“Seen in that light, black bodies came to embody evil and bestiality.”

—Munyaradzi Mushonga.

In our culture, women are either Madonnas, or mahure, whores. The Madonna is the image of pure placid perfection: the silent sweet bride, the clean woman, the one who greets the sun at its rising. Nowhere on her is the stench of sex, the smear of impurity. She is unspoiled. She is domestically competent, the pretty perfect picture of femininity. The hure on the other hand, is dastardly and deranged. An insubordinate, a roaming roving wanderer, uninspired by the virtues of asceticism, sleeping at all hours, clumsy with the mugoti, parading the shameful black body as though it were a prize. Speaking where one should be silent, making demands where one should ask for nothing.

Often in our culture’s heavy handed surveillance and policing of women—the impassioned efforts to subdue and subjugate—claims are made about preserving an authoritative ‘culture’, and morals. They are spoken of as though real, realer than ever, realer than life itself. But if we are to learn anything from Gramsci, it is that notions of ‘common sense’ should be resisted and challenged. In my attempts to dispel such notions, to display that often what we cling to desperately as ‘culture’—this metric against which we measure the world—is manufactured, I traced through Zimbabwe’s history the manufacturing of the ‘Madonna/Hure’ dichotomy. I found that the enforcement of these practices and beliefs that subjugate women were based off of misapprehensions about our pre-colonial societies, which came to be amalgamated with colonially constructed beliefs. I found that the advent of colonialism introduced new understandings of the body, of sex, of sexuality, of gender. In some ways this was deliberate, and in some I believe inadvertent. There is some senselessness, I believe, in allowing one’s life to be dictated by norms which are as real as fiction.

Hure, is a Shona word which translates loosely to the English word “whore.” The word finds its origins in the Afrikaans “hoer”, often used in mining areas in South Africa, to refer to the single women involved in the commercial sex trade, who offered their services to the lone men living in Bantu areas.1 This word travelled across the border, carried possibly by migrant workers and became transliterated into the word “hure.”

With the passage of time, the word ‘hure’ became synonymous almost with the word “woman.” It transmogrified into a state of being. The word hure carries with it heavy and brutal social consequences. Whores are alienated, ostracized, and punished. Whores are disobedient women, unpunishable women, women who roam, wandering women, clothed women, unclothed women, black women.

Watching Women

When we were girls this is how it was: we were watched. Watched all day, at all hours, at any hour, for all reasons, for any reason, for no reason. Watched at first light, surveyed when it was dark. We clutched our purity in our fists, slicing at the palms, and knew and feared the ease with which it could be snatched from us. The panopticon prison of womanhood affirmed that we were Madonnas at threat at any moment of becoming whores.

Except we were not Madonnas at threat of becoming whores, and within this notion there was a hidden simultaneity: That the Madonna is the whore, is the dirty stinking thing waiting to be unveiled. It became clear to me that the body, the black body, was a site of contradictions: Honor, shame, and humiliation ensnared in grisly and bloody battle. The body did not exist for its own purpose, pleasure or displeasure.

The body paralleled Rhodesia. If Rhodesia was ‘one big prison’,2 then the woman’s body too was a prison. If spatially, Rhodesia was a concentration camp, a site of contestation, of plunder and pillaging, but simultaneously, the jewel to be freed and won over at any cost, then Zimbabwean women’s bodies are sites of similar contradictions. Extremes and the oscillations between them have been our greatest inheritance. The nation plundered as the woman is plundered, the land exploited as the woman is exploited, the land subjugated as women are subjugated. The concentration camp, the prison, mirroring the prison of the woman’s body. A nation living in captivity as women live in captivity.

Bushmen, Bantus and the History of Surveillance

There is a mirror image in the manner that the concentration camp prison Rhodesia was surveilled, and the manner in which the black woman’s body is surveilled. I attempted to trace this history of surveillance, and found its starting point best articulated in Marc Eprecht’s book ‘Hungochani’, in which he attempts to trace the history of what he terms a ‘dissident sexuality’ in Southern Africa. After the Bantu migration to the Southern parts of the continent, new social relations, and the consequent understandings of gender and sexuality formed. It is around this time that the language of wealth was first spoken. Far different from the migratory hunter-gatherer Khoi or Bushmen society, with its broad conceptions of sexuality, the Bantu groups that had migrated to the South, had an agrarian economy. Agriculture was central to the organization of these various societies, and it demanded labour.

This necessitated the control and surveillance of sexuality, including that of women’s. Among women of the ‘Shona’, it was observed that they were rewarded (and inversely punished) for their ability to conceive many children. It brought much social and political reward to women to have many children. Sex that resulted in male orgasm without pregnancy was viewed as wasteful. These children would be labour for the family’s prosperity, a cultural practice that still persists.

It was not seemingly for any moral reasons that women’s sexuality was so tightly controlled in these pre-colonial societies. If there was any scandal in adultery or in pre-marital sex, it may have been because of the economic rather than solely social ‘moral’ implications. Virtue and honor, as we have come to understand them in the Christian influenced 20^th and 21^st centuries, were more tied to prosperity than anything else. Perhaps it was why women’s adultery and sexual activities outside and inside of marriage were so stringently controlled and strictly punished. The threat of impoverishment and family destitution, might be what drove the strict policing of women’s bodies and sexuality in the first place.

This is how it felt to be a woman: Swallowing mouthfuls of fear and shame. Choking on it and vomiting out of the bowels putrid fear and shame. Shitting it out but only to consume it again. While making my way through Eprecht’s book, I found it difficult to identify this shame. It was not the same kind of shame I knew. And so I knew then that it had to have come from somewhere else, undergone a cosmetic surgery of sorts. I had to find its true face.

Surveillance

The black populace of Rhodesia, indeed even the white populace, were watched every day and through the night. Watched in the ‘concentration camp’ protected villages, watched in the towns and cities, peered, poked and prodded. Watched in the houses, watched in the schools, watched by spies, watched by each other. Marechera wrote of this surveillance: “And the eyes of that House of Hunger lingered upon you as though some indefinable beast was about to pounce upon you.”

The culture of surveillance that had already existed pre-colonially, metastasized with the advent of colonialism. Onto the land, spilling from the bowels of some distant ships, came a flood of new men, whose eyes were everywhere, and who turned the indigenous women’s bodies into sites of heightened sexuality.3 Writing in the Rhodesian (now Zimbabwean) Herald, a Rhodesian official remarked that African women “have more of the animal about them in sex matters and [that] they have not the restraint and control that white women have.”4 A number of the colonial settlers took African women for wives, among them including Courtney Selous, after whom the notorious military regiment the ‘Selous Scouts’ are named.

Black women’s bodies suddenly found themselves sexualized as they were abused with impunity. The miscegenation laws that prohibited sexual relations between whites and blacks, only applied to black men and white women, with white men making repeated attempts to thwart the implementation of legislation that would regulate their sexual relations with black women.5 Munyaradzi Mushonga writes about the dimensions of race, sex and class in Rhodesia, and displays that white men lorded their racial and sexual power over black men and women, and white women as well. A steady population of Coloured children were even born in Rhodesia over the years, some left abandoned by their white fathers who would not claim them.

Assessing the social effect of the asymmetrical gendered pass laws in Rhodesia, Barnes notes that the relative level of ‘freedom’ of mobility afforded to African women, bred resentment in their male counterparts, who were on the inverse, heavily policed, controlled, surveilled and herded6. Although attempts were made to extend the enforcement of the pass laws to African women, that did not materialize. Complaints were made by African men to District Native Commissioners to enact legislation as fears arose that they would not be able to control their women. Many reasons were cited for the State’s hesitation to implement pass laws for women, including fears of indignation.

The subversion of the norms, mores and culture of the precolonial society was a process that happened swiftly and slowly, in simultaneity. A new social, economic and political order came to be established, violently rupturing what was into what came to be. What came to be was this: a stew of strange ingredients. One reason that was given for the necessity of laws that would regulate the movements of African women, was the fear of venereal disease. In the subverted new world, the one of Marechera’s perversions and Mungoshi’s stasis of nothingness, many black women seemed to turn to sex work as a means of survival. This was in the new world that Mushonga so aptly presents to us as one of a grisly transformation. The black body transformed into the image of depravity, of a lewd sexuality, of beastly urges and primal instincts. The ‘Black Peril’ swept over the land, with white settlers fearing the hypersexual black man, whose deranged and dastardly sexuality threatened the perfect purity of white women.

I have written before about Zimbabwe and its strange dichotomies and contradictions, and one such dichotomy, perhaps the one that mothered them all, is the racial dichotomy. Within the racial dichotomy (black and white), lay other dichotomies (pure and impure, clean and dirty, proper and improper, prudish and prurient.) If black bodies came to be the living and breathing manifestations of all that was animalistic, all that was lewd and lascivious, all that was dirty, and all that was unholy, then some manner must have been constructed to rid them of this very stain that could not be scrubbed out.

While the colonial settler project inevitably (mis)shaped the identity of its subjugated black populace, simultaneously, it was shaping that of its beneficiaries as well. Ushehwedu Kufakurinani writes about the role of Rhodesian white women in “mothering” the nation, and subsequently civilizing it.7 Alongside the churches that sprouted across the land, establishing with them missions with schools and hospitals, white women practiced their own welfarism. They established clubs and societies with the aim of teaching domestic skills to African women. In this manner, white and black identity were shaped, each informing the other.8 The black populace of Rhodesia was viewed as inferior, susceptible to primal urges while also possessing the kind of child-like naivety that needed the guiding hand of White Mother or Father to lead them to enlightenment.

Perhaps it is from these interactions, these introductions to new domesticity, and the shame of the inherent wild sexuality of the black body that our black Madonna was born. Whatever the Madonna is, it is a fiction. It modeled itself after the domestic and maternalistic White mother, who ruled the home and knew its ins and outs. Black dirtiness (actual and metaphorical) was cleaned out. White society viewed the African population in need of guidance, and if the Africans were children, then they were children who were raised in their mother and father’s image. If black was prurience then white was prudence, and it was this prudence to which we aspired.

Our fears about women who roam at night, daughters that are anywhere but in the home, women who are drunks, dirty unclean women, and ‘prostitutes’ are really legends. As I mentioned earlier, it is during the settler colonial era that the word hure traveled across the border, a transliteration of the Afrikaans ‘hoere.’ Due to those fears of venereal disease, which white farmers complained were being spread by roving groups of nameless black women, changing their names as they passed from this place to the next, it may have become necessary to name and identify these kinds of women, to differentiate them from the others.9

Under such a socio-economic and political system, it was inevitable that differentiations be made between the ‘good’ blacks and the ‘bad.’10 Good women were not rovers, they stayed in the home. They put to practice what the white women’s organisations had taught them about home economics and homemaking. Another dimension comes into play when we remember that in the towns and cities where black men mostly went to work (as well as the mines), it was by deliberate design that black men lived apart from their families in single men’s quarters (one calls to mind the Lobengula housing structures in Bulawayo.) Some of these men left wives behind as well as children. Could these women have come to scorn the single women who compromised their marriages and families? Especially given that this was at the same time that missionaries performed the Lord’s work, introducing to the black savages new understandings of fidelity, and a new way of understanding marriage and the bonds formed between husband and wife.11

Cleanliness and Dirty Whores

Kufakurinani writes that part of what drove white women’s welfarism efforts towards Africans in the Rhodesian settler colony, were fears of disease. “Africans were seen as sources of diseases that could be transmitted to the European family” he states. Intertwined with the fears of disease transmission, were those fears of venereal disease carried by black women. Natives were the “reservoir of infections” and “tropical diseases” that needed to be cleansed. Africans, and their blackness were pollutants, diseased, and dirty.12

They were viewed as the source of disease, and the only reason to be concerned for their health was to either prevent the spread of their disease to the white population, or to ensure the necessary black labour pool, crucial for the building of the white paradise, did not get wiped out.13 Given Fanon and other post-colonial scholars’ theories of the subjugated internalizing their colonial master’s beliefs about them, it would not be so outlandish to believe that all this black peril—the sick black, the dirty black, the sexed up, the primal, paradoxically the childish, informed a shame of such magnitude, which speaks which such an authoritative voice that one could not help but listen to it.

Racial capitalism, and the introduction and development of consumerism also influenced “culture.” If the Madonna is cleanly, wiping and scrubbing away at the dirt of blackness, then there must be products used to take away this dirt and the revulsion it attracts. The construction of the ‘modern’ black family necessitated selling the image of placidity, civility and cleanliness through products. I found the book ‘Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe’ to be an compelling exploration of the role of consumerism in the construction of African identity in the colony. The capitalist boom post World War II flooded the emerging African market with products galore, products that could at least allow the approximation of whiteness.

Madonnas, Hures and the Future

The image of the Madonna metastasizes with time as those dredges of colonialism and the misapprehensive relationship with pre-colonial culture, floating at the bottom of the cup, are licked at by thirsty tongues. Independence and the emergence of a black bourgeoisie, and black capitalists, spurred on by the post 2017 coup explosive capitalism, create new manners of performing purity, and new manners of measuring prurience. This is evidenced by the lobola/roora institution’s constant warping over time, reflecting a society’s shifting perceptions of what good women are, and mostly what they are not.

If the literature has taught me anything, it is that Zimbabwe may be stuck in a perpetual state of stasis. The Zimbabwe of Marechera, Mungoshi and Kanengoni’s writings, is in many fundamental ways unchanged, its norms unchallenged. If there is a culture, then it is a dead culture. How can a future be forged when we are frozen in an unchanging past? Where today and tomorrow are just yesterday again? It is necessary, vital, to challenge the beliefs we hold onto the most, to loosen the vice-like grip we have on them, to bring them closer to us, there in front of the eye, to look them in the face, and to recognize them for what they tend to be: Cages.

note: (i love these.) i have found that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to compress complex and often bulky texts into short and readable essays. the discussions in much of the literature i read and cited are broad, and extremely complex. much gets chopped up, and the edges never quite make it in. i hope the essays are more of a starting point than an ending point. there are many talented scholars who have dedicated time, resources and a fiery will to writing about many of the issues we wonder and talk about. i try to include all the works i either directly consulted, or thought were of even peripheral interest. happy reading folks.

While these dialectical contradictions—the oscillations between the prudent and the prurient, the vast dichotomy between wealth and poverty, white and black, the co-mingling of the ‘traditional’ with the new, the embrace of modernity amidst agrarianism, a taste for religiosity even amidst decadence, violence amidst placidity, luxury in chaos—may either not seem so obvious, appear unrelated, or seem ‘new’, they are the manifestation of our own complicated history.

Kitsch

Aesthetically, this contradiction shields itself behind ‘the degraded landscape of schlock and kitsch.’1 Both schlock and kitsch refer to what is considered ‘cheap’, ‘overly sentimental’, related to the elitist concerns about ‘high art’, under attack by postmodernism. It is favored by and is accessible to the masses. Digestible, tacky, uncanny, weird, ‘untraditional’, ‘trendy’, garish, jarring. Mass consumption, which Greenberg attributes to the industrial revolution, and the explosion of production associated with capitalism.2

Alongside this comes the false notion, or the ‘illusion that the masses actually rule.’ This was the essential cog in the machine of the totalitarian regimes of both Mussolini and Hitler. In 2003 then President Robert Mugabe declared “I am still the Hitler of the time.” He proceeded to elaborate on this statement, stating that his sole objective was “justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources.” Like most figures of kitschy totalitarian ideology3, his Messianic self image was cemented when he said of himself: “I have died many times—that’s where I have beaten Christ.”

Schlock and kitsch might describe the tastes for conspicuous consumption, monogram logo clothing, the scarf, millennial grays, opulence and luxury that shouts, the infamous design of faces on party regalia (both opposition and ruling party), palm trees, LED lights, Artificial Intelligence, new builds and so on.

The main function of kitsch, which makes us ‘feel good’, is ‘saccharine’, pre-digested, obvious and ultimately tasteless, is to serve as a distraction. Kitsch appropriates feeling, resulting in what Adorno writes is a parody of catharsis. If it is meant to make us feel good, to smile serenely at luxurious living, to look at new malls, new ‘progress’ and feel good, why does it all feel strange?

If kitsch, and the ridiculous and absurd, is concealment, then perhaps in our context, it is the concealment of our contradiction, a historical inheritance. It is a ‘buying in’ of sorts. With more associations to the luxurious, the new, embracing of advanced technologies, more mimicry of the West and its associated fabulousness, comes a purging of our own inferiority. Although I endeavor to expand more on this aspect later in this essay, it is no surprise to post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon, nor myself, that after about a century of psychological subjugation, our post-Independence identity formation seems to have consisted of a desperate clamor to prove ourselves as “just as good” as our subjugators. To enter the rooms we had once been forbidden from entering, to have what we inevitably would have longed to have, after being relegated to the periphery.

While initially it allowed the peasantry turned proletariat, excoriated of their own traditions and culture, ‘to buy into’ their new culture and new identities4, in the post colony, kitsch might allow a formerly subjugated people, slick with the sheen of shame like sweat, to wipe it off with thin towels that only seem to spread the shame even more. The destruction of linguistic diversity through the artificial creation of the ‘Shona’ language to ease the process of psychic subjugation, the deceit, defeat and capture of the Matebele people, the forced displacement from ancestral land through the Land Tenure Act—these are all manners through which the subjugated subject was excoriated of their own traditions5. A new way of living emerged, pregnant with disaster, birthing screaming contradictions.

Kitsch serves the function of concealment. It shields the reality of what Forster terms “shit and death.” The shit and death of a collapsing economy. The shit and death of structural failure that has become endemic. The shit and death of chaos over a century in the making. Behind each new shining mall, the glare of its LED lights and slightly slippery white tiles, the shit and death of poverty. Artificial Intelligence is lauded and welcomed with open arms, and like Kundera’s ‘grinning idiots’ it is the bastion of a new frontier that the black man has trekked, more progress, more strides, concealing again the shit and death of mass poverty.

I wonder at times if it could it be an endeavor to find the Self, after suffering economic, social, political and cultural annihilation. The ‘patchwork’ buildings, colonial relics, gutted and fitted with trending architectural and interior design styles, a patchwork of identity. A Self split into so many strange and contradicting parts that we endeavor to force back together.

Perhaps there is an attempt to push away the furor of the shit and death and pain and strife and struggle of not only the brutality of colonialism, but that that brutality was packed with us in our bags and carried to the new temporal landscape of the present and future. The postmodern, the taste for schlock and kitsch, are perhaps emblematic of Fanon’s descriptions of feelings of inadequacy on the part of the colonized and a yearning for the master’s ‘better’ ways. While ultimately ‘tasteless’, and at times even absurd and impractical, such as the ‘deranged postmodern masterpiece’6 that is the recently erected Parliament building in Harare, perhaps the idea is to communicate progress rather than materially enact it.

The tastes for the big and beautiful, the new and modern, the technological, the savvy, are a desperate clamor away from the shit and death. To stamp the shit and death, their shame, their disgust, their hidden festering wounds out. However, this endeavor to get away from, only paradoxically seems to be careening us towards.

Building a tower of contradictions, which shall inevitably fall like Babel. It is patchwork piling up. A congregation of contradictions whose screaming voices are shouting each other down. Black varungu, blacks shitting on other blacks, black masters and black slaves, high-tech and poverty, industrial and agrarian, crowded desolation, digital and analog, new buildings and old tensions, the past and the future screaming at each other in the discordant voice that is the present.

The Spectacle

Media is the medium through which the contradiction is displayed. More access to the internet, to phones, and social media may also have something to communicate about crisis. As our gaze becomes more transfixed on the new, the technological, and the shiny, we can immerse ourselves in a reality unlike the shit and death of our current.

