Springtime: Rhodesians called it the suicide season

The Rhodesians called it the suicide season. Zimbabwe's springtime. Particularly the month of October when temperatures soar exponentially, and then peak. Even trees are drowsy and resigned; they wilt and droop like a willow. The earth turns into an active furnace; it scorches. The grass is decidedly brown: dry and lifeless. Trees shed off leaves, to maximise on little food there is. Rivers become mighty sandbanks, emitting searing heat as if there is a subterranean fire smouldering. Animals desperately confuse shadows for shades, the heatwave turning shades to 96 degrees Celsius. All round, there is no succour. Even snakes leave holes, their safest habitats, in search of something cooler. The land is dry, thirsty, and a lifeless brown is what dominates the national landscape.

When baas got angry

Rhodesians transposed this inclement condition to the human temperament. In that sweltering heat, they reckoned the national temper to be short, to be highly combustible. A little scratch on the matchbox could ignite, nay start a conflagration. Farmers are hard at work, preparing for the summer to follow. Their figures are not balancing, bills mounting. The tobacco seedbed has to come right and the white baas will take no nonsense. In the late sixties, my brother narrowly escaped with his fragile life. He was a general hand at a tobacco-growing white farm in the Nyazura area.

Alongside his colleagues, he had not been paid for months. The white baas expected them to work all the same, as if nothing was amiss. A few of his colleagues had sought to escape, but baas "Buizendot" knew how to track them down, did so successfully, with fatal results. He used his well-fed, well-groomed black horse to account for the deserters. The horse knew how to run them down. Once within foreleg reach, the horse, highly trained, would use its foreleg to knock chidididi, the back hip, knock precisely that complex housing which unites the lower abdomen and the upper part of the human body.

Knock between the two dimples that show just above the buttocks, that show in tender age when one emerges from a cold bath in a bucket. The victim would come down, paralysis soon to follow. His spine would have been dislocated by the horse blow. From on high, the baas would use his revolver to finish off the wailing deserter, by then already useless to the farmer and to himself anyway. Loyal workers would dutifully throw the body into a shallow grave. Another death, no register, no case. Back home in the village, Mugandani would be reported as "akachonera kumapurazi", no one knowing he was long dead, killed by an irate farmer in the month of October, the burning month.

When baas committed suicide

My brother William was part of a lucky few who managed to revenge this ill-treatment, managed to escape, and managed to live to tell their sob tale. Generally a "hotwire", which is what earned him the nickname "Jakachaka", the-one-who-scatters, William was fed up of not getting his pittance wage, while obeying a punishing work schedule. He would not have it. Back in the village his father had a kraal "breathing" with cattle.

Why endure this form of slavery? Alongside a friend, one day he woke up in the dead of the night, armed himself with a sharp "pick": that sharp-ended agricultural implement for digging. They headed for the tractor "shade", viciously attacked and perforated big hind wheels of all serviceable tractors. Perforated them in such a way they would not be patched easily. Once done, they took off, literally. Such that by the time the sun peeped through the hills of Nyazura, they were crossing Mucheke, headed for Zviyambe, on a hot way home.

And they made sure they used jungle paths, often taking false directions to keep their pursuers off scent. By the time the white baas woke up for work, the culprits had devoured jungles. Back at the farm the supervisor met the mess, reported it to the baas. The whole shade was furrowed by mighty water gushes from perforated hind wheels, all his usable tractors crouching, beaten right down to their knees. Those who witnessed the scene claimed the white man broke down and wept. He was sapless, too sapless to even mount his dark horse for a vengeful mission. He disappeared. The following morning he was found, dangling on a musasa tree, cold. The month was October, when the planting of Virginia tobacco saplings is at its peak.

Too coincidental!

Yesterday I was struck by two editorial comments from two stables. One read: "Mr President, the ship is sinking". Another read: "Zim edges to tipping point". Both were anchored on the recent state-of-the-nation address, which the two papers are inclined to dismiss as empty. The address itself clinched Zim-Asset into a ten-point activity. The MDC-T leader, too, has dismissed the address as offering no options for the economy.

For him, the course should be clear: Mugabe must dissolve his Government, and call for fresh elections. It is a standard package which any opposition leader would give, call for. That is no news. What is news is that it finds echo in papers that pretend to be stand-alone editorial propositions, and this so soon after the opposition call. And to effect, the name of Dzamara is dropped in, this barely a week after a Dzamara prayer ruse aborted in Mandava stadium, in Mashava. It is no secret that the opposition has been banking on Dzamara for traction, a very bad hope if you ask me. It is a strange get-together: a people-less opposition; a dying press struggling both editorially and financially. Yet both still hoping to make an impression!

Mr Editor, the ship is sinking!

But there is a way in which the sense of irony is lost completely. Make no mistake about it, the national balance sheet is bad, very bad. But so is that of the raging section of the media. Some even go as saying because of it. And a few days before in one case, a few weeks before in another, the papers had given us their own 10-point plans! By way of massive dismissals. By way of editorial personnel changes. Still the monster won't twitch and things continue to fall apart, coming through as scapegoating anger.

Would I be wrong to say: Mr Editor, the ship is sinking? There is a loud boomerang, one which all things being sensible, should chastise and chasten those constitutionally hyper-protected loudmouths. But Mugabe seems to have a good story, a better defence even. He has enemies we all know, angry enemies hitting back for losing land. Two, there is a clear world economic crisis creeping in, however, fraudulently these media goons may want to particularise Zimbabwe's economic challenges.



