By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
MY February 7 2020 instalment for this column was titled: ‘How history informs and frames the Zimbabwean meaning of reform’.
I assumed that my obligation then was just to illustrate how the changes our country was trying to make in the new dispensation should be couched and understood in their historical context, so that we would not think we were re-inventing the wheel, so to speak, when in reality we could not re-invent the wheel.
That was my original understanding of ‘Operation Restore Legacy’.
But I did not go into what I meant by history; what history means.
Now, in this instalment, I think the best I can do is provide two opposite images of history, or rather one image of anti-history and one image of history.
Anti-history: Post-modern ideology
Here I quote from Page 176 of a book called ‘The Third Wave: The Controversial New Perspective on Tomorrow’ from the author of ‘Future Shock’, by Alvin Toffler.
Toffler titled the particular passage ‘Blip Culture’, which to me is as anti-history as one can get.
It says: “Today, instead of masses of people all receiving the same messages, smaller de-massified groups receive and send large amounts of their own imagery to one another.
As the entire society shifts toward Third Wave diversity, the new media reflect and accelerate the process.
This, in part, explains why opinions on everything from pop music to politics are becoming less uniform (and even more polarised).
Consensus shatters.
On a personal level, we are all besieged and blitzed by fragments of imagery, contradictory or unrelated, that shake up our old ideas and come shooting at us in the form of broken or dis-embodied ‘blips’.
We live, in fact, in a ‘blip culture’.”
This worldview in media and the arts has come to be known as a post-modernism.
It is violently opposed to history, which it views as a system for imposing oppressive narratives on an otherwise incoherent and incomprehensible world.
Many in the global South and East see Western post-modernism as a reaction to decolonisation and post-colonial theory.
Mosaics of history, multiple layers of culture
At the opposite end and from the series called: ‘Giants of Asia’, we have ‘Lee Kuan Yew: Citizen Singapore – How to Build a Nation’, in which, on Pages 82 and 83, we get an account of Lee Kuan Yew’s 1967 meeting with the late former US President Richard Nixon. Nixon would become US President in 1969.
According to Lee Kuan Yew: “No, he (Nixon) asked me about (Chinese leader) Mao (Zedong).
So I gave him a graphic assessment of what I thought Mao was doing.
I said that Mao is painting (his own legacy) on a mosaic with 5 000 (five thousand) years of history behind the mosaic.
He is painting his own picture on it.
The rains will come.
What he’s said will be washed away, what’s been settled for 5 000 years will remain.
This is Confucius.”
The interviewer then remarked: “That was a striking image: that the DNA of the culture (and history) remains far more deeply imbedded than some modern ideological flimflam.”
Both Lee Kuan Yew and his interviewer obviously did not like Mao Zedong.
They were sworn anti-communists.
But they recognised and admired Mao’s role in the founding of modern, revolutionary China.
That contribution was not flimflam at all.
Both enemies and adherents of communism had to reckon with Mao’s place in history.
The point is that, contrary to post-modern ideology and it’s blip cult, history and culture do matter.
They are part of our inherited reality, almost like DNA.
Whoever may want to lead in innovation, reform or even revolution cannot ignore society’s historical foundations which have endured the tests of time.
Lee Kuan Yew, as a reformer made a point of insisting on paying attention to the wisdom and heritage of Confucius.
What is our African equivalent of Confucius and Confucianism?
Is it Murenga and Chimurenga?
The question of history and philosophy is: Which light do you keep regardless of which path you are on and regardless of which direction you happen to be facing? Is it the wisdom of the dariro which is, in fact, our most enduring construction going back to our origins in the Nile Valley?
Why is it that dariro, as a discourse structure, has endured even among our forcibly stolen and removed African Diasporas?
It is not just the Great Zimbabwe Monument which has endured as a dariro form.
There is much content to be retrieved and re-organised in the form of hunhu/ubuntu, African Relational Philosophy deriving from madariro as discourse structures of which there are more than
20 genres.
The most surprising one for me to rediscover is the ‘ring-shout’ from the African Diaspora in the US and Caribbean.
In Zimbabwe, we have supposedly gone
from ‘The Road to Socialism’ to Economic Structural Adjustment (EASP), onward to the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (ZIM-ASSET) and now to neo-liberal reform called National Development Strategy (1 to 5).
What is the torchlight-cum-baton which
we have retained throughout?
The relational approach
African Relational Philosophy (ARP) assumes that relationships are real.
Every child is born into relationships which determine whether it will thrive or die prematurely.
History is not an object or even a set of documents.
It is first and foremost a relationship, not just between past and present, but a relationship among those who have actively, creatively helped shape the society in which we live.
It is a relationship of human agency in creating a society.
But often, confusion arises from our use or abuse of language, especially because of translations from one language or culture to another.
This is clear when one reads, for instance, poet T. S. Eliot’s critical essay: ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, where the poet-critic says: “Tradition is a matter of much wider significance (than repetition, imitation or adherence to past successes)…It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his 25th year, and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature…has simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional ( meaning relevant?).
And it is at the same time what makes a writer more acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity…No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone.
His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to dead poets and artists.
You cannot value him alone; you cannot set him (aside) from contrast and comparison among the dead.”
(Pardon the sexism of the English language used.)
It is clear that the context and meaning of the concept of tradition has changed.
In the long passage cited, it can be substituted by continuity.
Indeed the study of history is a quest for continuity and discontinuity from era to era, generation to generation.
In this context, what has happened to the 100-year Rhodesian intrusion and legacy, the strange coat of paint which the British tried to super-impose upon our dariro mosaic?
Have the rains of revolution in Chimurenga been able to wash away the Rhodesian paint?
What does the shrine of Cecil John Rhodes at Matopos stand for?
Is it the legacy of the British South Africa Company and Anglo-American Corporation?