Unable to resurrect and finally facing his political death, Mugabe resigned, and a new cabal ascended to power in 2017, ushering in a new age with a democratized approach to capitalism. Zimbabwe is open for business. The phrasing used here, short, and catchy, positioning Zimbabwe as the subject, suggested that Zimbabwe is literally open for business, its spoils available to any and all and sundry. With a renewed fervor, now any and all have the opportunity to complete their own hero’s journey, the rags to riches, ghetto to suburb mythology which is spoon-fed to masses through radio, the internet and social media, utilizing the essential tool that is Spectacle.

Spectacle— the attraction to the unusual, the garish, the loud, the absurd, the extraordinary, the violent and at times the ridiculous, has always been a significant part of Zimbabwean society. In Alexander Kanengoni’s ‘Things We’d Rather Not Talk About’, the protagonist Paul experiences and participates in the brutal murder of his father, who has been accused of being a traitor to the liberation effort.

Against the sonic backdrop of terrified villagers, forced to sing and sing, a pleading Paul is forced to axe his father. The young guerrilla figures often shout and use violent language, shooting bullets into the air. Public executions may have been used as weapons in themselves, to ensure the people, whose support was crucial, remained aligned with the war effort. Dambudzo Marechera’s ‘House of Hunger’ describes a grisly scene where two executed guerrilla’s corpses are openly displayed to a group of schoolchildren. “Beatings are now a common practice in Rhodesia” said the Bishop of then Matebele, Kenneth Skeltor. He had been referring to the violent and brutal beating of an African man by Rhodesian police forces until he lost consciousness.7

Violence, displayed through spectacle, often involves the participation of the group, either as voyeurs, or as active participants. It is essential that the group be involved in the exercise of violence. Violent colonial practices, from beatings, to forced head shaving and all manner of degrading treatment, weaponized against a politically and economically subjugated Black populace, molded this populace in the shape of violence. Punishments were often doled out in front of others, perhaps with the ultimate messaging that violence was something to be expected, anticipated, and then enacted onto others. Again, in Marechera’s ‘House of Hunger’, the apathetic unnamed protagonist muses passively “What else could I have done, when Peter flogged her like that day and night?” What else could I have done? The violence extends into the innermost corners and crevices of the society, from the domestic, to the structural, exacted in the manner of a grand performance.

It is the attentions of the group, and the group’s many watchful eyes which have been behind the existence and success at the time of publications such as B-Metro, H-Metro and uMthunywa8. The attraction to the bizarre, the crazy, the scandalous and shocking, and ultimately the collective’s desire for catharsis through them, was channeled into social media and the internet.

Gossip pages, among them Zim-Celebs and the like, are platforms for mass distraction. With the Freudian assertion that human beings are drawn to sex and death, using them for cathartic purposes, it is no wonder that sex and death seem to pervade news cycles. Sex scandals, horror accidents, the freakish and insane, create channels through which the exorcism of frustration at terrible material conditions can be purged. Perhaps this might be behind the ‘mob’ culture, both online and real life, of our society. Witnessing may be a kind of purging. But it is also this act of watching and internalizing, that subconsciously informs us what we should be aspiring to.

‘Spectacle’ may also describe the style of conspicuous consumption that is favored, particularly by nouveau-riche bourgeois types, the beneficiaries of democratized capitalism. It is characterized by obscene displays of wealth, wealth as entertainment, and wealth as insulation and a barrier against the shit and death that characterizes the day to day life of black Zimbabweans. Again, social media and the internet are tools through which the language of wealth is communicated.

The spectacle invites us to be participants in it: either by watching, or by placing ourselves imaginatively in the position of the enactor of the spectacle. I watch wealth displayed and imagine myself as someday the displayer of such wealth.

With each ‘spectacular’ display of conspicuous consumption, monogram designer clothing, expensive alcohol poured onto the ground, hundreds of dollar bills splayed out, treasure hunts for cash, and or simple displays of casual money expenditure, comes the subtle communication that a failure to succeed is individual rather than structural. If Zimbabwe is open for business, it must be your own fault that you seem to find it closed. There are spoils, a mountain of them to be had, and it becomes each man’s mission to obtain these spoils.

Catharsis Revisited

If kitsch is a botched attempt at catharsis, and kitsch seems to be the predominant style, perhaps the salient question is what exactly is it that we seem to need catharsis from?

It is interesting to note that in Kanengoni’s ‘Things We’d Rather Not Talk About’, neither Paul, the villagers, nor the guerrillas find any resolution. Paul descends into madness in Harare, taking ‘refuge’ from the hallucinated guerrillas who he believes are still terrorizing him. Even though he is now in post-independence Zimbabwe, a new landscape, he is still chased by the ghosts of the past. The inextricable bonds of past, present and future are more aptly displayed in the non-linear Joycean work of Marechera, whose protagonists often, as a result of some psychic trauma, cannot clearly delineate between what is happening now and what has happened and what is going to happen.

As such, colonial violence is something that is happening, has happened and is going to happen. The narrator of Black Sunlight is the jester of what seems to be a chief in a pre-colonial setting, however then comes the appearance of the white anthropologist woman, symbolic of the impending conquest and subjugation of the native population. Suddenly, soon after, the Chief, sadistic and paranoid, orders that the narrator be punished by being thrown in the pit-latrine—an invention of the colonial period. Instead of the pit latrine he is swung from his feet in the chicken coop, another anachronism.

Like Paul, who travels into the free Zimbabwe, laden with the paranoia of the past, and the temporal jumble of Black Sunlight, so too has the violence of subjugation followed into the ‘new’ era. Perhaps it is this that we are so desirous of catharsis from. The pain, shame and humiliation of violence. Kitsch is described as a “self-congratulatory spirit”, one that Broch writes allows man to “recognize himself in the counterfeit image it throws back at him and to confess his own lies (with a delight which is to a certain extent sincere).”

This self-congratulatory spirit is enshrined in our Constitutions, that Modiri argues purport to thrust us into a liberal present while ignoring the systemic legacy of conquest that allows apartheid (and colonial) beneficiaries to continue to exist as beneficiaries, without any meaningful redress9. Modiri uses the word (dis)continuity, and ultimately it is our desire for discontinuity that may be at the heart of the attraction to what looks luxurious, what looks modern, what looks like wealth, what looks like access.

The counterfeit image reflected back to us, predicated on discontinuity, is one that makes us look like victors, conquerors, achievers, survivors—a limp spritz of water to cool us down while the whole house is on fire.

The humiliation endured may have ultimately resulted in a perversion of Self, perversion in Self’s relation to Other, and is so great, its forces operating so strongly, that one is influenced to any and every degree to escape that humiliation. It is a humiliation characterized by Marechera’s ‘hunger.’ The hunger to escape brutality, but only through the same brutality experienced.

Strange Dichotomies

An integral element of kitsch is that it is characterized by both prudery and prurience—the rigid adherence to strict morality while consuming the sensational10. The result of both these forces working in ‘tandem’ is incongruence. In a sense, this could also describe the ‘culture’ of Zimbabwean society, which often oscillates between the deviant—from sexual deviance, to extravagant displays of wealth, the proclivity towards alcoholism, the rising usage of narcotics, to the prudish—the near fetish for religiosity, and conservatism. Beneath the veneer of the ‘feel good’, lie wriggling maggots.

With Broch asserting that the self-congratulatory spirit of kitsch is a deception, could this not suggest that our belief in our victory and success is also a deception?

Behind every new development in Harare—buildings that seem to be sprouting out of nowhere, sleek, shiny, modern. Office parks, ‘malls’, enterprises, brighter lights, new forms of advertising, new media, new art, new clubs, new and fresh—lies the ugly reality of shit and death. The New, seems to be representative of a desperate race to outstrip the shit and death.

Hip-looking and luxurious architectural trends, palm trees planted amidst exotic lawns, aluminium windows, white walls, minimalism, the crisp and clean, anesthetize the pain of collapsed systems, and feel like insulation from the pervasive shit and death of every day life. Similarly, while art critics do not believe that kitsch produces any meaningful catharsis, and is a distraction, a “real forgery” that supports our basic sentiments, rather than challenging them, swaddling ourselves in endless distractions does naught.1112 It does not detract from the horror of the working class and rural peasantry’s conditions. Perhaps this is what Chigudu attributes to ‘the politics of disposability’, experienced by Highfields residents during the 2008 cholera crisis13. “People were dying like flies,” said one resident, with the general sentiment expressed being that they did not feel that the government, that anyone had cared about them. They had been relegated to somewhere beyond the scope of view.

Spectacle, the spectacle of technology, the distraction of ‘progress’, the bright lights and the ‘feel-good vibe’ communicated to and between people, may have the ultimate purpose of forcing us to Look Over There. Don’t look there. Anesthetization becomes insulation, particularly in the cities. Of the places outside of Harare, Marechera wrote: “All those places out there were crying for development officers, literacy advisers, health assistants, teachers—not writers.” Perhaps there is some acknowledgment here that even Art in our context, is bourgeois fancifulness. It is also an allusion to the contradictions we had already inherited—structures that had served the purpose of Black subjugation, reserves and townships that housed (or imprisoned) black labour, and the work that had to be done to dismantle them. Even Edward Ndlovu, ZAPU’s vice-secretary stated that Rhodesia was “one enormous concentration camp.”14

More of this contradiction shows itself when Marechera further writes that the rest of the country “existed only in news reports about dissidents, cooperatives and Blair toilets, not to mention Binga, where it was reported that the main meal of each drought stricken day was a tray of fried grass.” Already at this point, only a few years shy of a hard won formal independence, cracks had started to show themselves in our newly built house. The forces that would erode our house of stone already unveiling themselves—The tensions between the fronts, political squabbles, the two political darlings Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo and the frustrations between ZANLA and ZIPRA wings and the asymmetrical development (or rather strategic undevelopment) inherited from a colonial state in which its last leader Ian Smith had proudly declared “I don't believe in black majority rule ever in Rhodesia—not in a thousand years.”15

Not in a thousand years indeed. Smith, and other Rhodesian nationalists, vehemently rejected majority black rule, often citing either their fears of retribution (another Mau Mau incident) or their belief that “the blacks” simply did not have the capacity. Within these sentiments lies the admission that the entire colonial structure was designed to socially, politically, economically and psychologically impair the subjugated populace. More contradiction. White is right and such sentiments. Even Marechera seems to be aware of these contradictions in himself, having once expressed that it had never even occurred to him to write in Shona.

In her meditation on Marechera’s work, from a psychoanalytic perspective, Mika Nyoni writes that Marechera’s characters, who reflected the broader social setting of the townships, “had been perverted in a fundamentally irredeemable way.”16 So too was Paul, Kanengoni’s protagonist, suffering from a psychological disorder. In another story, ‘The Men in the Middle’, more violence is experienced by the community. A group of armed men—who neither the protagonist vaHungwe, nor the reader can identify as either guerrillas, or the opposite, Selous Scouts—kill the father of a man they accuse to be a Selous Scout. Suspicion, and paranoia characterized that time. The same suspicion and paranoia turned communities against each other, filled to the brim with the fright that either the next man was a sellout, or that you yourself could be accused of being one.

The New identities, associating ourselves with Tech, AI, the future, the luxurious, the wealthy, the comfortable, may also simultaneously be acts of disposing. Disposing what is ‘ugly’, backward, inferior—what overall suggests powerlessness.

They are a series of approximations of the colonial capitalist culture. It extracts the principles of colonial capitalism: that is Power and Domination displayed through Wealth, and attempts to communicate that in methods that are inevitably mediated by the dredges of pre-colonial culture that have intermingled with the racialized experience of subjugation, resulting in the taste for schlock and kitsch. Tastes that don’t quite fit, feel uncanny, or don’t make any sense.

The Dead Industry

Schlock and kitsch may also be representative of collapsed industries. With the crippling of the local manufacturing industry, and the rise of imported and cheap goods, so too will come the look and feel of ‘cheapness’ and ‘bad taste’ everywhere. With the collapse of the economy, a dysfunctional currency that is used asymmetrically and is changed seemingly with no rhyme or reason, inevitably more contradictions will arise. Less money and more poverty means a higher demand for cheap goods will emerge, leading to the mushrooming of the infamous ‘China shop’, emporiums of low quality goods, exemplified in the common ironic joke about “Made in China.”

Accompanied by the social confusion that arises through the endeavors to create a patchwork quilt of identity, the literally cheap, and the symbolic cheap, create an incongruent union.

The kitschy, absurd, weird, saccharine, overly opulent and luxurious, are ultimately not isolated aesthetic trends, but are inextricably wound with our social, political and economic history. They have something to say about our relationship with ourselves, with others, with progress, with citizenship, with belonging, with trauma, and with history itself. Answers about our complete and unquestionable victory, shield the shit and death behind the war, behind every single year before it and every single year after.

note: I always have so much to say which is how I end up with notes! I was afraid of this becoming too long and had to keep quite a few things out, such as examining the role of the church in totalitarian kitsch, and the contradictions between our hyper religiosity and deviance. It might end up being another essay of its own.

When I go toward you, it is with my whole life.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

The question of love is one that seems integral to our nature. It is one I have often questioned, tried (and failed) to study, poked and prodded and stared at in frustration. I recall the common modern mythology of love: The mirror lover, the one who is totally known by us, one who has been ‘made’ for us, one with whom we fit perfectly. The one who knows us, will rescue us from the isolation of Being. The one with whom we share a language, a logic, who will locate instinctively our subterranean aches. We move lithely like dancers to the music of this philosophy. At the end of this song there we will be, totally known, totally understood, totally—

Then arrives the shock at this now seemingly foreign Other, who we discover cannot entirely be reached, with his own sea of dreams and nightmares. What has lied within us, incommunicable, waiting for one who will understand totally, must now contend with the idea that the deeply personal, the tender and private, can never accurately be known by others.

I remembered suddenly an old memory. The first weeks after adopting my first dog, Poppy. Poppy was a German shepherd, but a runt, much smaller than the others in his litter. I remember the way he used to howl as if possessed, running across the yard. I remember that it seemed as big as a field and there was a swimming pool filled in with sand, turned into a garden patch. I remember that the carpet in one room of that house was red, almost like blood.

Love and the Limits of Language

Barthes conceives of language as a skin. “I rub my language against the other.” It has a sensory and erotic capacity, something that can be used to feel others. However, perhaps it is not completely so. Could language be limited?1 Something that cannot comprehensively convey the totality of an experience. This leaves us staring awkwardly at the idea that we are to an extent, slightly unknowable to each other.

While I have described in some way, that fond memory of mine with my first dog, who I carried dutifully in a box on my lap while we drove the 500 or so kilometers from Mutare to Bulawayo, I cannot totally communicate that experience. The bogeymen of childhood, the dreams that tormented me at night, what caused them, I can put into words, but still, the totality of that experience cannot be contained in them.

The weight, feeling and meaningfulness of that memory is dependent on many things. For example the car we drove in was a grey Toyota Corolla, which left my family before I could even truly remember it. The journey to Mutare, stopping at the Hot springs, their boiled egg smell, and holding my breath crossing Birchenough bridge because it wobbled. My cousin Karen. Christmas Pass. Each aspect of this memory is imbued with even more memory, more history—what we would probably call ‘Turtles All The Way Down.’ It would be impossible to create a comprehensive map of myself for the Other to study. Here, within me there is a shrouded place.

Lovers as Worlds

Each of us seems to me not to be an island but a world. A vast landscape, tremendous peaks, unseen depths. I wade through the pools of the Other. I yearn to have my world totally explored. I yearn for every tree in my forest of memory to be named and identified. But it cannot be so.

When I explore the world of the Other, I am wont to forget that this world is an entirely different landscape. Things are placed strangely here. I am enraged that the logic of this world does not seem to mimic that of my own. I am panicked at this vast unfamiliar terrain. This unknowable place. When I transmute the logical rules of my world here, they can only seem to beget chaos and disaster. The wood in that forest of memory makes a blaze where in mine it would barely spark. This is a place where I can be swallowed up.

Christopher Cowley writes beautifully that an integral aspect of intimate relationships is their opacity2. He describes this opacity as being particularly “rich and impenetrable.” It is rich because it is the breadth of moments— feelings of terror, joy, confusion, surprise— cultivated in each individual day of my life. It is impenetrable because I cannot communicate enough with words, with paintings, with representations, all of these experiences, or the impression they may have made on me.

While Cowley’s essay focuses on relational vertigo, he does write that there is a “special kind of vulnerable dependency on an ultimately unknowable other.” To be able to believe, perhaps even to trust, that this foreign world— which you realize you have entered with only a flimsy (and perhaps even poorly detailed) map— must shelter you, sustain you, that at times you must live there, is daunting, perhaps even impossible. How can this place possibly be navigated by us?

For Chekhov, this world is navigated through forgiveness. In the first short story of his anthology ‘Love,’ the protagonist, who finds himself disgruntled with the bores and irritations of engaged and then married life says, “I forgive everything…I forgive it all almost unconsciously, with no effort of will.” He forgives the strangeness of the woman he loves. It is this forgiveness that keeps him from viewing the world of his lover as being hostile. With compassion, the protagonist feels almost that this foreign world is even his own world (“as though Sasha’s mistakes were my mistakes.”) It is the last line of this story that I find most captivating. Chekhov’s protagonist wonders about the nature of his love for Sasha; where the forgiveness came from, of her foreign world and her way of being, that once would have “made [him] wince in old days” but can now only move him to tenderness. He doesn’t know.

I have become fond of the track ‘Love Takes Miles’ by Cameron Winter. Partly because of its suggestion that love is a landscape traversed. To know the Other I must enter her world, and I must journey through it. I must journey through it with forgiveness, I must journey through it with vulnerable dependency, I must journey through it with courage, I must journey through it with faith. I must journey having satisfied myself with the idea that this world of the Other is too vast to ever become knowable to me. I must journey without any preconceived notions as to my destination. It must be a selfless journey.

D.H. Lawrence is famed for his reverent attitude towards being. In the foreword to the first version of his novel ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ his wife Frieda writes, “For Lawrence, all creatures had their own mysterious being…Lawrence had this desire to know all the universe in its different manifestations.” There could be something to be learned from Lawrence: Each of us contains an incommunicable mystery, and to love each other is to acknowledge this mystery. It is to journey for the journey’s sake. I go into the world of the Other for no other reason than to be in that world. Lawrence famously despised the mechanistic ideas of function and usefulness, preferring us to draw our attention to the “magical spurt of being which is a hare all explosive with fulness of self.” I admire the world of the Other, I walk through his veld, I stare up at the constellations, I bear the chill and frost for no other reason than to be there, to experience it. I do not ascribe inherent meaning to action because this world has its own history.

Perhaps then, love and connection are not exact, but a series of well-meaning approximations. Janet Malcom delivers a hard line: “We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others.”3 She goes on: “We cannot see each other plain.” To Malcolm this explains the tragedy of personal relations, especially romantic ones, which she contends contain a profound impersonality and are very truly solitary.

This detracts from the romantic erotic conceptions of the Greeks for example, who Anne Carson writes conceived of lovers as a type of metaphor and symbol. Aristophanes’ love is one of yearning for reunification with our other halves, torn apart from them by the gods. This might be where the ‘modern’ concept of romantic love derives from.

But how can the two halves—so differently shaped, with different grooves, formed from different materials, containing different histories— compose one meaning? How do we reconcile these contrasting parts, that Malcom’s psychoanalyst claims are irreconcilable? Can we? I agree with Malcolm partially, in that there is no point of total knowing. But while we cannot entirely know each other, we can try.

