HomeOld_PostsMyth of backward African ‘tradition’ exploited for profit...an example of chikwambo

Myth of backward African ‘tradition’ exploited for profit…an example of chikwambo

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

ON August 12 2020, H-Metro published a story titled, ‘Fake goblins supplier exposed’.

Among the reporter’s findings were the following:

A ‘self-styled prophet’ from the Harare suburb of Budiriro was in the business of buying goblins to plant, especially in the houses of people susceptible to the belief that they were being bewitched by rivals or jealous relatives. 

He would then turn around and prophesy that this family was having problems – illness, bad luck, accidents and other misfortunes – because someone had deployed goblins against them.

The prophet would have gathered enough facts about the family’s activities and relations to make himself appear to be a real seer when it came to the affairs of that particular family. 

The victim family would then relent and let the prophet come to inspect their home or business premises for the purpose, eventually of conducting some rituals, knowing very well where he or someone he sent actually planted the goblins. 

Alternatively, the goblins could be planted in the very same process of exorcising the home or business premises of suspected evil spirits.

In the particular H-Metro story, there are two separate con-artists required for the scam to work: the ‘self-styled prophet’ specialising in the spiritual psychology of victimhood and misery and the visual con-artist specialising in colonial/missionary and neo-colonial demonology of African beliefs by crafting authentic-looking goblins.

In the August 12 2020 H-Metro story, the second con-artist, the craftsman, was named as Edmore Simbi. 

The Budiriro prophet was not named.

Edmore Simbi appears as an urban hassler-entrepreneur charging US dollars for the hire of his goblins and exploiting his grasp of the visual aspects of so-called traditional African beliefs for profit.

The drama in the story arose from the fact that the Budiriro prophet wanted Edmore Simbi to advance him another batch of goblins for his deployment before paying US$60 for a previous set. 

So Simbi confronted the prophet at Machipisa Shopping Centre to demand his payment, when some of the by-standers called H-Metro reporters. 

In the confusion, the prophet disappeared, but Simbi remained to tell his side of the story.

Simbi revealed two interesting things. 

First, he treated the often dreaded goblins as mere objects because he manufactured them. 

Second, he understood his strength as arising from his craftsmanship, ability to portray in visual object form the fear, loathing and disgust visualised and associated with so-called evil traditional African practices, dating back from tales told by the very first white missionaries and inherited even by those denominations and sects that broke away from the white church.

But it was up to the ‘Christian’ teachers, preachers and prophets to endow these objects, now misnamed ‘zvikwambo’, with the aura they needed to be able to continue fascinating and terrorising large numbers of people.

For his part, Simbi chose materials and objects which authentically fit the diabolic image of evil and witchcraft created and handed down evangelists and missionaries for more than a century. 

Simbi used or abused traditional-looking African cloth, remains of dead snakes, sometimes live snakes themselves, parts of dead lizards, skunks, strange-looking beads, foul smelling bones, oils and herbs.

This H-Metro story documenting current urban abuses of a bastardised chikwambo concept provides concrete evidence on how African strategic and philosophical concepts were and are still being destroyed through the deliberate, cynical and commercialised popularisation of their most debased forms.

The following observations can be derived from the H-Metro story:

λ First, the backward practices often blamed on ‘African tradition’ have nothing to do with African tradition as such. The players are urban hustlers with lumpen capitalistic ambitions to make money out of a manufactured ‘tradition’ by exploiting gullible and uprooted masses, who are not in a position to know better precisely because of colonial and neo-colonial educational deficits in the teaching of African history and philosophy in our schools and colleges.

λ Second, and as a result of these deficits, the myth of traditional African backward practices goes back to the first missionary churches who even hired people to pose for the worst photographs to send back to Europe and America for fundraising. 

Africans who selectively portrayed the worst superstitions of their people favoured by missionaries and donors were rewarded for maintaining and perpetuating the myth and its stereotypes. 

