By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THERE is an expanding structure of discourse which continues to generate strange and unquestioned concepts, labels, slogans and sound-bites which end up polluting our language and compromising our own abilities as a people to speak with one another and understand one another. This growing structure includes the following features:
l The growth of the intolerant assumption that autonomous, independent and self-reliant peoples and communities should no longer be allowed to speak their own language, define their own needs and devise their own ways of meeting those needs. As a result Zimbabwean journalists report on the so-called United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as if Zimbabwe never had its own “Health for All by 2000,” “Education for All by 2000,” African land reclamation and reform as well as the current Command Agriculture programme which the Anglo-Saxon powers have tried to destroy through illegal sanctions about which the same UN has done nothing. So how can the UN’s MDGs be meaningful if the UN does nothing about illegal sanctions imposed on an innocent little country?
l The growth of an army of ‘stakeholders sects’ or orders, now called NGOs, who become intolerant, overzealous and expansive in assisting the empire to identify, target, demonize, harass and isolate those who refuse to be swept along by the latest crusades.
l The predominant role of lawyers and ‘experts’ as purchased ‘stakeholders’ serving the empire in its campaign of repression and counter-revolution.
l The growth of new media, new means of communication, which the stakeholder-sects or orders of ‘experts’ now employ to identify, target, demonise, harass and isolate their ‘clients’ or victims.
l The growth of new jargon, a new language, to suppress the independent thought of autonomous communities and movements by depriving them of their own language and their right to name their own reality and learn their own history.
l The growth of a cult or mystique of the human rights expert, activist, specialist or consultant paid or sponsored by the empire. In South Africa we hear a white NGO called Africom has declared African liberation songs part of ‘hate speech’.
Sometimes this structure also contaminates research carried out in national institutions of higher education and national research institutes.
In 2004 the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and the University of Zimbabwe published a booklet called The Zimbabwe Male Psyche with Respect to Reproductive Health, HIV/AIDS and Gender Issues. The publication signaled three significant developments:
l The neo-liberal conversion of UN agencies into mere conduits for Northern donor funds and donor policies;
l The donor-funded prostitution of academic work, whereby it became difficult to separate academic research from donor propaganda; and
l The donor manipulation and interpretation of the real existing suffering and oppression of women in pursuit of what the US Government and USAID call ‘transformational diplomacy goals’.
Indeed, although both men and women, boys and girls were experiencing similar oppression and suffering as a result of the same macro-economic and social and political factors, the booklet focused on women against men.
In that 2004 UNFPA booklet, the authors: P.Chiroro, A.Mashu and W. Muhwava, wrote as follows:
“It was hypothesised that the Zimbabwean male psyche is characterised by an internalised, insatiable and self-centered desire for sex with multiple partners, coupled with an intolerant attitude towards women who are perceived to be, primarily, objects of sexual gratification and child bearing.”
In reality it is actually possible to do research demonstrating that women are also capable of such ‘insatiable desire for sex’ with multiple partners here and elsewhere.
Without any reference to control studies based on other societies elsewhere in the world, the authors concluded thus:
l Most Zimbabwean men and male youths hold very poor sexuality standards which are characterised by a strong reluctance to engage in safe sex practices during high risk sexual encounters.
l The study reveals that the majority of Zimbabwean men and male youths view women as inferior to men. Adversarial sexual beliefs and gender role stereotypes are used to justify violence against women and to deny their sexual and reproductive health rights.
l The culture and legal system in Zimbabwe provide a fertile ground for the propagation and perpetuation of adversarial sexual behaviour among men and male youths. This exposes them and their partners to the risk of contracting the HIV virus as well as compromising women’s human and reproductive health rights.
In simple language, what was this UN agency and the three university researchers trying to say?
The English dictionary meaning of psyche is the human soul, mind or spirit. So, in what way could the UNFPA claim to have pin-pointed and isolated a definite factor called the soul of the Zimbabwean male or the spirit of the Zimbabwean male, which could then be made responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS in this country?
Indeed the UNFPA and its consultants attempted to tell the whole world not only that there was definite, separable power called the Zimbabwean male psyche; but also that they had demonstrated that this definite force or power was responsible for promiscuous sexual behaviour, lust, discrimination against women, abuse of women and girls and the spread of HIV/AIDS. They also meant that the Zimbabwean male psyche was so different from the psyches of other societies that it could be identified as typically Zimbabwean.
What the authors also implied was that we could select indigenous African foods such as dovi, muboora, nyemba, madora and grains such as mhunga, mapfunde and rukweza as well as the African practice of home-based care for use in fighting HIV/AIDS; but the culture which created the ingredients forming this healthy diet and the home-care was no good, especially in its male form. That culture had to be suppressed together with the virus itself.
Since that time, the defamation of the African male here has followed that highly questionable theory of African tradition and the presumed inherent nature of the African male psyche and male sexuality as responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS and other rampant evils.
This framework and recent history may explain why Madzimbahwe seem to have adjusted to sponsored hate speech and media abuse until things that used to provoke national outrage and outcries no longer raise even an eyebrow.