Thursday, June 10, 2010

Managing Eurocentric Contradictions

Managing Eurocentric contradictions

EUROCENTRIC history is the best way to determine Western psychology and ideology and it is this history that explains fully the deleterious nature of Western imperialism.

Unlike the history of many others, Eurocentric history is not written by any other people but the Europeans themselves, and as such this history is written as a form of self-indictment.

It is an admission in and of itself of the insane nature of imperial hegemony, and one only needs to look at the effort that Western powers put up in order to maintain the imperial status quo.

Most people look at European imperialistic history and they find it appalling, embarrassing and hurtful. However, not many people compel themselves to look at the prevailing ideologies that have flowed from that history.

The majority of our people shake their heads at the appallingly disgusting sadness of enslavement history, the death and killings of Amerindians, the colonial genocide of the Aboriginal people of Australia, the creation of weapons of mass destruction, the many unjust wars and invasions of defenceless peoples that have been perpetrated by an imperialistic people.

It is shocking how some of our people somehow find it doable to split this dreadful record from the ideologies put forth today by the same imperialistic people.

The colonial genocide of Aboriginal people in Australia is part and parcel of the reality of Australia today, just like the mass slaughter of Amerindians is part and parcel of the reality of the United States today.

The attempt on our part and the attempt by the imperial system to segment and cut off this history from the reality of today, to compartmentalise reality and life is, to a large extent, the major cause of our mental slavery and our physical dependency on Western powers.

We are teased and provoked by glorious promises of a wonderful Western sponsored fantastic type of democracy, and yet the imperial system denies us the chance to achieve real democracy for our own people in Africa.

There is no better democracy for colonially deprived people than to regain that, which was taken away from them by the colonial legacy.

Yet it appears like an unforgivable sin for President Mugabe to have repossessed and redistributed colonially stolen farmlands to his people.

The West wants to tease Zimbabweans and South Africans with fantastic ideas about a democracy that denies people access to their own resources and wealth.

We are told that if we do not have this type of democracy then we are worthless, that if we do not have the same kind of happiness as Westerners then we are nothing.

Yet imperialism denies us the economic opportunity and the structure to attain this kind of freedom and happiness.

Our people are then caught up in a major contradiction, where we all hate imperialism and the evils of Eurocentric history on the one hand; and hanker for aspirations prescribed upon us by the very system whose legacy we purport to loath.

We are told the Australian Foreign Minister; Stephen Smith has the temerity to decide who should be the leader of Zimbabwe without any sense of irony.

He was reported as having said President Mugabe "should move off the stage if the country is to reengage with the international community.’’

That is quite a lofty demand from a man whose relevance on the international scene is no bigger than his country’s tiny sibling relationship to the United States.

The reasons given for Australia’s demand on who should lead Zimbabwe include the assertion that President Mugabe is a "major obstacle to the reforms that Zimbabwe so desperately needs".

Who is the major obstacle to the reforms that Aboriginal people so desperately need in Australia? Would it be fair for other countries to make demands that this centuries long obstacle must "move off the stage"?

One wonders what Stephen Smith would say if Zimbabwe’s Foreign Minister demanded that Kevin Rudd should "move off the stage" on the basis of Australia’s domestic politics.

Quite a threatening legion of Australians are up in arms with the Rudd government’s disastrous home insulation programme that had to be abandoned abruptly leaving thousands of people jobless; after the poorly implemented scheme torched over 80 houses up in smoke, claiming four lives.

It must be entirely acceptable for Stephen Smith that other countries make demands for his government’s departure; strictly on the basis of solidarity with the homeowners whose homes were torched to ashes through an ill planned insulation scheme.

Australia is taking part in the globally condemned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet there are no foreign ministers out there making demands for who should be on or off the political stage in Australia, only demanding that Australia should be off the war stage in other sovereign countries.

What must be understood is that Stephen Smith follows an ideology that rationalises Eurocentric supremacy — an ideology that removes responsibility from the colonial structures for bringing about the inherent conditions that create poverty and suffering to formerly colonised communities.

This is an ideology that creates an aspiration in our people while it maintains the rationalisation of the imperial status quo.

It provokes us to strive for an abstract "democratic" set up and then it breaks our legs at the same time so that we never get there.

This strategy is meant to destroy the sense of self-respect in the African because when one fails they never realise that their legs are broken, but will be told that it is a personality fault so that they begin to blame themselves in a very destructive sort of way.