It is all around us: by way of generalised economic slowdown, currency crisis, share crisis, meltdown of key commodity prices, massive job losses. Who is not in it, who? For a financial paper to fail to appreciate that, to report that, is sheer dishonesty which can only be explained in terms of the Rhodesian October syndrome. An attempt to impute on locals negative developments which are global. Yes, an attempt to excuse yourself as a manager and editor of your failing paper. Is there an equivalent of the electoral option in the corporate world? Could we invoke it?

Between two myths

For quite sometime, in fact since the 2013 election which delivered unwanted results for the West, there has been a concerted effort to plant the idea of mass action, the idea of an unconstitutional route to power change. The line of "you can rig elections , but you can't rig the economy", was not local, could not have been local. The economy cannot be a weapon in the hands of local politicians who don't own it, who don't control it.

How can that ever be? Except for Zanu-PF, and even then marginally, none of our politics are based on economic interests, economic control. We are very far from that level of evolution, which is why our politics continue to go back to liberation myth, or to go far forward towards inventing another myth, the "democracy" myth. We can only mobilize around a struggle we have won -the only real thing which is ours - or around a democracy we can promise, itself a nebulous magnitude. In between is the economy, itself the only reality and key determinant of all politics in normal societies.

Only an irrigated acre

When Zanu-PF sought to move its politics from the bedrock of liberation to that of the economy by way of land and indigenisation, it discovered its opponents were not locals, much as there were locals who pretended to simulate economic politics. Its opponents were abroad, for abroad was, and is, where owners of, and players in, the economy are located. Both ZDERA and the European sanctions made it clear the quarrel with Zanu-PF was over the economy, never over this will-of-the-wisp called democracy.

Outside the small drip-irrigated acre in Buhera, Tsvangirai has no stake in this economy, does not exist in this economy. What has platinum to do with MDC-T? Or with Zanu-PF except as a policy-maker? The closest Tsvangirai got to the economy was as a boiler operator at Trojan, some little, invisible cog in a mighty wheel of overseas capital. It stands to reason that an economic marginal can only yield politics which are also marginal. Politics whose script is written and permitted by real economic owners. The Tsvangirais of this world do no more than add atmospherics to the whole drama. This is why they need those noisy instruments called the private press, indeed why their politics do with headlines.

Many more alternatives

Tsvangirai and his politics do not pass for an alternative to Zanu-PF; he is the dummy of the entrenched economic interests in this economy which Zanu-PF has antagonized, would or may need in the event of an ouster. He cannot employ the economy as a weapon; he does not have it. He can only benefit from its use by those who own the economy. And these are outsiders.

And as the events of last year clearly showed, he is not the automatic beneficiary. There are many alternatives for owning capital, which is why his voice as an alternative is disproportionate to his chances. His chances passed as way back as 2008. The debate around his fitness as a candidate has not come from Zanu-PF; it has come from external vested interests wanting a local face, and from his peers in opposition who know that such is the search for anxious capital. Capital has been frantically looking for a viable alternative to truculent Zanu-PF. Or at reinventing a pro-capital Zanu-PF.

Instrumentalising labour

So the you-can't-rig-the-economy mantra is the West's response to its failure to wrestle power from, or to delegitimise a Zanu-PF victory. Biti and Tsvangirai must not pretend it is their disputed slogan. It's a slogan of and by owners, not that nearly lot. And the abuse of the Supreme Court judgment is quite consistent. Here was capital calculating that mass retrenchments would create a situation of social conflict leading to an ouster of Zanu-PF.

The MDC-T split response goes a long way in nailing real agency. It was not their initiative, nay, it was an initiative which dug deep at the heart of their founding when it suited capital. That brings out a clear story: in 1999, capital used labour to agitate politically; in 2015, capital used mass retrenchments of labour in the hope of generating greater, more definitive agitation. What is consistent is not the role of labour. Or its supposed politicians. What is consistent is the political goal of capital, how these goals instrumentalise labour in their wake.

Rhodesian seers

And the Rhodesian syndrome? Check your record: all agitation scenarios for oppositional capital have always been set in spring, preferably the hottest months of September and October. There is a clear script founded on a psychoanalytical presumption of greater irritability of the native mind in about that period. Jan Raath and his club of Rhodesian journalists are real believers in that.

That our media share in the same bespeaks of the enduring hold the Rhodesian and western ethos enjoy in the newsroom. We have to have an agitational media every spring, and for as long as capital relates antagonistically to Zanu-PF. That is a fact. We have a crop of politicians and editors who rely on foreigners to know or approximate the national psychology. Of course they are chasing a mirage.

When heat rains down on everyone

Last week I raised the cushioning effect of key factors in our political economy, factors which prevent dead-end case in our situation. They also forget that should it ever be true that the national temper rises in spring, that holds for all of us, citizens and government alike. In the unlikely event of that ever happening, how far are people ready to push; how far are the authorities ready to pull? The October heat rains on both players, possibly alike! But in this distracting scenario-building, there is one loser: national consensus on a turnaround.

And a turnaround is underway, much as the opposition media chooses not to see it. It is very easy to feel and react to the overbearing October heat; it is very difficult to see the golden-brown shoots of the mutondo tree, heralding a creeping summer. The good thing is, summer will still come, happen, with or without ululators. And we shall all go uu-la-la-la. Seeping nectar from petals of mutondochururu, braving bee stings in the process.

Icho!

nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw