Zimbabwe: Mis-Perceiving Freedom

One wonders what it is that induces Africans to accept their subordinate status in world affairs as natural. Now with many among the civic and political leadership in Africa trifling in vacuous endeavours to excite admiration from vanity, many times elevating excrescent puppetry to levels of high-ranking nobilities like democracy or respect for human rights.

The continent is diseased with the viral legacy of colonialism and the interaction between African states is diseased, generating diseased social interactions within individual countries, degenerating into diseased psychological interactions within individual persons who make up African citizenry.

What is often called the inferiority complex is just a sum total of psychological discontents within individuals, which is a direct reflection of the discontents of the larger group.

We have a great chain of discontents cementing our societal and cultural make-up, and the culture of dependency and imitation emanates from this historical legacy of discontents.

The historical power relations between dominant colonial powers and subordinate African populations have to be factored in when one looks at the analyses of the character and conduct of the present-day African.

It does not matter one is making a judgment about good or evil leadership in Africa, or that one is making conclusions of superiority or inferiority, the prevailing dominant factor is always the historic intergroup, intragroup and interpersonal relations.

If one takes a filthy white vagabond from Europe and clean him up before flying him to meet Africa leadership, chances are that the man will be treated with the highest accolades of honour derived not from his personal worthiness but from the colour of his skin. He could easily be mistaken for a serious investor.

Conversely, if one takes an African invention to Europe it can easily be guaranteed that the invention will inevitably pass the test of primitiveness, not for its unmeritorious content but more for who has made up the invention.

From [HERE] The subordination of the African by Western influence is centred on historical power relations deliberately constructed by the white colonial establishments, and today perpetuated by the neo-colonial imperialist establishments in the Western world.

A child growing up in the Western world is made to believe that his social upbringing and conditions are by definition superior to those of an African child. The African child is socialised to admire the white child while the white kid is conditionally taught to pity the African child.

Hillary Clinton's recent visit to Africa was diplomatically packaged as a visit by a world leader to an Africa so desperate for Western investment and political intervention; starting with her reading the riot act to Kenyan politicians and warning them against continued squabbling or else, to defining what should be the political route for the people of Zimbabwe in regards to US sanctions imposed on the nation, up to declaring that only the United States of America holds the moral standard to promote democracy and human rights in Africa, even making the comical claim that the US foregoes its economic interests in pursuit of the high value of democracy and respect for human rights.

Hillary Clinton had the audacity to warn African leadership against partners whose aim is to exploit African resources, declaring with a straight face that the US was unlike these evil-minded unnamed partners, itself being such a morally upright nation only driven by the need to "stand up for democracy and universal human rights even when it might be easier or more profitable to look the other way, to keep the resources flowing . . . Not every partner makes that choice, but we do and we will."

This coming from a representative of a country that has systematically looted world resources for centuries from the Middle East, South America, Asia, and from Africa was quite telling. Hillary Clinton must be aware of her country's support for Chile's Augusto Pinochet, of the support the US gave to the murderous Saddam Hussein over the years, of how the US nurtured and sponsored the Taliban in Afghanistan, of how the US together with Britain supported fully the ascendancy to power of Idi Amin in Uganda, of the support given by the US to the murderous Raul Videla in Argentina, of the US support given to the Congolese brute Mobutu Sese Seko, and of the US support for dictatorial General Suharto in Indonesia. The list is endless and includes moments of US support for people like Gaddafi, for as long as they allowed the oil resource to flow northwards.

What Clinton was coming to perpetuate in Africa are social power relations that involve socio-political practices and processes which mediate the Western socioeconomic, socio-political and socio-psychological manipulation and construction of African consciousness and behaviour for the benefit of white interests.

White supremacy thrives on a socially manufactured black consciousness - where the behaviour of the African is labelled and judged by the white folk in ways only consonant with the imperial social control and expropriation of African resources.

Depending on how African consciousness stands as a threat to Western economic interest in Africa, the arbiter of normality or abnormality is raised by the Westerner. Those African governments that support the continuity of white supremacy over the affairs of Africa and have no problem with the West looting the continent's resources are labelled normal, and in the process are rewarded with such honourable titles as human rights defenders or democrats.

Those that openly oppose the continuity of white supremacy in Africa and call for control of African resources by Africans are labelled abnormal and often derided as autocrats, dictators, or tyrants.

Today what is being called normal black consciousness on matters of democracy and human rights is nothing more than endeavours created and originated in the West, with black activists sponsored or bribed to front them as matters of personal conscience. It is a matter of adding the black colour to white ideas.

