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Law society of Zim … a creature of history oblivious to Zim history

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The Sunday Mail for September 30 2012 reported remarks by one of the COPAC co-chairpersons, Honourable Douglas Mwonzora, which remarks included the claim that COPAC was justified to reject the views of the people gathered during its ward-to-ward outreach because some of those views would have taken “us to the 19th century” and others would have taken “us to the pre-Jesus Christ era.”

In the minds of COPAC lawyers, who are well-schooled and steeped in Roman-Dutch law, such antiquated and obsolete values and views  from African communities should never be allowed anywhere near a constitutional process in ‘the digital age’.

And yet, in 2020, Zimbabwe is faced with the paradox that former white settler farmers’ claims for compensation based on history were incorporated into the current constitution while the African claim for compensation from Imperial Britain for loss of land (dating back to 1890 and lasting almost a whole century) was rejected both in Britain and in Zimbabwe.  

Here then is a clear case of readiness to admit and use history where white interests are concerned while denying the same where African interests are concerned. 

An even more extreme case of white linear thinking adopted by an African was presented in the form of a Newsday feature on November 30 2010 which was called “Yesterday died last night.”

There, Noah Mangwarara elaborated the instant erasure philosophy which Mwonzora and other COPAC leaders used to justify their drafting of a neo-liberal constitution against the people of Dzimbahwe.  

Mangwarara wrote: “By spending time in the past, the open doors of the present are never seen.  Such doors only appear in the imagination after they have already closed…  

“There is no future in the past.  Somewhere ahead of us lies the future.  We would therefore rather focus on where we are going than concentrate on where we have been.  The important thing that you can do with your life is to realise that yesterday was buried last night and will never come back again, no matter how much you think about it.”  

It is not only the grammar about doors that spend time in the past which is wrong.  

The whole argument makes no sense in real life and human history.  It is anti-African and un-African.

If yesterday died last night, why did these same people  spend one thousand hectares of print trying to bury it over and over again?

What exactly is going on?  Consider the following facts and events:

λ After the ward-to-ward outreach, COPAC set off a massive blizzard of imported documents intended to bury the country’s liberation history and perform a constitutional lobotomy on the nation.

λ After the illegal sanctions took effect and killed the national research and publishing industry, donors and foreign sponsored NGOs also set off a massive blizzard of donated publications masquerading as classroom textbooks and sources of ‘global wisdom’.  These then filled our bookstores, including Kingstons at that time, until they also got buried in the avalanche of donated literature.

λ After the African land reclamation movement resulted in 300 000 to 400 000 African families being resettled, Anglo-Saxon donors instigated SADC into setting up a SADC Tribunal with the reversal of Zimbabwe’s Third Chimurenga and land revolution as priority number one.  That SADC Tribunal, though full of African judges, proceeded to snow us under acres and acres of white jurisprudence aimed at reversing land reform in Zimbabwe and erasing it from the minds of other dispossessed Africans in the region. It took the leadership of former Chief Justice, the late Godfrey Chidyausiku, to rescue Zimbabwe from the illegal judgement of the so-called SADC Tribunal.

λ When SADC realised its error in arming the SADC Tribunal with white law, the apartheid judiciary in South Africa took up the case and has been snowing the entire region with tomes of anti-Zimbabwe and anti-liberation judgements.  Within South Africa itself the same judiciary has openly condemned the discourse and history of African liberation as ‘hate speech’ which is forbidden and banned.

What is going on would be easy to explain if those obsessed with burying Africa and raising Rhodesia and Apartheid were not themselves Africans in appearance.

The problem is not the past. 

Mwonzora claimed that the reason why COPAC suppressed many of the values and views of the people was because they would take us to the 19th century and to the time before Jesus was born.  But how old is the English language which Mwonzora and COPAC deployed to bury the values of the people?  Was English invented in the digital age for COPAC?

COPAC’s rhetoric then was meant to rationalise African self-hatred.  The law which Mwonzora and his COPAC colleagues boasted about having learned and internalised so totally is based on Roman and Dutch philosophies going back to times way before the 19th Century and even way before the birth of Jesus.  Jesus was born in the Roman Empire which gave Douglas Mwonzora and Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana the Roman side of the same Roman-Dutch law which they boasted of knowing and using against the laws, culture and philosophy of vanhu.

The family and marriage were invented and protected under law long before the birth of Jesus and definitely before Roman or Dutch philosophies ever took shape.  So, are we going to erase the family and marriage from our culture and law just because they pre-date Jesus and the 19th century?  What exactly was the philosophy which Mwonzora and COPAC were trying to teach maDzimbahwe? 

