THE major tool of the West’s globalising mission is cultural imperialism.
Cultural imperialism is essentially about ‘exalting and spreading of values and habits – a practice in which economic power plays an instrumental role’. (Tomlison: 1991:19)
So imperialism plays a critical role in the promotion of economic practice.
As Martin Barker puts it, cultural imperialism means that ‘the process of imperialist control is aided and abetted by importing supportive forms of culture’. (Cited in Tomlison: 1991: 19)
Cultural imperialism is ‘a pattern of inherited colonial attitudes and practices, or the practices and effects of an on-going system of economic relations within global capitalism’. (ibid: 19)
Such imperialism manifests itself in various forms.
The media is one area where cultural imperialism is projected.
Television, film, radio, print journalism and advertising are at the centre of cultural imperialism.
Tomlison calls it ‘media imperialism’. (ibid:20)
The mass media has been expanding in terms of technical power and penetration, coverage and representation of both public and private lives of the West.
Cultural imperialism is the process by which an indigenous culture is invaded by a foreign culture where ‘indigenous’ may be taken to mean belonging to a geographical area and sharing a culture that is evolved from the people’s interaction with their environment.
According to Ngugi (1972 :04), culture, in its broadest sense: “…is a way of life fashioned by a people in their collective endeavour to live and come to terms with their total environment.
It is the sum of their art, their science and all their social institutions, including their system of beliefs and rituals.
In the course of this creative struggle and progress through history, there evolves a body of material and spiritual values which endow that society with a unique ethos.
Such values are often expressed through the people’s songs, dance, folklore, drawing, sculpture, rites and ceremonies.
Over the years, these varieties of artistic activity have come to symbolise the meaning of the activities, but we must bear in mind that they are derived from a people’s way of life and will change as that way of life is altered, modified or developed through the ages.”
Ngugi’s view of culture is also shared by Preiswerk and Perrot.
Both define culture as an encompassing concept.
Culture in the wider sense, which is also the African sense, is the complex of values, behaviour patterns and institutions of a human group, shared and transmitted socially.
According to Preiswerk and Perrot (1978:03): “It (culture) includes all the creations of man: the cosmogonies, ways of thinking … value systems, religions, customs, symbols, myths. It also encompasses the material works of man, technology, methods of production, the system of exchange as well as social institutions and moral and juridical rules.”
This broad concept of culture is quite different from the Western meaning of culture which seems restricted to the intellectual and artistic life of a society and to the symbolic objects produced by the members of that society.
In the wider sense, culture is not the result of man’s free imagination but of the action which men exert on their natural environment as interactive groups.
The economic dimension of cultural imperialism is centred on how capitalism entrenches itself upon nations.
Ngugi makes serious observations on the nature of culture.
First is the fact that ‘culture’ derives from the people’s interaction with their environment.
Second is the fact that a change in the environment leads to a corresponding change in the culture.
It follows, therefore, that when the African landscape was bombarded with new colonial values, their African culture was also inevitably subjected to colonialism which imposed a dominant ideology.
Karl Marx explains the nature of such domination: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production.” (Marx and Engels: 1970:64)
This quotation contains two key points: The first is that the dominant ideology consists of ideas of the ruling class that is culture, and the second is that these express material relationships.
The ruling class in the context of colonisation is the ruling white settler-minority.
A synopsis of how cultural imperialism has changed the cultural landscape of Zimbabwe over the years will provide another window justifying the search for lost meanings.
I now turn to how cultural imperialism contributed to the alienation of Zimbabweans from their metaphysical world view.
Capitalism produces a consumer culture within which all cultural action and experience become ‘commodified’.
Schiller (1976:9) defines cultural imperialism in this dimension as: “The sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating centre of the system.”
Cultural imperialism is here portrayed as an agent in the service of the colonial capitalist system.
Since the officialisation of colonial authority in Rhodesia following the 1890 colonisation, multi-media communication became a major mechanism for cultural domination.
Cultural imperialism manifested itself inter-alia the following ways; cartography, religion, education, technology, travel and tourism as well as language.
Cartography (map-making) was a major cause of the denigration of local cultures throughout Africa following the partition of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 which saw a whole continent being appropriated among Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and Germany.
In southern Africa, as elsewhere, colonial boundaries sliced whole cultural groups apart causing severe social and psychological damage on the social and cultural fabric of society.
For example, the boundary between Mozambique and Zimbabwe divides the Manyika people into two provinces of Manica in Mozambique and Manicaland in Zimbabwe.
Similarly, to the south of the country the Venda people were split into two by the imposition of Limpopo River as a colonial boundary, rupturing their cultural identity by alienating kins-people.
To worsen matters, cartographical dismembering of Africans was not just restricted to colonial boundaries.
Zimbabweans who had been islanded by colonial boundaries were further subjected to systematic displacement and marginalisation from mainstream economy through a system of racial colonial laws.
Daniel Boda Ndlela (1981) gives a detailed list of Rhodesian land laws which evicted Africans from their ancestral lands.
Chief among the alienating policies were The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 which ‘allocated over 50 percent of the total land area to the whites (3 percent of the population) and only 30 percent to the blacks (97 percent)’. (Ndlela: 1981:77)
This was followed by The Land Tenure Act of 1969 which consolidated the former.
Under both Acts, the Africans were displaced from Region 1 areas and condemned into the dry unproductive areas contemptuously named the tribal trust lands, where communal Africans ‘farmed on a subsistence basis’. (ibid 79).
Yet even these were not safe from colonial seizure or manipulation.
Ndhlela acknowledges that ‘under the law mining speculators, who were free to prospect in the tribal trust Lands, were able to make compulsory purchase of any area required for mining’ following which ‘African farmers were forcibly evicted into other tribal trust lands’. (ibid:79-80)
What this tells you is that you cannot separate the whiteman’s ideas from the politics of imperialism.