This is precisely why black people who are inherently disgusted by the practice of homosexuality find themselves championing the cause of promoting gay rights, more to please those who sponsor the idea and less in appreciation of what they advocate for.

This is precisely why South Africa's ANC leaders are fiery advocates of revolutionary leftist rhetoric on the one hand and very reliable disciples of capitalist extremism at the same time. Patrick Bond has called it "talking left and walking right."

The consciousness of the African is determined by habitual thought patterns and behavioural tendencies which are designed to make it inevitable for the African to be pliable to white dominance and social control, and resistance is often minimal. In fact, the African has largely accepted his subordinate status as only natural, with many of Africa's civic and political activists easily mis-perceiving their oppression by white imperialists as freedom. Many of them deride their own governments for not doing enough in pleasing Western governments in order to be top on the list of countries that receive Western donor funding.

Those political leaders like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe who may be as "abnormal" as to promote thought patterns and behavioural tendencies in blacks which make white dominance ineffective or intolerably so hard to implement are labelled legitimate targets of the West's regime change agenda, and they are routinely vilified as ruthless despots by Western media, and many times treated as outcasts of the "international community."

Protesting, resisting or rejecting imperial dominance is synonymous with barbarism and primitiveness inasfar as the West is concerned, and it is unforgivable.

The arbiter of being a democrat in Africa today is tied up to the continuity of white supremacy, not exactly to the idea of the rule of Africa by the people of Africa, and for the people of Africa. In fact, for a people to be labelled true democrats by the West, it must be discovered that in them are behavioural tendencies that serve well the hegemonic interests of the West. Precisely this is why President Robert Mugabe stands isolated and sanctioned while his Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, is hailed as a "freedom fighter" in the West.

Mugabe stands for the abnormal African and the pliant Tsvangirai is the epitome of a progressive democrat from the vantage point of the continuity of white supremacy.

Our thoughts as Africans have been manipulated by a past whose effect on our behaviour we dangerously underestimate. We are a people with disturbed emotions, with a disturbed sense of motivational appetite, and our values and priorities are derived from this disturbed thought process.

In defining oppression, author Amos N. Wilson says: "To be oppressed is by definition to have one's thought processes disturbed; emotions impaired; motives and values inverted; and one's body functions imbalanced."

For as long as Africa cannot wean itself from the supremacy of the white man, it will remain a requirement that Africans involuntarily and obsessively continue to wallow in self-deception.

Today the trademark of African consciousness is degenerating into this collective self-deception, benchmarking the main product of the relations between the West and post-colonial Africa. This power relationship has somehow successfully manipulated Africans into operating against their own best interests, inadvertently pushing for the interests of their Western oppressors.

We have today an African in self-denial, in self-defeat and continuously engaging in self-destructing conduct. The sad reality is that those doing so are more than convinced that the opposite is true.

Those Zimbabweans being led by Prime Minister Tsvangirai into believing that only Western investment can prosper a nation actually count themselves as very progressive thinkers, even geniuses. In fact, they view the indigenous economic empowerment policies being pushed by Zanu-PF as an excruciating attack on modernity. A world of indigenised economies to these people is a retrogressive march back to the Dark Ages. Only the civilised people from the West must lead in the control of resources the world over - so the reckoning goes.

A modern economy is to them a world of powerful Western investors providing jobs and livelihoods for hard-working and loyal African labourers.

Africa is not going to prosper by diligently providing its labour to foreign investors. Neither is the continent going to be wealthy by receiving billions of dollars in aid money from the West. Dare I say Africa is not going to be democratic by mimicking utterances on democracy from Western sources?

Poverty alleviation is not and cannot be a gesture of philanthropy or charity. Poverty is and can only be alleviated by production and not by aid. It takes working and not receiving to alleviate poverty.

Democracy is not the art of mimicking Western secular life. It is the rule of the people by the people, and for the people.

When the people of Zimbabwe spoke about what they wanted enshrined in the country's constitution, it was not the duty of Copac's committees of whatever names to negotiate these views towards compliance with Western tendencies and opinion.

Even Zanu-PF negotiators felt they could not be left out in this noble endeavour to modernise our rural populace by modifying their primitive views towards the Western line, as guided by those who were meeting Western representatives on the dark sidelines of the constitution-making process. That behaviour is treacherous.

Africa is not going to be emancipated by people obsessed with playing pliancy games to Western diktats.

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

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.