By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

LET me start this instalment by inviting the reader to focus on three spectacular events of recent months and weeks:
– The massive, joyful and peaceful demonstrations on November 18 2017 following Operation Restore Legacy led by the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) and the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA);
– The massive, peaceful and joyful crowds which filled the National Sports Stadium to mark the inauguration on November 24 2017 of now President Emmerson Mnangagwa, led by the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), the ZNLWVA and the ZDF; and,
– The equally massive but mournful, confused and hysterical crowds attending the burial of the late leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe Morgan Tsvangirai on February 20 2018 in Buhera.
Unlike the first two crowds, those at Tsvangirai’s funeral were subjected to confusion, insults, stampedes, mob violence, mob hysteria and contradictory messages.
There are three questions which I would ask my readers to ponder:
– Is it not true that in terms of the values of hunhu/ubuntu, one would expect the third event, the burial of Tsvangirai in his rural Buhera, to be the most peaceful and most dignified event, given the normal African expectation that ‘Wafa wanaka’ and that ‘Chemai nevanochema’?
– What philosophy, what ethos framed and guided the first two events on November 18 and 24 and what philosophy or ethos framed and guided (or misguided) the Buhera event?
– Why were the first two events so starkly different from the third, even though it is clear to anyone trying to analyse the crowds that young people clearly dominated all three in terms of numbers?
My tentative conclusion from looking at the three events is that Zimbabwe faces a grave youth emergency and that any blame games between ZANU PF and the MDC formations trying to say which party’s youths are more violent than those of the other simply serve to deny the problem.
I say this partly because by the time Operation Restore Legacy took place, those youths who were being used by the G40 cabal in the name of ZANU PF were also exhibiting the same sort of chihwindi behaviour which caused intra-MDC-T mayhem in Buhera.
I say so because soon after the burial of Tsvangirai, there was also violence in the central business district of Harare on February 22 where two people died.
While all this mob violence is characteristic of MDC-T-orchestrated riots of the past, analysis of the rhetoric which accompanies the riots demonstrates that we have an entrenched negative culture which some have described as a nihilistic, self-defeating and survivalist ‘mentality’ which now stands in the way of our efforts at economic reconstruction and turn-around.
I call this mentality ‘chihwindi’, knowing very well that this is an inadequate description of the whole phenomenon. Chihwindi is typically unlike Chimurenga and it is often anti-Chimurenga.
Many academic studies of chihwindi have been carried out in recent years.
Their common weakness is that they all focus on trying to explain its causes in order to justify the behaviours involved, without analysing the cultural content, implications and impact of chihwindi mind-set on the larger society and economy.
Clement Chipenda in Livelihood Resilience and Diversity In The Face Of Socio-Economic Challenges: Exploring the Experiences of Urban Youths in Harare (Zimbabwe) defined chihwindi in the following terms:
“Chihwindi involves people known as mahwindi (touts) working at designated bus terminuses or undesignated or illegal terminuses… At these …points for commuters the hwindis can be seen being active in calling and seeking customers to board the commuter buses or cars.
Two hwindis, Tichaona (23) and Ras Weli (34) indicated that touting is a job like any other job.
It involves them being in charge of a commuter loading or drop-off bay.
As the owners of the place, they charge an average of 50US cents or US$1 per vehicle which would have picked up passengers and this was dependent on the time and how busy it is with peak periods being more expensive.”
The author also pointed out that the hwindi practice started with mild forms in colonial days where the hwindi was an informal or volunteer conductor helping a bus driver at a station or actually riding on the bus.
The practice became a mob practice in response to the mass youth unemployment which intensified after the imposition of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) in 1990.
Some aspects of the current chihwindi as a mentality
– An urban response to, and an integral feature of, what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism’;
– In terms of social relations, chihwindi represents extreme alienation and extreme individualism in which the alienated individual or gang focuses on short-term, hand-to-mouth, survival strategies which disregard law, custom, taboos and the sanctity of life.
