HomeOld_PostsRacist lies and the tracking power of history

Racist lies and the tracking power of history

Published on

By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

“Musandisukumidzira kune vavengi vangu; Nokuti zvapupu zvemanyepo zvakandimukira, pamwepo nevanofemurika ngeushungu,” Mapisarema (Ndwiyo) 27:12

THE remobilisation of the Black Lives Matter movement and coalition from within the heartland of the US has enabled Africans and their supporters worldwide to regain lost ground against global racist lies.  

But that ground can soon be lost again if the global linkages created in the wake of the videotaped murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 2020 does not go beyond being a fashionable global media spectacle.  Unless this tragic opening becomes a catalyst for serious attention to living history, Africans will continue to move one step forward and two steps backwards, only to start again when a similarly gruesome spectacle appears on global TV. 

Following this latest upsurge of support for the Black Lives Matter movement, there were stories within the US that the white right-wing movement and the Trump administration wanted to suppress the Black Lives Matter movement and limit solidarity support for it by planting white terrorists to commit acts of arson and sabotage in the name of that movement and ANTIFA.

ANTIFA stands for Antifascistische Action, a radical movement from the 1930s struggles against Nazism and Fascism in Europe.  This tradition was revived in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s and it came to the US in the 1980s where it was translated in Minneapolis into Anti-Racist Action (ARA). 

The ARA no longer exists.   

There are offshoots on ANTIFA in various cities but they no longer use that name.  Some of them, of course, support the Black Lives Matter movement.

But our interest in this history and these linkages in Zimbabwe arises from three stories:

λ The first was the allegation by US administration officials that Zimbabwe was one of the countries helping to fuel demonstrations and riots in the US in the wake of George Floyd’s murder there. 

 This was flatly denied by the Zimbabwe Government and most Zimbabweans considered it to be ridiculous.

But that story was indicative of many possibilities.  One of these was that the US Government itself was up to a lot more mischief against Zimbabwe than before and the fabricated allegations were meant to justify the escalating mischief.

λ The second story was about the US administration’s efforts to link ANTIFA to Black Lives Matter and to classify by Presidential decree the two groups as domestic terrorist organisations. 

The quick spread of the demonstrations throughout the US and the world appears to have made Trump hesitate to issue the decree.

λ The third story appeared in The Harare Post as ‘Fake abductions unravelling’, written by Trevor Shiri and ‘The abduction story is fake Analysts’, by Innocent Mujere.  

It also appeared in The Herald on the front page as ‘(Tapiwa) Mashakada exposes MDC-A fake abductions’, on June 22 2020.

My purpose is not to dwell on one story, but to return to the subject of history and suggest that lies and blatant propaganda replace living history whenever intellectuals become sloppy and lazy and when society becomes bitterly divided along ideological lines, including religious beliefs.  For imperialism the fertile field for lies is polarisation.  Apartheid and racism polarised societies.

For more than 300 years, the white settler-churches of SA mixed a Eurocentric Christian gospel with the doctrine of apartheid which they presented to themselves and their victims as the ultimate truth and revelation. 

But historians tracked these pious liars and exposed them in a book called ‘Apartheid Heresy in the 1980s’.

From 1962 to 1980, the Rhodesia Front confused its total control of Rhodesian ‘native’ education and of the media with total control of the African mind, until the 1980 elections and the publication of Julie Fredrikse’s book  ‘None But Ourselves’ revealed the Rhodesian claims to be hollow lies. 

 In 1979, the British used the Lancaster House Constitution to characterise Zimbabweans as ‘willing buyers’ of their own stolen land while calling the whites who had stolen and monopolised that same land ‘willing sellers’. The African land reclamation movement has, since 2000, also exposed that lie.

It is therefore not just the late Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith who lived to regret his lying boast that there would never be African majority rule in his lifetime.

Journalists, preachers, academics and politicians should all be careful when they are offered time, space and communication vehicles and bribe money to use at will.  

What they say or write may come to haunt them when the tracking power and memory of history follows after them and focuses on what they once wrote and said in a moment of hubris, anger, excitement or drunkenness.

History does not only follow one’s tracks, picking up significant turns and twists, which at the time of their happening seemed justifiable but now look ridiculous, history is also the system of collective bearings turning a people’s shared knowledge into memory.

The use of mass media for purposes contrary to ethical human communication has the effect of negating history, erasing history or scrambling history.  The one whose history is erased or scrambled and the one doing the erasing and scrambling will eventually and equally suffer.

In April 1999, when the US,  through NATO, was waging an illegal war upon the small country of Yugoslavia (Serbia) and when most people in the world knew the war to be based on lies and madness, some boys at Columbine School back in Colorado, US, decided to do to their school teachers and classmates more or less what President Bill Clinton and NATO commanders were doing to men, women and children of Yugoslavia or what US aggressors had done to the people of Vietnam.  

The boys shot and killed their teachers and schoolmates in cold blood.  Since that time, similar school shootings by pupils have happened almost every year in the US, sometimes several shootings in one year.

Peggy Noonan related the behaviour of the children to the values and events dominating US media which she summarised as the culture of death:

“This time it [the culture] wore black trench coats. Last time it was children’s hunting gear.  Next time it will be some other costume, but it will still be the culture of death [and lies]…. The boys who did the killing, the famous French Trench Coat Mafia, inhaled too deep the ocean [media] in which they swam.

Think of it this way. A child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water [the media]. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar. The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazine, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by all are waves. The fish, the child is bombarded and barely knows it. But in America, the waves contain words like this…”

This was before Twitter, facebook and other anti-history media made the ‘culture’ even worse.

Then Noonan went on to quote the typical content of US media to which the average child is subjected.

