Published by the government of Zimbabwe
Reason Wafawarova
4 July 2009
opinion
Harare — The Zimbabwean Prime Minister has returned from a tour of Western capitals that was meant to seek a lifting of the illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe by the Western coalition, as well as to seek material support to implement the policies of the new inclusive Government.
Through his Press conference after the trip, Prime Minister Tsvangirai made it clear that his trip was a success in that he got pledges totalling about US$500 million, albeit to be channelled through Western NGOs resident in Zimbabwe the so-called implementation partners.
Other than these pledges, the Prime Minister came back with a counter assignment from the West, an assignment upon whose completion the country is meant to see the US$500 million as "nothing compared to what will be coming" according to Mr Tsvangirai.
What is the assignment? We have political benchmarks to meet.
The Prime Minister's hosts suddenly imposed themselves as exegetic authorities of the Global Political Agreement an agreement whose guarantors are the African Union and Sadc.
To this end they tasked the Prime Minister to unequivocally remind the rest of Zimbabwe that those who did not meet the West's bidding on the GPA were standing in the way of unlimited aid from our "Western friends".
The GPA that the Prime Minister and his Western friends want respected is the same GPA that Cabinet members from the Prime Minister's MDC-T party are at liberty to violate by boycotting Cabinet meetings whenever they feel like frustration has taken the better side of their rationality, as the Prime Minister tacitly explained the June 30 Cabinet boycotting by members of his party.
Frustration is not a virtue, and no one should be boasting about it or even justify ill-behaviour on its mis-assumed merits.
Most certainly, no one has a monopoly over frustration and those in the inclusive Government that assume their frustration must be viewed as a national concern are clearly overrating the power of mischief.
We are told we are solemnly supposed to treat as Bible truth that the decision to channel whatever aid was promised by Western governments through NGOs was based on the "reality" that the central Government of Zimbabwe is too corrupt to be trusted.
And of course in that scenario the only other way to provide this assistance is not to ensure accountability but to sidestep the Government through the avenue of NGOs.
Zimbabweans are meant to see the plausibility of this position by Westerners and indeed some have hailed the move as the civilised way of doing things.
One of the general consequences of neo-colonial hegemony is the destruction of self-respect and self-image.
Kenneth Clark, in his book "Dark Ghetto", wrote this about the oppressed black Americans.
"Human beings who are forced to live under ghetto conditions and whose daily experience tells them that almost nowhere in society are they respected and granted the ordinary dignity and courtesy accorded to others will, as a matter of course, begin to doubt their own worth.
"Since every human being depends upon his cumulative experiences with others for clues as to how he should view and value himself, children who are consistently rejected understandably begin to question and doubt whether they, their family, and their group really deserve more respect from the larger society than they receive.
"These doubts become the seeds of a pernicious self and group hatred, the Negro's complex and debilitating prejudice against himself."
This passage from Kenneth Clark is most telling when one looks at how the AU and Sadc are demeaned and ridiculed on the issue of the otherwise impressive diplomatic score on settling the political conflict that was in Zimbabwe before the era of this inclusive Government.
Now we are being told Zimbabweans are so hopeless that NGOs have to stand in to make the inclusive Government allow aid to reach the ordinary people.
This is supposed to be greeted by raucous applause from the ranks of the African community - and of course this is the view of those with a neo-colonial sense of supremacy claiming to represent the "civilised world".
We as Africans have come to believe in our own inferiority.
We have developed a sense of shame about our own sense of capacity and even cultural identity.
Instead, we have embraced the values of an alien culture and began to ape the Western world, emulating specific aspects of its life-style: political beliefs, their sense of human rights, their sense of democracy, their eating habits, their drinking habits, music, cosmetics and even exaggerating the particular accents of the Western languages.
Albert Memmi wrote in the book "Political Economy of Africa" that the ambition of the ordinary African was "to become equal to that splendid model and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him".
This is what is happening when some of us Africans hanker to fulfill Western benchmarks on what we are told are matters of democracy, human rights and all the other truisms the NGO community is running amok with.
It is most amazing how old themes persist from generation to generation.
It has been argued by people like John Daniel that the culture of dependency was perpetuated by the distortion of Africa's cultural systems and their eclipse by alien cultural values, and that this formed an essential part of colonial domination.
After the granting of formal independence by former colonial empires, Africa has been smoothly transforming from colonial to neo-colonial dependency.
The culture of dependency has been perpetuated in post-colonial Africa and it continues to serve the instrumental ends of imperial metropolitan powers.
Africa's response to the persistence of this subordinate culture was initially that of initiating socio-political education programmes like Ghana's National Service Scheme, Mozambique's political education programmes and of late Zimbabwe's National Youth Service Programme and many other such examples from across Africa.
These programmes were denounced heavily in the West as either covers for barbaric brainwashing of citizens or just as plain Communist programmes with no room in "democratic societies".
None of these programmes was a success story, and it must be noted that Africans helped a lot in shunning and denouncing these efforts as primitive and failing to identify with the "civilised Western models".
Capitalism has values and the three pillar values are acquisitiveness, competitiveness and individualism.
Needless to say, these are antithetical to the corporate and communal values of traditional Africa.
Neo-colonialism seeks to perpetuate the relentless and multi-faceted assault on the surviving non-capitalist values of Africa.
This assault is taking both a conscious and an unconscious form, and those who undertake it do not necessarily do so with a malicious or self-serving intent.
Rather, their attack on African culture and values is prompted by their ideological stance which regards Western culture as the ultimate refinement and repository of all human excellence, virtue and industry.
Nonetheless, the onslaught is no less brutal for this perception.
The primary actors in this onslaught are the Western imperial regimes, operating in collusion with such auxiliaries as the NGOs, sponsored political parties, and the so-called pro-democracy civil society.
These groups play the same role that was played by the missionary, the trader and the educator in executing colonialism.
Today these functionaries are assigned the task of socialising and orienting the African psyche to the Western capitalist incursion and sense of civility.
During the colonial era similar functionaries, as described already, were assigned the role of altering the African mode of economic behaviour and social thought so that Africans would undertake the labour roles assigned to them for the benefit of the coloniser.
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