Knowing the Unknowable Other

First, I must rid myself of the notion that I know the Other. Carson traces a parallel between the analogies of the “wooing of knowledge” and the “wooing of love.” Sokrates was in love with the search for knowledge, desirous to find answers. This search begins with an acceptance that “I do not think I know what I do not know.” I do not know you, but I am on a search for you. I will not find the Other resting in one place, but across a huge shifting landscape. It is an expedition that is cyclic, continuous. It is one that I will be on for my whole life, for the Other’s whole life. I recall Rilke’s declaration: When I go toward you, it is with my whole life. Rilke does not write “when I arrive at you”, he chooses to use the word “go.” There is a movement. Retrospectively, I find that the trouble with me is that I was always quite desperate to arrive at the Other. To arrive at some determination, to say that I knew them. This involved imposing the (somewhat faulty) logic of my world into theirs and being quite flummoxed when it only made me understand it less.

Knowing might be limiting, and inflexible. Saying I ‘know’ the Other cannot be true when I have barely traversed their world. When I can never fully traverse it anyway. But this is not so pessimistic. Barthes’ intractable lover ceaselessly affirms love as a value4. “Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love within myself as a value…I counter whatever “doesn’t work” in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile.” Like Barthes’ intractable lover, who says, “Let us begin again” and crucially desires love’s return and not its repetition, we must be called to renewal. This means love and lovers are boundless, places that spark a continuous curiosity because within the one I love lies much to be discovered. Approaching new terrain, new difficulty, not with the logical rules of our own realms but with trust, and a co-operative spirit. So I cannot ‘know’ you, but I can look and listen. I can keep looking, keep listening.

Ultimately, the beginning place of an enduring love might be in the relinquishment. In acknowledging my precarious state of unknowing. In navigating this new world with a gentle curiosity. This world that is so unlike my own, it possesses its own kind of beauty. I forgive it. Like Chekhov’s protagonist I embrace it as if it were my own world, with its own mythologies and histories. Yes, we may not ever truly say we know one another, and yes we might be groping through Malcolm’s “thicket of absent others”, but it is in the action of ‘groping’, reaching, extending, journeying and looking that we can ‘know’ and love others. Perhaps in this effort we will catch slight glimpses of the truest tender parts that constitute the ones we love, perhaps in the reaching out we will brush against each other and perhaps on the journey we will encounter beautiful sights.

***

LOL I’m a huge fan of love letters and one I have actually committed to memory is one of Vladimir Nabokov’s to Vera. In it he signs off, “I love you, I move carefully so as not to break you…” Maybe we must move carefully through the worlds of our loved ones. Love is the navigation.

I think much about God on these bird watching walks. Listening to the canaries in the Acacias, crickets chirping hidden in the grass below I felt my way to a thought I had been determinedly avoiding throughout much of my conscious life: There is much mystery in this vast unknowable and un-masterable life. I have been determined to get my fist around it, to rationalize its myths and secret hidden corners, to shine my bright and septic light on them as if to display to myself that there is nothing to be afraid of. Finn Bowring discusses the unerotic aspects of science and rationalism in a chapter of his book ‘Erotic Love in Sociology, Philosophy and Literature.’ He writes:

I wish for a moment to let our gaze rest itself on the second half of Tolstoy’s question: How shall we live? Bowring argues that while scientific rationalization may provide us with the the capacity to calculate and define “how”, and then to establish means or mechanisms that can be controlled, there is still the question of “Why?” This belongs in the realm of the erotic, which I have already written about. It is incommunicable. It is unknowable and unmasterable.

An unfortunate and unforeseen side-effect of my atheism is it fed into a grandiose and mechanical desperation to seize life and thereby control it. The Dance I have referred to is a delicate interplay between resisting and yielding. The birds do not flap their wings ceaselessly. Often I have observed that they allow themselves to soar, to be carried by the wind, this unseen mystery that they cannot name nor understand, but trust. They cannot waste their reserves on a constant resistance that serves no other purpose but futility. The grass is swayed in the dance because to resist it means to invite certain death. Seeds are carried by this same wind, to pollinate elsewhere. This is how they continue. Yielding is something I fear. To yield to me, is to invite harm and destruction.

The wind is unseen, a senseless and strange thing. In The Dance, the birds and the plants accept this unseen thing. Acceptance. To accept is to understand, acknowledge and then embrace that which is beyond me. Acceptance demarcates the boundaries between my Self, and that which is external to me. That which is unknown and mysterious. That which conceals itself from me. That which speaks a different language. That whose substance and structure is foreign, and whose implications remain elusive to me. Could it be spiritual? The acceptance of having a limit. I cannot, and will never master anything, nor everything. Weber acknowledges that with science, with rationalism, there is a ‘dispiriting certainty, that every form of insight or knowledge is destined to be surpassed.’1

This statement perhaps encapsulates what has been a destructive attitude in my life. An attitude that has resulted in my being flighty and restless: An incapability to be content. A terror with what is had, and a fixation with what is not. I have written before that where God inspires fear, admiration, hatred, love, awe, contempt and terror in others, ‘He’, has only invited jealousy and envy from me. How impervious He must be to pain! I could dream about it, the inability to lose anything, fear anything. To know all that has happened and shall happen! To be limitless. Striving towards perfection, expecting that from others, ridding myself of my humanity—something I have always hated.

It is not so much the existence of ‘God’, or which one or which kind I am interested in, but rather the capacity of the human being to surrender. To yield. To know that there is more beyond herself. To fail. To be caught unawares. To be at the mercy of something. Intimacy for me, was something to be feared. It was the racing panting herald, stumbling on his feet through the city gates, screaming that war is coming. There can only ever be two in the erotic ritual: Conqueror and Conquest. While intellectually I knew this to not be true, being myself a subscriber to egalitarian principles, in the shadowed Self I knew I could not be the Conquest. If I was a Medieval king I would surely have been one who slaughters his own village before he surrenders it to foreign invaders. He cannot attempt to peacefully give it away.

I have mentioned the Conqueror and Conquest. The mechanical dichotomy thinking transcends the realm of intimacy, establishing an unsustainable inability to yield oneself to unavoidable suffering. If I were to draw a diagram of it, it would resemble the Ouroboros. By avoiding suffering, fearing the natural vulnerability that comes with being a creature in the wild, it is nearly as if that suffering is felt more intensely when it naturally comes. I could go so far as to say it even invites suffering. It sets the table for it, it lays out the finest cutlery so when it comes it feasts on your humanity.

When reading ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’, it is quite obvious to the reader that Raif Efendi’s fear and suspicion of other people, his terror at possibly being the object of ridicule and crippling shyness caged him and kept him perpetually alienated and alone. His restlessness, and the constant search for an external answer to his internal dissatisfaction, meant the world shone and glimmered from a distance, quickly becoming dull as soon as he entered it.

I recall a recurrent scene in several of the cartoons I watched as a child: The fool who comes out of the toilet and has a piece of toilet paper stuck under his shoe. He is the object of our ridicule. We know something he does not know: That in some way he is spoiled. Because we know, we the audience, have the authority. His foolishness, and thus his weakness, stem from his lack of knowledge. None of us wished to be this fool. Remember the dream of waking up naked in school. Often these images begin and end within the moment of humiliation. We do not move past them. We cannot process them, to perhaps then understand that there is another moment, several of them, after the humiliation. It will be metabolized in the natural bustle of things. Our focus replays like a broken record on that moment where we are all either the victim of or an audience to shame.

To yield and surrender mean to accept that we will be needy, annoying, cruel, embarrassed, awkward, grief-stricken, the object of pity and so forth inevitably in our lives. That is not the moment at which we must flap our wings determinedly because we shall surely tire of that frenzied beating, and fall out of the sky. It is the moment to soar.

The Internet, and the Theatre of Shame

Perhaps the internet, and its cruel cousin social media have had the adverse effect of being able to do three things:

i) Document our natural shame
ii) Platform it for an audience (thereby creating an infinite space where shame can be scrutinized and discussed)
iii) Freeze and memorialize it

We have now been placed in a dark theatre with a brightly lit stage where we can all examine each other’s shame. In the audience we all shift nervously in our seats, neurotically desiring to never be seen. We are a cruel and jeering audience. At times we are not even sure of what we are watching—all we know is that at the end we must identify what was done wrong, and so with squinted eyes and furrowed brows we attempt to establish new ways of moralizing, and punishing our behavior.2

There seems to me to be something strangely inhuman about this time. A shunning of mystery and of shadow. To be each in ourselves little gods, passing little judgements. Do we want to be good or do we want to seem good? We cannot find our way to goodness in that theatre of shame. After watching each other for long enough we can only start to simulate and perform it.

We cannot seem to name and acknowledge our inherent imperfection. In her poem ‘Satan Says’, Sharon Olds explores freedom, displaying that it possibly can only be found through an embrace with the shadow within us. The poem begins with the subject trapped, possibly in a false representation of the past:

I am locked in a little cedar box
with a picture of shepherds pasted onto the central panel between carvings.

To escape this oppressive box (coffin), the subject prays to Satan who tells her throughout the poem to say things such as “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” It is only through this repetitive embrace of the repressed and concealed shadowed self that she breaks out of the box, and becomes free. Perhaps similarly, when we can stop examining the subjects on the stage before us, and identify with them, their embarrassment or anger or meanness, we can explore more avenues to humanity, to goodness.

Without the acknowledgment of what is human, there go the frenzied flapping beating wings! We will not soar. For if we soar then we shall be transported to that stage, and we shall be the Fool, and we shall be punished.

God Again

I have begun to imagine the wind as a kind of god. This is how I picture it: When I am standing outside, observing the house sparrows carrying away pieces of bread, and the wind passes through the trees, caressing my face, I imagine I am also in The Dance. I imagine this wind is carrying me, but also carrying away my shame and my guilt. It is bringing what makes me human from somewhere else. It is bringing some other person’s joy, but also some other’s rage. It is transporting my own happiness, my embarrassment, my sorrow. It is carrying the joy of a child’s first introduction to the world, freshly out of the hospital, and raucous laughter from friends together somewhere. The heaviness of mourners in the graveyard, lifted from them, carried to me, and in turn taken from me, carried to another place. We are sharing it together.

Engels says of Marx: Fighting was his element. “He fought with a passion, a tenacity, and a success such as few could rival.” This fight, and this immense passion ring out clearly to me in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ when Marx and Engels write, “…[the proletariat] ever rises up again; stronger, firmer, mightier.” They are hopeful. I felt within me very strongly when I read this, that there was something to look forward to. I read an article in the magazine ‘Africa is a Country’ where William Shoki mentions the positive philosophy of Jesuit priests. He says a Jesuit priest said to him, “We have a positive theological anthropology. We are hopeful about human nature.”

Is it not hope then that is the bedrock of our ideology? Love and passion? Care? A belief that we have as much capacity to do bad as we do to do good. I do not think it is possible to extricate Marx’s passion and romanticism from his political ideology. Feeling and thinking are inextricable. They are wound into each other. My favorite writing of Marx’s is not a political writing at all. It is in fact a letter that he wrote to his father after his secret engagement to his love and later wife, Jenny. He says in this letter:

Dear Father,

When I left you, a new world had come into existence for me, that of love, which in fact at the beginning was a passionately yearning and hopeless love. Even the journey to Berlin, which otherwise would have delighted me in the highest degree…left me cold. Indeed, it put me strikingly out of humour, for the rocks which I saw were not more rugged, more indomitable, than the emotions of my soul, the big towns not more lively than my blood, the inn meals not more extravagant, more indigestible, than the store of fantasies I carried with me, and, finally, no work of art was as beautiful as Jenny. (My own emphasis.)

It is important that Marx loved passionately, that he could be changed by it, because love brings us forth into a new world. The possibility of a new world is what drives us to analysis, to diagnose what it is about this one that we could make better. It requires passion and belief, and the positivity which drives the Jesuits.

Recently I have been working through the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. In Sonnet 11 from the anthology ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’1 he writes:

Even the starry union can deceive.
Yet for now let’s allow ourselves 
to believe in the figure. That suffices.

Rilke is hopeful. He believes in belief. He believes in the reframing of perspective. While in actuality the stars that we view as constellations are millions of miles away from each other in space, he says we should “believe in the figure”, believe in the perceived unity.

Meaning is something that is made. There should be room for belief, passion and love in our politics. In conversation with my good friend yesterday, he said that we are trying to be good. We spoke about the role that our friendship has made in making us want to be better. I believe in goodness because I have seen it. I have seen the people around me try. I have seen love transform us. I have seen it move people towards the repudiation of all that is oppressive, unfair and unjust. I was moved by Engel’s eulogy because it is evident that he loved Marx, that they were true friends. It would not be outlandish to suggest that perhaps their friendship, and Marx’s love for Jenny fed into his analysis of the world.

Rilke writes that love “…is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.” (My own emphasis.) He aptly expresses what my friend and I were saying to each other. That our friendship has called us to vast things. Love has allowed me to believe in a new world— one that could be fair, one that could be just. I believe in goodness because I have seen it, and because I have seen it I will always work towards it.

Love is revolution. Love is repudiation. The late Zimbabwean academic Dr. Alex Magaisa wrote once about an encounter he had with the liberation fighter guerrillas during the war when he was a boy. He said they told him they were at war for his sake, for his freedom. He said they used to call them vakoma, which means brothers. Kinship, and the capacity to really love and care—to step outside of oneself, to be “called to vast things”, that is what drives revolution. This kind of revolution begins within. It begins with loving, and changing. Meaningful change requires a total shift.

Kinship extends to more than just other human beings. Kinship is the acknowledgment of even the natural environment. It moves firmly past an extractivist, masculinist relationship with the world—one predicated on taking— towards one that prioritizes giving. There is humility in it, acknowledging that I do not exist above or below anything, but amongst and within it.

Love and passion should always take us outside of ourselves, should always drive us towards change, towards repudiation, towards revolution, and towards the creation of a new world, and new life.

Painting from the series ‘#Bodies’ by Hugo Winder-Lind. Chose this painting for this essay because of the themes of connection and interdependence. I suspect it may have been inspired by ‘La Danse’ by Henri Matisse, which also displays instinctual passion and joy. The usage of green throughout emphasizes the theme of connection, and the inseparability of not only ourselves from others, but ourselves from the environment. The impressionist style creates the feeling of movement and flow. With regards to iconography, the circle may represent continuity, or change. Like ‘La Danse’, featuring dancers moving in a circle, a revolution means a complete rotation. Complete change.

My thoughts arrive like trains at a station, each idea a passenger that I must look in the face, greet, converse with, question, examine. Every action must be traceable to its origin, its departure point. For example: My urge to tame the environment around me might be influenced by a desire to engage with the environment as a thing of conquest. Something that exists at my mercy. The colonialist within me makes me believe I must be the master of the world, and not another creature within it.

This colonialist taught my great-grandmother and father this, when he chased them from the steeper mountains in Manicaland, closer to Nyanga, to the reserves of Vhumbunu. He taught them what his Power looked like. He taught it to them in the schools, taught it to them when he shaved their heads, taught it to them when he gave them his strange tongue. When he defeated the Matebele with rifles between 1893 and 1896 he taught them the power of this new kind of violence.

He taught them a new way of being: One which is vertical and not horizontal. He taught them that there is Man and Wife. That man is above wife, and that she shall be subsumed by him. He taught them this when he built the one roomed houses in Makokoba and the flats in Mbare. When man traversed the veld, left the reserves for the city, he arrived in these places and found there was no space for his wife, no space for his children. His children, the boy and the girl, had to fight for resources, compete against each other, but the boy would ultimately win. He would be the one to go to the new schools, to really learn this new way of living. He would join his father in the small houses in Makokoba with the communal toilets, his own family alienated somewhere from him.

The world was reshaped, transformed into something new. The tongue replaced by the pen. The spirit by one god. The world does not exist as it is, but as something that could be. Function and use. Land to farm, land to building. Creatures become pests. When I killed the spider, I thought I have to kill the imperialist within me. Thoughts arrive like passengers on a train. Each descends and I have to, I must ask, must say to them Hello, who are you? Where are you from? When I give them time they tell me their places of origin. The barren planes of patriarchy, the steep cliffs of classism, the merciless winds of colonialism.

Why does it seem that people are so hesitant to admit that the very foundations of this reality are influenced by structural dynamics? That a thing is not just a thing. The black widow was killed not only because of some base evolutionary desire to protect myself, but my desire to assert my dominance over this environment. The dominance the colonialist exercised upon by great-grandparents when he arrived like the premonition of death upon their doorstep and said You do not belong here. The only language that is spoken and can be heard is power. Wield it or die.

The very foundations upon which we build family, love and civilization are tied in many ways to colonialism, to patriarchy, to capitalism. What is it about our understanding of the world that refuses to be questioned? Does it placate our existential fear? Will slowly unpeeling the layers that are our existential experience is wrapped in lead to crisis if we fully uncover? Or is it out of fear of the Shadow and confronting the badness within us? Does acknowledging the colonialist within us, or the imperialist or the capitalist or the patriarch, make them more real? Will it suddenly burden us with the responsibility of killing them?

I can only repudiate that which I can acknowledge to be real and true. I can only be a true creature of transformation if I acknowledge that I am made of the basest of materials, and then I can be alchemized into something better. A woman said a while ago on Twitter that if she makes mistakes, she is just a human being, but if her male partner makes a mistake it is evidence of the ways men are socialized under a patriarchy to be careless and undisciplined by not punishing them hard enough for the mistakes that they make1.

This post caused a raucous discourse, and she was attacked. I saw many people say it cannot possibly be healthy to engage in a relationship like that. I wondered, what is so cataclysmic about acknowledging the ways that our understanding of the world is influenced by external factors. Our interpersonal relationships are not exempt from Power. That it is a dangerous falsehood to perpetuate that we all experience reality in the same way. What great calamity befalls us when we acknowledge the patriarch inside us?

Where is the room for radical repudiation if we are too afraid to name the ways in which we are made to be different? It does not validate the binary colonial gender/sex system to acknowledge the very real ways that it has influenced our lives, influenced our thinking, and influenced our behaviour. This year my brother turned six years old. His favourite food, other than Popticorns is rice. He eats it very messily, often leaving another mound on the ground that should be cleaned up. Patiently I have explained to him why he needs to clean up after himself, something he still does not quite fully understand, but tries to do. Why do I need to help? he has asked me. In contrast, his playmate, a three-year-old little girl, picks up her individual grains of rice, places them in her plate and waddles to the kitchen. She is too small to reach the top of the counter so she would hand it to me. Sometimes she even throws the leftovers in the bin.

Again, once I caught the two of them frolicking in the mud in the rain. Her mother gave her a stern scolding while my brother received a sigh. This kind of behaviour is expected of him. Already they are being taught to live differently. To engage with the environment differently. They are shamed differently for different things. By seeing only women perform domestic work he may begin to think it is “women’s work.” When he goes to school his hair is cut very short, cropped very close to the scalp. They say this is an example of a neat haircut. They also say it is a boy’s haircut. In his class he will see only girls have long hair, wear earrings2. They will become girls’ things.

On Christmas day a man said to me “You shouldn’t let him play with those.” His eyes were narrowed and hard, pointing at the Mickey Mouse doll I had gotten my brother. “He is not a girl.” When he is my age, approaching his mid-twenties, how much more of this will he have experienced? Will it be wrong for someone to acknowledge the ways that he has been raised to think of himself as being different from women? How much will he have to unlearn? There are approximately 8395 or so days in 23 years. Each day was a lesson for me in what being a woman is, a black woman in a former colony. A middle-class woman. An able-bodied woman. A Manyika Shona woman.