What is clear when one reads the waves of typical content summarised by Noonan is that this content has eliminated history and it dwells instead on incomprehensible events.

 The so-called typical news bulletin is mostly a reading of words and sentences but not a reading of the world, not a reading of situations, not a reading of relationships for the purpose of understanding them. News in the culture of death now sells, rivets, bombards and bewilders but it does not explain. It immerses and drowns but it does not wash.

The waves of lies which the imperial North American weapons of mass deception have unleashed on the rest of the world to erase the world’s memory have also been erasing the human memory of North American society itself. 

 Back in Britain and back in time, in November 1962, undergraduates at Oxford University had realised that their fate as descendants of the British Empire depended on some understanding of world history, especially African history.  

They had noticed a paradox in the British memory of the world.  On the one hand, it stressed the need to go out and conquer the world in order to keep Britain Great.  

On the other hand it relied heavily on denying the dignity, history and autonomy of that ‘Third World’.  To some extent the global nature of the coronavirus crisis has precipitated the same contradiction as that faced by British students in 1962.

The students, therefore, demanded that Oxford University should teach African history to white European undergraduates.  

Today, we have moved a little bit further.  

The students demand that Oxford should divorce itself from the money and legacy of Cecil John Rhodes.  

The late Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern European History at Oxford University in 1962, objected to the implied importation of African History or memory into the British curriculum.  He wrote angrily:

“Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they be taught African history.  Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach.  But at present there is none.  The only history there is to teach in Africa is the history of Europeans.  The rest is darkness, and darkness is not a subject of history.” 

Professor Trevor-Roper died in 2004.  So he, like Ian Smith, lived to see not just the growth of African history as a subject in Europe and America but also as the history of the African impact on world events. It is not idle, for instance, to note that the AU has adopted the most radical and most progressive position on UN reform to date.

If we look at little Zimbabwe, we notice that the history of this country is haunting the entire EU, the US and so-called Great Britain.  

The US has stooped so low as to pass the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act as a piece of US legislation.  The US and European media pay extraordinary attention to Zimbabwe.  Most of the content of that attention is made of media lies.

But if we look at the year 1962, the year Hugh Trevor-Roper swore that there was no African history to teach, Africans made many strides in their living history.

Apart from the many African countries which renounced British rule and became self-governing, there were other important developments. 

 That year was the year the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) was formed.  The next year, 1963, saw the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).  

This OAU created the OAU’s Liberation Committee to co-ordinate and channel aid to Southern African liberation movements.

History, therefore, treats media liars very ironically.  

In the first place, while the white racist media are busy concocting lies against other peoples, they cannot also teach their own people properly. 

 The time spent lying is lost to lies and cannot be spent teaching the truth.  

This is the problem US citizens face today under President Donald Trump.

But even more profoundly, the reasons for the propensity to lie cannot be examined by that channel which is used to lie. In 1962, Britain was facing a crisis of economy, a crisis of empire and identity.  But British media helped to hide that crisis or to deflect it and make it appear as if it was the Africans choosing liberation and building liberation movements who were in trouble and in crisis.

As Marc Raboy and Bernard Dagenais suggest in their chapter called ‘Media and Politics of Crisis’, global mass media help those societies who own them to divert attention from their crises by portraying diversionary crises instead.

  As Professor Claude Mararike once remarked when I read him Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1962 outburst against undergraduates, the darkness Trevor-Roper accused the Africans of living in was, in fact, in the British professor’s own mind.  African events from then on served to expose the racist darkness of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s mind.  

According to ‘Media and Politics of Crisis’:

“The tendency is, therefore, for the media to seek out crisis where it does not exist, and to obscure the actual forces of change that threaten media privilege along with entrenched social privilege in general.  Paradoxically, this means that the media will tend to pay even more attention to a fabricated crisis than to one that can stake a material claim to reality… a serious limitation to contemporary mainstream media is their reluctance to recognise and legitimate an actually existing crisis whose logical outcome would empower those who do not currently form part of the dominant social elites.”

The white racist churches of SA find it difficult to face their theological lies of the last 300 years.  

Rhodesian journalists cannot stand in public in Zimbabwe and defend their roles and practice during UDI.  

They cannot defend their prediction about ‘Rhodesians never die’.

Likewise, the US lies against Grenada, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq are already unsustainable.  

When historians study these gigantic lies, the hollowness of US claims about implanting democracy in Iraq will be as great as the hollowness of Adolph Hitler’s claims.  

George W. Bush’s claim that God commanded him to invade Iraq compounds the scandal.  

History will punish both the liars and those who allow their own history to be distorted, purchased and dominated by liars.   

The lies which Trump told his followers about China or about his immediate predecessor Barack Obama have come back to haunt the whole country, now staring at the US Government’s failure to prepare for the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Latest articles

FOZEU’s call for strike…an attempt at provoking anarchy

By Elizabeth Sitotombe IN an attempt to sow anarch across the country by calling for...

Chitepo’s fight for land

This story was first published on 21/03/2016 By Patience Rusare LAND ranked highest among the grievances...

Winning mindset in post-elections

WE, in the village, are known for our resilience, we never give up and...

Import of US illegal sanctions

By Jonathan N. Moyo TWENTY-ONE years ago, on March 6 2003, US President George W....

More like this

FOZEU’s call for strike…an attempt at provoking anarchy

By Elizabeth Sitotombe IN an attempt to sow anarch across the country by calling for...

Chitepo’s fight for land

This story was first published on 21/03/2016 By Patience Rusare LAND ranked highest among the grievances...

Winning mindset in post-elections

WE, in the village, are known for our resilience, we never give up and...

Discover more from Celebrating Being Zimbabwean

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading