By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE Shona verbs kuparura, kushaura and kutara are important for understanding and explaining indigenous African leadership philosophy as I started to explain in the last two instalments.
Mutungamiri anoparura, anoshaura kana kutara gwara nemitemo anenge ari mudare, mudariro kana mudumba. Kana aparura, ashaura kana kutara gwara nemitemo, anomirira kuti vamwe vake vari mudariro, dare kana dumba vatsinhire zvaaparura kana kuzvigadzirisa kuti zvisvike pakutsinhirika. Zvisingatsinhirike hazvitsinhirwi, uye hazvigoni kutungamira.
The African circle or dariro therefore represents solidarity and complementarity in leadership.
But in this instalment I want to stress two elements: The fact that the three concepts have to do with positionality, with real place and space; and the fact that the African circle as an emblem of community and discipleship also operates as a refinery, an instrument of mediation between internally generated ideas and ideas coming, flowing or being borrowed/imported and shared from the rest of the world.
When there are more participants to accommodate, the dariro is enlarged; when there are fewer people, the dariro is deliberately reduced. The same applies to ideas exchanged in solidarity with other groups, other peoples.
Positionality
The three verbs kuparura, kushaura and kutara, all relate to a specific ground and grounding, which we often refer to as founding principles, the foundation, the permanent interest, the national interest.
What is secured inside the dariro represents the fundamental ground and position; it is the physical metaphor for the permanent interest, the home turf from which acts of leadership must start and come back.
The teachings and actions of the fool and the sell-out are assigned opposite verbs: kupaumba, kutengesa, kufumura, kudzongonyedza. Madhisinyongoro was coined during the Second Chimurenga as a noun to describe the unspeakable works of terror carried out by sell-outs. Madhisinyongoro served to undermine to destroy the solidarity and positionality of the povo.
Mediation, Initiation and Discipleship
It is best to explain this mediatory power of the African circle in terms of recent history.
On November 30 2012, the Chancellor of the Zimbabwe Open University His Excellency President Robert Mugabe, made the passing remark that his generation subverted the original purpose of colonial education in order to build an intellectual and ideological foundation for the Second Chimurenga.
Contrary to colonial missionary and settler purposes and expectations, the African youths who went to college in the late 1940s and early 1950s figured out how to use their dariro to combine elements of their own upbringing, memories and lessons of the First Chimurenga, current affairs, and elements of the colonial curriculum.
I hypothesise that because of the distance nature of much of their education (turning colonial detention centres into Open Distance Learning circles or clusters), the “Generation of 1949” deliberately brought down to a revolutionary anti-colonial and anti-imperialist and African base the very same numeracy and literacy they had obtained from the missionary and the white settler teacher.
White conservatives accused liberals, including missionaries, of intentionally adding a subversive anti-imperialist base, a subversive anti-settler and anti-capitalist foundation, to their teaching of Christianity, literacy and numeracy to Africans.
White liberals replied that in fact the best African products of white missionary and colonial education were anti-communist, anti-socialist, pro-western and Christian. Therefore students of the white liberals were going to prolong the best of Western “Christian” civilisation in Africa.
Therefore the liberals demanded that they should be given credit for prolonging Western influence among Africans, against Marxist and socialist influences from the Soviet bloc and from China.
But radical African youths had a completely different perspective to which President Mugabe referred.
I further hypothesise that the more members of the Generation of 1949 studied away from the conventional colonial or missionary school the more independent they were of the colonial baggage and indoctrination which came with intra-mural colonial education.
This was because distance learning in political detention centres allowed the student some control of the circumstances under which he or she acquired numeracy and literacy.
Distance learning in detention centres ironically cushioned the African detainee-learner from the elaborate day-to-day socialisation in the formal school and classroom.
In the detention centres the detainees formed mutual aid clusters similar to the 12 disciples following Jesus in the New Testament.
These detainees earned degrees through distance learning, mostly with the University of South Africa and the University of London.
The purpose of the mutual aid cluster or dariro was to enable the detainees to teach one another, to learn from one another, and to make the best of the limited learning materials.
The cluster of learner-detainees served as a fierce mediating device for sifting and synthesising disparate materials.
These clusters ironically replicated the African dariro or dare in detention and allowed students to become freer and more radical than those remaining in conventional classrooms under the direction of the missionary teacher and colonial church chaplain.