– The focus on short-term, hand-to-mouth survival means that any means can be justified, including driving kombis without a licence, driving kombis in the wrong direction on a one-way street, speeding through red robots in order to get away from the police or to pick up passengers along a route designated for rivals and, above all, extorting money by charging for public space which people have already paid for or by claiming to have offered a driver or shopper some service or protection which would not be necessary were it not for the menace which gangs of vanahwindi have created for the supposed receiver of the alleged service.
– Assaulting and coercing any prospective passenger (customer) by confiscating his/her luggage and placing it in the boot of the bus for which gangs of vanahwindi are working and by dragging a prospective passenger by the collar or by the hand and forcibly putting him/her on the bus chosen by the touts.
This is done not because buses are few and difficult for passengers to find and to board; this is done to force passengers to part with a few dollars in addition to the actual bus-fare. l From Page 7
– Vanahwindi make money at bus termini and other passenger pick-up points by threatening to make termini ‘ungovernable’ or actually making the termini ‘ungovernable’.
It is clear from analysis of examples of the hwindi behaviour that it depends on commandeering goods or services that are already available and free to the public, such as public bus termini, or putting a huge mark-up on goods and services which are someone else’s business by threatening hostile action against the real owners or potential customers.
Examples of the extension of the hwindi mentality to business and and society
– EcoCash agents routinely demand and receive a 15-to-30 percent premium from account holders wanting to obtain cash.
This is illegal and unnecessary.
– The business sector, in general, is maintaining five prices for the same product of service: a price for those using foreign currency; another for those using local Bond notes or coins; yet another for those using swipe cards; a fourth for those using EcoCash, and a fifth for those using RTGs. This is also unnecessary and unjust from the point of view of the customer.
– Most so-called businesses do not document or study the needs and requirements of their customers; they assume a take-it-or-leave-it attitude.
– There is little attention in business given to long-term value-creation; focus is on short-cuts and short-term profits normally based on mark-ups on the products of others, with little attention given to sustainability or quality.
– Relationships do not matter or they matter very little, compared to short-term gain and maximum gain in the shortest time.
– There is no investment of the proceeds from instant gain.
– The people interacting with customers are not trained to understand the clientele.
So customer care is generally appalling.
Chihwindi in politics
– The MDC formations, for a long time, promised to seize power by making Zimbabwe ‘ungovernable’.
But the benefit of ungovernability for the people was never clear.
– Chamisa’s faction of the MDC actually made Tsvangirai’s funeral ‘ungovernable’ from the point of view of the community there.
The ungovernability was meant to fast-track Chamisa and his faction.
– At the height of the G40 faction, statements by some of the leaders demonstrated chihwindi philosophy: Saviour Kasukuwere’s outburst that he was untouchable because he happened to be ‘the biggest thug in ZANU PF’; Grace Mugabe’s idea spoken at a rally to the effect that President Robert Mugabe would never retire from office because in that office he was ‘simbi yangu yebasa’ (my crow bar).
– The G40 cabal’s commandeering of the presidency, State House and other public institutions for the gain of G40 members.
This commandeering included the sale or use of state land to ‘buy’ youths or to get favours from certain individuals.
– When Professor Jonathan Moyo was being accused of abusing ZIMDEF funds, Mai Mugabe said more or less: “Kutora mari painenge iri muchiendesa kwaisiri hahusiri huori.
Ndikwo kutonga kwacho.”
Chihwindi operates the same way.
Whoever appears to have more money, more valuable goods or a better car than the hwindis must be made to give up something for the support of vanahwindi.
Chimurenga contrast
Unlike chihwindi, African relational philosophy constitutes the progressive revolutionary as one who intervenes as the nurturer of life through the building and enlargement of long-term relationships using a communication process of kushaura nokutsinhira, which is to say hunhu/ubuntu defines revolutionary participation in history as the deliberate building of long-term, optimal and optimising relationships.
Munhu as historical agent is a builder or restorer of relationships.
Even power is defined in terms of relationships, so that gender or being male or female, being a youth or an elder, cannot in itself define an absolute and constant level of power.
This relational approach is well put in Shona as follows:
“Gunde repwa rinotapira, asi hariiswi mudura.”
