By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN my October 13 2017 instalment, I cited a Sunday News story on Deputy Minister Godfrey Gandawa’s views about history and other humanities subjects, which story is worth citing again:
“(Twelve) 12 varsity degrees to be redundant… It has emerged that at least 12 degree programmes offered by the country’s universities might be redundant in Zimbabwe by 2040 due to technology disruption.
Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development Deputy Minister Dr Godfrey Gandawa said the degree programmes that risk going under include Media and Society Studies, Political Science, Paralegal (Studies?), Tourism and Hospitality Management, Psychology, Accounting, Business Administration, Marketing, Economic History, Heritage (Studies), Pharmacy and History.”
The reporter wrote that Dr Gandawa’s reasons for alleging imminent redundancy of the listed subjects included STEM education, industrialisation, modernisation, artificial intelligence, robotics and the internet.
STEM refers to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Gandawa’s assumptions echoed Henry Ford’s idea that:
“History is more or less bunk.
It’s tradition.
We don’t want tradition.
We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a thinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Ford’s view was published on May 25 1916.
Although detractors of history, as practice and discipline, latched on to Ford’s confused declaration, it was clear from the start that Ford did not define or understand the subject. He expressed a personal reaction to a faulty method of teaching history as ‘tradition’.
He mistakenly thought history excluded contemporary life and contemporary affairs precisely because he had been made to believe that history meant tradition and the mindless memorisation of past events and dates.
But what is more critical to students of history is the fact that global capitalist interests have consistently opposed the teaching of history because it undermines their view of globalisation as universalism, as uniformity and standardisation which would make it easy to impose a corporate dictatorship across the globe.
Ford was a pioneer of that global thrust and saw popular historical consciousness as an impediment to global capital.
In the late 1970s, history as an academic discipline in the US reached a crisis.
Institutions which had traditionally hired historians were no longer hiring them and the resurgent neo-liberal ideology did not have any place for historical knowledge within its main underpinnings.
Like structural adjustment programmes, the devaluation of history as a discipline and the denigration of the knowledge of history were exported to the South.
In Zimbabwe, the promoters of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) also became enemies of history and the role of nationalist intellectuals in economic debates.
Their hostility was expressed as a general attack on the humanities as a whole.
ZTV and The Herald, for instance, reported in late November 1998 that the late local businessman Eric Bloch and other ‘experts’ used a British Council-sponsored workshop to demand an end to social science and humanities teaching at Zimbabwean universities.
Instead, Bloch said the universities should concentrate on technical and practical training to produce entrepreneurs.
The Herald paraphrased Bloch as saying:
“We don’t need several hundred political scientists, socio-economists, linguists, holders of general degrees in the arts and the like.”
The President of Saint Mary’s College, Maryland, US, Edward T. Lewis regretted the devaluation of history as an academic discipline and the denigration of historical knowledge.
Lewis made the painful observation that society, and the economy in general, were devaluing history at exactly the time when it was most needed because of the proliferation of confusing media which also ignored historical knowledge.
In other words, it was not necessarily the children and young people who hated history.
There were bigger forces who saw a clear national and international historical consciousness as a threat to their interests.
According to Lewis:
“As a result (of the devaluation of history), many of these students … have no sense of their past, no sense of their roots.
They are victimised by a sort of solipsism in which they perceive themselves as self-created, existing entirely in the present.
Locked in a concern for the immediate and strictly personal, they possess little sense of the shared values of a community.
They clearly believe that one must decide for oneself with no responsibility to the past, no obligation to the future.
For the most part, they recognise only an obligation to survive the (moment).”
The African view of History
History derives from philosophy and, as such, represents the progress of philosophy from being mostly speculation about society and social relations to being analytical and strategic.
The African view of history is based on African relational philosophy:
“Munhu munhu navanhu.
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.
I am who I am because of the relationships I have enjoyed or endured.
I relate, therefore I am.”
In this sense, the African view of history is that it is the study and the method of study of the continual transformation of collective social, economic and political relationships over time.
It includes the transformation of class relations as well.
Because the African view of history is relational, there is agreement between Marxists and Africans that the biggest barrier to understanding and teaching history is alienation. Therefore to be historically conscious and historically engaged means to overcome alienation in its various forms.
