Maurice Taonezvi Vambe

Knowledge production and publishing in Africa

This article explores the practice of ‘knowledge production’ and ‘publishing’ in Africa. Knowledge production and publishing in Africa has been and still is dominated by Western experts, most of whose interests do not serve Africa. Powerful social groups in post-colonial Africa construct knowledge about Africa from the sites of universities. Ordinary people also produce knowledge, most of which is elaborated through unwritten forms, and actually contest dominant modes of knowing. Publishing in Africa ought to be controlled by Africans if African states are to realise the dream of an African renaissance. African governments ought to invest in knowledge production and publishing. African intellectuals with university education should work with ordinary African intellectuals to create new sites of knowledge. Knowledge production and publishing is not an ideologically neutral phenomenon. Therefore, African governments should create, and not thwart, conditions conducive to knowledge production and publishing that is self-interrogating.

Opening and transforming South African education

This article examines the challenge of opening and transforming South African education. ‘Openness’ and ‘transformation’ of any education programme in any society are ethicopolitical processes. In the case of South Africa, the transition from an autocratic education system serving the interests of a minority to a more modern and democratic educational dispensation demands a critical rethinking of the meaning of these twin concepts of openness and transformation. The policy of outcomes‐based education (OBE) has been used as a strategy for educational change. This article argues that, although OBE can be understood in the context of the desire for change, the programme’s implementation does not lead to radical opening and qualitative transformation of the South African educational sector. Any pedagogy of radical empowerment through political and deliberate advocacy policies needs to take into consideration the content of the new system of education, the professional quality of the educators, and the calibre of the new learners.

Fictions of Autobiographical Representations: Joshua Nkomo's the Story of My Life

Summary The aim of this article is to critically analyse the problems of the ideologies of narrativity raised in Joshua Nkomos autobiography The Story of My Life. When this Zimbabwean version of the book was published in 2001, there were speculations and “gossip” that its contents had been tampered with by the Zimbabwean editor. However, a close comparison with the contents of the first edition published by Methuen of London, revealed that there were no editorial changes that could have prejudiced the depiction of his public image published in Zimbabwe. The Story of My Life documents the details of Nkomos life from the point of his birth to his life as an immigrant in South Africa, and then a nationalist guerrilla, up to the period of independence from 1980 when he was politically persecuted by Robert Mugabe. This article demonstrates that in attempting to tell the story of his life, Nkomo found himself forced to suppress some facts about the contradictions that he lived in his personal and political life. The article argues that although Nkomo details the pain he suffered in the hands of Robert Mugabe, he could not totally ward off the lure of the dominant ideology that inclined him to explain his political misfortunes in tribal terms. The article suggests that the “fictions” contained in autobiographical works such as Nkomos story is that they lay claim to the authority of incontestable truth emanating from a single subject position. This perception that Nkomos book promotes should be questioned because any account of the self is predicated on the suppression of some facts of “other selves”. This irony at the heart of autobiographical writings suggests that the storyteller unconsciously suppresses certain memories which may not “sit” comfortably with the version of personal/national history that a story of selfinscription is forced to authorise.

Zimbabwe genocide: voices and perceptions from ordinary people in Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces, 30 years on

Studies on genocide in Zimbabwe in particular, and the world in general, focus on the number of people who die. However, significant attention now needs to be directed towards understanding the conditions under which the people of Matabeleland and the Midlands live after Gukurahundi. It is imperative to consider the importance of the voices, views and perceptions of the surviving victims regarding how they move on with their lives. Furthermore, it is crucial to the new frames of aspirations that the victims have developed. This can be done without wishing away the painful past, but with a desire to project into a possible and safer future. Research on Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces needs to ascertain whether or not there have been changes in the voices, views and perceptions of the victims of Gukurahundi about the impact of this genocide, 30 years after the event. If the political, economic and social conditions of the people from these areas have not changed, this constitutes a continuing silent genocide whose dimensions must be understood with a view to stopping it. To evaluate the perceptions of some victims of genocide in Zimbabwe, using interviews and questionnaires in Tsholotsho, Gweru, Mberengwa, Nkayi and Umzingwani can elicit responses to the questions regarding what I call, the victims spiritual agency that is important when considering how the people have forged ahead with their lives despite or because of a previous history of persecution.

