Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Its Time the Zimbabwe Diaspora Re-framed Their Thinking

Its time Zim-Diaspora re-frame their thinking

January 16, 2014 Opinion & Analysis
Zimbabwe Herald

OVER the years I have noticed with concern the widening rift in perspectives between Zimbabweans living abroad and those in the country with the latter being perpetually obsessed with painting a dire picture of developments at home.I was reminded of this continued negative attitude when I read an article by Chenjerai Hove, an author that I once revered but who has since sold his “soul to the devil” in his self-imposed exile.

In his article published in the Mail and Guardian of 12 April 2013 titled Why laughter is a risky business in Zim, Hove used his fiction writing skills to caricaturise President Mugabe as paranoid.

Judging from the tone and assertion of the article, Hove, with reckless abandon, tried to paint a picture of President Mugabe and law enforcement agents as not just barbaric but psychologically unstable.

As a Zimbabwean who has lived his entire life in this country, I find Hove’s article not just repulsive but a typical example of the warped thinking common among the Diasporans who resort to sickening levels of smudging their own country in an attempt to be seen as “good Africans.”

This typical “house nigger” mentality is so pervasive in the Zimbabwean diaspora that often fail to acknowledge any positive developments in their country as doing so would be a betrayal of the whole purpose of them being outside the country.

Any sane person reading Hove’s article would be quick to dismiss it as stuff for the kindergarten audience whose thinking processes are yet to fully develop.
One thing that makes the article glaringly fictitious is that all the people that he alleges to have been arrested are nameless are referred to as “a man from that part of the country.”

Everyone, even those with elementary schooling, will testify that any credible story must always be accompanied by real people, with real names and specific residence.

As someone who once dabbled in journalism, Hove must be aware of the fraternity’s parlance that any credible story must always be accompanied by attribution of real life characters.

It boggles the mind as to why Hove failed to consult his colleagues of similar ilk in the country as to the actual names of such individuals arrested in order to make his opinionated piece credible.

His inference that most of those arrested came from one part of the country (Manicaland) is meant to incite people from that region to smudge, flog and abuse the person of the President and celebrate such a move as an act of bravery.

The article by Hove gives the impression that President Mugabe gives instructions for certain individuals to be arrested for any mundane matter yet the truth is that President Mugabe is a subject of ridicule and derision in the private Press yet no one gets arrested.

President Mugabe is not omnipresent and therefore cannot stop anyone from making a police report if he/she feels that certain public utterances by certain individuals would have vulgarised their Head of State in the same manner that any individual can seek recourse in the courts if he/she feels defamed by anyone.

It is up to the courts to decide the veracity of such defamatory statements and any suggestion to the contrary is an attempt to present our police as incompetent and trigger happy.

It is shameful for people like Hove to find self-gratification in writing fictitious stories about his country and use the cauldron of his self-imposed exile to appear rebellious in the eyes of his paymasters.

While it is a given that Zimbabwe just like any other country in the world has its problems, it is also true that the country is surely on a recovery path, something that even our worst detractors have publicly acknowledged.

The gibberish he gives as the reasons for him leaving Zimbabwe are as laughable just as his claim that he was haunted by state intelligence operatives. Surely, given his “stature”, it’s still a wonder how all this could have escaped the eyes of journalists especially those in the private media. But Hove is not alone in seeking self-gratification through the constant flogging of his country’s standing at every public forum.

It would be useful if Hove and his ilk would revisit the last chapter of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth where he laments that; “Humanity is waiting for something other than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature. If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us.”

As if prophetically speaking to people like Hove and his ilk, Fanon says; “for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new man.”

Zimbabweans in the Diaspora are an important component of our intellectual and human resource base. They surely must move away from a victimhood mentality and embrace the positive developments currently taking place in our beautiful country.

It is not helpful for Hove and others to remain stuck in the muddied stereotypical image that the West would always want to see when everything points the opposite. Hove and others must stop sulking and instead embrace positive developments taking place so that Zimbabwe reclaims its rightful place in the global village.

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