HomeOld_PostsThe pungwe as the mobilisation of collective memory

The pungwe as the mobilisation of collective memory

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN 2011, I was asked to give a lecture on public security and the phenomenon of so-called ‘social media’ with special reference to Egypt and the ‘Arab Spring’.
I told my audience that for those of us who were freed through the Second Chimurenga, with its pungwe model, the three concepts: Arab Spring, social media and Egyptian revolution were fake because they were all based on media simulation rather than on realities on the ground.
The first problem was that BBC, CNN, Euro News, Sky TV, Fox TV and Al Jazeera were not exactly revolutionary channels.
How then could they name and define revolutions?
Their naming of what was happening in the Arab world as an Arab Spring was in itself not credible.
The second problem was that we had been persuaded to accept the humanising term ‘social media’ to refer to blogs, twitter, LinkedIn, facebook and other platforms, without asking when and how exactly we had ‘socialised’ them, so that they could indeed become ‘social media’ for us.
The third problem was the theory of media and communication being used to frame events in the Arab world as the Arab Spring.
African communication theories encourage us to remember the difference between the historical world and the world as simulated and mediated by someone else’s gadgets and platforms.
The postmodern theory being deployed against us encouraged the exact opposite.
Postmodern theory and philosophy offered ‘simulation’ and the ‘simulacrum’ as all the reality and history we can hope to live.
In a book called The Drama of Leadership, one author presented this postmodern world view as follows:
“Society is a house of mirrors, a masquerade, a continuous, self-serving commercial (that is, an advertisement).
“It is not rational; it is driven by greed, power seeking, and inflated egos. “Everyone has a hidden agenda.
“Heroism is suspect, if not out of fashion.”
This means the society which imperialism and crisis capitalism have unleashed and foisted on the world through NATO and the US military-industrial machine is based on deniability and an attempt to escape from reality and history.
History is treated as only a raw material from which one uses media and mediation in order to quarry only those bits and pieces which serve the immediate purpose of the manipulator.
To ‘simulate’ means to imitate the appearance or nature of something.
It also means to use computers and other gadgets to create a construction or model or to produce conditions which approximate or even appear to surpass those in real life and living history.
A ‘simulacrum’ is therefore an image which is formed in the likeness of someone or something else.
Indeed, we have been told that the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the US Presidency was one such revolution made possible through young people’s use of ‘social media’ to which the older generations were too slow to adapt.
After the Obama ‘revolution’, then came the ‘Arab Spring’ involving young revolutionaries in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and several other places where old regimes were swept aside with the ease of a swipe on a single smart gadget.
Later we were told that the same scenario awaited established governments in Zimbabwe and South Africa, where young people had also abandoned the pungwe and the rally and were now meeting on twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms.
In reality, however, the techno-savvy young revolutionaries in Egypt were surprised when the Moslem Brotherhood won the first elections following the ‘revolution’.
They were shocked when the Egyptian military overthrew the elected Moslem Brotherhood President Mohammed Mursi in a coup d’état which was then followed by yet another election administered by the military.
In the 2013 elections in Kenya, the techno-savvy politicians who were most popular according to internet surveys lost to those who were popular in real villages, real townships and real ghettos, again because the techno-savvy youths supporting them had not registered to vote.
In the case of Zimbabwe, the urban-based and techno-savvy youths who were mistakenly expected to vote MDC turned out to be either not registered to vote or too alienated to vote and decide the election.
In the May 2014 elections in South Africa we are also told that the supposedly techno-savvy youths did not constitute one revolutionary block either.
There the established African National Congress won the elections.
The Arab Spring therefore represented a classical case of simulated ‘revolution’ and simulated ‘democracy’.
But that is not what the Western media told the world.
Their account was:
What happened in North Africa was the inevitable outcome of globalisation, digitalisation and democratisation, symbolised by the mass adoption of powerful ‘social media’ by young people.
The governments of these North African states were easily swept aside by the tide of popular youth resentment coordinated through social media.
The national broadcasting services and newspapers owned by these regimes remained stuck with local content and national content programmes which were out of touch with the demands of young people and therefore totally unappealing.
Both Muammar Gaddafi and the content of his government’s media were totally unappealing and unpopular.
The ‘pro-democracy rebels’ quickly adopted the new technologies and new platforms which enabled the youths to communicate directly among themselves and to create their own instant content, now dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’.
Given the fact that Zimbabwe has been under informal sanctions since about 1997 and formal sanctions since 2001, the US-NATO explanations of what happened in North Africa quickly found a market within the regime change camp in Zimbabwe.
The Rhodesian rump loved such pseudo-explanations because they fed into their own resentments of the Third Chimurenga and African history.
The mystique of new digital gadgets was employed to serve as a substitute for:
l Revolution;
l Political ideology;
l Moral superiority over oppression, over dictatorship and over backwardness.
The mystique of new gadgets was also used to substitute for leadership and history.
The white racist agenda and NATO aggression in Libya and Syria became acceptable once they were presented as inevitable.
The idea was to associate the NATO-chosen sell-outs with the fascination over new gadgets and new digital platforms in order to hide the real activities of European powers and the US on the ground and the consequences of those real activities for the people of those countries.
What the Western media have subjected us to on North Africa helps to hide important facts, such as:
That NATO bombed and destroyed Libyan TV and radio stations and transmitters. These were not destroyed by facebook and twitter.
That the new digital technologies do not necessarily oppose or replace radio, TV and newspapers. Rather they merge with them. So, the real issue for discussion should be technology merger.
That the youths who are hooked on twitter and facebook are not necessarily revolutionaries, whether in Athens, London or Tahir Square. The new gadgets lack the deep memory of revolution. Their messages are prone to instant erasure on deletion.
That out of the crowds brought to the square by sms, twitter and facebook … no revolutionary leadership has yet emerged.
There is yet no Fidel Castro, no Patrice Lumumba, no Robert Gabriel Mugabe, no Hugo Chavez and definitely no Che Guevara among them. They remain mainly faceless, twitting and deleting their messages.

3 COMMENTS

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