Within these 8395 days I was socialized to be an imperialist, a colonialist, a capitalist and a patriarch. That white is right. That to exploit is virtuous and I prove my value through discovering a means for transforming wage labour into profit. I was taught that domestic labour is my lot as a woman. Or that if I am wealthy enough I can pass it off to women poorer than me. I was taught that boys don’t cry. That men who are emotional are bitches. That I am not rational, but I am nurturing. Before I even reached high school, I began telling my mother I wanted to marry a white man because at least white men carry their babies3. This was in response to being told I had to learn how to cook and clean and manage a household for my future husband. I imagined him to be black and a terror because that is what I knew.

Within these 8395 days I watched my nanny buy Caro-white, a skin lightening cream, from a vendor while on an afternoon outing with her. At school people held ‘dissing contests’ and would say to each other “You’re so black if you jumped in a swimming pool it would turn into Coca-Cola.” I was praised often for my hair, which was long and chemically straightened. Grown women would touch their heads and say their hair was mufushwa. Nappy, and ugly. A boy in my class cried a lot, and our teacher would humiliate him for it each time. These are the lessons I was taught all my life.

In church, and at my Catholic high school I learned that we either belonged to God, or the devil. I used to live with my grandmother, a strict Catholic, in Budiriro 4, and above the fireplace she had a painting that depicted the passion of Christ and the three temptations. Jesus was white, and he had beautiful brown hair that shone with gold. The scheming devil was dark skinned, and his skin was ashen and chalky. We also lived with my great-aunt Stella, who I thought must be an angel because she had white skin.

Every single one of these days has been one I have had to unpeel like a covering. From the schools I went to I saw that the best schools are the ones with white headmasters and headmistresses. That netball was a black sport and hockey and rugby white ones. I discovered desirability and knew that certain bodies were better than others. That the boys did not like it if you were too tall, or too dark or too fat. That we did not like when the boys were too soft, too weak. We liked when they were strong and manly.

On the television I learned that America was a great place. That it was where dreams came true. I learned that there was a place called the ‘Middle East’, and there was always war there because every morning at 6:30 my father would turn on CNN or Al Jazeera and something was happening. Once, in a Bible Knowledge class, a Catholic sister said Islam is a religion of violence.

Within my own nation, I heard often from other children, Shona children, that Lobengula sold the country for sugar. Mugabe told Ndebele people to return to South Africa where they had come from. That they were dissidents. Visiting my Shona relatives during the holidays they pronounced Bulawayo as Bhurawayo. One came to visit once and was shocked that he could not speak in Shona to the people in the kombi.

Why then the shock and revulsion when one says that we are socialized to be a certain way? That it is our responsibility to examine our lives and our influences. That thoughts are not truth. They arrive like passengers, with luggage that must be checked in case they harbour something more sinister. A thing is not just a thing. That to repudiate privilege only comes from acknowledging it, acknowledging how it might make us harm others, and how to mitigate or even totally stop this harm. It does not come from false formal equality.

Joel Modiri writes about constitutionalism and conquest, questioning the extension of coloniality in post-apartheid South Africa4. He argues that the post-apartheid 1996 South African Constitution might entrench rather than address historical harm. That to pretend as though Independence (and the adoption of the Constitution) fixed the structural issues of apartheid is what allows these issues and the harm caused to continue. A new society was not made for Zimbabweans in 1980. We did not “start afresh.” True decolonization will come when we investigate and uncover the inner workings of the colonial system.

Similarly, I believe it would be grievously harmful to partner with a man and pretend as though our desire for equality in our relationship erases the hierarchy of inequality that governs our every day lives. That for my entire life I had to hear of a fictional husband who looms somewhere in the future, who I must prepare for, while my partner heard little to nothing about being a good husband or a father. That when we walk in a room, I have been taught to scan it for defects, for dirt, for organization. He just walks in. That before we marry the women I know will gather around me and tell me all the ways I must guard my marriage with my life. That in some places, it is unavoidable to give up your name, or that in Shona culture, refusing a roora will lead to a rejection by your family.

That as an able-bodied person, disability is somebody else’s problem. I am not taught to look at the world and see its failures and lack of accommodations. It simply exists for me. Ramps, lifts, guides, lights, even the harshness of the sun etc., are not my concern. But they should be. Acknowledging how I benefit, how I am taught not to care and to ignore allows me to think of how to be better. Investigating my language is an example. Recently with worry I have seen that certain slurs are returning to the contemporary lexicon. With the rise of fascism, and Nazi ideology, I am afraid that we are unable to see how we are marginalizing groups of people. Genocides begin with alienation.

This false equality must be rejected at all costs. While we are fundamentally the same, we have created structures that do not treat us similarly. We live within these structures. Ignoring this perpetuates harm, it stifles meaningful relationship making and distorts how we engage with the environment. When the train comes and its passengers disembark, maybe it is wise to look at them, really look at them, know them, and then let them be on their way.

Perhaps acknowledging the inequality of the world, and the ways that we are not so good to other people, or to the environment would place a responsibility upon us that we don’t want to shoulder. It would mean questioning our comforts and luxuries. It would recolour every day we have ever lived. It would mean maybe the people we love are not good people. We are not necessarily bad people when we don’t know, but like the Christian God declares in the Bible, knowledge of sin places a responsibility upon us. We will not be able to stand before him on that awesome and terrible day, the day of Judgment, and say “I didn’t know.” I am not religious or spiritual, but perhaps there is some truth to this. Maybe this is why we hate our thinkers and our activists and our scholars, because they are damning us.

Both/And, Moral Ambiguity

Yasmin says to Harper “it’s both/and”, to emphasize her belief in the complexity of life and its situations. She doesn’t believe in any one thing. She doesn’t believe in good or bad. She believes in the grey. ‘The grey’ and moral ambiguity are a key theme in not only this season but the entire show. All these characters operate in the grey and it reminded me of a tweet I saw months ago where a user said something people always fail to understand about domestic violence is that it thrives in the grey2. Abuse is never clear. It exists like a shadow or a specter. One which you can never clearly see or put your hands around.

The grey area— these lapses in judgments, bad calls, ego, manipulation and even self-protection, are where these characters abuse and traumatize each other. Eric fathers Harper, motivates her, supports her and mentors her while failing to do that for his own children. In his inability to face himself and his struggle with his ego, he is a father in a half-hearted way. His children sense his distance, and one particularly begins to lash out as a result of his neglect. Throughout the season I felt that every single time Eric was on the precipice of redemption, he determinedly refused to take the leap. He makes an unselfish choice for once in the show, saving Harper and the fund from the potential danger stemming from his assault of an underage girl, but does that redeem him? Even in his best efforts he still fails.

Lost Fathers

I thought about the theme of fatherhood in media I’ve consumed recently. I watched Paris, Texas (1984) and the protagonist Travis’s journey towards becoming a father. He says to his son Hunter “I was hoping to show you that I was your father.” Hoping. “What does a father look like?” he innocently asks Walt’s cleaning lady.

It became almost immediately clear to me watching this film that Travis was not a good parent. That he, although he meant well, was still neglecting his child. He takes Hunter out of school to embark on the search for his mother and then leaves him unsupervised as a ‘lookout’ at the bank where she secretly deposits money for him every month. When he says “We’ll split up” he unveils his total naivety and inability to be a grown up and protect his child. After the car chase on the highway Travis gets drunk and Hunter must take care of him. He often shares information with Hunter that a child either does not need to know or could be worded more sensitively. He is careless.

Eric too is careless. Charles Hanani is careless. Harper’s mother is careless. Rishi is careless. Yasmin is careless. Their failure to recognize that protection is proactive means they often leave those who should be in their care, vulnerable to exploitation. Eric does not take a proactive stance as a father to his children. His first proactive act of protection is like I mentioned, the scene where he gives Harper total ownership of the fund.

Charles does not protect Yasmin from the sharp and predatory gaze of his friends. Or from himself. Harper’s mother deliberately fosters an environment of hostility and intense competition between her children. Rishi leaves his family vulnerable to the consequences of his gambling addiction and his usage of drugs. Yasmin does not recognize her own power and privilege, and she exploits Hayley and the other women she is essentially pimping out. They are all careless.

Back to fatherhood specifically. “Orestes: Flight Before Fury” is the title of the beginning section of the novel “Of Time and the River” by Thomas Wolfe. In it, Wolfe writes “Which of us shall find his father? And in what place, and in what time and in what land?” Eugene, the protagonist, is a man who is lost and wanders around in his youth, desperate for life, for purpose, for meaning. He looks for his father everywhere, and struggles with reconciling the love, awe and adoration he possessed with the immense destructiveness of his personality.

Hundreds of pages later Wolfe writes “How like the wild, lost soul of youth you are, how like my wild lost father who will not return!”

Sir Henry Muck is another child who has been failed. He is also desperate for a father. His own father died by suicide when he was a child, and he has lived with the trauma of that, struggling like Eugene, to find meaning. Him and Yasmin are easy targets for predators like Whitney, who provides what their stunted child selves lack: Affirmation, direction and purpose. Whitney gives it to Henry who gives it to Yasmin. The theme of fatherhood is more obvious in Henry and Yasmin because they are so desperate for theirs. Henry is traumatized by his father’s absence and Yasmin is traumatized by her father’s presence. They both seek their wild lost fathers who will not return.

In the final scene with Henry, his uncle and his godfather—where they are fishing on a boat— I noticed that Henry thinks the fishing rod is broken when he finally catches one, but his godfather surreptitiously fixes it for him. He has no skill with it. This suggests to me that either he has never been fishing or has little experience in it. The Father-son fishing trip has culturally (in the West)represented bonding and trans-generational exchange. Henry never got to fish with his father, and now his uncles are finally fathering him. Could it be a kind of rite? One that he never had because his father was dead. This is his ushering into manhood3.

At the end of the season finale Yasmin, dishevelled after her confrontation with Harper, listens to an old voice memo from her father. She plays it twice. Her father praises her in this audio, says he named a boat after her (Lady Yasmin), calls her by pet names and showers her in adoration. “Darling!” “Love you, my little cherub!” and “Light of my life.” This scene unveiled two things to me: The first being that Yasmin brings people into environments where they can be exploited (Harper to the fundraising dinner in the finale and Harper to the boat in season 3.) The second is that Yasmin might still love her father. How like my wild lost father who will not return! Again, that complexity and that greyness. From Season 1, Yasmin’s complicated relationship with her father has been open for all with eyes to see. And yet she recurrently engages with him. Why?

I can change. Can I change?

Eric’s daughters don’t totally disavow him either even though he is neglectful of them. His ex-wife and daughter even sleep at the hotel he is in on one night. His daughter says, “I love you” to him expectantly. She gives him multiple chances to be a parent and to step up. Yasmin meets her father for lunch and goes to the boat. She listens to his voice still. Perhaps they desire change. Perhaps they wanted them to be different. Redeemability. Harper attempts to redeem Yasmin. She says, “I know your voice.” She wants to believe that inside her there is a being capable of change. Could it be because Harper herself is changing?

She recognizes that she will not find herself at the other side of Power. Both these women were powerless. “I grew up at someone’s mercy,” says Yasmin referring to her father. Harper has to escape across an ocean and claw her way up to success so she can escape her mother. She says she wants it so her mother can beg for her forgiveness. But she recognizes that only hollowness waits there. She is the first to say, “[Yasmin] is a survivor” and she even admits her own fallibility by telling Kwabena she doesn’t know how to make a relationship work. Her rejection of totally selling out, by funding a right-wing candidate and coalescing with racists, and her displays of vulnerability after she has gotten what she always wanted, might be a portrayal of breaking the cycle. Or at least disrupting it. Harper somewhat is redeemed.

Both/and. Yasmin is right. It is both/and. She becomes both a victim of sexual abuse and exploitation and a perpetrator of it. Industry perhaps also alludes to the idea that Charles Hanani and his sister might have been victims of abuse as well. In Season 4’s episode 2, Yasmin’s aunt says they had a “bohemian upbringing”. They were strangely affectionate as children. I wonder, where do children learn their habits?

The intersections of power, wealth and class with this kind of experience creates people like Yasmin. Who is a victim, and a woman, but is also wealthy, is also white, and is using her wealth to exploit women who don’t have it. Yasmin’s case feels common: A person who is abused and has been abused so terribly they are indoctrinated into using the faulty logic of their abuser.

Charles Hanani says, “She became a woman when she wanted me!” of a teenage victim of his in a confrontation with Yasmin. In that scene Yasmin insists that this girl was a child, but in this season, she justifies having a minor do escort work by saying she herself was 14 years old when she lost her virginity. She says, “I became a woman as soon as I wanted someone.” She believes that this is just how the world works. That it is cold, ugly and exploitative and that she suffered because she had no agency and not because someone should not have exploited her. She thinks that’s what she’s giving to Hayley and the girls working under her. Agency. ‘Power’ where she never had any. She is ashamed of her vulnerability, as are many people who have been abused, especially as children. She says, “We both know that this world will own you if you don’t harden up.” So that is what she is doing. Hardening up.

Is it better to speak or to die?

Harper, who has shirked away from vulnerability throughout the show, to the point that she cannot even talk about her personal life at all, finally chooses to speak. She admits to Kwabena that she avoids intimacy because she is unfamiliar with it. She doesn’t know how to nurture something. She slowly undoes the tight dressing she uses to cover her wounds. There was a lot of quiet development of her character throughout this season. Harper emphatically says “My trauma traumatized me.” Does trauma serve any higher purpose? No. There are no lessons to be learned from it, starkly contrasting Yasmin’s attitude, that trauma was a lesson to “harden up.”

She also speaks up for Yasmin, who seems to be unable to do it for herself. Throughout the show Yasmin has not called herself a victim of abuse. Somebody else has to do it for her, whether it be characters on the show or the audience itself. We have to piece together what happened to her. Other people in the show (the woman from the boat in Season 3 and Harper in Season 4) have to say to/about her that she is a victim.

She doesn’t seem to be able to accept it. She listens to the sound of her father’s voice, adopts his logic, even at some point invites her aunt to Henry’s 40^th birthday, which indicate to me that it is both/and for her. It is alluded that her aunt knew about the abuse, and Yasmin knows that she knew. She cannot totally accept her aunt, rejecting her all of a sudden at the party, but she cannot totally reject her either. Perhaps this is why she was even invited. Later that night the foundations of the inappropriate relationship between Yasmin and Hayley are laid. Both/and.

Even she doesn’t really know how to view her father. He is her father and also her perpetrator. How will Eric’s daughters view him (if they ever found out)? How do we as the audience? Harper who is loved by many viewers, has succeeded this season partially because of the efforts of a man who has raped a child. He has a trust fund for his daughters. It is totally reality altering to accept that you have been a victim of great trauma. It necessitates a shift in your life. It covers your memories in an unrecognizable sheen. It’s alienating. It is terrifying. And perhaps Yasmin4 prefers the familiarity of her reality. It may be an ugly world, but how can she see a softer and more beautiful one if the eyes to behold it were ripped out?

‘Industry’ and ‘Paris, Texas’ perform a fantastic dissection of trauma and abuse, and they are earnestly engaged in portraying the ambiguous space in which trans-generational pain are inflicted and even institutionalized. They ask many important questions. What does a father look like? Where exactly do the choices we make meet the pain we inflict on others? Can we ever deviate from the path in a meaningful way? Can we ever break the cycle? How?

Two aspects of this sentence strike me. Arrests becoming so commonplace that Marechera describes them as being “a part of one’s food” followed by the grisly description of the murder of the two guerrillas. The extremity of the censorship has altered the psyche of these characters. What should inspire shock, dismay, rage, revulsion or disappointment, only inspires feelings of defeat instead. While this may be a fictional work, it is still an apt display of the colonial black society. It seems to mirror the relationship that the current post-colonial Zimbabwean society has with fear, with violence, with exploitation, and with restriction. The fear tactics themselves, mirroring those of the oppressive Rhodesian government. Fear becomes food. It is our daily sustenance.

There are many parallels between the usage of censorship, fear and control in Smith’s Rhodesia and in post-independence Zimbabwe. The police and military are brutalizing agents of the State, used to quash dissent. They make any kind of organizing impossible. They beat, and they kill. Marechera’s description of the two guerrillas whose brutalized bodies were placed on display to inspire fear is reminiscent of the activists and regime opponents whose bodies are often found discarded, naked in fields or on the side of the road. The entire three branches of government, which were tools for racial prejudice, have been turned into tools for political and class prejudice.

A society predicated upon fear can only operate in limitation. Fear is limiting because it creates boundaries on what we can make, what we can think, what we can feel.

***

What appears to many to be chaos —a free fall of disorder that only compounds on itself as days, weeks, months and years pass— is a deliberate construction. Censorship acts as a mould, into which a society is poured into and a shape formed. Censorship does not only restrict, it actively shapes. So it is not only a negation, that is, it doesn’t only say “No”, or “Stop” or “Never”, it also informs what a person can do. It is this that I am interested in exploring. What are you allowed to do in a censored society? How does that shape culture? The way people relate to each other. The language they use, the art they make, the music, the jokes, the advertisements, the school curricula. It creates a space that allows strictly for certain kinds of conversation, and a certain kind of culture. What is ours?

A restricted society, with restricted thinking, and restricted dreams and restricted access. It is predicated upon exploitative dynamics. It makes your world and your understanding of it small. There is no room for Big Thinking—critique, reason, connection and analysis have cannot exist in this type of environment. In this new world there are no systems or structures, only individuals. Providers and receivers. I rely on X to provide me with food, because I have been bred to believe that X is a provider and I am a recipient. I cannot question why X even has so much to give in the first place. I cannot question if there is any relation between X’s wealth and my lack of any. When X drives past me in his car, I first think to put my hands out to beg and not to pick up the stone.

It also creates a society predicated on fear. Fear is limiting. It creates boundaries on what we can make, what we can think, what we can feel.

Whittling down what citizens of contemporary Zimbabwe are allowed to do has been a task. They are allowed to drink. They are allowed to beg. They are allowed to be religious. Encouraged to be religious. Alcohol has always played a placating role, with it historically being weaponized by colonialists against unpaid or underpaid black workers, creating alcoholism with devastating effects on black society. Now it is used to dull and soothe the aches of existing in a lawless and senseless place. In the time I spent in Harare—which is where I was mostly exposed to people— I observed a relationship between alcohol use and feelings of existentialism. I thought to myself There is so much drinking here. Alcohol distracts from the confusion, shame, hopelessness, resentment and anger, that people who have been failed by those with power feel. The chaos of this censored society is not a conducive environment for building a coherent sense of self. There is no self-actualization. There is only today. There are no long term goals or dreams, because those are impossible. They require order, a system, and reliability— three things which do not exist in Zimbabwe.

Drinking, begging, being religious, and scandal are the four mechanisms used by the average citizen to cope with existing in this censored society. They act as distracting salves, blurring the sharp edges of exploitation and State failure into more manageable and nonthreatening shapes.

Not Naming, Not Speaking

A curious result of the censorship in Zimbabwe are the ways in which people have adopted strategies to talk about what they are not explicitly allowed to. They speak around an idea, a feeling, a concept, rather than talking directly about it. It is not uncommon to find citizens voice out anger, dismay or frustration at their material conditions in ways that seemingly identify structural issues, but not how those issues came to be or who is responsible for them. There is no actor. In this case of assault there is no aggressor, only a victim. Even I cannot name, can only allude, can only draw out the rough shape without adding any detail.

Again, a deliberate construction. Censorship cuts out the tongue, impeding members of a body politic from not only being able to Name things but it scrubs away the active role that particular individuals play in creating the environment of suffering that plagues a vast majority of the population. It is by design that they cannot truly be named, or identified. The chaos acts as a mask. It creates a distance, between the unequipped hospitals, pitted roads, nonexistent jobs, failing economy and the unfathomable luxury being enjoyed by those mercilessly pillaging resources.

Censorship and Slop

Similar to the United States—which masquerades itself as a haven for free-speech, but strictly censors its population while simultaneously feeding it placating slop— Zimbabweans have also been indirectly encouraged towards that which is unchallenging, and placating. Arts and culture, which should provoke, question and ultimately challenge, become mediums for mediocrity. They dull the senses, diverting the attention of members of the body politic away from what is crucial and what threatens their lives, towards more comfortable subjects. Spectacle. Scandal. We are drawn to large displays, whether they be of opulence or violence.

With these new and empty minds fashioned for us by the powers that be, we create beautiful but meaningless things. Books, songs, paintings and sculptures that at best do not challenge and at worst praise oppression. By not being able to fully discuss and thereby comprehend the extent of your oppression, you begin to conflate it with success. In this new censored society there are new values and ideals. It is the terrifying hybrid child of gluttonous patri-colonial capitalism. How well can you squeeze others under your boot?

It is unsurprising that our understanding of our world shrinks per generation. Censorship dulls thinking and creativity, puts a cap in our imaginations, and this kind of stunted thinking and feeling seems to have been passed down. Droves of aimless youth, bred into a culture of silence, unable to articulate themselves. Marechera writes:

All the black youth was thirsty. Thirsty for life and chance. This thirst has been rerouted to a materialist hunger for instant gratification. Spectacle. Opulence and luxury have replaced functionality and structure. This is partially because in a censored society one doesn’t even have the capability to conceive of a functional system in the first place. Marechera suggests wartime Rhodesia was an intellectual desert with only “[oases] of thought.” Censorship creates a dry barren landscape that is unfruitful for critical thinking. It makes sheep of members of the body politic, citizens who are only capable of following. In Rhodesia, censorship naturalized skewed racial dynamics, with the goal of limiting black thought to be totally unable to conceive of majority rule. In independent Zimbabwe, censorship naturalizes skewed class and racial dynamics, with the ultimate goal of cementing in the mind that excess and poverty are natural constants in the world. That dysfunction must be expected and anticipated.

This political censorship is already married to conservatism, and they create a barren landscape, devoid of any real feeling or thought. Religious teachings about patience, endurance and reward, mixed with the fear of living in a censored state, create a nation of culturally timid people. People that are afraid to use cuss words, to dress indecently, to commit acts of immorality, to criticize and argue with their elders, and to revolt.

We must be attentive to the role that media and popular culture play in a censored state. We must be able to question what we consume. To ask in what ways it is good for us, beneficial? What is it saying? More importantly, what is it not saying. Are these platforms naturalizing fear, poverty, and oppression? They prey on young people on social media, inundating these spaces with poorly made and uncritical slop. Spectacle. Salacity. The types of conversation being held on radio are equally as harmful and insidious. Often I would hear these. I called them Conversations that seem to lead nowhere. The programs either become platforms for propaganda, or promoting conservatism, and they result in a brainwashed nation.

Media produced in a censored state can only dull, it does not sharpen. Its purpose is to foster placidity and indifference within people. Placidity and indifference inspire inaction. Rage, hurt, and disappointment are moving. Everything we consume is meant to keep us still. It is important that we consume art which shocks, confuses, awakens or angers. It is important to be critical and to ask questions. To Name things. To lick all oases of thought that are available to us, dry. To question, ceaselessly and maddeningly.

I had always suffered from a mild shyness, awkwardness and anxiety that sometimes peaked in bouts of neurosis that came and went kind of infrequently, but it exploded into a violent paralyzing fear (borderline paranoia) the year that my mother fell ill (or when her illness peaked in a series of sudden life threatening episodes that happened unrelentingly and inexplicably in a way that left a thick cloud of Fear over me and my family.)

I remember it was sometime late in December of 2020 because each time she was admitted to the hospital she had to take a Covid test that piled costs onto the bills. It was before Christmas I think, maybe 22 or 23 December. We did spend Christmas together, before she left for the hospital again. In the evening we ate kind of early, because my mother believes it is good for digestion to have early suppers, around 5-ish 6-ish. I probably made the dinner because I did most of the cooking at that time and I probably left for my room immediately afterwards because I was depressed and isolated all of the time. She ate watermelon slices afterwards and was watching the TV when I left.

Everyone went to bed, and my family sleeps early-ish so perhaps around 8 or 9 P.M. I remember that I first heard my name being called in a dream before I woke up. A few seconds of disorientation and then the sudden striking sensation that something is wrong. An unfortunate aftermath of this event is that whenever anyone calls my name in any context, I cringe a little bit in fear. I hear it ringing out in the dead of night: “Tako! Tako! Tako!”

Getting up mechanically, running to my parents’ bedroom, my mother on the floor wailing in what at first would look to be pain but was probably fear. Running running running, half naked, but fully clothed by a heavy coat of fear. Aware of nothing but the total and absolute primality of it. In the darkness of night I ran barefoot to the neighbors house. The blood in my ears was a huge rush. I recall only yelling out dazedly “Help! Help!” Saying their names repeatedly until a torchlight came on. Being asked what’s happened but I didn’t know. Nobody knew.

Lifting her to the car, suddenly being aware of the heaviness of a body. How it resists you when you try to help it. Briefly, on our way out of the kitchen door, hauling, heaving I saw that her face was swollen and I felt relieved because I thought Oh okay, she was just bit by something probably. It’s just an allergic reaction.

I thought if I knew, if I researched like Joan Didion researched and read studies and papers and articles, then I could understand what was happening, and I could clearly set my mind to willing a positive result. You can’t will what you don’t understand. Before, there was a straight line between cause and effect. Once you understand the cause then you can mitigate or stop the effect. She came home later that day. I dressed her in the emergency room. Lifted her feet to put on her shoes. She felt very small like a child and I felt that a perverse switching of roles had happened between us. Mothers worry over their children. They wake up gasping at night with anxiety. Now we both had that motherly fear. We all thought Thank goodness this is over. I still felt sick, uneasy, disoriented and scared but at least that is one scary event that will not repeat itself.

It must have been two nights later when the same thing happened again. Again at 2 A.M, the dead of night (which I later read is approximately the time when most people die) waking up. The same chanting of my name again and again, running half naked and barefoot again, sloshing through mud, to the neighbours, this time hauling her out of the tub. Where before my anxiety was kind of a general dread, it had turned into such a tight feeling of disorientation that I felt like collapsing all the time. I had to will myself to get up. My back felt numb persistently. But strangely, through this numbness a distinct prickling sensation.

I still had to do things. My brother was a year old at the time. I remember walking the hospital grounds with him, passing the chapel and wishing for the first time in my life that god existed because at least there would be a higher authority to appeal to. The chaotic senselessness of disbelief meant anything could happen. She could die. This time she was hospitalized and they said many things. Lungs that had collapsed, possibly kidney failure, anaphylactic shock from certain medications. But nothing stops, somebody had to make porridge for the baby, change his diapers, feed the family, make food for my mother in the hospital, take it to her. Despite that tight feeling, despite the black spots in my vision, the shortness of breath, the insomnia, everything had to keep going.

Eventually, after repeating this process a few more times things somewhat stabilized. But I never left that state of wild fear and panic. The illogical thinking that had taken over me, which I had already been prone to, found its way into my everyday life. Panic and an obsession with routine have taken over my life. Any slight deviation from what I want, how I want it, means disaster is soon to follow. Maybe in my mind I managed the aftermath of the illness through a set of rituals and routines, and if I deviate from them things turn over on their head. When you have an anxiety attack your body becomes very cold, and at least for me, very still. I imagine the Animal Planet shows of animals in the wild, prey standing stark still, and trembling, when they hear a rustle carried by the wind, before they are chased or before they are shot.

Any sound feels like I am in an auditorium, and it is blasting into my ears and I am stumbling around dazed and confused. I still wake up at around the same hour at night, even if only for a few seconds. On the longer nights I’ll sit still like a sentry, waiting for any sign that I have to jump up, and run run run for help again, fighting against the tightness in my chest and the desire to keel over.

“Events accrued and it was hard to know what to make of them, apart from pictures. Time passed without any concern for its inhabitants who were lodged in it through no choice of their own. I thought often of my father’s question: No, it was not a trauma.”

—Stephanie Wambugu, Lonely Crowds.

Unusual Dependence

“Were we unusually dependent on one another…?”

—Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.

When describing different kinds of grief Didion says she read that certain adverse reactions to death can be caused if the griever and the loved one had an usual dependence. This term was very striking to me. Unusual dependence. Anxiousness can feel like it is being caused by an unusual dependence on a certain routine, a certain way of living. Any slight deviation from that can make the world feel as though it’s spinning off its axis. Maybe it’s an unusual sensitivity. An incapacity to be flexible. I am very brittle. Very brittle and very afraid.

Commanding Thoughts

Slightly more recently I began experiencing what I call “Commanding Thoughts.” A commanding thought will go like this: If I don’t spend enough time thinking, willing everything into place, then everything will fall apart. The Commanding Thoughts can also work like a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. I recognized a few months ago that my habit of ‘willing’ things into existence, even if it worked, was probably setting myself up for a disastrous fall.

In ‘The Silver Lining’s Playbook’, Pat. Sr., the protagonist’s father, is slowly revealed to have a series of habits and rituals that he believes produce certain outcomes. He believes that the presence of his son when the Eagles play a football game is ‘good luck’, and that the Eagles only win if Pat. Jr. watches the game with him (or is at the game itself). Maybe these are also Commanding Thoughts.

“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.”

—Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.

“When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not
go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
This still seems to me a good question.”

—Anne Carson, The Glass Essay.

I remember telling a friend in psychology some months ago that I had suddenly developed a strange and inexplicable aversion to cars. A Fear. I kept seeing myself in a car crash, a pole from nowhere launching itself straight into my forehead. Each time I was in a taxi I would imagine this same thing, obsessively, perhaps to avoid it. It was a vivid thought, one that I had to put a great effort to wrench out of my mind. If I gave myself into it I could really imagine it happening, the bloody mess of it, the smell of a burning car engine. “Go away where?”

The ‘horrible images’ and the thoughts have a curious way of making you their slave. They are inescapable. The death knell rings at every hour.

“In panic disorder, the individual experiences recurrent unexpected panic attacks and is persistently concerned or worried about having more panic attacks or changes his or her behaviour in maladaptive ways because of the panic attacks (e.g., avoidance of exercise or of unfamiliar locations).”

—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders : Fifth Edition Text Revision DSM-5-TR™ American Psychiatric Association

The Scaries

I came up with this term to describe the peaked feeling of fear (I would go so far as to call it paranoia) I experience generally. When you give something a funny, not serious name, maybe it has less authority over your life. The Scaries can sometimes have a traceable cause, but more often than not are just sensations of senseless fear. Whereas panic feels to me like a wilder, more confronting feeling, The Scaries feel like hiding away from something. Cowering in a dark corner.

Often when I feel them I assume a physical position: Lying in bed in the fetal position, squinting very hard. Sometimes one hand is on my back, because it is numb from fear. I will lie under the covers. It has to be dark. I need to feel like I am in a totally different silent universe. They can sometimes happen in the middle of the night, when I am back there again, December 2020 in the commotion and then sudden quiet that accompanies facing sudden death. Even when I am thousands of kilometers away, in a different house, I still feel like I am back in that house, and I have to lay awake as a sentry, in case something happens.

Anxiousness and panic feel like standing in an open field, vulnerable and naked, with a thicket close by in which you know something is waiting. “No-one is out to get you.” I don’t believe that. The death knell tolls at every hour. We are often afraid. Mild anxiety is the engine that drives everyday life. Afraid of failure one pushes themselves to be better in school, at their job. Afraid of death one exercises, assumes a healthy lifestyle. Afraid of losing our loved ones, we try to the best of our capabilities to ensure their safety. We love them. My fear is more unproductive. It paralyzes. It is necrotic. It destroys rather than builds relationships.

“[The individual] changes his or her behaviour in maladaptive ways because of the panic attacks.” Maladaptive. Extreme avoidance. A funny quirk of mine anyone close to me is quick to notice is that I seem to hate being communicated with over the phone. I hate messaging platforms. I can take days if not weeks to reply (I never do). I selectively respond, often without rationale and have piled up probably tens of thousands of unopened messages across platforms. I am avoiding Bad News. I react to sounds and vibrations adversely. The death knell tolls at every hour. There is something to be afraid of everywhere if one looks close enough for it. When my mother was in the hospital there were a lot of calls. I feared that any one of them might be The Call. The world was stuck in between The Before and After. Which one of these rings will separate one part of my life from another?

There is a non-exhaustive list of things that give me The Scaries. Crowds. Loud noises. Shouting. The phone. The sound of the ringer. Whatsapp. My university campus. Conflict. Hospitals. Certain kinds of medication. Diclofenac. Absolute silence. The News. Night. Et cetera.

“When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them? Why keep watching? Why not go away? I was amazed. Go away where?”

On one of the National Geographic channel on the DSTV back in 2011 or 2012 there was a show aired called “Doomsday Preppers.” It followed families in America (I’m guessing the Midwest is probably where one would find that sort of thing) that were preparing for an anticipated apocalyptic event. They canned food, built sheds, taught themselves to hunt and live off the land. I always got the sense that there was a slight mockery of these people running as an undercurrent. What ridiculous paranoid folk! They prepare and anticipate for a day that will never come! How silly! But anxiousness in a way is like being a doomsday prepper. I am symbolically also building a shed, canning food, living off a desolate emotional landscape in preparation for some feared but unknown and unrealized event. It is better to be prepared for disaster than for it to find you naked and shaking pitifully before it.

The Commanding Thoughts, the rituals, they help one prepare for anything. I will never be caught off guard by a partner leaving, a loved one dying, failure, deportation or being in a car accident. I have thought about it many times! There are contingencies and plans in place! The death knell tolls at every hour.

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
And I have asked to be Where no storms come”

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, No Worst, there is none.

“I have asked to be where no storms come.” The death knell tolls at every hour— something is ending, faithfully I must heed it.

As a child, I understood it as some kind of transaction, an exchange. Being sold by one family into another. Chattel. I attended a roora for the first time somewhere around 2011 or 2012, and I remember it very vaguely as old people muttering about money, and women sitting uncomfortably on the floor. My second roora was in 2022, after I had already discovered and named my desire for agency. I was even a bridesmaid at this one, which shocked me because I have never expressed any desire for marriage, and I used to amuse my mother and aunts at family functions by saying I didn’t want to get married. This amusement has obviously turned into suspicion and now alarm as it becomes clearer that I was and still am very serious.

The day progressed. The women sat on the floor on mats,1 the men on chairs or couches while the proceedings dragged on. I couldn’t believe the entire thing. With each new point of business (vhura muromo, mombe yehumai, rusambo etc.) I slowly came to the realization that roora is heavily propagandized. This was quite obviously a brazen transaction, haggling included. How did anyone conceive of it as anything else?

The ceremony began with a sermon from a pastor laughably claiming that it was the most important event of either the bride or groom’s lives (but especially the bride.) He went so far as to say even her university graduation was not as much of an achievement as this. That disturbed me particularly, as the bride was a radiologist with an established career. The entire day I watched the event as if from behind a film. It struck me firstly, that the bride and groom played passive figures. The groom stayed in the car outside until everything was over and the bride sat placidly on the floor, very meek, soft and feminine. This was an exchange between families.

This exposes the underlying dynamic of gender relations in our society. They are ruled by the opinions and beliefs of other people. Love is literally a group project. Earlier on that year before the roora, my co-workers and I had a debate with our manager over the idea behind kuroora. He said something that struck me: Even if you do what you want, go against your family and cohabit, when it doesn’t work out, who will help you?

Perhaps this is the rationale behind many progressive or outright feminist Shona women deciding to conform to outdated ideals. The family plays a role of support that is crucial to the peaceful existence of women in Shona society. This ‘support’ conceals something sinister. A woman is not part of her family but belongs to her family. During the 2022 roora my biggest concern was that it seemed my relative was being passed from her own family to another. She had never lived by herself. She had never been truly independent. She had never discovered agency. She had passed from being at the mercy of one group of people to another. There is no real support system for women. This false support, that is lorded over the heads of women is a stick used to beat them into submission.

A woman who has never owned her own life, lived a life totally independent of others and gained the necessary social and economic skills that a fully functioning adult should have will always be a child. Women are eternally children in a Shona society. Children are even viewed as free exploitable labour, without any sense of agency, totally subject to the kindness or cruelty of their parents and extended family. After roora, women experiencing marital problems are tossed back and forth between both families like a volleyball, neither side fully claiming them.

While you are no longer a part of your family, you aren’t part of your husband’s either. You don’t even belong fully to yourself. You have nothing of your own, none of your own property, and not even your own identity. It is inextricably tied to the people around you. From womb to tomb woman does not own herself. It is highly discouraged for unmarried women to live alone. Women are an amalgamation of skills and virtues (virgin, can cook, clean, decently educated (meaning she can contribute monetarily to the household), placid, and overall, a good servant!) At the roora ceremony there is no mention of a woman’s character —her joys, talents, eccentricities. The ‘investment’ the family has put into her must be accounted for. Prized property. The fattest cow at the auction.

It is no surprise that after viewing women through such a vulgar and dehumanizing lens, that their new possessors will expect the investment they have paid for to pay off. In-law abuse is particularly rife in a male-worshipping culture that views sons as faultless, and women as machines or chattel that should endlessly be high performing. Once you have been bought you relinquish your capacity to be seen as human. Child-rearer, home maker, cleaner, perhaps even sex worker. Where all these are industries, deserving of worker’s rights and protections, the wife has no union to represent her. She is abused by her possessors in silence. Of course, the romantic propaganda that paints all these sufferings as virtuous has worked itself well into the subconscious of Shona women. It is desirable to be sold to the highest bidder. It means you have value, that you are beautiful, maybe even that you are loved. Both by your family and his. I wonder why love has to be bastardized and transmogrified into such a strange and ugly shape.

The Church also plays a role in both funnelling women from the realm of their own families into another and manufacturing the marriage ideal that women buy into. All the platitudes on submission being power, against fornication and pre-marital sex and cohabitation instil the literal fear of God in women. Another way of shepherding them away from any form of self-discovery and agency. The inter-mingling of this pre-existing patriarchal culture and the colonially introduced Christo-patriarchy create a culture that is against women. Against pleasure, against joy, and ultimately against freedom. It creates gilded cages. A woman exchanges one prison for another.

I wondered why, when warning women against cohabiting or getting divorced, the argument relied on is that they lose the social safety net of the family and larger community. There is not much I have to do to unveil the sinister and alarming connotations behind such statements. The messaging is very clear: Conform or be punished. The ‘love’ given by the family is extremely conditional. It is not freeing, it is restraining, like a leash. A family that truly loves its daughter will free her, truly free her. Liberal Shona families might provide a false freedom, allowing the daughter to attend university abroad (or generally in a different geographical location), live alone for a while, even relax the surveillance, but it will never extend to totally repudiating the roora system. The roora system affirms that you are owned by somebody else, no matter what.

A truly loving family will give her agency, and the skills to navigate the world as a capable adult, free to make her own choices, good or otherwise. Strangely enough, the hyper-conservatism and surveillance culture that creates the backdrop of women’s lives in a Shona society is not conducive to teaching the inter-personal skills that would allow a person to be able to recognize abusive relationship patterns and avoid them. The society is deliberately structured to funnel women towards abuse. The hyper-surveillance of parents, who do not allow daughters out past 4 P.M, becomes the domineering husband who is suspicious of friends. Prizing purity and modesty creates women that become victims of marital rape, their bodies being used as incubators to bear children out of duty and not desire.

Loving and controlling are synonymous with each other. So much of what our culture associates with love is a militant control over other people—their bodies, lives and choices. The new wife is ushered into this culture when she advised by her forerunners that the best way to be a wife is by subtly controlling her husband. Here, the Church’s submission doctrine finds its practical application. If submission is control, a woman controls her husband by having a strict hold on the household. She should ensure that the conditions of her home are so perfect that he won’t want to be somewhere else. This doesn’t alter or elevate the status of woman in any material way. It is simply a pseudo-power. Despite the epithets—calling wives or girlfriends “General”, “The Boss” or “Madam”—women do not pull the strings. There is no real domination, like walking a large dog with a leash made of yarn. The dog might behave but at any moment it can break free and run.

Zizek writes “This spectre of woman’s power structurally depends on male domination: it remains its shadowy double, its retroactive effect and as such, its inherent moment.”2

Woman’s agency, her power, are like Zizek says, a “spectre.” A ghost. An apparition. It is not tangible, and it is not real. Roora, kuperekwa and the post-marriage position of the wife, are all smokescreens behind which patriarchal domination hides. They are living expressions of the demoted status of the woman. Women at the rear, at the bottom, behind, never ahead, never looking behind for once, never at the same pace. Varoora are a sub-class of workers.

Wealth and bourgeois status might insulate middle and upper-class women from the labour typically thrust upon varoora from the working class or the peasantry. This does not alter the nature of the system and may even only show the true subservient labouring role varoora play. Wealth is used to outsource this labour to others (poor women), rather than a total repudiation and restructuring that would lead to equitable distributions of labour. In fact roora among the bourgeois is a blatant exposition of what it truly symbolises: an exchange of power and an assertion of the woman’s submissive position. It’s not about money because the wealthy have enough of it— it is about what the money, goats and cattle represent.

Love, Joy, Celebration and Family

The 2022 roora had some positive aspects. I remember watching my little sisters dance to Oliver Mtukudzi with my younger cousins and the joy of family brought together. A house full of laughter, and my mother’s dimple when she tells jokes with the aunt she only sees once a year. When a different cousin married, we celebrated and welcomed his bride by singing, ululating (and giving her money.) It puzzles me that what should be beautiful things— love, community, and family, are bastardized in such a way. That the recognition of two spirits,3 loving each other in the inexplicable and mysterious way of love can be processed in such an unerotic manner and turned into a transaction, is almost painful. Love is a limitless, boundless thing, surely it cannot be restrained by such tawdry displays of domination. True erotic capability, mutual care and concern cannot be felt where they have been spoiled by ideas of objectification.

It is a beautiful thing to bring families together, to forge a new kind of community. Why can’t these aspects be the driving force behind cultural events? I kept thinking to myself, Why can’t this be about love? Of life, community— family, friends. A celebration of all these things. Giving ourselves to each other. The kind of family building that creates actual ties between people. A woman finally valued by the entire community—not as a servant or the paradigm of purity, but as she is. For her light, her generosity, her ambition, and even her faults. She will know she is loved, truly loved, and truly protected. There is a new, bigger family to appreciate her, and to help her if ever she decides she doesn’t want to be married, or if she hasn’t married, decides she doesn’t want to be partnered anymore.

Youth is a very very painful thing. All the knowledge in the world can’t change that (I read obsessively, and yet my understanding of the world seems to only get poorer). The older I get the more I think about my mother. How very strange it is, that as time increasingly passes the larger I become while my parents only seem to get smaller and smaller. Womanhood feels like standing on a very precarious hill, at threat of rolling down down down helplessly. I have to hold on very strongly to myself, like a guarded secret. Women are weathered like cliffs on the shore, receding and receding until the house of their being collapses into the waves beneath. The pains of this kind of existence are astonishing, the wounds deep and fresh, no matter how many times I’ve tried to cauterize them. Everywhere around me the faces of women burn themselves as haunting images in my mind. There are so many ways to suffer.

Of course I’m still trying to Eat life. As a child I was very prone to spells of dissociation. Reality unfolds itself like a tight paper. Astonishingly, it goes on and on. The layers I have to keep peeling away to reach the center. To fully Eat life one must be anchored firmly in the present. Unfortunately I exist in the shadow of memory, flitting through the past. My solitudes, my watchfulness of everything, as if behind a layer of film. Waiting for somebody to do something first because I didn’t know how, I couldn’t have done it first.

Thinking very often of Clara, and how mangled up life became very early on. How very strange, to watch a child die. My own mortality suddenly undressed before me, naked and ugly. Holding on to many griefs and many pains until they become a lattice. Again I remember the death of my great aunt Stella, who was very formidable and strong. I used to live with her and my grandmother, and so the foundations of my life have always been set in womanhood and matriarchal influences. At the funeral I heard my grandmother cry for the first time, a wounded howl like an injured animal. It was unnatural. I was frightened. I had to contend with the idea that nothing insulates you from pain. Here was a woman who had not had an easy life, old and wise, weeping so strongly you could hear it from outside.

In primary school after the holidays at an assembly, we were told one of our schoolmates had died in a car accident driving with his family to South Africa. Only his father and newly born brother survived. That baby grew up and ended up being my younger sister’s classmate. This is the way my mind works. Things that should barely form pebbles on the shore of my life turn into huge mountains in the landscape of my mind. This is how I came to understand life—a series of sorrows, one injustice after the other.

I came to know and understand the plight of the poor in this way: My father grew up a rural boy in the mountains near Mutare. We traveled to the rural areas all the time. I wallowed in the guilt of being aware of the suffering of other people. How strange, the dichotomy of life. At break time during school we would open our lunchboxes and devour our sandwiches, or cereal, obsessing over Disney shows, while I knew children who had never seen a TV before. Again, these same injustices. Suddenly the things that had seemed so regular started to arouse in me a strong sense of revulsion. Why was it that everything was so set in stone? Year after year we went, and very little seemed to change. The landscape of poverty was kept the same. In fact, after a certain point it seems to have rapidly deteriorated. Nobody seemed very compelled to change it. Poverty had been naturalized— a necessary pillar to structurally maintain the lives of the people around me. This is why I found traveling to Harare to be a bit alarming. I couldn’t understand how you could have so much poverty and so much wealth, co-existing in the same space, so garishly opposed.

So many stories I have, the endless range of mountains in my internal landscape. The horror of my world, which appeared so big at the time, shrinking and collapsing on itself like a dead star. Things I once found beautiful, suddenly revealed as shabby and ugly. I am afraid one day it will inevitably implode on itself. I have a great sensitivity towards things. Every year I return home, and it feels like a huge chunk of what I knew has been broken and thrown off. The old country is dead. I have died with it.

“Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem” says Asa Sesrin, whose brilliant article “On Heteropessmism” not only affirmed feelings I’d already had, but opened me up to new avenues of conceptualizing sexuality.1 I had lived my entire life feeling like being attracted to men was an unfortunate consequence of my being alive. There wasn’t much I could do about it, it was just there. A fixed and unchangeable abstract idea. Even with queer women, very rarely (unless the men are queer themselves) do their relationships escape the tyranny of the heterosexual institution.

In conversation with a friend I described being in a relationship with a man as similar to the feeling of waiting for my father, who is always late, to pick me up from school. The marriage of anticipation and dread. I can’t help that he is never on time and I’m forced to depend on him. I’m humiliated by desire. I’m still chained to heterosexuality. I sneak to it at night, devouring it under the cover of darkness, and when I turn the light on on myself, I discover my mouth covered in it like a naughty child with chocolate smeared on my face. A vice like alcohol and cigarettes, irresistible and terrible. Most of the time I do well without it, then a scent reminds me of the feeling of sitting on the couch with a man I loved looking at his books. We went through them all carefully, I sitting cross legged next to him, thinking “I wish I could do this forever.” The Roland Barthes, the Yewande Omotoso, Edward Said, and coughing because he cooked with way too much chili.

When the Etta James is playing I can’t help but mourn the loss of the security of the performance: the curtain rising and I take the stage, the feminine fragile woman, an object of care and concern. Making myself much smaller, more stupider than I am in real life all to feel taken care of. He used to tuck me into bed and that delicious feeling that someone knew me intimately and cared for me is hard to scrub from memory. I revisit it at certain points. There is more than this, there is more to life, and yet I still revisit the same empty room staring at the walls hoping I can live in it again. But I am fulfilled, I know I am fulfilled. Here I am, loved in a way I could not possibly imagine, then I am struck by such a wallowing pit of despair. Longing, longing, longing for something I don’t even understand. Even now I can’t articulate it. What is it that I want? To be held? To be known? To be valued? It feels like a phantom hunger.

At times in conversation with friends when the topic of men and desire is brought up my initial reaction is to totally deny that I feel any sort of desire at all. Or to portray whatever desire I may feel as external from me. Like the Greeks viewed eros as a sickness and a deep physical, emotional and spiritual affliction, so too did I and the women around me view attraction to men. It is something we can’t control, an unfortunate and embarrassing addiction. We are all very ashamed of ourselves. I know many women in relationships with men, and they all avoid eye contact when they speak of him, ashamed that I might see that they’ve chosen him. Their desire is veiled by many curtains of guilt. ‘On Heteropessimism’, ends with the simple but piercing line “It is not a pathology to love your boyfriend.”

Maybe my claim to not feel any desire is partially true—many months seem to be able to pass me by without me ever really thinking about a relationship or about a man. But it’s also true to say that I wear my shame like an old worn cloak. Admitting to my desire is acknowledging that I am an active participant in my own pain.

I am clinging to the desire to fix—to take broken chopped up parts and turn them into something new, something that works. How do I relax into this thing? My back is up straight and I cannot ease myself into love with a man. The role is not one I can play anymore. Any relationship I try to have with a man feels like having a dangerous stranger in my house. I’m not sure what to do with it. I’m trying to go to the root of my desire, to dissect it piece by piece, stare into the bloody mess and say “There I knew it. This is what the problem is. This is how I fix it.” Do I desire because love is biological need of mine? Or are these desires that have been forced upon me from above? Loving a man can feel like being nailed to the cross but I wonder if I help them carry it there.

It hit me with a startling clarity on one day that what I truly wanted out of a relationship—to be respected, and to be human was utterly impossible. Initially I thought I was just failing to articulate my desires well enough to my male partners that they just didn’t get it. I later realized that they couldn’t, they didn’t want to. I was asking for something fundamentally and diametrically opposed to the state of things. I was asking for perversion. They recoiled at the idea of me being seen not as some other creature, standing across the gender gulf shouting muffled words into the wind, but as a whole person. We were locked in a power struggle, I refusing to be dominated, and my male partners constantly trying to reshape the dynamic of the relationship so that they would be at the top and I at the bottom. “Women arouse not only desire and affection in men but aversion as well” Susan Sontag argues. Women are not humanized, and are merely “thoroughly domesticated familiars,” straddling the gap between the real and the unreal. Trying to leap over this gap, to look men and desire straight in the face, is abnormal.

Finn Bowring writes about the erotic desires of the Greeks, and their seemingly dualistic ideals on erotic love. True erotic desire amongst the male centered militaristic society of the Greeks lay between two men2. Women were relegated to the home, and could not earn the same kinds of virtue as men. The real stuff—conversations about politics, philosophy, and to some extent even religion were cordoned off to men. The symposiums where philosophical ideas were exchanged were exclusively for men, and even in instances where ideas were brought forward, they were not physically present3. Women could not aspire to the politically charged homo-erotic standards of their society. My desires were absurd and even repulsive. I was asking to be seen as a man. To have my ambitions, iniquities, cruelties and kindnesses recognized. Men can desire and ravage the world like wild fires to satiate their desires. Women gnaw at nothing. I’m secretly hungry.

“Women should tell the truth,” Susan Sontag says—and here is mine: I want to be desired and I want to be loved. But I want my humanity to be recognized more than I want these things. I need, hungrily, desperately to be myself. My truest self. The ritualistic performance of womanhood, that extends even into the darkest and most hidden crevices of the personal, is a cage from which I must escape. The ridiculous pretenses of heterosexuality have ceased to be attractive to me. Traditional conceptions of love ring very hollow. Patriarchy kills eroticism, chokes and suffocates it, processing it into a dull, rehearsed play with old smelly costumes that never quite fit right. The lines are terribly written, it’s a bad production. The love I desire is a rushing wind in the mountains. What the institution of heterosexuality offers me is a limp sporadic breeze. It is dead desire. A deformed eroticism that requires women and men to maim their erotic capabilities.

My last intimate relationship was a failure. On one night I made the unsettling realisation that I had, without even noticing, turned myself into a caricature. I had distorted myself into some other thing. Sontag writes that women exist in states of retardation, and live very child-like lives characterized by little to no agency, aspiring to behavior that is “immature” and “weak”4. Men are the only ones allowed to sink their teeth into the flesh of real life. I had turned myself meek. Even though I was much more intelligent and well-read than the man I’d been involved with, I began to look to him for guidance and knowledge. Where before I had looked at him, now I was looking up at him. I had inherited the same boring, unimaginative script and was reciting lines that sounded derisive coming out of my mouth.

The musician ‘Loving’ expresses my contradictory views on desire. “It’s a strange kind of prison. It is and isn’t.” Being good means denying myself. Self-denial is the highest form of virtue but Lacan calls on us to hold firmly to our pleasures when he says “Do not give up your desire!” From what I’ve read it seems we can never rid ourselves of our desires. Whereas as agape (platonic love) is selfless and humanizing, eros is narcissistic and rooted firmly in our ego. As long as I am conscious of myself I will want to love romantically. I will want to desire because I am using the Other as a conduit for achieving something beyond myself. Maybe it’s best to acknowledge that by seizing my desire and claiming it as my own—fashioning it in my own image. Rather than resign myself to the idea that I have been compelled to desire that which destroys me, I can acknowledge that the institution of heterosexuality is something I can lean into or out of by utilizing my agency. Someone could argue that women don’t have much agency, and in that case all there is to say is sometimes things need to be taken by force.

Instead of mythicizing eros as a divine (or in our case biological in the age of science) and mystical force that comes like a thief in the night—a force that compels us to love men despite ourselves, practicing agency can shape a new kind of romantic culture where women can finally shape their own desires.

“Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem” so I’ve decided to make it mine. Instead of hiding behind my identity as a queer woman, and allowing constructed shame to force me into a box, I wrote this to take ownership and responsibility. I can only know fully what I want if I accept that I want it. A kidnapped person has no say in their conditions, and many women, especially those in liberal or post-liberal societies do have a say. The structures that uphold the institution of heterosexuality are at their weakest in this age. In the essay I talk about heterosexuality, or the desire of men as being something that can be leaned into or out of. My personal choice has been to try to lean out of it. Women should realise that they can opt out of doing things they don’t like or demand better. Honor yourself. I have desires like everyone has desires. I am also interested in companionship. But I am more interested in respect, humanization, care and empathy, qualities that are glaringly absent in heterosexuality’s dead desire and bastardized eros. I don’t have to accept anything I don’t want—I can demand change or leave.

A few months later I began thinking about the erotic. In my journal, which I hadn’t touched in 2 years I started obsessively circling the word, writing down synonyms, antonyms, related terms and concepts. The erotic is mostly about sex, but what if it’s far deeper than that? The two words– ‘Feeling’ and ‘Erotic’ melted into each other, and I wanted to understand what it is about these two terms that I felt were related to one another. What is the relevance of the erotic in our social and political climate? What are its ties to late stage capitalism, tech feudalism, immigration and culture?

I imagine the erotic to go beyond the sexual. It is instinctual. Audre Lorde even says it is “deep and non-rational”. Even now, writing this I struggle to find the words to explain it. It seems to be what rests inside of me. I think of the erotic as the unseen, what operates internally while bridging the external gap between ourselves and others. It is what binds us to our reality, what allows us to be present, to experience and to feel. To feel is to be aware. Aware of your environment, of the people around you, what is happening, what is missing, what is coming. The erotic, and the feeling, ground us in a shared reality with each other, and this keeps us not only aware of our own humanity, but that of others. It creates a pathway for empathy, concern, and care. When you can feel for yourself you can feel for others. A sterile, unfeeling society breeds individualism, and creates a ripe fertile ground for terror.

The word “Process” then came to my mind. To arrive at Feeling, one must allow themselves to open themselves up to Experience, Perceive, Endure, even Suffer. Feel and respond are core tenets of our humanity.

The erotic is the vehicle that transports us across the landscape of experience towards the destination of feeling. It’s about time—taking your time. Taking your time to experience, to indulge, to listen, to taste, to long, to hate. Only after discovering the depths of what we can feel can we adequately respond.

I took this idea of “feeling and responding” and applied it to politics. I seem to turn my head and everywhere around me something crumbles hopelessly, and the most alarming and frightening thing is that the people around cannot see this too. These are people whose capacity to feel has been stunted, or put out like a candle. How can they possibly respond to the world around them when they cannot even comprehend it? The erotic lets us experience the world, lets us experience passion, and enables us to find what we love and what we want to change. You cannot change what you don’t understand.

Human Machines

The idea of process can also be bastardized, and influenced by the language of machinery. “Optimize”, “produce”, “maximize” have crept into the modern lexicon, and this kind of language can be used to tacitly detach people from the inner erotic. Instead of being present in one’s body (feeling), and engaging with the world around them (responding), the body is mutated into a machine. It operates like a machine and must be maintained as one. It must be primed, prepped and preened. It must be shaven or unshaven, exercised daily, build muscle, be capable of being worked and be capable of production. Bodies can’t exist in the state between the light (doing) and the shadow (feeling), they must be possess some of kind of purpose—they must work. The body is a tool to be used for the achievement of some external purpose. For women, this purpose is to produce more workers, to socialize them, to maintain a patriarchal and capitalist status quo.

My writing process has consisted of experiencing flashes of words in my mind and then pausing to think about them. For example I am thinking of the word “loiter.” This presents another example of the ways language desensitizes us from experiencing the erotic. A person who loiters wanders or stands around an area with no particular purpose. They are aimless. But then this makes me wonder about these words: purpose and aimless. What counts as purpose in a time where time doesn’t belong you? My time (and therefore my body and my ability to feel) belong to someone else and I should use them wisely. Does having purpose mean dedicating my body and feeling to achieve something? For a corporation (or a similar entity) or for myself? I cannot waste even a second of my day on feeling. There is no time. I swim in deadlines. I must make myself useful. Every movement my body makes must be for the achievement of some particular purpose. My body cannot move for itself, want for itself.

If I must eat, I must eat to fuel my body in preparation for labor. If I must clothe myself it is to signal my standing on the race/sex/class stratum. I don’t really sit with it and I don’t really understand it. I live in it but it is foreign to me. Things happen to it that I don’t have the room to navigate and I suddenly well up with feelings I cannot name.

Algorithms inform our personalities. Rather than traveling across a sensory landscape to discover my likes and dislikes, my joys and pains, I turn on my device and it decides for me. I don’t understand how I’ve come to enjoy the things that I do, or dislike the things I dislike—all I know is I have arrived at feelings but they don’t have much of a relation to me. I don’t know where they come from. They are just there.

If techno-feudalists own the virtual space where we live our lives, can they own the feelings we have too? Are we also loaned our personalities by algorithms, in exchange for attention and in some cases even money? What you might have felt in real life by way of trial and error or discovery, you have given to an algorithm.

