I have a couple of friends that like to remember what they refer to as the good old Zimbabwe days.
Be it when they were in primary or secondary school. Or undertaking one or the other state-sponsored tertiary education. They talk of getting milk at school, eating well, getting student payouts/loans and how everyone was generally happy in Zimbabwe.
They debate this broadly until you broach the subject of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) of the late 1980s. While we were too young to understand this then new neoliberal policy thrust of the Zimbabwean government at the time, our contemporary conversations immediately depart from nostalgic reminiscence to anger at what then befell us by the time we arrived at adulthood.
And this is largely toward the turn of the century when not only ESAP was in full flight but the ruling Zanu PF party was now trying to rediscover some sort of its revolutionary ethos via a now hurried Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in the year 2000.
While at the same time using state and no-state orchestrated violence on supporters of the newer opposition political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as then led by trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai.
Some of us still remember those terrible years and in particular the calamitous periods of cholera, hyper-inflation and poverty that were stark between 2005 through to 2010 when the then Global Political Agreement and government of national unity as mediated by SADC had sort of got a foothold on our economic predicament.
In this, a decent number of us who were political and civil society activists at the time assumed we were in some sort of progressive revolutionary struggle to challenge the ruling Zanu Pf party’s hegemony. And a lot of suffered and are still suffering for this. Be it here at home or in the global Zimbabwean Diaspora.
What we may have missed, however, is the passage of time and the fact that there are others that while having been young in they year 2000, are now adults. And they have a different experience of what they consider their priority realities and ambitions. They are also referred to as ‘ama 2000’.
These and other younger comrades have a different consciousness template from many that have nostalgia for a previous Zimbabwe prior to for example ESAP. Theirs remains an immediacy of material consciousness. Be they male or female.
Based on not only the fact that they have greater access to multiple nodes of information and lifestyles but also because they experienced the worst of our longstanding economic challenges since the early 2000s.
And their politics and political activism are also more immediate. Based on both religious perception as well as celebrity dynamics as motivated by both mainstream and social media.
They are definitely not going to read Marx, Cabral, Luxembourg, Nyerere, Nkrumah, Gramsci or de Beauvoir unless its for an academic examination.
And this a reality that we now have to accept across class, geographical location and even claims at ethnicity.
Age, conversations and consciousness have come full circle in Zimbabwe. With the latter being the least relevant. Mainly because consciousness in and of itself is not only less fashionable but it is challenged by the hegemonic and behavioural moderation media that we can no longer avoid consuming. Be it via social media or streaming platforms that are carried over to the mainstream television and radio stations such as Tik-tok, Netflix, Youtube and Whatsapp (in no particular order).
So when I am in some sort of debate (online or offline) with people younger than me I am aware that if I overdo any sort of intellectualism I will be met with an equally resistant counter-intellectualism that focuses on everyday realities as opposed to any sort of idealism. Or one that emphasizes one celebrity over another or one faith in challenge to others. And a derisive turn of phrase about age and no knowing whats really going on in the world
This is something I first experienced in a radio interview in 2010. I had prepared well for it, crosschecked my facts, re-read on the relevant ideological contexts of how to challenge neo-liberalism for a progressive new social contract. Lo and behold the interviewer, young as she was didn’t care about that. She just wanted to know about the significance of the celebrity like infighting in the then inclusive Zimbabwe government and its constitutional reform process.
I then realized that perhaps because of age, experience and also being more ideologically oriented, I was beginning to miss new realities about how young Zimbabweans are beginning to think about their country and their lives.
As a final example, I once interacted with a young artists group who vociferously laid claim to being a network of progressive young minds seeking out new ways of expressing their challenges in the public interest. This was assumedly in relation to unemployment, poverty and ambitions to go to the Diaspora.
It turned out that most of them found their best spaces in quoting the bible and relying heavily on the Christian Gospel for their own consciousness.
It struck me that we (my nostalgic comrades and I) had been brought up on Ngugi, Marechera, Mungoshi, Vera, Soyinka and many others but these ones I was interacting with at that time, mainly had the Bible and very business focused motivational writers and speakers from the global north.
This is still something I still cannot shrug off. And I am not sure who’s fault it is. But it is a fault. WE need to talk consciousness age. More-so where we have imperial presidents like Donald Trump talking about racist ‘Golden Ages’ for their own countries and controlling social and mainstream media narratives.
Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity.
Featured image: Revolutionary thinker Amílcar Cabral (Courtesy: African Skies)
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