Thomas Mapfumo's ‘Toi Toi’ in context: popular music as narrative discourse1

A central motif in Paul Gilroy’s exploration of ‘Black Atlantic Sounds’ is the paradoxical way in which popular music names and marks its discursive territory as it attempts to assign meanings to things. Popular music likes to represent itself to its audience as independent and capable of fulfilling the demands for freedom that its fantasy promises. Popular music also likes to embody in the same formal vessel collective aspirations as well as the national principle’s antinomies. In reality popular music is wired to and exists inside and outside culture industries as counterculture to modernity. Popular music resists this capitalistic base of modernity in an ironical context in which capital is constantly striving to police potential meanings of that music in order to turn that music into big business. This tenuous existence of popular music, this relationship of ‘dependency and antagonism’, underpins the power dynamics that define popular music’s attempt to forge a local idiom of identity formation in a global context that insists on turning popular music into a commodity for sale and profit. However, the specific ways in which popular music is implicated in the status quo extend to how the music claims to know itself, and how it seeks to translate ‘knowing into telling’. Popular music as narrative discourse does in fact know that in a world where the production and representation of communal aspirations and the circulation of collective ideals and knowledge are fought over, imaginative processes involving narrating events both become moments of and provide sites for potential contestation from other vying narrative discourses. The question of translating ‘knowing into telling’ does assume that knowledge is negotiated for, that it is not simply there to confirm certain of the values informing popular musicians’ conclusions about life. In fact, if we follow Hayden White’s lead in viewing narration and narrativity (in popular music) as the instruments with which the conflicting claims of the imaginary and the real are mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in a discourse, we begin to comprehend both

Orality in the Black Zimbabwean Novel in English

The question of the extent to which African orality exerts an influence on the black Zimbabwean novel in English has taken centre stage in recent critical debates. One view is that a revived African cultural nationalism during the war of liberation claimed for its own purposes that African orality was always resistant to colonial policies. According to this view, colonialism’s attempt to suppress African culture instead generated among Africans a sense of oneness, producing a united community with the single aim of achieving freedom. This assumption that resistance was inherent in orality, both before colonisation and during the struggle, is complicated by evidence that, in the periods in question, orality communicated absolutely everything, including authoritarian and hegemonic ideas. Because orality occupied a highly volatile cultural space in the lived contexts of African societies, serving multiple and sometimes apparently contradictory purposes, it is not surprising that the same paradoxical uses of orality can be traced in the black novel. The challenge for black Zimbabwean novelists was whether they would attempt to make use only of specific ‘traditional’ protest genres within orality or whether they felt that the mere evocation of orality was enough to give an anti-colonial authenticity to their novels. Referring to Feso,1 Waiting for the Rain,2 Bones3 and Black Sunlight,4 this article argues that, in fact, Zimbabwean authors use orality to confront the reader with an array of unstable meanings that potentially subvert narratives of resistance. The article demonstrates that there are ideological differences and conflicting views underlying the ways in which authors use orality. There are also, ironically, ideological inconsistencies and conflicting perspectives in the use of orality within a novel by an individual author. As a consequence of these paradoxes, the article concludes by suggesting that orality is a tool to express any social vision rather than a mark that confers ‘authenticity’ onto the black Zimbabwean novel in English.

Musical rhetoric and the limits of official censorship in Zimbabwe

Abstract Cultural critics of the Zimbabwean government argue that the passing into law of the 75 percent requirement of local content on television and radio is the most visible expression of musical censorship. The critics argue that control of television and radio helps the government to censor the content of music of those singers whose visions of Zimbabwe do not agree with that of the ruling Zanu-PF. While the idea of 100 per cent local content on the air waves might seem noble and positive at first sight, in that it seems to represent the movement of local music from the periphery to the mainstream, in reality this has implications for the character of Zimbabwean music, as it increasingly strives to imitate American music. Thus, local content quotas may kill the music industry as Zimbabwe does not possess enough material to meet the local content criteria. Censorship also manifests itself in the form of a campaign of intimidation against artists, and in the suggestion that what people watch on Zimbabwe television and listen to on state radio is not local Zimbabwean content but Zanu-PF propaganda. These views are not shared by all musicians and listeners. In fact, the identification of local content with lyrics gives birth to the perception that people are what they listen to. However, a reconsideration of music in terms of lyrics, rhetoric and voice creates a different framework of understanding music in which people can generate their own meanings and be what they do not listen to. Using the music of Tambaoga, Zhakata and Chipanga, this article argues that the politics of listening as performance forces us to take notice that other than lyrics, singers use musical rhetoric and voice to evade official censorship as well as expand the conceptual understanding of the question of what is ‘local’ in the debate on localising musical content in Zimbabwe.

