DREAM STATES AND INTERRUPTED PEOPLE The Current Crisis in the Zimbabwean Nation and Identity 17 January 2012 As I see it, the problem with Zimbabwe is its people. We have failed to fashion a national identity for ourselves that we all buy into. Without a national identity, we cannot act as a nation of people, nor as people of one nation. Without a common identity we cannot act in such a unified manner at any time. Certainly, without the prerequisite identity we cannot act in unity at times when unified action is most needed. This is to say that Zimbabwean responses will be desperately inadequate in times of uncertainty and challenge. For times of challenge and uncertainty unsettle even well-formed, integrated and stable identities. Where identity is poor and badly formed, the result of challenge is disorganisation and chaos. The problem of disorganisation and chaos has been said to visit all African nations roughly two decades after the nation achieves independence. As I write, that group of people called Afro-pessimists are declaring doom on South Africa, where the post-independence grace period of twenty years will soon be over. To be fair to these pessimists, though, the great majority of post-colonial African nations have succumbed to various degrees of chaos and disaster. The extent to which Zimbabwe has disintegrated has been the bitter disappointment of many people, both inside and outside the country. At its independence in 1980, Zimbabwe was proud of a number of educated political leaders, and of relatively good infrastructure and systems which latter had resulted from about one hundred years of British colonial rule. In addition, events on the continent had given the new leaders the chance to learn from history. Zimbabweans themselves and many others were convinced the country would get it right. Zimbabwe was seen as an island of progress and hope on a devastated land mass. The new nation was to embody a new prosperous beginning for a continent of wretched people. Social reforms quickly carried out by the then almost universally popular ZANZ-PF government led to improvements in services such as health and education for the majority. Zimbabwe, like Nigeria, boasted to other Africans and to itself that it‘s nationals were amongst the most literate at one end of the scale, and amongst the most intellectually accomplished at the other end, of the scale, on the entire continent. I remember personally benefitting from these reforms. Studying at the University of Zimbabwe at the time, I received a government grant which was fifty per cent scholarship and fifty per cent loan. Medical fees were staggered according to income. Reforms in other sectors included labour and agriculture The much maligned land acquisition programme in Uimbabwe did begin, immediately post independence with documented successes. In short Zimbabweans were proud of their nation. And then it all went wrong wrong? What most Zimbabweans failed to realise as we jubilated in the streets in 1980 and as we enjoyed the brief post-war period, is that independence does not make a nation. We know now that nations are built up painfully. Time, vision, forebearance, endurance, and, as my mother always says, statesmanship, are essential. Nation building takes place over extended periods and different seasons. Progress is fitful. There are many setbacks which function as tests of capacity. At some historical moment, nevertheless, there comes a moment of consensus. People acknowledge common history, common tribulations, toiling, successes and struggles and common vision. Individual people and groups of people freely recognize each other’s commonality. This commonality is acknowledged and clebrated. The notion of nation is conceived. In this context, Zimbabwe as a nation is not yet. Zimbabwe as a nation has been conceived, but it is still only becoming. When Zimbabwe will truly be born depends on the people, achieving consenses. And this consensus must be broad enought to engender buy in from all its people including its leaders, its business and working class, its militaryand peasants, With a large political elite still calling itself “Comrade”, it is scandalous in Zimbabwe today to speak of ‘peasants’. The phrase ‘rural population’ is often preferred to cover up the scandal. Yet, Zimbabwe has a huge population of peasantry, numbering roughly five and a half million individuals. This figure is based on general figures of a Zimbabwean population of 8 million following the exodus of the last decade. Of this eight million, seventy per cent are estimated to dwell in the rural areas. Some of those included in this number are small-scale farmers who acquired title deeds during the Rhodesian occupation, and subsequently. However the vast majority of this non-urban population consists of people who do not own land in their own right. Ownership of rural land is one of the banes of the Zimbabwean administration today. The debate over title deeds or no title deeds in the rural areas continues until the time of writing. The status of the rural population is