Pornographic Feeling

Audre Lord points to the pornographic as being the opposite of the erotic. The pornographic emphasizes sensation without feeling. The word that settled into my head this time was ‘Sterile.’ Pornography is sterile, it imitates the erotic, and can only produce grey translucent half-copies. Rather than traversing the landscape of the erotic, taking our time to experience sensation, and to connect with what lies around us to eventually reach feeling, we are vulgarly teleported there. There is no scenic view, no time to think, no time to connect, no time to understand. We are just there—standing awkwardly in an uncharted unfamiliar place, blundering around clumsily.

The body is taken on a journey where it is transformed into a machine. It begins by alienating the erotic and feeling. In a world overrun by tech feudalism, Artificial Intelligence usurps the human ability to feel. To feel confused, to work through problems, to exercise the mind and interact with the environment by applying one’s senses. People grow ever more distant from one another— AI drafts condolence messages, congratulations messages, speeches and academic work. This non-rational intrinsic ability to experience sensation, to place yourself in a specific place and time, and to bridge the gap between yourself and others, this is what makes us human. This is what creates culture, and what builds civilizations. This is what allows us to evolve. To change. To ‘feel’ allows one to respond.

When artificial intelligence creates drawings, paintings and movies, it has not felt anything to respond to. It cannot make sense of this environment of ours, it cannot process emotion and it cannot feel as we feel. It cannot love as we love, or even hate as we hate. It can create visually stunning but emotionally dead things. It is pornographic. Full of sensation, and lacking feeling.1 I’m even hesitant to call it art.

This alienation from our bodies, and from the erotic, makes us less likely to understand others and even less likely for us to view them as human. We cannot even recognize the humanity in ourselves. We are predisposed to ‘othering’ and are so easily swept up into exclusionary ideologies. There is nothing to share between ourselves and others. The immigrant woman is my enemy and her children are intruders encroaching on the sacred plains of my country, town, village. They seem to be different creatures from what I am. I don’t understand them. I don’t want to. I can’t.

Cavemen

This makes me think of what I call the Caveman phenomenon. Popular media between the late 90s and the 2000s heavily featured films centered around a caveman trapped in ice who is discovered by modern people. These contemporary people nurture the caveman—feed him, clothe him, attempt to help him/her assimilate to the modern world and may attempt to understand some of his culture as well. I remember watching Encino Man, and Ed’s struggles to fit into 1990s America. There is always a scene in these movies, where the caveman and the modern people fail to communicate with each other. He obviously cannot speak English, nor they his neanderthal language. Somehow, through using gestures and sounds, a crude form of communication is created. Absurdly, this represents the erotic to me: Bridging the gap between ourselves and others in order to understand them and be understood in turn. This kind of kumbaya media has disappeared over the years, representing to me a turn from inclusivity to open segregation.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say the late 20th century and early 21st century were amazing periods of tolerance, but I do find it interesting that these representations of tolerance, understanding and connection have ceased to be in a time where othering and extreme self-identification (obsessive categorization) run rampant. Perhaps this is why I feel wary of nationalism. Within nation building lies the exclusion of others. Our desire to be unique, to belong to a group of people, can be weaponized in an instant. Others become not objects of understanding but vessels to channel our hatred.

Ultimately, experiencing, feeling, enduring, discovering and perceiving seem to be fundamental aspects of our humanity. They help place us, they help us understand what happens around us and between us. Without them we become the playthings of capital, and our reality doesn’t stay our own, it becomes something dictated and loaned to us, and what is worse is we won’t be able to recognize when this is happening.

The usual repetitive arguments of the day occurred, between the people who point out that there is nothing worth celebrating, and those who believe that there is a difference between the country itself being free, and being well-managed. The underlying question to me seems to be one of Freedom and Independence. What does it really mean to be free?

Meaning, Importance and History

Independence Day celebrates the breaking of colonial chains and the establishment of a new and democratic republic. Both liberation fronts, Zimbabwe African People’s Union and Zimbabwe African National Union, were guided by Marxist principles. It seems this ideology was not just limited to the political movements, but was so pervasive even young people held these Marxist views and they influenced their imaginings of a post-colonial Zimbabwe. Interviewing black students from St. Ignatius College in 1971[1], the British show ‘This Week’, run by ThamesTV, asked them whether there would ever be black majority rule in Zimbabwe[2]. The responses were well thought out, hopeful, and reflective of the ethos the black majority wanted to carry into their new Zimbabwe. “If communism is going to bring the [Black Africans] freedom, then they will accept that ideology,” said one of the students. The students commented that the hegemony of western empire was coming to an end and losing its influence in the country, which explains the assistance from Russia, Cuba, and China to the liberation movement.

From this I can only assume that at the time, it was not only a struggle against white minority rule that was occurring, but a broader struggle for equality, non-discrimination, and most of all, opportunity. It was the lack of opportunity, to participate in government, to attain an education, to get jobs, that frustrated the black majority to the ends that they engaged in armed struggle. In the documentary, ‘This Week’ interviews young people across the race and gender spectrum, trying to understand what the underlying issues were in Rhodesian society that could have led to these contestations. Young black people (mostly men[3]), expressed that their frustrations lay with the fact that they were living lives defined by extreme limitation. They had nearly no social mobility. The few black people that had access to primary, secondary and even tertiary education found that very limited opportunities were open to them. One expressed that despite completing his secondary education, the only job available to him was becoming a gardener. Even the white principal of the school, Father Davis, empathizes with the frustration of the black students, agreeing that anyone would get “fed up” existing under the conditions of the natives in Rhodesia under Ian Smith’s regime.

Within the struggle against a racist colonial regime lay a class struggle. Upward class mobility was made impossible by race. In ZAPU’s ideological concept[4], the party states firmly that it is against the capitalist foundation of society in Rhodesia. It states that the racism present in Rhodesian society exists to insulate the capitalist purpose of that society. More specifically, the ideological concept says that “White racism is a compound device to protect the capitalist privilege of the white community as well as an attitude for degrading and undermining the human dignity of the black man[5].” The party then puts forward socialism as its identified solution for the capitalist racism prevalent in Rhodesia. Its key points included free education, anti-bourgeois principles and ideas, as well as nationalizing industries and resource ownership.

Although I have failed to find any written document of its own expressing ZANU’s (now ZANU-PF) ideology, it is quite clear and evident that ZANU embraced a socialist ideology during and after the Chimurenga war. Programs implemented in the first decade post-independence by the ZANU government were also socialist in nature, with Makaye and Munhande (2018) noting that it is in the area of social services (health and education) that the Independence government made its greatest strides, making education and health freely and easily accessible for the black majority, breaking the barriers created by the colonial government.[6] ZANU’s shared history with its sister party ZAPU would also lead me to believe that they shared similar ethos and a similar ideology.

Visions of a new Zimbabwe

To really understand what freedom and independence mean, and what they connote, it is important for me to display the motivation for their attainment. Although I was once an unconditional believer in the strict meaning of Independence, and Independence Day, it has become obvious to me now that Independence and Freedom have very complex and multi-layered meanings. They may mean legal freedom; an abolishing of racist and colonial laws, the establishment of a majority led government and the shaping of a pro-black and post-colonial jurisprudence, but it goes far deeper than that. It is obvious, from not only the adopted ideology of those that fought for our independence but even ordinary black people, that it was a fight for social inclusion, dignity, liberty, and humanity. It was a fight to escape a dehumanizing existence, where a dog belonging to a white family could be respected more than a black person. The struggle aimed to seize the colonial administration by its shoulders, shake it and say “Sonke singabantu”, “Tese tirivanhu”, “We are people.”

Criticizing Independence Worship

What does it mean then when the underlying aims of the liberation movement have not been met or effectively put into practice nearly half a century later. In an article titled ‘Conquest and Constitutionalism: Thoughts on an Alternative Jurisprudence’, which I had to read for a Jurisprudence class, Modiri criticizes the pervasive culture of legalism and says that South African legal culture is in the grip of “constitutional worship”. He criticizes the 1994 Constitution, and its failure to address the colonial and apartheid history of South Africa adequately. A failure to really look at the underlying colonial structures that still are present in society leads to laws that can never address the real issues that have remained as hard residue in the proverbial pot that carries the new mixture of post-independence societies. In the context of South Africa and Namibia, land is still a highly contested issue. Although years have passed since independence, the white minority still owns the land, black people are economically excluded and although on paper we have acquired “rights”, they seem to exist in a far-off abstract plane, totally divorced from our real lives.

In a similar way, using Modiri’s thought-process, I can also say that Independence worship in Zimbabwe, is strict, rigid, and also in some way a form of “colonial-unknowing.”

I believe that there are two kinds of independence: Formal and Substantive Independence[7]. Formal independence occurs when there is a shift in regime and is the popularly known meaning of Independence. When the colonial government of Ian Smith’s was replaced by the Independence government, and the Constitution of the Republic of Zimbabwe was introduced, a new legal regime was created. Colonial laws such as the Land Tenure Act and the Law and Order Act[8] were repealed, and post-independence legislation such as the Land Reform Act were passed, with the aim of addressing historical injustices. I argue that Formal Independence alone is nearly meaningless, and has the same worth as an act of symbolism.

Substantive independence, although having some similarities to material independence, is rooted in the word ‘substance.’ I like this word ‘substance’ because it has many meanings. It can mean “materiality”, it can mean “meaningfulness”, “reality” and even “actuality.” When a thing has substance it is solid, tangible and real. When independence is substantive, it means it not just exists theoretically, or legally (which I believe is very close to being theoretical) but in the lives of every day people. If formal independence is the soul, then substantive independence is the body of a revolution. It can be touched, heard, felt.

Formal Independence is a way through which Substantive independence should be achieved. Substantive independence is measured through the level of impact a post-colonial society has on its citizens.

People picked up arms to change the material conditions of their lives. They were frustrated at how extremely limited their lives were. They were grouped in reserves like animals, on barren land, with little access to decent healthcare systems and subjected to brutal treatment and even torture. In House of Hunger, Dambudzo Marechera describes a scene in a township where the Rhodesian forces left brutalized black bodies in the streets to discourage the natives from acts of rebellion. This is the kind of existence black people aimed to escape from.

My grandfather grew up in the mountains nearer to Nyanga, and his family among others were displaced by a milling company, moved to a reserve closer to Mutare. This is the story of thousands of black families. Half a century later, black people still live in the ruzevhas, without running water, very little electricity and very little opportunity to leave. The same ghost of upward immobility sits haunting our house. Black bodies are still brutalized, and black women, who faced the brunt of intersectional violence under the colonial regime, are still limited to depending on the men in their lives to provide for them. Like countless other and more established African political writers, have critiqued, Formal independence has led to very little change except for the black bourgeoisie.

The emergence and success of the black bourgeoisie means especially nothing, except to show plainly the endurance of the colonial capitalist system against which the black people struggled. Still, half a century later, like the white masters, gardeners are called “boy”, and wealthy blacks are called “murungu” and “khiwa.” Apart from the socialist golden age of the 80s, the black majority in Zimbabwe cannot access adequate healthcare, sleeping on hospital floors and transporting women in labour to clinics in wheelbarrows.

The central issue identified by the black youth who fought in the war, which was the lack of job opportunities is still present today. This seems to me a symptom of the real failure to decolonize beyond lip service. The white minority, though not as economically powerful as in South Africa, still live lives of far better quality. In response to forced integration, they have created a thriving insulated economy, to protect themselves from the instability of the black government.

Contestations regarding Sovereignty

Half a century later and the dream of Zimbabwe seems to have become dark and indiscernible. Sovereignty achieved but for who? I recall my first time hearing that word, ‘sovereignty’, somewhere between 2007-2009. Robert Mugabe had made a speech, one of hundreds, bashing Western attempts to interfere in Zimbabwe, stating firmly that Zimbabwe was a sovereign state. I remember hearing one of the adults around me say “Hatidyi sovereignty.” “We don’t eat sovereignty.” This was probably my first time encountering the idea of the dualism that exists in the word “Independence”; the dualism being formal and substantive independence. We don’t eat sovereignty means independence can only become consolidated when it changes the lives of those it was supposed to liberate. We don’t eat words, we don’t eat laws, we don’t eat symbolism and we don’t eat patriotism.

Back to Visions of Freedom

In the preamble to the Zimbabwean Constitution, there is a recurring theme of reverence for the ‘gallant sons and daughters of the soil’ who fought for independence, and an acknowledgment of the Chimurenga/Umvukela as being the deliverer of our freedom. Former Chief Justice of Namibia Ismail Mahomed said of the Namibian Constitution, that it is “a mirror that [reflects] the national soul” and “the identification of the ideals and aspirations of a nation.” The Zimbabwean Constitution, although flawed because of its historical context, also reflects the dream and ambition that was held by the black majority in 1980. It says it will “[Cherish] freedom, equality, peace, justice, tolerance, prosperity and patriotism in search of new frontiers under a common destiny.”

So, it is clear that freedom and independence in our context mean many things. They mean hope, opportunity, fairness, equality, justice, peace, prosperity, and patriotism. With this in mind I think it is only fair to believe then that we have not fully attained that freedom. That we can only say we have fulfilled the second aspect of independence when we can say we have created a society where the black majority can finally access free, accessible and high quality healthcare and education, when the black majority can participate in all aspects of governance, when there are no more contestations on the transparency of elections, when poverty is eradicated, and when still existing colonial norms, values and systems have been dismantled and struck down.

Reconciliation

I find that between the two Independence Day battling camps I mentioned in the beginning of this essay, there exists a failure to reconcile both their worldviews. I agree that formal independence was important, that it was the product of the blood, grief, pain and hard work of many. My own aunt ran away from home at the height of the Chimurenga to fight for the black majority and escape the tyranny of the Smith regime. Many people hold fond memories of the liberation fighters, and even Alex Magaisa, famed critic of the Zimbabwean government said he would always celebrate Independence Day. In a news article he recalls an encounter with vanamukoma[9], and how after telling them his childhood dream of becoming a farmer, they told him they were fighting to ensure he could realize that dream. The truth is it took a great deal of banding together to achieve this beautiful thing, this Zimbabwe that we have. It is also true to say only one leg of the dream has been achieved. It is true to say that we have not reached the vision of the promised land that many died for. It is true that the dream has faded into the dark of night.

“Colonial-unknowing” also leads to an incapacity to appropriately apportion blame for the Zimbabwean Dream not being accomplished. There is a rushed urge to cast blame on corruption and greed, but even that is a complex issue deserving of its own essay. The perceived failures of the post-colonial government do not exist totally divorced from the historical context that precedes them. Colonialism is pervasive, a stubborn stain that is difficult to wash out. The similarities between colonial Rhodesia and the new Zimbabwe to me can only be explained by the commonly used phrase “I am what my father made me.”

[1] When contestations against colonial rule were high, and only a few years after the inception of the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress, which was the mother party of ZAPU and ZANU

[2] Rhodesia Zimbabwe | Children of Rhodes | What the young say? Accessed at

[3] Which also goes to the show the inherent patriarchal dynamics during the struggle for independence.

[4] Zimbabwe Africa People’s Union. Ideological Concept

[5] Here again I notice the patriarchal shortcomings of the anti-colonial movement. I note with interest that ZAPU makes multiple references to the “black man”, which goes to show that even within progressive movements, misogyny was still pervasive

[6] Makaye, P & Munhande C. 2013. Zimbabwe’s Socialist development experiment 1980-1989. Journal of Humanities and Social Science, pp.66-68

[7] In this essay I use the words freedom and independence interchangeably

[8] Of 1960

[9] Translates to “brothers”, used in reference to the freedom fighters

An affair debuts you into womanhood. The real cruelty and barbarism of the world become neatly unfolded before you like a napkin. Love, desire, commitment, turn into abstract philosophical concepts, and they become muddled and mixed up so much so that you cannot differentiate between them anymore. My wants and my desires vis a vis what the right thing to do was, became so mixed up. Desire forms you into a new creature: one made solely out of it. Desire whose power is so all encompassing the presence of the other is nothing but a small nuisance.

Things progressed and I watched myself as if in a film; my hatred for her develop, my underlying envy festering like poison. Knowing that I had nothing to offer was the worst of it. I hid behind my silent and simmering contempt for her because I knew any confrontation with him would scare him off like an animal in the wild. I wanted nothing less than to cause him to run to her. My position was precarious and characterized by cowardice. Too cowardly to confront him about the other I simply hid behind my own feigned ignorance and delusion. Knowing she was there but pretending I didn’t know this, and that it had nothing to do with me.

My feeble self clung to stereotypes I can only describe as disappointingly patriarchal. Things I could not recognize in myself but could not stop myself from doing— the irresistibility of it all, like hard drugs. My youth, my capacity to elicit sexual desire from men: I clutched them childishly and stubbornly in my fists like toys. I had nothing else but these small possessions. I turned myself into a caricature much like the fictional portrayal of women in male written novels: the sexy busty woman who reads Charles Bukowski and only ever opens her mouth to give blowjobs or Say Something Profound. My body I was quick to turn into a tool to achieve what I most desired. What I most desired was to win, and then to be loved; secondary to and resultant from winning. Desire rips the body apart like a demon escaping hell. I imagined it to be a feral creature, shredding my flesh to pieces while tearing itself out of me. I could not be normal about love. I wanted to be complicated but I was a simple thing. I wanted to be held, and seen, and loved, and like a scavenging animal I was willing to eat off of the leftovers of someone else’s carcass.

Prior to this experience I had thought of myself as a Moral person. I knew what was right or wrong, I understood ownership, monogamy. But things became so indistinguishable. Who was to say what was right or wrong? Was it fair that what I wanted had to come secondary to someone else? I didn’t really have an interest in the meta and normative ethics of the whole incident, I was just seeking any excuse to justify how I felt. I learnt about the power of human emotions in this affair. How whatever I felt, trumped any and all rational thought. What I know is I was something close to love (probably infatuation), and I was so determined to win, to clutch romance and love in my fists that very little else mattered to me.

But now, approaching it with a slightly clearer lens, I really do wonder about the ethics of desire. All the great artists I knew had been involved in some form of adultery or other. There was a common thread of loving people who were loved by others first. Of arriving at the scene of love too late. In Wind-Related Ripple in the Wheatfield, Mikko Harvey writes,

“I typically arrive three years too late. 
I wish I had been able to sit
in that white, aromatic kitchen and look you in the face 
but I was not ready. I was still on my way."

Romance fosters faith even stronger than religion. I believed I had my rights, as a lover, to love who I wanted. After all, the operations of the universe and of timing were beyond me. I could not control when I met someone, or how. If I could have had it my way, if I could have done the right thing, I would have. But I couldn’t. All I had was now, and the love spilling out of my hands and the loved one there, in whatever form, to receive it. Salvador Dali, Franz Kafka, Frieda Kahlo, Vladimir Nabokov—all found themselves a part of love with complications. Life was not so black and white. I thought of Dante, who said upon seeing his muse Beatrice for the first time: Behold a god stronger than I, who comes to rule over me. I too felt myself overpowered, succumbing to the strong winds of passion. Perhaps this exposes a deep inner selfishness—artists have been known to exist in their own inner realms, subject to their own codes of ethics and morality. I can’t claim to be much more evolved than this.

I am a kind of anthropologist because I love to study love—its language, its reason, its meaning. The ritualistic element of it. Anecdotes about first love, true love, failed love, complicated love. Love makes me feel as though I’m losing my mind. I’m particularly fond of anecdotes, and my favorite is of how Salvador Dali and the love of his life, Gala, met.