What exactly was going on?

The problem is that history is so present and so dominant in the lives of these young politicians and technocrats that they feel overwhelmed by it.  They feel overwhelmed because they have no conceptual and philosophical handles to enable them to enjoy its benefits in wisdom or knowledge.  

So the easiest route is to reject, condemn and insult African history in the hope that it will obey and die.  But the results of such amnesia for the people are quite dire. It is not only lawyers who represent this amnesia.

In its section dedicated to views from the Zimbabwe Diaspora in the United Kingdom, The Patriot newspaper on February 24  2012 carried the story of one Sarudzayi Chifamba.  

The title of the story was “A generation of suitcases … Are we the weakest link” (in Zimbabwe’s struggle against imperialism)? That title went to the heart of the challenge of linear thinking:  how speed and the illusions of progress are used to induce mass movement and displacement which can obliterate one’s historical time, one’s autonomous space and one’s indigenous storage of value just as fast and as effectively as force and violence during a war.

The substitution of soft power for war is real. The setting in motion of an entire ‘generation of suitcases’ globe-trotting on an Anglo-Saxon-sponsored campaign to deny their own history, demonise their own country and its leaders, and embrace a non-existent global village and ‘open society’ out there, was premised on the illusion that by embarking upon the Third Chimurenga Zimbabwe was moving backwards while the Anglo-Saxon world (which was now falsely credited with giving birth to the new country in 1980) had moved centuries ahead.

To unleash such a mass movement of ‘suitcases’ the Anglo-Saxon powers had employed the blitzkrieg approach to Zimbabwe as soon as their proxy Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was in place inside Zimbabwe to help dramatize the shock-and-awe effects of the onslaught.  

Suddenly almost a third of the youths saw themselves as self-created activists, part of a so-called civil society which was preparing for the ‘New Zimbabwe’ by helping the British administration of Tony Blair to pull out of Zimbabwe hundreds of thousands of youths who were not going to come back to Zimbabwe until the war veterans, the Government and the entire liberation movement from the Second Chimurenga were finished.  

What was supposed to finish them was the Anglo-Saxon blitzkrieg combining financial warfare, the cutting off of all lines of credit, media war and psychological warfare.

The youths who found themselves in the UK felt so lucky to be allowed in, because of the television pictures of so many East Europeans, Arabs, Asians, Latinos and Africans from other countries killing one another and falling over one another and struggling to enter Europe and the same UK but being denied entry.

The easily admitted Zimbabwean youths found themselves becoming a captive audience for MDC leaders passing through the UK on their way to other Anglo-Saxon destinations to campaign against Zimbabwe and keep morale high among those who had left that country.  Chifamba found herself among the youth audience:

If the British government puts pressure on Mozambique and South Africa to switch off their electricity supply to Zimbabwe, I tell you Mugabe will be gone within a week or two, said an overzealous MDC leader, who had become so stout overnight, to an excited audience in the UK sometime in 2003 amid ululation and drum beating.”

This youthful fantasy in 2003 defied both logic and the living histories of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Much later, Chifamba found herself repeating the same sanctions message during yet another rally.  What she did not know was that the New Labour Government’s and the MDC’s promises to Zimbabwean youths to quickly leave Zimbabwe for the UK and be made ready to take-over a New Zimbabwe to be built on the ashes of illegal sanctions were seen as reckless, dangerous and unrealizable by ordinary Britons who understood their own history in relation to Rhodesia and former Rhodesians.  

From the perspective of real historical time, space and value, it was bad enough for the Blair administration to be admitting into an already declining economy hundreds of thousands of African youths from Zimbabwe.  

The worst part was the mission of these youths to obtain cheap refugee status there while helping to destroy the Zimbabwe economy, which destruction would unleash even larger numbers of both Africans and the remaining white population who would all come crushing on the shores of an already crumbling British economy! 

Therefore, when one British male journalist confronted Chifamba, he meant to ask really genuine questions of living history and he was not prepared to accept mere rhetoric for answers because the Zimbabwe issue was a matter of life and death, bread and butter, for the British working class.  Chifamba reported:

“Unconvinced, he asked me why at all we would be willing to give back the land (to Rhodesians) when after all there was no fairness in the way it had been taken from Africans.  He asked me what I thought would happen if most of the land in Britain was owned by Africans at the expense of British people.”

The journalist asked Chifamba to think (in terms of real historical time, space, value and society) what the results of a successful Anglo-Saxon onslaught on Zimbabwe would be?  “Surely wouldn’t your own people suffer?”