seldom clarified publicly. From one point of view these people are granted permission to work the land they live on for subsistence. From another point of view post-modern Zimbabwean peasants have the right to work the land. In reality hwoever, whether rural folk have permission or the right to subsistence from the land, these permissions and rights are utlimately granted by the state. Thus Zimbabwean peasants are state peasants. Many of the rural poplulation understand the situation in this way. A friend of mine, who lives in the coutry-side, recently informed me that many rural people believe that all the land belongs to President Mugabe. Since independence a new urban class of peasantry has developed. Today many urban Zimbabweans subsist on menial labour supplemented by urban agriculture. The picture is chillingly feudal and is prominent in Harare where many of the richest Zimbabweans live. Wealthy city dwellers who own title deeds to their land employ impoverished individuals for less than a living wage. These individuals supplement their income with urban agriculture in land owned by the City Council. In addition, farm workers who live on large estates and are granted the right to works small plots by the titled land-owner are peasants in the classical sense. Distubringly, in more than thrity years of independence the Zimbabwean administration has not significantly emancipated its peasant population. A large peasantry, analogous to today’s rural peasantry, has characterised the Zimbabwean state since precolonial times. While the definition of state used by hisotrians of pre-colonial Zimbabwe was developed as a historical tool, I find it instructive to return to this definition in my analysis today, because it allows certain comparisons to be made between the development of the old Zimbabwean state and the development of today’s Zimbabwe. Most historians agree that even before the Berlin Conference of 1884 set boundaries to the southern African nation, a distinct geographical structure in southern Africa had resulted in a certain group of people flourishing in the area. The geographical feature was a plateau ranging from roughly 2000 metres to 4000 metres above sea level. The northern edge sloped down into the Zambezi river valley. The southern edge descended into the Limpopo river valley. The eastern edge was the highest and descended abruptly into an area of lowveld that leads to the Indian ocean. To the west the plateau petered out into the Kalahari desert. Historians are also generally agreed that the ancestors of present day Zimbabweans had settled on the plateau by the early Iron Age age or the Late Stone Age, in the last millenium Before Christ. These ancestral people followed the nomadic hunter gatherers of the late Stone Age onto the plateau. Beach tells us that the lives of the inhabitants of the plateau were already fairly stable by the beginning of the Iron Age. While settlements were not permanent, the residents of the plateau were not entirely nomadic. There were two main reasons for this situation. Firstly, changes in altitude and rainfall patterns, as well as soil conditions from area to area resulted in changes of vegetation and therefore wildlife. These changes would render knowledge gathered over many years by a specific group of Late Stone Age people of the Plateau that was necessary their for survival useless in a new environment. Secondly, the new environment was unlikely to be uninhabited. While relative population density was low, relative population pressure had long been a feature of life in the geographical location of present day Zimbabwe. Although this was not pressure of actual numbers, it was pressure derived from the number of people the land could sustain given the lifestyle of the time and the technology that accompanied it. Therefore while portions of the southern African plateau might not have appeared to have been inhabited in terms of site territories, few areas for hunting or of edible vegetation would have been unclaimed by one group that inhabited the plateau or another. According to Beach, there were two criteria for statehood on the southern African plateau. The first criterion was the ability to raise large armies. The second criterion, associated with the first, was the ability to exact tribute from less powerful political entities. Five great states that dominated the pre-colonial history of the plateau have been identified using these criteria. The first great state was in fact called Zimbabwe. It flourished before the 16th century in the south of Zimbabwe around the area that is now called Masvingo. Masvingo means and refers to the stone enclosures that surrounded the households of the more noble families in old Zimbabwe. The second great plateau state followed the demise of Zimbabwe and did not coexist with it. It is known as the Torwa state, and its capital in the south west of the plateau,was at Khami. It flourished from the late 15th until the late 17th century. The Torwa state was succeeded by the Changamire state with its capital at Danamombe to