The culture of crisis and crisis of culture in Zimbabwe

If one looks at the news, it appears that Zimbabwe is a country in lonely crisis. When the world does pay attention to Zimbabwe, it is to sanction its leaders. This issue is solely about Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe’s ongoing struggle for freedom that is under threat both from within Zimbabwe itself and from the outside world. The concept of Zimbabwe as home for its citizens is one fractured along historical, spatial, political, racial, ethnic and personal lines, and indeed it is a multidimensional intersection of all these factors. It is within this agglomeration of identities, often under extreme threat, that ordinary Zimbabweans are daily constructing themselves and their lives – not only to survive the crisis that has pervaded so many facets of their lives, but to go beyond it. The disquieting aspect is that there is now in Zimbabwe a culture of crisis; leaders taking crisis as normal, thriving from it, and holding the lives of the people to ransom. When the crisis has been formalised as a culture within state institutions, it distorts attempts at resolving tensions and conflicts that lead to crisis in the culture. Since culture reflects on the materiality of the nation, there can be a crisis of culture when leaders, people and writers joust and fail to move out of the orbit of this culture of crisis that produces crisis in the culture. This is what the articles in this issue of African Identities prod. Whilst rigorously analysing the issues that have lead to the profoundly difficult conditions in Zimbabwe today, this issue also records the inspirational way that ordinary Zimbabweans have moved beyond the crisis and are living successfully. In the second article in this issue the author quotes Mungoshi’s poem ‘If you don’t stay bitter and angry for too long’ (1998), which challenges the reader to move beyond bitterness and anger, so that they might finally rescue ‘something useful’ from the situation. This issue aims to proclaim this challenge and demonstrate how ordinary Zimbabweans have taken it up, interrogating both the culture of crisis and the crisis of culture. The first article in this issue, ‘ Zimbabwe’s creative literatures in the interregnum: 1980–2009’ by Maurice T. Vambe announces the strength of creative literary cultures. It suggests that, unlike the visible political institutions such as education, law and the security forces, culture is often less amenable to total destruction even in the face of the most brutal and dictatorial regimes. In fact a social, political and economic meltdown can even be the suitable condition of possibility for the rebirth of creative art as creative cultures authorize their own narratives in ways that both confirm and interrogate the conditions of the country and of the arts, and allow for a myriad of suppressed voices and interpretations to be heard. ‘Where is my home? Rethinking person, family, ethnicity and home under increased transitional migration by Zimbabweans’ by Thabisani Ndlovu is the second

Reading the Zimbabwean National Anthem as Political Biography in the Context of Crisis

Summary The aim of this article is to render thinkable the idea of reading the Zimbabwean national anthem, Simudzai Mureza weZimbabwe, as a political biography. Biographies are peoples lives narrated by others. However, the act of writing the lives of the nation in the form of an anthem, and then projecting these experiences as epitomising the lives of the individuals within the nation, is in fact marked by a disjuncture. This happens because by their very nature, acts of narrating individual or collective identities should always be viewed as approximations of that lived reality. Furthermore, national anthems as wish lists are based on some selected themes deemed of national importance by others and not everybody. This problem is at the heart of reading the Zimbabwean national anthem as a political biography. This article argues that if it is remembered that the lyrics of Simudzai Mureza weZimbabwe were composed by a literary figure, and selected and adopted by the Government of Zimbabwe, amongst other compositions, then there is reason to believe that there are, from that competition, some versions of the national anthem that were turned down, whose lyrical content Zimbabweans may never come to know of. Read from this “subversive” perspective, the Zimbabwean national anthem is a political biography “complete in its incompleteness” or incomplete in it completeness.2 2The formulation that a text says more in what it does not say than in what it says suggests that there cannot be any text that can claim to be total, whole, or complete. For further elaboration of this concept see Macherey (1978).

Rethinking the notion of chimurenga in the context of political change in Zimbabwe

Abstract Chimurenga music was popularised by Africans during the struggle for independence in Zimbabwe in the 1970s. Its creators were freedom fighters struggling against colonialism. This music was articulated from guerrilla bases in Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia, and from some local artists inside Zimbabwe. Chimurenga music protested against the exploitation of Africans by colonialism, and also critiqued the oppression of women within African society. Critics of chimurenga music have given the erroneous impression that the musical genre ended in 1980, and that there was only one version of chimurenga music. After independence, chimurenga music has criticised corruption, bad governance by the new leaders and delays in redistributing land to the African masses. Post-independence Zimbabwean singers with varying levels of political consciousness and employing different linguistic strategies have created different ways of naming reality through alternative versions of chimurenga music. These Zimbabwean male musicians demonstrate that attempts to generate a local discourse of freedom in the era of globalisation and corporate organisations that control the production and distribution of chimurenga music produce not one version of chimurenga music, but multiple versions (and sub/versions) of chimurenga music that confirm, collude, overlap and contradict each other in their ways of naming the post-independence Zimbabwean reality.