THE history of the liberation struggle for Zimbabwe itself demonstrates the superiority of the reclaimed ground in contrast to the studio or newsroom as the arena for winning both collective and individual freedom of expression.
The ‘pungwe’ took place in pockets of the liberated zones permanently or temporarily wrested from the colonial enemy.
This is the message and finding of Julie Frederikse’s book, None But Ourselves: Masses Versus Media in the Making of Zimbabwe.
The freedom of expression which defeated white Rhodesian and Western propaganda was not individual and it was not scripto-centric.
The role of land ownership and the control of space in communication and memory creation is so palpable that it is criminal to exclude it from the constitutional provisions on freedom of expression.
Yet it was excluded and it is still excluded from the so-called home-grown Constitution of 2013.
Freedom of expression needs to be rescued from its colonial Roman Dutch pigeon hole.
What is even more paradoxical is that it is the British, the North Americans, the Europeans and white South Africans and Rhodesians who backed the Lancaster House Constitution.
It is they also who have come forward as the champions and guarantors of the idea of freedom of expression in Zimbabwe which excludes the role of land in making possible much of that freedom.
It is they who wish to limit freedom of expression to just access to the newsroom and the page, the studio and the microphone, the satellite dish and virtual space.
Yet even the satellite dish requires premises on the ground.
Rhodes carved out arbitrary colonial borders which remain to this day.
He planted his informal intelligence agents in the form of thankful missionaries along the eastern highlands.
These then served to block Rhodes’s Portuguese rivals from expressing themselves by expanding westward and encroaching on the land that Rhodes wanted.
The written and published laws of Rhodesia were meant to define and defend that macro-form of expression on the land.
Rhodes instructed his followers to express his final wish for him by burying him on our soil, in the very prominent spot where one of our African kings was supposed to be buried.
And, today, it is the African King whose memory has grown fuzzy among the African population while that of Rhodes remains sharp, ensconced in a prominent spot which we obligingly show to every ancestor – worshipping white man or woman who comes here from the Anglo-Saxon world.
Now if there is any doubt about the power of a definite burial ground as a place for planting a collective memory, we must reflect on those massive multi-generational crowds that gathered from every corner of Zimbabwe to bury our honourable Vice-President Dr Joshua Nkomo on July 5 1999, or the mobs who went to mourn and bury Nelson Mandela during the week leading to 15 December 2013.
The massive expression of national memory would not have been so solid if there had been no place of reclaimed Zimbabwean soil called Heroes’ Acre to provide the space and ground.
Why, then, do we continue to treat freedom of expression in terms of access to e-mails, web sites, columns, pages and microphones?
Finally, this euro-centric and scripto-centric notion of freedom of expression is also presented by the same groups and their media as a way of ‘empowering’ women and ordinary people.
It is often described as, ‘the right of the powerless to be heard’ and therefore to become ‘empowered’.
The problem is that the vey groups and persons making these claims for women and ordinary people actually do not ‘wish to be heard’ where and when they are making their most powerful decisions.
It is important to illustrate what I mean.
We did not hear the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank back in 1987 when they decided that Zimbabwe should be forced to adopt structural adjustment by making all lending from these institutions ‘policy lending’.
This meant that as a legitimate member of these institutions, Zimbabwe would no longer be able to receive any benefits at all (as in the past), unless it agreed to get the supposed benefits only in exchange for changing its internal economic policies.
We only ‘heard’ this much later on when these institutions or their front men were now trying to justify ‘policy lending’ and its devastating effects on us.
Likewise, Africans did not hear John F Kennedy, the CIA and their Congolese stooges when they decided that the first Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba should be murdered because a US diplomat with corporate interests in mining in Katanga had labelled Lumumba a ‘communist’.
Africans heard only the false explanations of the ‘crisis’ when the United Nations (UN) was now being manipulated to cover up for the United States, just as it did for NATO in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya.
Indeed, we heard nothing when Ian Smith set up the bandit group called the Mozambican Resistance Movement as his way of preventing ZANLA from toppling his regime.
And even in April 1980, we still heard nothing when the same Ian Smith saved RENAMO by transferring it from the control of the Rhodesian forces to that of the South African Defence Force.
What we were told was that RENAMO was a self-starting and legitimate liberation movement trying to free Mozambique from communism.
The question for African thinkers is obvious.
The people most interested in our being the first to be ‘heard’ as a matter of right actually do not want to be ‘heard’ at all until they have accomplished what they really want to do.
We hear their rationalisations of decisions already made, when those decisions begin to hurt us.
So, why are the same people so eager to give us the privilege of being ‘heard’ all the time?
They are telling us ‘Rambai makashama’, instead of ‘Rambai makashinga’.
Up to now I have established two main things about the right to freedom of expression.
The meaning attached to it in the Lancaster Constitution, in the new Constitution of Zimbabwe (2013), and in media circles in Zimbabwe should be rejected because it is euro-centric, scripto-centric and hopelessly limited. Because it excludes the importance of land in guaranteeing freedom of expression, it can be seen in communication terms as limiting us to matters of the text at the expense of the ground as the context and arena of expression.
The people’s freedom to express their identity and personality cannot and should not be lumped together with mere press freedom.
Secondly, this euro-centric and scripto-centric notion of freedom of expression also implies a poor understanding of power and the communication of power.
It equates visible (audible) communication and visible decision making with evidence of power or empowerment.
But the most powerful decisions in the real world are neither audible nor visible. And the very same groups urging us to be ‘heard’, to be ‘accountable’, do not follow their own rules when it comes to decisions dear to them.
They become visible and audible to us when it is now time for the public relations exercise to justify what has already been decided.
More specifically, on the question of the right to freedom of expression, they are most audible and visible when championing our access to the microphone and the pages of letters to the editor; but they are so silent on land as a basis for freedom of expression that they have never even acknowledged any connection between land and expression.
The African should reveal this link by studying the ‘pungwe’ as communication for liberation based on land; African dance and theatre as rituals of space and ecology; the history of African stone sculpture in Zimbabwe, as a dramatisation of the African body of memory demanding space on the land; the history of mbira, marimba, hosho and other music instruments as celebrations of land, ecology and space; and the many ways in which African language itself reveals the appreciation and celebration of land and space as bases of power and empowerment.
The history of shelter and architecture, the history of cuisine and diet, would be most revealing.