the west. The Changamire state lasted until the middle of the 19th century. This Changamire state gave way to the Ndebele state under Mzlikazi. Nzilikazi crossed the Limpopo to set up a mobile capital called Mktokotloke near Bulawayo in 1840. The Ndebele state was stable and safe for the next fity years, during which Lobengula succeeded Mzilikazi. Meanwhile, the Mutapa state dominated the north of the plateau from the fifteenth century until the late 19th century. The Zimbabwe, Torwa, Changamire and Mutapa states are generally believed to have developed from plateau societies that had migrated to the southern African highground during the Stone Age. The , Nebele state, on the other hand, resulted from a migration north from what is now the Kwazulu-Natal province of south Africa in flight from the megalomania of the Zulu king Shaka. Having settled south of the Limpopo with their capital near Pretoria / Tswane, the Ndebele found themselves in conflict with the Afrikaaners. They departed from this conflict further north and crossed the Limpopo to settle in the south western part of the plateau. The newcomers consisted of original people from the south-east cost, as well as Sotho people conscripted en route. Plateau dwellers already in the south west where the Ndebele settled were incorporated into the Nebele state. The social organisation of the newcomers and that of the plateau dwellers was very similar. The economic base of both groups was agriculture supplemented by cattle herding and trade, and exhibited more similarities than differences. This was the case even if there were somewhat different emphases placed on these practices. The Ndebele culture placed greater significance - justifiably, given its history - on militarization, and also on cattle herding. The main differences between the Ndebele and the earlier plateau dwellers appears to have been that of language, with the plateau Iron Age peoples speaking versions of what is called the Shona language. Due to its history, the Ndebele state always exhibited a greater linguistic diversity. A private army belonging to megalomaniac Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company raised the Union Jack on 30 September 1890 at Fort Salisbury (now Harare). This effected a complete rupture in the flow of development on the plateau. By the time the British arrived on the plateau, Zimbabweans had had a long history of interaction with Arab and Portuguese traders. This trade had been carried out under agreements between the ruling dynasties and the foreign traders. Such had been the discipline of both sides that, not withstanding friction and conflict the traders and the Zimbabweans had observed practices that ensured co-existance. Cecil John Rhodes’ objective was complete domination of the plateau and not co-existence. A royal charter had been granted to Rhodes’ British South Africa Company in 1889. The Encyclpaedia Britannica says the following about the company: “The BSAC’s function was to take the risk of extending the infrastructure of modern capitalism (including railways) into south-central Africa for the benefit of the British but without the cost’s falling on the British taxpayer. Unlike normal companies, the BSAC was permitted to establish political administration with a paramilitary police force in areas where it might be granted rights by local rulers. It was also allowed to profit commercially through its own operations or by renting out land, receiving royalties on the mining of minerals, levying customs duties, and collecting other fees. The British government guaranteed the BSAC a monopoly where it operated and, as a last resort, was prepared to support it militarily against rival European powers or local rebellions.” Thus by granting the charter gave the company the British monarch consolidated subjugation of Zimbabwe. From now on language ceased to be the major difference between groups on the pateau. There followed a new order of inclusion and exclusion, of being and non-being, of the right to the necessities of life and prohibition of this right. Whereas language had been the signifier of a distant homeland abandoned in favour of the plateau, with colonization language itself became a signifier that created boundaries between the human and perceived inhuman. The sad truth is that in time this perception came to work both ways. I remember being mystified as a young child when I asked the domestic help a question such as, “Who was that person?”, and recieved the answer, “It was not a person. It was a European.” It is in this sense that the development of the people of the plateau can be said to have been interrupted. Earlier migrations had been gradual, allowing for assimilation, adaptation and integration. This was not the case with the British onslaught. The motive behind the British arrival on the plateau was not a new life, a beginning. The motive was quite simply conquest and the acquisition of new lands as resources for the British Empire and its people. The independent states of the plateau ceased to exist and in their