By Tafataona Mahoso

THE last quarter of 2017 presented a paradox in the intellectual and academic history of Zimbabwe.
On one hand, some officials in the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology Development were preaching the redundancy of history as a university subject; on the other hand, the failure of the G40 political formation in the face of a remobilised Chimurenga mass movement and spirit, together with the launch of a new curriculum by the Ministry of Primary as Secondary Education demonstrated the currency and relevance of history as a critical subject not just for schools and universities but for all institutions and all Zimbabweans.
In the last two weeks of October 2015 I wrote two articles related to G40 and history for this column:
‘Imperialist origins of and reasons for attacks on liberation war veterans and VP Mnangagwa’ and ‘G40 as the mutation and domestication of Operation Shumba’.
Except for mentioning VP Mnangagwa as a specific target of the G40 formation, the two articles did not name any individuals at all.
I was therefore shocked but not surprised when several high-ranking ZANU PF officials and Cabinet Ministers responded defensively to the articles, rejecting my analysis and denying the existence of G40 as a formation:
On November 1 2015, Professor Jonathan Moyo twitted: “Dr Tafataona Mahoso’s philippic in The Patriot is infantile and crude propaganda.
The Patriot surely knows better!”
On November 2 2015 Bulawayo News 24 reported: “Jonathan Moyo, Mahoso in G40 bust-up.”
On November 1 2015 newszonlinenigeria.com reported that: “Higher Education Minister Jonathan Moyo savaged Chief Executive of the Zimbabwe Media Commission, Tafataona Mahoso, over an opinion piece that the latter penned on Friday.”
The article and G40 attacks on it were also reported on www.zimbabwesituation.com, www.newszimbabwe.com and many other platforms.
The reactions were extraordinary at the time, but I came to understand them later when the respondents all turned out to be key figures in G40.
Following the October 30 2015 The Patriot article, other media outlets began to use the term G40 frequently and the G40 formation itself fought hard to portray those not allied to themselves as a faction while claiming that they represented a national vision and national unity solely because they supposedly enjoyed the support of the President and his wife or because they were more loyal to the President and his wife than anyone else in the Party ZANU PF.
Now, following the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) intervention to open political space for the remobilisation of the masses and re-assertion of the Chimurenga ethos, it is necessary for MaDzimbahwe to ask ourselves what lesson we can learn from the spectacular failure of G40 in November 2017:
– The first historically significant mistake G40 made was to model their formation after Malawi toward the end of Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda in which the youth and women’s wings of the Malawi Congress Party seized control of the party and the Government.
G40 forgot that Malawi did not have a Chimurenga ethos; did not have a significant war veterans organisation; and did not have a defence forces institution built from the meticulous integration of military traditions and armed liberation philosophies and practices such as those of the ZDF.
In the Malawi context, the youth and women of the MCP could wield almost unlimited power as long as they sang praises to the ‘Ngwazi’ President Kamuzu Banda.
– The second mistake G40 made was to foreground leaders characterised by their entrenched or increasing alienation from the armed liberation ethos, from the war veterans and from the organic constituencies of the united ZANU PF.
The teargassing of war veterans and farmers by the ZRP in 2016 signalled this alienation.
This mistake meant that none of the key leaders of G40 was really fond of or capable of ‘going to the people’ and communicating with the rural population as effectively as war veterans have been able to do over almost 40 years now.
– The third mistake therefore was in communication.
The G40 could not distinguish between symbolism as substance, tokenism and solidarity, platform and content, speaking on TV and at length versus resonance and impact of the message.
G40 therefore went for quantity, for bulk and for counting ‘likes’ on social media platforms (cyber-space) while ignoring Zimbabwe’s native sources and resources of communal intelligence, people-to-people information, morality, ethics and wisdom.
In this way, G40 created a situation where they pursued a dangling philosophy of youth in governance against the cell-to-base, base-to-ward, ward-to-district, district-to-province philosophy inherited from the armed liberation practice of encircling the reactionary centres of colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Given that mistake, media outlets and mere individuals nominated by G40 leaders naturally told this formation what it wanted to hear and they even lied about what the districts and provinces were saying, let alone what the districts considered important issues for the national agenda.
The purpose of rallies was lost in that confusion because the so-called interface rallies were meant mainly for symbolism, turning each particular rally into just another platform or another spectacle instead of a resource and a source of authentic understanding.
For that reason, there seemed to be no effort to verify what the various G40-captured platforms reported about those rallies.
There seemed to be little investment in intelligence and counter-intelligence for the purpose of avoiding wishful thinking or self-fulfilling prophecy.
The G40 for the most part heard what they wanted to hear.
– The fourth mistake followed naturally from the preceding mistakes.
The G40 leadership became consumed with concerns about claiming and taking personal positions at the highest levels of the party and the State.
In this way, they could not pay attention to the real daily and historical economy of Zimbabwe which people were enduring.