“Mwana wamambo muranda kumwe.”
“Ambuya vepano muroora wekumwewo.”
“Sekuru vepano muzukuru wevamwewo.”
“Mbuya vekoko muzukuru wekuno.”
“Shefu wemughetto anozvininipisa kana asvika kumaruwa.”
One cannot rule everyone absolutely everywhere all the time.
But this philosophy is more critical when applied to neo-liberal linear assumptions that one who is young in age represents youths; or that a woman necessarily represents women; or that if that person is a man he represents men and only men.
All this is wrong in terms of African relational philosophy. One cannot represent anybody or any group unless one has engaged them in the deliberate building and maintenance of real organic relationships of representation.
Operation Restore Legacy makes sense as revolution and as change because it restored a relationship which the 2004 US regime change recipe for Zimbabwe called ‘Operation Shumba’ defined as the ‘Fourth Chimurenga Narrative’ which is what G40 and the MDC formations were meant to erase for good.
That revolutionary relationship and narrative of Chimurenga came from far back and it sounds miraculous every time it is narrated.
The armed freedom fighters of the 1970s came back to issue the revolutionary call, kushaura and the Chimurenga circle responded, vakatsinhira zvakare, on November 18 2017 as in elections held since 1980.
This is the narrative in brief:
The armed freedom fighters of the Second Chimurenga were young men and women trained in mission schools to demonise, denominationalise and wipe out ‘primitive’ native memory in the manner of the Witchcraft Suppression Act.
But they abandoned that colonially assigned role in response to the voice and memory of Chaminuka and Mbuya Nehanda.
The most prominent medium of Mbuya Nehanda had been executed by the settler-regime during the First Chimurenga in 1896 and Nehanda was not supposed to be heard ever again, let alone be followed by missionary trained African youths 80 years later.
After abandoning Christian mission schools to join the liberation movement in response to the voices of Chaminuka and Nehanda, the same youths had been sent out to undergo military and technical training in such diverse countries as China, USSR, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Romania, Ethiopia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Tanzania and Mozambique.
David Lan then describes briefly what those of the freedom fighters who came back to Dande had to do as builders of revolutionary relationships upon arrival:
“Within a short period of their arrival in Dande, ZANLA guerillas were incorporated into local social categories. The category into which they were placed was ‘descendants of the mhondoro,’ which is to say they were regarded as members of the royal lineages.
This was not the only way in which they were perceived nor was their incorporation into this category absolute and complete.
It was nonetheless remarkable, for few of the guerillas active in Dande were born in the region or had any historical connection with the ancestors believed to take care of (this connection).
Despite this, notions of descent, by definition a closed category, were opened out to receive them.”
That opening up was the demonstration of hunhu/ubuntu as revolution practiced via Chimurenga.
But African memory is modelled after the ubiquitous dariro (circle).
It radiates.
The guerillas, on arrival in Dande, joined the dariro or circle of memory which at once integrates past, present and future.
The circle was adjusted creatively and the freedom fighters were defined in it as part of the royal lineage precisely because of their role in rescuing the three bases of memory and therefore helping to reconstruct the collective African memory of Zimbabwe.
One of the bases was the land, stolen, occupied and defiled by the settler.
He or she who reclaims the land and possesses it becomes royalty.
The second base was the African body surviving the white chattel plantations of slavery, the African body surviving the single-sex labour barracks and compounds of apartheid and WNLA, the African figure now able to stand on its own ground after abolishing the Vagrancy Act and its no-trespassing signs.
The third base for this African memory was the African institution, that is the engine for creating relationships.
On arrival in Dande, the freedom fighters introduced the African institution which was going to reclaim and reconstruct lost institutions while also creating new ones.
That one institution was the African liberation movement.
The ZDF, in November 2017, proved to be that same national liberation institution from the past and the population responded peacefully and with joy on November 18 2017.
In contrast, on February 20 2018, chihwindi as an alienated urban force and value system invaded Tsvangirai’s humble rural village using intimidation, insults, assaults, vilification, greed and pure disrespect and desecration in order to fast-track Chamisa to the presidency of the MDC formations.