place was created the colonial state of the British Empire. This colonial state was governed for six decades by the British Government through, its chartered companies and its colonial administration. This period was followed, beginning in 1965 by a brief decade and a half of unilateral independence delared by the white settler state of Rhodesia. To a Zimbabwean, the events that followed the raising of the British flag on Zimbabwean soil was chaos and could not be termed development. By being denied the right to participate in the administrative processes of the first the colonial and subsequently the settler state, the people of Zimbabwe were effectively rendered stateless. Though the right to carry a Rhodesian passport was sometimes recognised if the individual was not seen as a threat to the abusive Rhodesian state, carrying the passport was not a guarantee of full human rights in the Rhodesian state. On the contrary, the function of the carrier as a useful resource for the Rhodesian state was recognised. The plateau dwellers saw themselves as being brutally socialised into a system of lawlessness and plunder. Colonial myth-making saw the plateau dwellers being socialised into civilization with its foundation of codified law and the rule of the same. It was a schizopphrenic interim. The possibility of a true Zimbabwean state built on inclusion and consensus remained a dream. To one section of the new order it was a dream of hell; to the other it was a dream of heaven. The definition of state used by historians of the 19th century Zimbabwean states applied to the new plateau state of Southern Rhodesia. It was able to raise large armies from amongst its people. It was able to exact tribute, in the form of livestock, land, taxes and labour from other political entities, who were the remains of the original five great plateau states. Soon, however, the dispossessed people of the plateau began to dream of a return to statehood. After a period of civil engagement that proved useless against the intransigence of hard line settlers, the Zimbabwean armed struggle was launched in 1966. The foundation of the pre-colonial Zimbabwean state was the house, or the clan. Historians of the southern African plateau have made the distinction between the small society and big society. The small society refers to the small social unit bound by close kinship ties in which day to day activities were carried out, whereas the larger society refers to how these smaller units of society coalesced into states. In reality there was a continuum from small society to the wider society. The basic unit of the small society was the household. The household consisted of a man and his wife and their children. The man might have had more than one wife, but this was the exception rather than the rule as marriage was expensive due to the practice of the male party to a union paying a bride-price. In addition to this nucleus, there were relatives who might or might not have been of the same blood-line as the male household head, and there were often also hangers on. Physically the household was a cluster of huts used for various purposes - sleeping, storage, cooking and so forth. Several such clusters of huts usually existed within easy walking distance from each other. This group of clusters formed a village and was necessary to afford the villagers protection from beasts of prey or hostile groups of other humans. The village also provided the inhabitants with access to necessary resources such as water, which were not available at simply any site. In addition, this organization into villages enabled the community to cooperate in the tasks necessary for the communities’ survival, such as the backbreaking agricultural work that was the basis of the plateau inhabitants’ existence. A number of villages made up what has been called a territory, but the Shona word “nyika” is also used. In addition to geographcial limitation, “nyika” implies the totality of all existence in a given area, encompassing human, animal, plant and spiritual. The number of villages that made up a nyika was again extremely variable, ranging from a mere handful to a large number. Where the territory was very large it was subdivided into wards. The nyika was governed by an hereditary ruler, who was chosen from one lineage, although not necessarily by direct descent. The ruling house was the dominant lineage in a territory. However, as wives joined their husbands’ villages on marriage, and relatives were welcome, not all the members of a nyika were of the same house or totem. Beach estimated that in a village or ward about a third of the households belonged to the dominant lineage. Three quarters of the remaining 66% were related to this dominant blood-line. Thus most individuals in a unit, be it village, ward or territory had kinship ties with the dominant lineage. This being the case, it was unusual for minor houses dynasties or totems to overthrow the dominant house. Power struggles and coups were usually carried out within the dominant house. Dynasties that were particularly