Being conscious historical agents in society means organising and understanding social relations so as to prevent or overcome three aspects of alienation, according to Africans and according to Karl Marx:
One aspect of alienation is called in German ‘entäusserung’, and in Shona ‘kurashikirwa ngenhaka, kurasa nhaka, kutorerwa nhaka’.
In English it means divestiture, renunciation, forfeiture, loss, alienation as in settlers alienating land and attributing the Great Zimbabwe Monuments and civilisation to foreigners. The term also means externalising, separating, cutting off from ourselves that which belongs to us.
This is relevant to the loss of both tangible and intangible value.
The prodigal son did not begin by taking what he thought was his portion of material inheritance.
He began by alienating himself from his father and his brother, leading to a selfish demand to alienate material wealth and later to squander it with strangers.
What this sub-concept of alienation means is that much of history is concerned with how we build or destroy tangible and intangible wealth and heritage.
History deals with how, as societies, we tend to take our inheritance for granted, to neglect it or to forfeit it because we do not understand our own history and the histories of those others with whom we have relations.
The second feature of alienation is called ‘enfremdung’ in German.
In Shona ‘kurasiswa, kupesaniswa, kupanduka, kupandukirana’.
Shona proverbs concerning this idea of alienation include: “Watungamira haatori (hananuri) nzira,” (the one who pioneers or leads the way does not die or disappear with the path or road).
The path and direction must endure.
The path must be protected for the direction of youth and posterity.
This kurasiswa refers to the failure of the individual, the group or new class of people to recognise their changed or improved fortunes as deriving from the society and nation as a whole.
Shona proverbs against these tendencies include: “Rwizi runokura nezvikova,” (a river becomes long, wide and powerful because of the countless tributaries feeding water into it).
But some individuals, groups and social classes may view themselves as self-made and may sell-out to real aliens, believing that all they have benefitted from the collective is purely because of their own separate ingenuity and genius.
The third feature of this alienation is called ‘vergegenständlichung’ in German.
In English it means reification, objectification or domination by a product or derivative of one’s own powers.
In Shona this may be translated as ‘kusvetwa simba nevawakapa masimba, kutorerwa simba nechinhu chawakagadzira, chawakasika’.
Shona proverbs applying to this category of alienation include: “Kurera imbwa nemukaka, mangwana inofuma yokuruma.”
This third aspect of alienation is relevant to the transformation of perceptions and the vulnerability of those without knowledge and experience of history to false or distorted communications.
The most common example is the worship of images and symbols by the very same people who created them.
Instead of representing the creator’s power, the images and symbols come to dominate, to rule their creators. Stories attributing all sorts of hell and destruction to ‘social media’ demonstrate this reification. By extension, organisations, institutions, companies and structures based on our ideas, our resources and our skills may grow out of control and come back to dominate and even destroy us.
They can do so only when we fail to connect their existence and power to our own struggles, our own agency, our own power.
The historian’s method therefore is about seeing and understanding linkages between or among different events and processes.
How a relational framing of the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) can help underscore the role of the African liberation movement in the struggle to overcome alienation.
To illustrate the importance of history and the relevance of the African relational approach, I use just one example; the context and history of the UDHR.
For Africa, for what we call the South and the East, the human rights doctrine represents the whiteman’s strategy and cage to frame anti-imperialist leaders and movements, to imprison them and their peoples by redefining what is good and bad leadership from the whiteman’s linear vision and on grounds laid by the West.
The Western-driven human rights crusade is one of the latest pretexts of intervention in a long line of other pretexts which started with the slave trade.
A few paradoxes about 1948, a year which the whiteman loves, will show how and why humanity should move out of this cage called the UDHR.
First, 1948 is the year white settlers in South Africa, under the domination of the newly elected Afrikaner Nationalist Party, proclaimed apartheid as the official political and social policy of the South African state.
As Anthony Thomas has demonstrated in his biography of Cecil John Rhodes, the British settlers under the leadership of Rhodes were the true founders of apartheid in South Africa in the 1880s.
The British kept and practised apartheid informally and effectively, helping to maintain the myth of Rhodes as an open-minded white liberal who loved Africa and the Africans.
But in 1948 apartheid was proclaimed officially as a state policy. The UDHR did not make a difference to the fate of Africans in South Africa and Rhodesia.
This is important because South Africa in 1948 was a self-governed British colony.
Britain, as one of the five truly autonomous signatories of the UDHR, would not have allowed its star-colony South Africa to proclaim apartheid at exactly the same time as the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights if that document had been about human rights and if it had been truly universal.
Even more shocking is the fact that the white settler-racists of South Africa were represented by Jan Smuts at the same UN conference in Los Angeles which proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Smuts had with him a team of white lawyers who participated in the great event before going back home to benefit from what the UN in 1973 was to condemn by adopting the International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crimes of Apartheid.
The 1973 condemnation of apartheid as a crime against humanity was not the result of any consistent application of the UDHR.
Rather, it was the product of consistent liberation struggles in the Third World.
It was the result of solidarity between communists and Africans at the UN General Assembly.
In the fourth place, both the UK and the US, as key promoters of the UDHR, played equally critical roles helping the proclamation, creation and defence of yet another apartheid state in 1948 which still exists today, Israel.
Israel remains today the hub of the new Anglo-American strategy for extending apartheid in the Middle-East, through the bantustanisation of Iraq, Palestine and even Syria.
In the fifth and final place, the year 1948 ushered in Southern Africa a long chain of racist laws against African ‘natives’.
These laws included:
The Railways and Harbours Act of 1949 which segregated both passengers and workers on trains and ships on the basis of race; the Unemployment Insurance Act, which was amended to exclude Africans from social security and unemployment benefits; the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which was added to the Immorality Act of 1927; the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, which equated African aspirations for liberation with ‘communist terrorism and subversion’ and therefore legalised and legitimised the total denial of pan-African values and African aspirations for liberation to suit US Cold War ideology; the Bantu Education Act of 1950, which clearly sought to deny quality education to all Africans; the Race Classification Act of 1950 and the Population Registration Act of the same year which brought to South African practice the procedures and techniques of racist population classification and dysselection which the British and the North Americans had just finished condemning at the Nuremburg trials in Germany; the Group Areas Act of 1950, which required racially classified individuals and groups to be forcibly removed according to the settler state’s arbitrary classifications; the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act which by 1952 extended the compulsory carrying of passes to African women, so that Africans (male and female) were required to have passes on them all the time and to be treated as visitors and superfluous appendages in all areas designated white.
If the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 helps to sanitise the birth of official apartheid and of the Zionist state in exactly the same year — what are we to make of the latest ascendancy of the same UDHR in the post-Soviet era?
Why did the UDHR become so important as a pretext for imperial intervention after 1989?
We have to suspect that similar crimes to those of apartheid and Zionism were to be committed under the cover of the UDHR.
The new apartheid proclamation was the 1997 Programme for a New American Century and its idea of a unipolar world.
Anyone who doubts this should study the speeches of the world leaders who spoke at the 58th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN).
Almost all the leaders admitted that unipolarism is a threat to the existence of a truly UN and that the wars fought in the name of human rights had seen atrocities as great as the crimes of apartheid.
So the global relaunching of the UDHR on its 50th Anniversary in 1998, in fact, marked the start of tragedies and crimes like those that followed 1948.
Latter day crimes obscured by today’s loud noises about human rights include:
– The destabilisation and dismemberment of Yogoslavia, 1990-1998;
– The NATO war against Serbia, 1999;
– The destabilisation, invasion and looting of the DRC by Rwanda and Uganda with British and US complicity;
– The US-UK war to recolonise Iraq, March 2003 to-date;
– Attempted coups de’ tat against Venezuela;
– The overthrow of the Government of Haiti in 2004;
– The invasion and destruction of Libya in 2011;
– Extension of the war against Libya to the war against Syria;
– The selective use of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to put only African leaders on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The confusion demonstrated by African leaders and many of their followers about the true identity and meaning of the ICC means that Africans in general remain alienated from their own history and who they are.
Therefore the objective teaching of history remains absolutely essential.