The platforms and rallies were characterised by the amplification of rumours and the pronouncement of self-defences and disclaimers which left the povo dumb-founded, wondering what G40 really sought to achieve for all Zimbabweans if and when G40 took all the posts to which they were laying claim.
So while G40 were scoring victories in pursuit of positions, the majority of the people were stuck in bank-queues waiting for tiny disbursements of cash which municipal and national police would snatch away from motorists along the highways and at city parking areas under one pretext or another.
– The fifth historical mistake G40 made was their literal definition of youth as anyone of a young age or any youthful-looking face instead of a vision, a body of collective aspirations and programme for the protection and governance of heritage and inheritance, including the Chimurenga ethos as nhaka.
Because of this literal definition, any stooge or buffoon who was the right young age or showed a youthful face could claim to represent all the youths and to speak and eat for all the youths of Zimbabwe!
Yet it was obvious from the start that Kudzanayi Chipanga as Youth Secretary of ZANU PF did not enjoy the following of college and university students and graduates, to say the least.
– Finally, G40 failure to articulate a unifying heritage and inheritance programme beyond the occupation of posts by young turks also led to a glaring error: The use of tribalism, hate speech and other divide-and-rule tactics which reminded history-conscious Zimbabweans of the developments which plunged Rwanda into genocidal conflict in 1994.
G40 under-estimated the extent to which all Zimbabweans would be shocked and horrified by expressions of regionalism, tribalism and hate speech in pursuit of mere positions!
Ignorance of history contributed greatly to the spectacular failure of G40.
In the last instalment I showed how the study of history may help MaDzimbahwe to understand that the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was irrelevant to African struggles for human dignity and independence until after our war veterans liberated the country in 1980.
Likewise, it is necessary to end this instalment with what history teaches about the uses of tribalism, regionalism, ethnicity and racism in politics.
If we take the Western media stereotype of Zimbabwe, we find that it is based on exaggerations of what settlers in particular, and the West in general, regard as permanent and inevitable enmity between the Shona and the Ndebele and sometimes Zezuru and Karanga.
Upon closer examination we notice that this image of Zimbabwe is often a caricature of petty rivalries between Harare as the capital and Bulawayo as the second largest city in Zimbabwe.
And most foreign journalists believe they have described the reality of Zimbabwe if they present a dispute or a disagreement in terms of individuals or groups based in the two cities.
Recently Masvingo has been used the same way Matabeleland has been used.
Likewise, the Unity Accord of 1987 is caricatured also as a marriage of convenience between former ZAPU and ZANU led by the late Vice-President Joshua Nkomo and President Robert Mugabe respectively, as if these leaders just emerged out of nowhere with no grassroots following beyond their so-called ethnic bases.
This distortion has many effects on Zimbabwe’s image in the world.
The purpose of the persistent efforts to fuel this Shona versus Ndebele myth of ethnic conflict is to hide the shocking persistence of white versus black racism.
This tendency has the effect of restricting the meaning of reconciliation to relations between the former colonial white minority and the African majority, while excluding relations among Africans themselves.
-As a result, journalists who praise the declaration of a policy of national reconciliation in 1980 often denigrate the signing of the Unity Accord in 1987, because the first is seen as between black and white and benefiting whites; while the latter is seen as only uniting two national liberation movements and therefore ‘not involving everyone’.
-This peculiar logic arises from the fact that the myth of permanent Ndebele versus Shona conflict has always required white mediation and white interpretation.
But since there is no apparent white mediation in the negotiation of the Unity Accord of 1987, those who want to perpetuate that myth must denigrate the Unity Accord because of its total exclusion of white mediators.
The 1998 pan-African intervention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) caused panic among the same detractors for the same reason: No apparent white Western mediation, Africans solving their own problems.
But the challenge which Zimbabweans must confront as a second effect of the stereotype is that the myth makes solidarity invisible while conflict is presented as endemic and inevitable.
John R. Bowen in The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict puts the challenge bluntly.
He says: “In speaking about local group conflicts we tend to make three assumptions:
First, that ethnic identities are ancient and unchanging:
Second, that these identities motivate people to persecute and kill;
and third, that ethnic diversity itself inevitably leads to violence. All three are mistaken.”
The third impact of the distortion is that the communities and individuals who represent our solidarity most effectively also become invisible.
These are the communities and individuals of the Midlands who in most cases speak Shona, Ndebele, English and other Zimbabwean languages and therefore do not fit the stereotype which the myth of tribalism and global ethnic conflict seeks to project.
For the myth also often confuses language with race and racial difference.
Now if a Zimbabwean speaks three languages he or she does not fit the desired picture.
I bring up these nuances to demonstrate the horror which MaDzimbahwe suffered when elements within the G40 formation began to manipulate the ethnic stereotypes of Zimbabwean society inherited from white racists.