powerful and which exercised dominion over a large territory or over more than one territory are those entities that constituted the historical states of the plateau. Dominion was supported therefore by powerful ties of blood and kinship. This way of life had changed very little in rural Zimbabwe until the last few decades. The imposition of colonial rule, however, rendered the blood and kinship ties of the once powerful houses impotent. In the camps that constituted the exiled guerrilla state, ties of common fate, common purpose and common oath filled the Zimbabwean power vacuum created by colonial rule. The launching of the armed struggle provides an interesting case with respect to Beach’s definition of statehood. Guerrilla leaders were able to muster large armies. They were also able to obtain tribute from some sectors of their native population, or the inhabitants of Rhodesia. Tribute was often freely given. However, it was also extorted using brutal reprisals and threats of brutality where individuals and communities were not inclined to cooperate.. Practially, therefore, the guerrilla movement based outside the physical boundaries of the plateau amounted to an exiled plateau state. The guerrilla state evolved into the political party during negotiations with the Rhodesian government and then into the ruling party. At Zimbabwe’s indpendence in 1980 the guerrilla state in exile finally took formal leadership of the nation it was created to administer. The beginning was promising. There was talk of reconciliation amongst former antagonists, who were divided conspicuously along racial and ethnic lines. Former internal and external armies were integrated. Social services and citizenship were extended to the majority. Soon, however, international capital decided to adjust Africa structurally, without specifying to what the continent was to be adjusted. Zimbabwe’s own Economic Structural Adjustment programme began in the 1990s. Services, which were a sign of sovereignity, indeed humanity, to a people who had been disenfranchised of this humanity by the colonial project were the first casualty of the new policy. Discontent grew amongst a populace that had enjoyed a decade and a half of peace and relative prosperity compared to the previous decade and a half of guerrilla warfare. Pressure mounted on the ruling party, ZANU-PF’s government to meet the first real challenge since independence and perform the function of a government, that of providing for its people. ZANU-PF proved in spectacular fashion that it did not have a clue what to do beyond shout abuse at the west. The identity of the guerrilla state as a civilian administration began to unravel. The identity of a guerrilla state that could muster a large army that could exact tribute had not changed. In the new Zimbabwe, ex-combatants became a reserve army. Tribute was and is exacted in the form of votes. Where this tribute was denied, the guerrilla state masquerading as political party remained true to its identity and reverted to guerrilla practices. Rather than expound the array of atrocities committed by the new Zimbabwean state against its nationals, suffice it to say, post-independence events in Zimbabwe have made it clear that the exiled liberation movement did conceive of itself as the Zimbabwean state. ZANU-PF has repeatedly justified its cruelties against Zimbabwean nationals by asserting that these people, are enemies of the Zimbabwean state, when in reality the individuals concerned are enemies of ZANU-PF. Thus the guerrilla movement continues to this day erroneously to conceive of itself as the Zimbabwean state. Just as language and other constructs were used by the colonial state to justify inclusion versus exclusion, respect for human rights against disrespect, and appropriation of resources versus disappropriation, ZANU-PF devastatingly uses the dichotomy of membership of the former guerrilla state in exile versus non-membership of this entity to justify inclusion against exclusion, respect for nuan rights againsts lack of resepect, access to resources against lack of access. Zimbabweans reacted inappropriately to this evolution of the once idolized guerrilla administration in exile. Few apart from former guerrilla leader Edgar Tekere were willing to take the personal risk of founding a post-independence political party that could free itself of the brutal heritage of an indescribably atrocious liberation struggle where crimes against humanity were committed by every party involved. Others took up the post so-called World War 2 human rights discourse. These latter established civil society movements to monitor ZANU-PF abuses and create counter movements in the name of democracy. In the majority of cases this was done not because of personal conviction but because promoting human rights discourse was heavily funded by the west, thus these activitis were an increasingly lucrative arm of the international aid industry. When I write my history book, I will rename those conflicts of the first half of the 20th century the European Wars