A response - It's unMthwakazian, Mugabe has never been the enemy!

Thank you for your short rejoinder to my article which appeared on Bulawayo24.com on 09th August 2014, Mnu Velempini Ndlovu.

Protecting uMthwakazi from demagoguery
In the present context, everything must start and end with 'Mthwakazi'; what it means to be Mthwakazi or Mthwakazian. This is important to underline because being Mthwakazi isn't a prior claim, an entitlement, or something given by prior 'owners' as a reward for 'good' behaviour to 'outsiders' or newcomers. UMthwakazi is a value system based on the ubiquitous and extensive concept of Ubuntu claimed and owned privately and collectively by all who subscribe to it. As such, Mthwakazi or Mthwakaziness isn't something static, but is something that is dynamic as such a value and living system.

A brief point about how 'uMthwakazi' came about, and what it is now, is in order. There are many different explanation, with some locating that term during or post-Mzilikazi. See for example, Cont Mhlanga; others like Ray Magaya Tshuma explain it purely in linguistic terms. I believe the more accurate version is antecedent to both these versions.  

The word 'Mthwakazi' existed well before Mzilikazi in South Africa, and that is why it is still in use there even today. Many will know the Xhosa female jazz artist, 'Mthwakazi'.

'Mthwakazi' is really a 'refinement' or bastardization of a Zulu/Xhosa phrase: umbuthwa, meaning a union. Personified, it is 'umbuthwakazi'. Over time, however, the 'b' and 'u' in that word have been dropped, leaving the now commonly used word: Mthwakazi.

A nation-builder, it is easy to see how and why King Mzilikazi - with but a small group of men, women and children - would have found this name attractive to his nation-building venture. Thus, that name has never lost this, its core meaning since the days of King Mzilikazi and that is why uMthwakazi - whether you choose to use the name Ndebele or Mthwakazi - is not reducible to a tribe or ethnic group. UMthwakazi is a sum of its parts, ever-expanding and adapting. Admittedly, it is with King Mzilikazi that the name got its political prominence.

I guess you know which part of your rejoinder this is addressing, baba Ndlovu.

Once we start tempering with the core, the core value of Mthwakaziness - and subjecting and reducing the name to a political commodity that can be wrapped in the political paper bag of demagoguery - we are by that very act alone, unMthwakazian and contra-Mthwakazi.

President Mugabe is not Mthwakazian, not because he is Shona, nor are some Shonas not Mthwakazian because they are Shona. President Mugabe is not Mthwakazian only because he has attacked and sought to repudiate by State power, Mthwakaziness, as have those Shonas who have supported and continued to support Mugabe's political assault on Mthwakaziness. A fortiori, or on the strength of that fact, Mugabe and any Shona who subscribes to Mthwakaziness, are Mthwakazi.

Exclusivity, therefore, is the very antithesis of Mthwakaziness, and when it seeks to malign, unacceptable.

An ugly face of tribal tyranny
Mugabe is just the ugly face of a tribal tyranny at the apex of which he sits - not his face in person. He is not - as a person - and has never been - uMthwakazi's enemy - even as he may have himself as a person hated uMthwakazi. Indeed, here, there is a strong case to be made that unrestrained personal hatred combined with institutional excess to produce the Gukurahundi outrage, but for me and you, that is as far as it goes. And this realization isn't primarily moralistic, but mainly political. You collapse uMthwakaziness by any other construction.

Political blindness is politically expensive, as we by now, should know very well know Mthwakazi.

If we blindly helped the #Tajamukas, MDC-T's and ZPF's of our time (because of your blind hatred of Mugabe) - all of whom are Shonaists at their core - and have no possibility of disgorging that Shonaist understructure, how are we helping ourselves Mthwakazi? How does leaving an oppressive system intact and changing merely its face, clever? And such a mistake would result because we have confused and conflated the system with names; persons.

Remember, in this endgame, there has been an unprecedented equalizer that nobody - absolutely nobody - foresaw. The Mnangagwas of our land - and others like them who are now in the political cold - never saw any of this coming. Who can predict the future anyway? They thought their brutality against uMthwakazi in the 1980's was virtually their self-coronation, but they are now finding, suddenly, that the road to State House is not a promenade lined up with cheering Mthwakazi vassals on either side of the promenade. The game in town has changed - suddenly and counter-intuitively!  

And in this endgame, what is now exposed - and up for grabs - is not Mugabe, but the State. And only Mugabe has his hands on that. Isn't that exactly what everybody wants, including, and more so, the so-called 'successionists, to take control of the State'?

So how can it be wrong for Mthwakazi to try and lay her hands on that prize now, when it counts most - and when everybody is doing exactly that - and when the opportunity is presenting itself to Mthwakazi, not somebody else? Why antagonise such an 'offer'?

The Heavens have fallen before
On 7th August 2004, the National Party in South Africa - by that time the New National Party - announced that it had voted to dissolve itself and join the ANC. Yes, the ANC! The rest - as they say - is history.

On home soil, in 1890, the Shona fought on the side of colonialists against King Lobengula and the Ndebele State in the First Matebele War. The Shona would also only join the Second Matebele War (Umvukela) months later, after the Matebele.

As I write, the Hung Councils produced by the local government elections in South Africa last week are the subject of coalition discussions that might result in even ideological enemies going to bed together - unless the ANC government decides to order re-runs. The UK has only recently emerged from a coalition government of the extreme left and extreme right (not far right) - 'irreconcilable' political enemies at the best of times, you can say. Examples from across the world are many!