To this day, foreign-funded NGOs in ‘development’, ‘human rights’ and politics continue to do exactly the same thing – getting lucrative funding for perpetuating a Western media picture of Africa, Zimbabwe and ‘African tradition’ which fits the bill.

λ Third, the transplanted concept of chikwambo in the current city ghetto has been stripped of its relational meanings and is now presented in its base and objectified form as goblin. But the original meaning of chikwambo is relational, collective and developmental, meaning an originally well-intended mukwambo (son-in-law) gone wrong. It has gone wrong because it has violated the basic collective principles of the dariro as society’s firewall against viruses and dubious imports masqueraded as quick rescue solutions to the community’s or society’s challenges. 

The real original mukwambo in African society brings new optimal relationships and adds to the developmental ideas of the receiving family/society. 

A true mukwambo, first and foremost brings new relationships and relatives into the society/community. 

Even at the level of chiefdoms, kingdoms and empires, that was always the understanding.

Current applications

The paradox of the educational deficits previously referred to is that Zimbabwe and Africa in their national, continental and global relations are faced with really critical zvikwambo but which can no longer be recognised, or identified or communicated as our current zvikwambo

These are technologies, theories, formulae, projects, investment packages and programmes whose results have turned out to be the opposites of what was promised.

Today, account holders with banks are charged costs of maintaining ATM machines, which were sold as the ultimate convenience tools for accessing abundant cash(liquidity.) 

To make the chikwambo look like a real mukwambo, the ATM at one time actually dished out crisp US dollar notes at the mere push of a button. 

Today, the ATMs give neither Zim dollaars nor US dollars. 

But our banks charge us the cost of security guards still watching those redundant machines.

The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) of the US was in 2000 requested by an opposition political party here as the ultimate instrument for development and democratic reform in Zimbabwe. 

But today, SADC and the African Union are saying this US sanctions decree against Zimbabwe has not only ruined

Zimbabwe’s economy alone.

It is hurting Southern African and continental African economies as well.

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of Zimbabwe suddenly realised that privatised and over-crowded vans called ‘kombis’ as a form of public transport were a recipe for disaster. 

Yet these unguided missiles had been introduced in the 1990s through the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), as the most progressive answer to our public transport problems. Just let private industry provide kombis

Let the Government restrict itself to governing. 

That was how the Zimbabwe United Passenger Company (ZUPCO) was disabled and plundered. 

Only with the menace of the COVID-19 pandemic in crowded ghettoes in 2020 did the Government wake up to its grave error of the 1990s. 

But there were many warnings to the Government in the late 1980s and early 1990s against most aspects of ESAP. 

They were not heeded. 

We are paying the price for that chikwambo now.

ESAP was a real chikwambo brought to us by the World Bank and the IMF with the reluctant blessing of our Government, trade unions and the media. 

The ZBC then wrongly described ESAP as, “Chirongwa chekuwandudza upfumi.”

Any discerning reader can see the consequences of allowing to continue the educational deficits I mentioned earlier. 

Instead of focusing our sights on the really strategic zvikwambo wreaking collective havoc upon our society and nation, we are being amused or disgusted by goblins ordered by fraudsters masquerading as prophets fighting remnants of ‘African tradition’. 

In fact, we are told that most of our serious problems arise from African culture and tradition, without asking which culture and tradition. 

The one manufactured by hustlers and fraudsters or something else.

We are misrepresented as mindless people, who cannot perceive real dangers to society and nation unless the threats are presented as simple and disgusting objects such as beads, scales of dead snakes and shells of dead tortoises decorating little calabashes. That is supposed to be the beginning and end of the African intellect. 

In that state of mind, we can never imagine chikwambo in the form of advanced technology such as redundant ATM machines here, or the nuclear bomb, whose threatened manufacture, possession and possible use today tears apart societies and nations in the Middle-East and elsewhere.

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