavery and apartheid: “Thou shall not take back property from the white pioneer because thou hast become property;” and “Thou shall not fight back against the white master or his proxy even in the name of African unity.”

The immediate punishment consisted in a three-pronged war:

•   thorough demonisation of African liberation veterans using all available media; 

• financial warfare targeting the national currency; and

• economic sanctions.

What African journalists miss

Exaggerating the departure of the Second Republic from the First  Republic has made journalists fail to ask critical questions about the economy.

Economic effects of the three-pronged attack on Zimbabwe in 1999-2000  were blamed on the late former President Robert Mugabe, on the then Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Dr Gideon Gono and on a $50 000  (Zimbabwe dollar) gratuity paid to war veterans on November 14 1997.

Against Zimbabwe, the small gratuity to war veterans  has served the same symbolic purpose as Zuma’s dusty Nkandla Village in South Africa. The day the war veterans were paid is even now referred to,  without shame, as ‘Black Friday’!

An elementary analysis 

The complicity of our journalists in justifying sanctions and demonising war veterans can be exposed by asking a few simple questions, as follows:

Dr Gideon Gono is long gone from the RBZ and completely incapable of manipulating national monetary policy;

Former President Robert Mugabe is long dead and buried;

We have not paid any gratuity to war veterans in the manner of that paid in 1997; and

Zimbabwe has not intervened in a regional war on the scale of the 1998 intervention in DRC.

Yet our currency has depreciated heavily and our Government and the people are fighting hyperinflation and financial warfare similar to what was blamed on war veterans’ gratuity and the DRC, among others, in the period 1997-2008.

A careful historian and researcher has the right to ask: What exactly is going on, in the press, in the economy and in our heads?

There have been efforts to blame the NATO proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. But surely there were wars even in the period from 1997 to 2008?

One can count Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, among others.

These  were not blamed for what happened to our economy and money. Mainly the war veterans, the DRC, the then RBZ Governor and the late former President were blamed.

Double damage through media and propaganda

The result of the demonisation of African liberation heroes and heroines through the Western-dominated media in our midst is a double damage: We fail to explain or understand what was happening to us in the period (under the First Republic),  especially in 1997 to 2008; and  we also fail to explain what is happening now, under the Second Republic because much of it is a continuation of the same phenomena and problems but we are too eager to exaggerate our complete departure from back then. 

Part of the clue to our problems lies in the relentless demonisation of our liberation heroes and heroines for insisting that there is no departure from the African living law which caused us to call the African land reclamation and land redemption movement the Third Chimurenga and not land reform.