Here is a Short Sunday read for you (hi there Alex Magaisa, that thing I owe you on the constitution is on its way, and it is good!), a little something on my views on the recent announcements by Nkosana Moyo, Linda Musarira and Fadzayi Mahere to enter what is called in Zim the political fray. And this is not a "rant", by the way, a word used by Zimbabweans to refer to anything on Facebook in which an opinion is expressed in more than two paragraphs. It is a series of reflections on something I am writing.
I think it is pretty clear that I no longer write regular opinion pieces on Zimbabwe. There are many reasons for this, which are too long to go into. Instead of writing myself, I apply as far as I can the writer Kate Mosse’s principle, something I heard her explain at the Women’s Prize panel a few years ago: if you are a woman with any kind of visibility, and you are asked to do something, and you can’t, recommend another woman. That is the principle I have adapted to the Zim context and what I have been doing since I stopped writing regularly in 2013: if someone says please write something for us Petina, I say, why don’t you try X instead, and for me, X is not an unknown quality, X is a Zimbabwean.
The reason I started writing in the first place was to counter the Godwin/Fuller narrative. I like both these writers very much even if I have not loved all their books equally. I have done events with them, I launched Peter’s book in London, and have had a riotous series of conversations with Alexandra Fuller that I hope will never end. My concern was more to do with their reception than their writing because there was a point in the last decade at which the only voice of Zimbabwe was the white farmer’s narrative.
The thing about international media is that they will frequently go to a person who is a known quantity, than risk one they have to explain to readers or viewers even if that person is brilliant. So I worked really hard to gain that recognition to be the alternative go to voice on Zimbabwe. At some point though, it began to feel fraudulent when I knew so many other voices who had sharper insights, were closer to things, but were simply not being heard because they had not won some prize or other. So for this and other reasons, I decided to retreat and do the Kate Mosse thing.
I have also taken to heart the three questions you should ask before you post anything public: Must this be said? Must this be said by me? Must this be said now?
For a person who loves debate and sharing ideas, it has also been a way of disciplining my writing, and sharpening my thinking so that I now say only what I think needs to be said, what I think needs to be said by me, and what I think needs to be said by me now. The one opinion piece I have written which is the best thing I have done was one I wrote after developing this principle. It was a piece on Mugabe published by the FT a couple of years ago that reflected months of thinking and distillation and conversations, distilled into 800 words on an insight that had never been before shared at least not as succinctly. I am very proud of that. I have decided that unless I can offer insights of this nature, I will not write on Zimbabwe.
But after the announcements by Nkosana Moyo, Linda Musarira and Fadzayi Mahere that they are running as independent candidates, I am itching to take up the pen again. I am going to finish editing my novel this week, and will then write something on this matter.
My piece will go beyond these three and address all the newcomers who are announcing as independents. I am interested in this phenomena from some people who I know to be exceptionally bright, and certainly bright enough to know that they cannot possibly win.
These announcements have given me sociological insights not just on politics, but on privilege and entitlement and the crisis in the middle class. Together with the manufactured backlash I faced when I mused about my plan to one day enter the civil service, these announcements confirm to me the true damage Zanu PF has done to the middle class intelligentsia of this country: our people have developed a binary view of the individual’s contribution to public life, and what it means to live a life that makes a difference to others.
I am still stunned by what I have seen of my beloved law faculty. Most of the law lecturers working at the UZ are involved in writing papers for civil society etc, but with few exceptions, no one has published a peer-reviewed paper in any Journal at all.
The Commercial law Institute we launched to such fanfare and with Tiny Rowland's money is no more. The Zimbabwe Review in which Kempton Makamure and Shadrack Gutto wrote passionately about international law and the invasion of Grenada, and in which the brilliant Pearson Nherere parsed arcane but fun principles of Roman-Dutch law, and in which I read insights that made me respect the exceptionally ordered world of African customary law, this Review was simply allowed to die even when there were lecturers there, working every day but not working, because a faculty of people who just lecture students without writing and developing new thinking or even just basic commentary on judgements is ultimately a group of teachers. The aim of an academy is to do more than teach.
This collapse in engagement and intellectual labour has been replicated across all university faculties. All you need do is look at the webpage of the UZ to see the state the Academy is in, you will find it located in the corner of the internet where bad websites go to die.
So.
We have lost the academy to politics and the politics of getting by, by whatever means.
We have lost the media to politics and the politics of Little Tommy Tuckerism, by which I mean singing lustily for one's supper, only for that supper to turn out to be nothing more spectacular than brown bread and butter.
We have lost the civil service to politics and the politics of the stomach.
We have lost completely our police, intelligence and armed services to politics and the politics of not wanting to be put out into the cold.
We have lost the civil society to politics and the politics of hunger.
We are even losing the church, the arts and the private sector to politics and the politics of compromise.
All that we value is politics.
But we have even lost our politics to the politics of Our-Turn-To-Eatness and other forms of mediocrity.
There is little value for public service, creativity, inventiveness, novelty, commitment to standards, the things that normally lead the middle class - always the socially ambitious group in any country - to thrive and push hard the development of the professions, the civil service, the sciences, technology, the private sector, the media and the arts. Traditionally the middle class passes those values on to their children, and new entrants to the middle class adopt them too, values ranging, depending on where people fall on the political spectrum, from hard work, ethics and integrity, social justice and philanthropy, pull-your-self-up-by-your bootstringness and intellectual curiosity.
So the announcements by Moyo, Mahere, etc reveal to me a crisis at the heart of a navel gazing middle class that sees public life in extremely narrow terms.
So I want to write about why I believe that we will only mature as a democracy when the best and brightest of our middle class give equal value to serving in ways that are not only political.
More on that soon.
Until then, this page is open for any of your insights on this matter. I am off to write!
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