When Smith says the "international community" including Australia, "will then be able to fully assist with the difficult task of rebuilding Zimbabwe’s economic, social and political fabric", what he is doing is trying to get the African to confirm his own incompetence, to doubt his own ability, to doubt his worth and ultimately to hate himself.

Self-hatred leads to the hatred of one’s own people because they happen to remind one of their own failures.

When one questions their own adequacy and competence then they will begin to question the adequacy and competence of those around them and this is why our people begin to convince themselves that Africans cannot competently decide on anything without the assistance of Westerners.

It is very important for the West to have Zimbabweans questioning their own adequacy and competence to run commercial farms.

This is why the land reform program must be pictured as a mere misadventure of a tyrannical "African dictator" who must "move off the stage" so that the civilised Westerners can "fully assist with the difficult task" of shaping Zimbabwe’s economic and political landscape.

So we have to live with this contradiction that says we do not have the ability and competence to build Zimbabwe’s economic and political fabric without the hand of the Westerner.

This is why the Zimbabwean community is smitten by dissonance, contradictions and conflicts. We have a self-hating people who also hate their fellow citizens because they believe these comprise a community incapable of any form of success.

When one has to cope with contradictions there are a few options that may be followed to resolve the challenge. One easy way is to admit that the determinant circumstances are beyond one’s control.

We often tell ourselves that it is other people who are totally responsible for the situation that we are in, and therefore we conclude we have no control over what is happening.

This is how most of us would feel when we blame the illegally imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe. We feel there was nothing that could have been done to prevent the economic decline of the last 10 years. It was all because of the ruinous sanctions.

While this to a degree is true, it led to this reality that our policy makers just became apathetic, gave up and resigned from active duty — gave up trying and began to believe that we were all powerless as a country.

This kind of apathy and resignation among many of our people is actually the means by which imperial hegemony maintains itself.

The biggest problem we face as Zimbabweans today is the fear of trusting and uniting with each other, the fear of coming together and solving our problems together, the belief that it is just not in us to unite and solve our problems and overcome the dominance of Western imperialism.

Some of us deal with failure by lowering aspirations so that we can fit into a lesser place where we create our own comfort zone.

Others do the opposite and they inflate their little achievements so that they can in the process also inflate their personalities.

The imperial system awards these people by all manner of rewards and accolades so that the boastful among us can pretend to have achieved great things while we are all stuck in the status quo.

So we have people like Phandu Skelemani, Botswana’s foreign minister, being very boastful, being very egocentric, bragging a great deal about "a democratic Botswana" and a "good economy", pumping himself up, and pumping the smallest of achievements up into giant milestones.

For all intents and purposes Botswana is a small poverty stricken African country and the gloating of its Foreign Minister will not take away the reality of the colonial legacy.

But even our own great nationalists do bury themselves in the great history of our liberation struggle. There is this kind of historicism that has developed among our politicians that only serves as a means to avoid confronting reality.

We have some politicians who live their lives in history, and they dig deep into the great events of the liberation struggle, building themselves a false pride, and pumping themselves up about the achievements of our liberation history — totally looking away from the perils of the current reality and avoiding the challenges of preparing for the future.

These are the nationalists who make us feel really good, they pump us up and they make us gloat and glow about our awesome past, but they never deal with the present; they have no clue on how to educate the youth about coping with the future.

Most importantly, they fail to prepare our people to remove Western hegemony and imperial subjugation. These are the people who holler about the devilishness of the Westerner, the evilness of the white man, but they leave it at that — at rhetoric level without performing any meaningful service for our people.

These are the things that maintain the status quo – they keep the rule of imperial hegemony well in shape.

It is on purpose that colonial history is about colonisation and not about the nature and condition of the colonial master; that slave history is about slavery and not about the nature and condition of the slave master.

The questions dealt with must not be about the mental stability and characteristics of those who enslaved and colonised us; just like the question must not be about how the same people remain influential today, or whether they should continue to be influential.

Rather the questions dealt with are meant to portray a civilised slave master and coloniser, despite the contradiction in terms.

We live in a world of contradictions today. It is the people without any measure of love that talk about love most often.

It is the people who keep and protect a very undemocratic United Nations Security Council who preach democracy more than anyone else.

It is the people who are ready to go to war; who have gone to war and destroyed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian lives who talk a great deal about peace.

It is predatory propaganda peddlers who destroy young minds in schools who talk most about education.

Who among us has the irreproachable commitment to fight the monster that subjugates our people and our continent?

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

--Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or visit reason @rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova. com

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Love this article.....great