What imperialism achieved temporarily between 1997 and 2007 was to use its domination of money and the Rhodesian domination of space (in the form of industrial space and agricultural land) to instigate a youth revolt which produced what Chifamba later called the generation of suitcases.  

These youths were then sucked into the blip culture of the West after leaving Zimbabwe. 

 Once in the UK or any other Western country, they would be bombarded by the blip culture there to make them even more  disoriented away from their sense of Zimbabwean historical time, away from their space, away from their indigenous values.  The image which these metropolitan societies would present to the new arrivals was what Alfin Toffler describes in his book The Third Wave:

“This speed-up of image processing inside us means that images grow more and more temporary…Ideals, beliefs, and attitudes skyrocket into unconsciousness, are challenged, defied, and suddenly fade into nowhere-ness. Scientific and psychological theories are overthrown and superceded daily.  Ideologies crack…Contradictory political and moral slogans assail us.  It is difficult to make sense of this swirling phantasmagoria, to understand how the image-manufacturing process is changing.”

As a result our history, to many lawyers trained in Roman-Dutch law, became a sort of ‘nowhereness’.

In such a situation, anyone who announces that they have come up with a clear roadmap would be welcomed and given attention.  

So the New Labour Government of Tony Blair hoped to give these new Zimbabwean arrivals a roadmap which included first helping to justify illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe by demonising its liberation movement in government and then organizing to help the British and the North Americans to set up a puppet regime similar to the one which has just been set up in Libya and Iraq.

And yet, the same west got bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and lost appetite for proceeding with an armed force to Zimbabwe.  

And by 2011 they realised that the chaos caused by their war on terror programmes in the Middle East had in fact accelerated the decline of western domination in the region while elevating the power and influence of Iran, Russia and China.  

Zimbabwe remained a threat by their account; but compromising with the liberation movement in government there might be more beneficial than escalating the old hostilities.  

This was especially important for the British and their European allies because of the economic chaos which has grown worse there since 2007-2008.  

The dream of George W Bush and Tony Blair to recreate Africa and the Middle East from the ashes of structural adjustment and war has been abandoned in favour of looting these regions for the quick recovery of the west from its worst recession since the 1930s as well as from economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic now.

Alvin Toffler put the problem of imperialism clearly in 1990, as the West was busy trying to recreate the entire South through economic structural adjustment programmes.  He wrote:  

“Elites, no matter how enlightened, cannot by themselves make a new civilisation.  The energies (and indigenous wisdom) of whole peoples will be required.  But those energies are available, waiting to be tapped.  Indeed if we, particularly in high technology countries, took as our explicit goal for the next generation the creation of wholly new institutions and constitutions, we would release something far more powerful than energy: collective imagination.”

Western elites and those they sponsor among us remain confused in their narcissism and amnesia. They mix up what they think with what is experienced by the overwhelming majority of the world; they mix up what is in their plans and in media with the living history of humanity.  So, it is not only the speed of technology which has reached a dead-end in terms of optimal benefit.  

It is also the Western elites and their institutions who have exceeded their maximum capacity to lead.  

They still monopolise force and violence but that is not leadership.  Acceleration is also not leadership.  Beyond a certain threshold it becomes counterproductive if not dangerous to continue accelerating and increasing speed.

Kurt Mendelssohn in his book, The Secret of Western Domination, makes a sobering observation:  The folly of some leaders and cultures has been to believe that apparent improvements in science, technology and communications can directly translate into improvements in social and political organisation, so that those with the most sophisticated gadgets continue to rule the world forever.  History is not like that:

“Here it must be noted that the predictability of political schemes has not appreciably improved in the last thousand years or so.  It was very much on the same level at a time when flying appeared an unattainable dream.  Politicians tried and erred then at roughly the same rate as they are trying and erring today.  The remarkable progress of science is merely a relative phenomenon…”

In other words, revolutions around the world will continue to surprise and threaten the so-called world leaders of the world despite their technological and scientific wizardry.

That is why some of those who imposed illegal sanctions expecting Zimbabwe to collapse and disappear in a matter of months 12 years ago now feel as if they are the ones who have suffered sanctions.  

The Western elite has been raised on an over-mediated his-story.  As Jerry Mander points out, the pitfalls of such a his-story are obvious.

“In separating images from their source, thereby deleting their aura, television, photography and film also remove the images from their context of time and place…All images arrive in sequence with equal validity. (Yet) human beings and living creatures live in process…What’s more, human culture, government, religion and art are also in process (and not artificial sequenc).  Explaining (to understand) a human being or culture or a political system requires some historical perspective.”

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