and I will not call them the World Wars. However, as Zimbabwe approached the turn of the century, those Zimbabweans who were not bravely forming new political movements, nor cynically joining the post-independence inland manifestation of the guerrilla state in exile, nor jumping on the economically rewarding development aid gravy with its emphasis on the human rights movement, were hiding their heads in the political sand. By the time Zimbabweans woke up to the fact that they had been re-colonised by their own state, it was all but too late. The most recent large scale manifestaton of the murderous guerrilla state identity, when Zimbabweans slaughtered other Zimbabweans in order to retain power and to achieve political ends occurred in 2008. It remains to be seen whether the current tensions will explode into similar destruction during the next elections, expected to be held in 2012 or 2013. Important to note is that the criteria determining retention of life or the ending of life in present day national violence are the same as the criteria which guided the Zimbabwean on Zimbabwean carnage that characterised the liberation struggle: are you for the guerrilla state or are you against it? As was the case during the liberation struggle, Zimbabweans today are sufficiently complicit with the system to allow this brand of violence to persist as an influential Zimbabwean identity. My own awakening came during the disputed 2008 presidential elections when the psycho-technology of guerrilla warfare practices were imported into the city. No doubt if I had frequented the rural areas in the preceding decade, I would have understood that these indoctrination practices based on instilling fear and awe, and euphemistically called ‘mobilization’ continued in the rural areas at election time after independence. Many Zimbabweans, though, make peace with the staus quo and declare, in a clear way back to primitivism that people always die in African politics. Few Zimbabweans are thinking seriously of change. People are concerned with finding enough food, medicine, education in order to survive at one end of the spectrum, or with abusing the nation’s wealth at the other end of the spectrum. In both cases the activity is consumptive. Rarely, if ever are Zimbabweans engaged in productive activity. Where activity is productive, as, for example, in the case of President Mugabe’s line of youth fashion called “House of Gushungo”, the aim is the continued political survival of the former guerrilla state. The aim is not to turn around Zimbabwe’s creative industry through competitive product. The positive aspect of this development in the Zimbabwean fashion world, however, is that the guerrilla state seems finally to have understood that people will not vote for you if you cut off their limbs or kill them. Clearly, we Zimbabweans have developed an array of dysfunctional identities. On one hand we have a Zimbabwean identity that stops at nothing, not even slaughter, one that socialises its youth into the culture of murder and butchery to achieve megalomaniac ends. If these practices are engaged in to obtain political ends, the picture is even more frightening. Politics is defined in my dictionary as pertaining to policy and governement, or pertaining to parties with different ideas on government. Thus Zimbabweans have developed an identity that baulks at nothing in order to remain relevant in policy or government, or in contestation with parties that have different ideas on government. On the other hand, we have Zimbabwean dentities that excuse, tolerate or condone the former in the interests of not rocking the boat. Protest is largely opportunistic, based on economic rewards. Ther are few protests voices in Zimbabwe that have defied hardships to endure without significant external funding. Finally, wih resepct to today’s identitis, there are those pseudo protest voices that purport to be sites of resistance. These attract large donations, but do not produce anything. In other words Zimbabwean identities almost always are instrumental to achieving a material end. Zimbabweans seem no longer to have an identity rooted in the essence of what it is to be human. Fear is often cited as a reason for not engaging more fully and with righteous anger against the horrors of mutilation, rape, death and other crimes against humanity that are committed by the guerrilla state. Zimbabweans whisper that they know what the guerrilla state is capable of, and retreat into cowardice, hoping that the spirit of death will pass them over. Individuals are content to continue as though nothing is amiss as long as they can eke out another day in one way or another. Zimbabweans have retreated into moral cowardice. As Zimbabweans we have brutal war-mongering identities on the one hand, cowardly, self-serving identities on the other. We do not have an identity of national good, unity of purpose and respect for Zimbabwean life. We are a nation divided against itself, and thus we are falling. Today’s dysfunctional identities were conceived in the discontinuity caused by the interruption of the nation by the colonial era. A pre-feudal organisation of society characterised by communal property transformed at a stroke into a dual system of communalism and a wild west form of private property. The dual system was retained so that the colonial era, having caused it, could also exploit the disunity of Zimbabwean identity. The communal areas acted as a vast reservoir of labour, food and health care for the neo-British state. This colonial state was the first and only brush with modern statehood the Zimbabweans experienced before independence. As such this repressive state formed the model for the post-independence nation. The new Zimbabwean state had neither the will, the imagination nor the temperament to establish any improvement. Identities are stable when they are accepted or preferred by the identity holder. In such a stable identity system, the identity holder acts in a way that maintains the preferred identity. Challenging an accepted or preferred identity leads to dissonance, or discmfort, in the identity holder. The identity holder initiates actions aimed at reducing the dissonance. An identity that is not accepted by the identity holder, or that is undesired, is unstable. In this situation, the identity itself causes dissonance in the identity holder. The holder of an undesired identity is thus continuously impelled to act to reduce dissonance. It is reasonable to assume that undesired identities are imposed and not freely chosen. Thus dissonance reducing adaptations in situations of undesired identities will often be directed at challenging the source of the unacceptable identity. A variety of reactions aimed at reducing dissonance are available to the holder of an undesired identity. These reactions can manifest mentally, emotionally or in overt behavioural realms, or in any combination of these. If a challenge to an unacceptable identity results in greater threat to well-being and continued existence, however, dissonance reducing reactions fequently involve changing cognitions concerning the acceptability or desirability of the dissonance-inducing identity. In other words, the holder comes to accept the initially unacceptable identity, or “becomes used to it”, as we commonly say. Since unacceptable identities are imposed, dissonance reduction involves changing thinking about the imposer, and about oneself in relation to the imposer. This is how the identity of victim becomes a preferred identity. The new preferred identity then becomes resistant to change as other preferred identities are. Amina Mama emphasises how vexed the question of identity is for the African. She informs us that there is not, in any of the African languages that she is familiar with a word for identity. Pointing out that “European psycho-technologies have been implicitly designed to serve the administrative, bureaucratic selection and social control needs of late capitalist welfare states,” Mama emphasizes how African nation-states have failed to synthesize identities that serve their own nations. She notes that our African cultures did not produce ‘a substantive apparatus for the production of the kind of singularity that the term [identity] seemed to require”. In Zimbabwe, as seen above, in order to fill this negative identity space, the identities of guerrilla state and victim emerged. Presumably, however, a ‘substantive apparatus’ did exist for production of the kind of identity in the pre-colonial Zimbabwean states that served the purposes of these pre-colonial states where identity of person was based on blood or clan membership in the first instance, and more broadly on kinship. The colonial interruption imposed the identity of colonial subject upon Zimbabweans. This identity was undesired and unacceptable. A range of civil and political actions were initiated to challenge the undesired identity. When these actions met resistance, two options remained. The first option was to change thinking about the nature of the undesired colonial identity. The second option was to intensify activities challenging that identity. The identities of victim and guerrilla fighter emerged. The ‘victim’ identity was of a particular kind. For the first time in Zimbabwean history the colonial period represented a state whose purpose was to subjugate a whole and numerous group of its people. The Zimbabweans were thus victims of the state, leading to the development and the acting out of the identity ‘state victim’. Guerrilla fighters repaired to camps in neighbouring countries. Here again blood became a powerful bond. However, its was not the common nature of blood that flowed in veins that united, but the ritual of blood shed that by a common action. The guerrilla fighter became a member of a guerrilla movement held together by common cause which necessitated the shedding of blood. This movement coalesced, through military action and the exacting of tribute. Finally, the guerrilla state took on the identity of warrior nation where inclusion required identity with a guerrilla bond based on bloodshed. Cognitions concerning the nature of the Zimbabwean guerrilla state warrior nation have taken on the character of myth. The average Zimbabwean is fearful of any activity that might raise the wrath of the guerrilla state and unleash the army of ex-combatant. The result is submission and a recycling of the ‘state victim’ identity where the villain is now no longer the colonial but the guerrilla state. The identity of victim of a guerrilla state has become acceptable to many Zimbabweans. A common result of this identity is moral decay. Zimbabweans think “I may steal, defraud, terrorise, cheat etc because I am a victim”. Ironically the guerrilla state justifies its excesses in the same way, by publicly, through its propaganda machine, identifying itself as victim of a malevolent world order. This seemingly cynical claim can, however, be better understood as a dysfunctional ‘victim’ reaction to the undesirable identity of failed state. Zimbabweans have not seen many true efforts by the guerrilla state to change its identity into a true government of the people of Zimbabwe with the common good of the nation as its raison d’etre. Rather, the guerrilla Zimbabwean state appears to have chosen a victim nation identity over the identity of failed state. In doing so that arm of the Zimbabwean state justifies once more the need for a warrior nation. More recently, however, as the discomfort associated with it grows beyond endurance,, the people of Zimbabwe are increasingly making attempts to prevail against guerrilla state domination. The negative consequences associated with the identity of ‘state victim’ seems finally to be outweighing the negative consequences associated with identity of ‘fearful Zimbabwean’, even in the absence of significant foreign subsidy. At a recent workshop held by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, twenty two parties were represented. The successes of the MDC have been well documented. These successes culminated in forcing the guerrilla state into a power-sharing arrangement. However, these successes appear not to have resulted in identity change on the part of the old guerrrilla apparatus turned state. The identity of exclusionist warrior movement persists, with army generals refusing to salute Prime Minister, Tsvangirayi of the MDC. It is unclear whether they have been ordered to do so. The question of identity becomes particularly vexed in the African terrain when negotiating the spaces of group and individual identity and the grey stretches between these. However, as group identities require concordant individual identities, some generalisations may usefully be made. Clearly, to move into the future in a way that does provide a future for Zimbabweans, Zimbabweans must change identity and this refers to both group and individual identities. Failure to effect such change has cost Zimbabwe its nationhood before in history. Commenting on the decline of Lobengula’s southern plateau state, Blake writes “The social structure of the Ndebele state militated against just those changes which were needed for political and military survival. Its economic bargaining power was on the decline with the exhaustion of its ivory. …Worse still, the whole mentality of the Ndebele military leaders was resistant to reform. Like the Prussians before Jena or the French before Sedan, they were rigid conservatives who thought in terms of the tactics of a vanishing world” (p45). Zimbabweans must develop psycho-technologies that are equal to the task of creating a new identity that serves a free, prospering nation, where inclusion is the paradigm rather than exclusion. Zimbabweans have to understand that the identity of victim in any context is the identity of failure. The identity of ‘victim’ whether as explanation of apathy, of petty individual moral degeneracy or of gross state decay, must be done away with. Notwithstanding any intrinsic worth it may have carried in the past, in today’s post-colonial world the category ‘victim” bears absolutely no value. What is needed is an apparatus that transforms ‘victim’ into ‘victor’. When we see ourselves as generous, compassionate victors, we will map the steps that need to be taken to move from where we are and make the new identity a reality. Zimbabweans need a lot of imagination and courage. The apparatus at our disposal is that of culture. We must develop, with all the non-violent means possible, the courage, vision and will to change our culture. Zimbabweans must engage with culture in all its facets in order to transform the old malignant into a new beneficent identity. Material referred to Beach, D N. The Shona & Zimbabwe 900-1850: an outline of Shona history, Heinemann, London 1980 War and politics in Zimbabwe, 1840-1900 Mambo Press, Harare, 1986 Methuen, R. A History of Rhodesia, Nethuen, London, 1977 Mama, A. Challenging Subjects: Gender and Power in African Contexts. Plenary Address, Nordic Institute Conference: ‘Beyond Identity: Rethinking Power in Africa’, Upsala, October 4 - 7 2001;
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