What is the point here? It is not merely a problem if someone who has placed a doughnut in your mouth has to then go on and tell you to chew it. (The risk is of course whether it's poisoned or not, but how about if it isn't?). It's a bad illustration, I know, but I still hope it conveys the point.

We need to unfreeze these political principles and strategies, activate them and make them work for us Mthwakazi. It takes courage. Making peace often requires more courage than waging war!  

Positioning and joining are not the same thing
The opportunity I spoke about in my article was positioning, not joining. But positioning can't be a mere promise of salvation, it has to be action - action from both sides. Naturally, there will be bargaining; nothing done blindly.

But what a way of getting retribution for Mthwakazi if the Shona (those who have created and sustained this system) - as such Shona - got to experience the full wrath of what they have created while uMthwakazi watched from a safe distance for a change? It all sounds callous, yet necessary. All the proof that uMthwakazi isn't a piece on a political chessboard!

A hollowed homogeneity
What is loosely referred to as the 'Zimbabwean electorate' has never existed. UMthwakazi as such has always voted against Mugabe, counter-wise to Shonas who have always voted pro-Mugabe. While this is broadly true, it remains a general statement. There is therefore nothing called a 'Zimbabwean electorate' in that homogenous sense. Truly, no one should blame the 'Zimbabwean electorate' for choosing a dictatorship without specifying which electorate they are speaking about. This is factual.

So it is very easy and possible to delineate uMthwakazi as a composite and separate electorate and to invite her to act in a particular way on a particular thing, point-by-point, issue-by-issue. That invitation in my article for Mthwakazi to take sides with Mugabe is specific to that particular point or issue.

What is broken in Zimbabwe - and this is critical - isn't Mugabe or even the system, but one part of the electorate. It is this braying mob that some uncritical Mthwakazians are asking uMthwakazi to give respectability to, endorse and validate its mobocracy. It is this section of the electorate that needs to recover and correct itself, not uMthwakazi.

When and how has uMthwakazi jika-erd, certainly not Jamuka-erd?
Why would uMthwakazi this late allow herself to be described by certain adjectives she has never been described by for the past 36 years by people who wake up today drunk and intoxicated with childish and childlike excitement? Or allow herself to be wrapped into or subsumed into agendas she is neither party to nor privy to their origins?

Ses'jikile, tajamuka - who has, when and who says?
UMthwakazi has fought a methodical, resolute, and sustained revolution alone - and in conditions extreme brutality and hatred - long before these fly-by-night inventions emerged yesterday to tell us sebejikile.  

But uMthwakazi kajikanga. Osejamukile ujamuke yedwa and without uMthwakazi. And those who want to beat pots and strip in public and call that a revolution or civil uprising are of course free to team up with those asebejikile lasebejamukile, but uMthwakazi has never and will never conduct revolutions that way. UMthwakazi cannot surrender its revolution to volume and excited noise - this late in the day! If uMthwakazi has to - in this endgame - then it must be on the side of order - an order that promises to store value, rather vandalize it, for a future time when we can fight another day - for something!

No to Congolization of the State
Mthwakazi, we have to refuse and resist the Congolization of the State, however we may disagree with the State. We are here being made to choose between order and disorder, lawfulness and lawlessness by this marauding mob passing itself off as a revolution. In that choice, Mugabe has been made to glint.

In order, there is a lot for Mthwakazi to gain, in disorder and lawlessness, everything to lose! And we are not about to easily surrender a jewel that our forebears built with blood, sweat and tears by taking to flight when frenzied Barbarians come down the hill braying and shouting. Those Barbarian gave us this tyranny in the first place, and we are not about to partner them in fostering another! Let them get rid of it on their own; in their own way! The old rallying cry of divided we fall united we stand rings hollow to a Mthwakazi that now knows better!

As I said in my article, those who are behind this excited madness are those who want to take everybody down the abyss of lawlessness out of which they will emerge with a re-privatized State and a murderous purge soon after. I think it will be a tragedy if uMthwakazi - after following this mob blindly -  was made to look back a few years down the line and think of the Mugabe years as a period of glory!

When you are so wrong you are right
At the time of writing this response, your reply Mnu Ndlovu has generated 1260 views against my original article's, 772. Clearly, your view resonates better with uMthwakazi (maybe) than mine. But isn't that where the problem begins rather ends - sometimes - that we go along with what is 'safe' and usual? But how about if what is 'safe' and usual is wrong or outdated, or static - or even retrogressive? I do not have the answers to these questions myself, and have no way of knowing if they are the right questions to be asking in the first place, but I look at the so-called 'Unity Accord' before it was 'signed' and after, and find myself asking myself: Should the right questions have not been asked throughout?
Against received wisdom, Galileo was thrown into prison for saying the world was round. You and me are of course not on that scale, Ndlovu, but I'm using this example dramatically, and asking: Is there a time when your ideas can be so wrong that they are right - as clearly I believe I am here?

And how about if you can't even see an opportunity that presents itself as one because you have turned yourself into this straightjacket of rejecting, dismissing and accusing off-handedly?

And then you wake up one day to find that your enemy has grabbed - by the same tried and tested method you didn't avail yourself of - the same opportunity you knew to be one but didn't take at the opportune time because you are decidedly anti-.

Now, that is losing!

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Vuli Moyo <vuli.moyo@gmx.com