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Breaking through the nexus of terror

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

ONE of the results of acceptance of the white liberal myth of a universally open society for Africans is the accelerated demand to set up contradicting and contradictory platforms aimed at destroying the unity of the African family and community.
In the beginning, these platforms consisted of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the forms of competing Western church denominations.
Later the churches were overtaken by secular NGOs.
The secular NGOs have now been joined by millions of media platforms some of which we foolishly call ‘social media’.
The Herald on January 21 2015 carried a story called, ‘Marital disputes flood the courts’.
It opened as follows:
“The courts were last year flooded with cases involving marital disputes, with a combined 110 707 people finding themselves before the courts over maintenance, child custody, domestic violence, divorces or peace orders.”
First, The Herald numbers under-state the extent of conflict between men and women which is fuelled by adversarialism.
This is because the Roman-Dutch-Law-centred courts handle only about 40 percent of all cases in Zimbabwe.
More than 60 percent of cases in Zimbabwe are resolved by indigenous African courts.
It might help to refer to two recent gender projects.
The first was carried in the 1990s carried out under Women In Law In Southern Africa (WILSA) that resulted in the 1988 book called Pursuing Grounded Theory in Law: South-North Experiences in Developing Women’s Law.
The 1998 book went some way to recognise the continuing vibrancy of living African law in Zimbabwe, but the authors could not free themselves of the derogatory or pejorative language which has become conventional among NGOs, academics and lawyers when describing indigenous African knowledge and practice.
How could a people wage a liberation struggle as colonised outlaws for over 50 years and succeed without law of their own?
How can the same people behave as if they must now be taught Roman Dutch Law by their former slave master?
By 2003-2004 the double imperialist assault on higher education through the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) and illegal sanctions led to deplorable conditions for academics which Oxford academic, Blessing-Miles Tendi documented in Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media.
Blessing-Miles Tendi interviewed Zimbabwean academics and intellectuals at the height of the economic crisis precipitated by ESAP and illegal sanctions.
He found that too many of them had abandoned the ideals of scientific and scholarly research in favour of foreign funded projects intended to deepen the Western-sponsored regime change agenda against Zimbabwe.
Professor Sam Moyo and Ernest Mudzengi confirmed that too many academics and intellectuals were seeking ways, “to make money and one of (those ways) is to come up with briefcase organisations claiming to be fighting for the masses”.
Some faculties were overrun by donors.
The University of Zimbabwe (UZ) closed down for several months during those crisis years.
Since shutting down left more time available for lecturers to do donor work, there were many academics and intellectuals who did not mind the closures.
The late Professor John Makumbe of UZ was one of those who liked the closures.
Such lecturers used the time to go on foreign speaking tours sponsored by USAID, CIDA, DANIDA, NORAD and the British Council.
Blessing-Miles Tendi interviewed a female UZ academic who told him, “my children do not eat book chapters”.
The interview went as follows, page 62:
UZ academic: “Today I learned that a security guard at the government’s Reserve Bank earns a higher salary than me, a UZ lecturer.
UZ intellectuals hold PhDs, are getting old, do not have a car or drive an old car, have lousy houses and have not accomplished much. Zimbabwean intellectuals are a downtrodden lot. What else can they do but sell-out (for money)?”
Interviewer: “But you have stayed out of it and managed to maintain your integrity.”
UZ academic: “Who says I am not in it? I do consultancy work for NGOs and I bend my analysis to please them. I tell NGOs what they want to hear.
“I tell them Mugabe is bad and there is a serious crisis and I say it loudly so they are satisfied. That way, they will come again next time for my analysis and even bring me new clients.”
Another indication of the accelerated departure from the living law approach taken by WILSA in the 1990s was the 2004 donor-funded demonisation of the African male entitled The Zimbabwe Male Psyche With Respect to Reproductive Health, HIV, AIDS and Gender Issues.
In that 2004 UNFPA booklet, the authors: P Chiroro, A Mashu and W Muhwava, wrote as follows:
“It was hypothesised that the Zimbabwean male psyche is characterised by an internalised, insatiable and self-centred desire for sex with multiple partners, coupled with an intolerant attitude towards women who are perceived to be, primarily, objects of sexual gratification and child bearing.”
What was this United Nations (UN) agency and the three university researchers trying to say?
The English dictionary meaning of ‘psyche’ is ‘the human soul, mind or spirit’.
So, in what way could the UNFPA claim to have pin-pointed and isolated a definite factor called the soul of the Zimbabwean male or the spirit of the Zimbabwean male, which could then be made responsible for the spread of HIV and AIDS in this country?
Indeed the UNFPA and its consultants attempted to tell the whole world not only that there was a definite, separable power called the Zimbabwean male psyche; but also that they had demonstrated that this definite force or power was responsible for promiscuous sexual behavior, lust, discrimination against women, abuse of women and girls and the spread of HIV and AIDS.
They also meant that the Zimbabwean male psyche was so different from the psyches of other societies that it could be identified as typically Zimbabwean.
Since that time, the defamation of the African in HIV and AIDS campaigns and adverts here has followed that highly questionable theory of African tradition and the presumed inherent nature of the African male psyche and male sexuality as responsible for the spread of HIV and AIDS.
The purpose of adversarialism is to foment modern day conflict between men and women in the context of disastrous capitalist relations generated by SAP and sanctions.
This conflict is then explained away and blamed on indigenous African values through bogus and poorly researched documents such as the 2004 UNPA pamphlet.

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