“Salvador Dali, when a boy, had a dream of a little Russian girl swathed in furs riding in a sled pursued by wolves. Many years later, in 1929, he met Elena Diaranoff, known as Gala, the wife of the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, and recognised in her the child of his dream. “We fell in love instantly,” he has written. His courtship, conducted largely on the beach at Cadaques, was both passionate and childish. He wore a red geranium behind one ear, and laughed when there were no jokes. Gala seems to have understood. “My little boy,” she told him, “we shall never leave each other.” Dali invented tender names for her: bee, squirrel, fur bell, noisette poilue, lionelle. Whimsical though their love must have seemed at the time, they remained devoted to each other for over fifty years.”1

Rather than idealizing desire, love, romance, passion, I found that reading about artists in love made it more human—more real. The complexities of human nature were laid open, and it was very easy, with all my youthfulness to be thrust into the fine print and get lost within them. Romance flies on the wings of youth. It was easy to believe fully in the power of my own passion and desire. I was a human being, engaging in a human experience, the collateral was not very real to me. I found I could not really think of this situation in absolutes. What if I said something, did the right thing, and that did nothing, and she stayed? What if she already knew and didn’t care? What if she had been in on it the whole time? No act of heroism was worth anything beyond satiating my own ego. Who was right? Who was wrong? Who was innocent? I still don’t know.

I do laugh when I think of the absurdity of it; my childish obsession with winning. When I had regained a bit of myself, and I could think clearly, I was shocked. That I could have been driven to such lengths and extremes, to the very near edge of madness. Feministly castigating myself. How trivial and ridiculous it was. It seemed to go against every facet of my personality. I attempted to analyze my behaviour. Am I still a Good person? Was I ever one to begin with? I walked through the wilderness barefoot in hope of penance and all the time I felt like I was dying inside. Harshly I remembered my youth, and all of a sudden I felt like a small girl again, shivering out in the cold. To see the currency I possessed, barely anything, shaken in front of me like a bag of silly jingling coins, as if to say “Look! What you have is nothing.” I was suddenly reminded of the impermanence of these things, and the cold reality sliding on my body like slime that they never ended well for anyone. What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to be in service of other people? Refraining from being party to an affair is an act of selflessness; choosing the other before your own desire and passion.

Is it an act of weakness or calculated selfishness to continue to indulge in it? Is it better to fight against it and lose than not have fought at all? People seem to be generally more accepting of the former2. But still, it is callous, a great betrayal— it ruins families, destroys partnerships, and hardly ever develops into a fruitful relationship. It is even mainly predicated upon misogyny. I was young, still energetic, impressionable, still fun, still bursting at the seams with the eroticism and desirability that so often attracts waning masculinity. All things which women supposedly lose as they grow older3. So it was not perfect, and hardly the passionate, moving love story I would have desired it to be. It was closer to a boring uninspired cliche instead.

I can’t claim to know everything about human behaviour, or even what inspired mine. Partially why I believe I was so susceptible to bending my moral convictions is because I had never really given any thought to them in the first place. What happens when a situation becomes complex? What do you with yourself then? I was suddenly thrust into a hazy maze where I couldn’t make my way out. I didn’t have the answers and I didn’t know what to do. The right thing gets squashed and swallowed up by aching desire, and the warm feel of a tender body and a shared language. The feeling of being cocooned by the steady hand of someone older, more established. How I luxuriated in it like a warm bath. How I felt so clever, so witty, so grown up. The right thing is love—endless, boundless love. The right thing is honor. The right thing exists in a place so far beyond me that I’m not sure I can reach it.

“You’ve lost weight,” my parents said to me in horror. I had no way of telling them the stress I feel over my life can be so consuming eating anything makes me want to throw up. Perhaps this is a representation of how I feel during the year: caving in on myself.

The beginning of the year is also characterized with the usual visa stress and the associated xenophobia that makes me feel like a stray dog tracking mud into someone else’s house. I had a brief romance with a Westerner who remarked that he had never faced any maltreatment from the employees at the Immigration office and I said something funny, something witty, in response but it shocked me, to see the naked truth pulsating in front of me like a dismembered organ: They only reserve that kind of vitriol for other black Africans. I quickly learned what it was to be the right kind of immigrant. The relationship taught me plenty about contradictions and complexities; the power of wealth, race, class, sex, age. That a person can be discriminated against in one place, and be part of a class of oppressors in another. The power of the West and those subsumed into its imperial core were bared open before me. That I could be brought to tears at Immigration because I had my papers thrown at me like a dog, while those with better citizenship in predominately white lands could be welcomed with all teeth displayed, allowed to push the indigenous population out of housing, flood shopping malls and inflate prices. Over drinks at a local restaurant my friend and I witnessed two European men obviously in their thirties/forties, pick up two very young black girls and take them on a ‘date.’ At Immigration, when they applied for their visas, they were most likely not rudely asked “what [they were] doing here?” and “why [they] don’t just stay in [their] own country.”

It becomes wearying to try to justify what you are looking for in another country that isn’t your own. A common theme among other Zimbabweans I meet is desperation. The life of an immigrant seems to be made of small concessions of your dignity and character. We survive like animals. Sometimes I feel like I hate my university and general adult experience because all it consists of is strategizing and planning. Where to next? What then? I’ve begun to joke that the only way out is to marry a Westerner and change citizenship. We all make jokes like this. How we will resort to crime and begging. They hide our desperation, panic and fear. Our clutching at straws at any chance to escape here and live a good life. Accompanying desperation is guilt. It sits with me, the feeling that I don’t deserve to be here. Then more guilt at feeling resentful about an experience I know another person wishes to have.

A part of youth is resenting where you come from. There’s a heavy cloud of shame associated with being African, and being Zimbabwean. I know a Zimbabwean who religiously posts “Happy Independence Day” on a foreign country’s date of Independence. He says nothing on the 18th of April. You carry around the perceived failures of your country. That stench of desperation and the desire for a good life, is so potent, everybody else can smell it like sharks smell blood. Time runs in a strange way. It is measured by how quickly I can get a return on my investment into my education and moving ‘abroad’. Which place is the best to immigrate to, with the best jobs, and the clearest pathway to citizenship in the shortest amount of time. When I was slightly younger I had dreams of Europe. Perhaps the idea of dominating lands of conquest was appealing to me but now that I grow older I yearn to be around people who look like me and sound like me. I long to be indistinguishable. Another black face in a black crowd rather than a white one. I find that when I come home I walk barefoot nearly everywhere because I want to feel grounded where I know I belong. Through passing conversations with friends it seems this is a shared feeling. Everybody wants to go home. We want to live together, break bread together. I hate feeling alien elsewhere. After I moved I made the shocking discovery that I hadn’t introduced myself using my full name to anyone for months. And even where I had used the shortened version, it took a ridiculous amount of time for anyone to get it right. Mostly I just gave up and let them continue botching it because I disliked the hassle of forcing syllables and consonants out of someone’s mouth. Every introduction is a reminder of my other-ness.

But this all feels very far away on holiday. When I come back to my childhood home the duality of my life is put before me. When I am at my other home, I cannot imagine my life here, and when I am here I cannot imagine my life there. It seems I can only think of things in absolutes. And the person I am there cannot be who I am here. So instead of transitioning, I sort of get drop kicked into the one life or the other. This makes it particularly horrific when the time to return to university life looms closer. Then I buck and kick in pure resistance at the thought. No, I don’t want to go back to an endless cascade of deadlines. No, I don’t want to go back to working. No, I don’t want to go back to being depressed and feeling like a hunted animal all the time. But this also allows me to also analyze my life in a detached and clinical way, like a coroner over a dead body. I can make neat incisions and peer closely at everything: my relationships, my past, my future. What I need to change…what needs to stay the same.

The complexities of it are astonishing. Because although the deadlines wait in the shadows waiting to club you to unconsciousness the second you forget to be aware of them, there is a beautiful thread of community being woven there. I think of nights out at the book club with my friends, the back and forth of shared ideas and the feeling that you are close to being completely understood by people. The domesticity of sharing meals with friends you live with. As an immigrant I struggle with feeling a sense of place, and the fear that the relationships I have will crumble to dust when I eventually have to move on to the best place for my survival. But they feel as real to me as the ground beneath my feet and the sun in the sky.

“…we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.”1

I remember that I am human, and not an algorithmic creation, trying to create the best odds for the best outcome for myself. Joy is also very real to me in those moments. I become aware that I am in the process of constructing my life, and that it really never ends. There is no neat conclusion lying at the end of this; no answer to placate youthful questioning and sooth yearning and longing. Each day is something in its own right: It does not need to be attached to the next to find validity. I can do something today and it will have nothing to do with tomorrow. But I can also use tomorrow as a chance to be different from today. Perhaps to Sisyphus, the act of rolling the boulder up the hill was individual, each time totally separate from the others. It was always a new task, a new challenge, a force of will to see if he could do today what he did yesterday, and do tomorrow what he did today.

1

A.S. Byatt, Possession

A woman’s relationship with her body is toxic, at times even abusive. This is encouraged. As girls we played with dolls whose body parts were removable. My Barbies and other dolls had flimsy detachable legs, arms, even heads. The woman’s body is psychologically dismembered even before a coherent thought can be formed. Subconsciously it is placed in the mind that you can and should be easily able to change and alter parts of yourself until you find what sticks. When I was twelve I would sit fixated in front of the glowing screen of my mother’s work computer and spend hours of the day playing games on the website “www.girlsgogames.com” The overwhelming majority of those games were dress up games, in which the goal was to turn an ugly girl into something beautiful. To pick at her skin and remove her blackheads and pimples, to aggressively do her hair, to place her in skimpy outfits. Day after day I spent all my time doing this, until this naturally translated into real life. This reinforced an idea in my mind: Woman as a project. Seeing myself as separate individual parts and never as a whole. My face, my teeth, and worse, as a black girl, my hair, my bum, my breasts, all individual parts of some abstract whole.

We view our bodies as blank canvases upon which we can paint and recreate whatever image has been placed in front of us. Today I am thin, tomorrow I have fat in the right places, the day after I have filled my lips and my nose because that is what is beautiful on that day. My body exists in a transitional state. It is something waiting to be, it is not something that is. I will beat and cajole and punish it if it fails to co-operate. My body exists as an antagonistic character; the villain of my story and what ultimately I must victor over if I am to win beauty. I must step over its bloody carcass, the proof of battle, and accept being beautiful as the reward.

I did not grow up watching a lot of TV or having a lot of exposure to social media, nor did I grow up with a mother who was decidedly feminine. My mother does not wear make up, braid her hair, wear wigs or wear jewelry. And so the day it became revealed to me that this was not normal, and that I as a result was vastly different than what I should have been, many things changed. Suddenly, the teeth my mother loved so much because they were so much like hers, went behind braces for four years because I couldn’t stand the sight of myself anymore. In the space of a few moments, the concept of “beauty”, which existed as an abstract idea in the periphery of my life was violently brought to the forefront. Retrospect has been brought by the fact that I have a teenage sister, and it’s painful to see how young women are made to perform femininity, and subsequently beauty, at every waking moment. How suddenly they become aware of themselves, conscious to all the standards they now have to adhere to for the rest of their lives. I still succumb to this pressure. Life becomes a play, a one woman show with a never ending audience and you are expected to dance and dance and make a spectacle of yourself always.

The Fear of Being Ugly

Behind this culture of obsessive weight watching and preening…wanting to be the most gorgeous thing in existence, lies a disturbing paranoia. We are paranoid of being ugly. The permanent lipstick, the semi-permanent eyelashes, the shift towards plastic surgery: these reveal an incredible fear of being humane and being ugly. This fear is more particular to women (and anyone who subscribes to femininity) because there exists value in beauty and vulnerability in what is ugly. Being ugly is being vulnerable and our culture does not care about the vulnerable. When you are vulnerable you are for all intents and purposes useless and are dealt with as such. Sentiments bordering dangerously on eugenics are born from this because what separates perceived “ugliness” from race, sex and disability is a veil that is so thin it is almost transparent.

A lot of a woman’s value comes from being beautiful. If you can be anything, be pretty. Everything else is an addition. Pretty AND smart, pretty AND useful. Sometimes I catch myself militantly ensuring that at all times it is evident and obvious that I am beautiful. I shrink away in shame when I notice that some part of my beauty has been muted, and for a time others were able to behold my ugliness, my humanity, my vulnerability.

The way we look primarily serves as a method of communication to other people. We are only aware of our own existence through the act of being beheld by others. We are aware of whether how we look is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based off of others reactions to our appearance. We then internalize this reaction and use it to fuel our inner dialogue. I only knew that my body had become “womanly” (gross hypersexualization) because a classmate on a school trip told me the shorts my mom had packed for me were too tight and I had a big bum. I was otherwise oblivious to this fact. Being somewhat reclusive and only getting into the groove of social media late into my adolescence and early twenties, without warning, I had entered into a strange world where quite literally anything on a woman’s body was subject to scrutiny. The hair on our arms, legs, armpits. Some women going as far as shaving the virtually invisible hair off their face. I discovered that a person could be insecure about the size of their pores, and be so afraid of being seen bare that the state of existing as you are as a woman, has become associated with masculinity.

Women liken themselves to little boys or men when they are not aggressively feminine, i.e. when their hair is short, when their makeup is not done or when they have no nails on. This indicates a very subtle and implicit understanding in the fact that femininity (and inversely masculinity) is a performance. It is a costume you put on every day and nothing inherent or ingrained within you. Femininity can be taken from one woman and just as easily dressed on a man. Although I won’t explore it in this essay colorism is an example of this dynamic. Dark skinned women (and this exacerbates when the women are either too muscular or too fat) can be in a second stripped of femininity and have this femininity dressed on light skinned men, who are viewed as less masculine and less virile than their darker skinned counterparts.

This in fact signals to other people the kind of person you might be, whether you should be treated softly, or roughly. It is a way of guaranteeing safety from societal harm because if you can present yourself as someone with value, you reap the rewards of such. People only want to be skinny because they want to be protected and to be treated well. The closer you are to being whatever is beautiful, the closer you are to being human, and the closer you are to being human, the more likely you are to be treated like one. I sometimes felt (and this is a sentiment that has been repeated by friends who look/present themselves like myself) that I was treated differently by men (and women) because I did not present myself in a way that was particularly ‘feminine’ or appealed to traditional masculinity. I do not look like the kind of woman who is desirous of being taken care of, or being dainty or gentle. Women who do not appeal to masculinity, and who lean more towards it than femininity are often punished.

People who were previously “ugly”, engage in acts of such severe self deprecation that I wonder how at all this can even come across as normal. They feel the only way to make up for having gone through life with their vulnerability exposed like naked flesh before us is to race us to that realization. If I make fun of myself for having had been ugly, then I can be welcomed into the world of beauty and accepted as one of their own. Then I stop being vulnerable, then I am on the inside.

The obsession with thinness has always been rooted in anti-blackness and misogynoir1. It is currently wedded to the worsening recession and the capitalist class creating a distraction from the tough times that lie ahead of us. Making thinness the ideal body type at a time when the climate crisis is causing droughts, floods, and subsequent food insecurity is a masterful way to shield the rot that is eating up the world. So while you diet, rationing your food to prevent weight gain, it is worth investigating whether you even have enough good food to begin with. If you can afford to buy vegetables, grains, meat, or whether buying groceries would plunge you into bankruptcy. Do you even have any free time available to exercise? Or are you working for so often and so long that you can barely stand and make yourself a meal with the groceries you scrounged coins to afford in the evening. Are there any social spaces for community building? My father used to play in a rookie football league and I wonder if that is possible in a social climate where third spaces are locked behind paywalls and you have to pay to be healthy, to connect with people and to be happy.

Fascism and Beauty

Like I mentioned before it is also an indicator of a rise of fascism. Beauty is used as an indicator of superiority. People that do not fit into the ideal of beauty quickly find themselves at the periphery. In Nazi Germany, the Nazis commonly used imagery of the ideal beautiful German to attack (and then kill) people who did not fit into this image. Men were strong, muscular, handsome. Women were feminine, with bodies that suggested fertility, softness, but still firmness and superiority. The lines between gender were clear. At the Heroes Acre in Harare the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier features two prominent figures, a man and a woman. The man towers over the woman, able bodied, strong, muscular, virile. The woman stands below him, suggesting subservience, femininity and fertility. This imagery of beauty is often used to represent “strong nations.” It is once again on the rise. The inferior peoples, are going to find themselves slowly being pushed out of society. This already has begun. Like I mentioned before, the obsession with beauty and vanity underlies implicit gender essentialism: Women should look like this and men should look like that. There are strict lines between the two that cannot be crossed and trans people are already being persecuted for not fitting into fascistic ideals of beauty. Next, they will target disabled people, and black people etc.

Some of the attempts to create community in this current climate unfortunately end up circling back into reinforcing the same harmful notions about beauty. These communities are simply mirrors in which one gazes at themselves and sees a reflection of their outward beauty. They reinforce the validation of feeling accepted: If this group of attractive people can subsume me, and make me one of them, then I have been truly accepted. Then it means I am also beautiful.

Because no one wants to be left on the periphery, women adopt dangerous methods of staying on the inside. We are so obsessed with beauty that we even choose vanity over safety. The same horror we express at the Victorians using lead beauty products and other archaic beauty practices will be expressed towards our culture in the future.

Food as the enemy becomes relevant here. In all the early 2000s chick flicks or films marketed towards women, at one point in the movie some reference to disordered eating was made. The girls either ate salads, totally abstained from carbs or obsessively worked out to maintain their body. But life cannot be lived in the pursuit of beauty. It is not enough to simply state this however, because the violence of beauty is backed by structures that force conformity to them. One individual cannot make any meaningful change. However, sometimes I fear some women are all too happy to carry on being oppressed. All the progress made steadily over decades is being undone in a matter of seconds. Body positivity is lost, partially because it became absorbed and watered down by capitalism and was turned into a trend. Trends go as easily as they come and body positivity was never going to stay. Now we have regressed and being thin is a sign of being beautiful.

I think ultimately the resurgence of eating disorder culture, body negativity, and “thin is in” is a reflection of the broader socio-political landscape. It is a reflection of late stage capitalism, of a rise of fascism, of impending war, of the climate crisis and future food insecurity. It is a reflection of a culture that is set on consuming itself and an inability to move forward. Regression is resistance to change, and maybe this is a sign that change is on the precipice, if only we could reach out and firmly grasp it in our hands.

The most recurring question I ask myself is if I in my personal capacity will ever stop suffering. Then it is swiftly followed up by the question of whether suffering; mine and anyone else’s, is something pathological.

Is suffering a part of the core, or pure fabric of existence? Or is it artificial, aesthetic, something that is attached later on to our being.

If it is part of the pure life, what causes this to be so? And if not, if it is indeed attached, and auxiliary, how can we remove it?

Naturally, as one does when they are extremely unhappy, I fell upon the subject of suicide. Suicide, the notion of one wanting to bring about their own death, now feels such a contradiction to evolution and our general instincts as animals. All life, for a reason strange and mysterious to me, wishes to carry on; to survive; and in some cases, even to conquer. Why then, and what then, could cause a living organism to fight so strongly against this primal urge? To kill oneself? The conditions of life must surely be so terrible, so unendurable, that even the most animalistic parts of ourselves can see no way to survive.

When I was younger my father after work would watch animal documentaries on the National Geographic channel. There, I was exposed to the seeming cruelty of animalistic violence. It became repetitive and formulaic; it was by the design of nature that there was one hunter and one hunted, one prey and one predator. I specifically recall an episode where some kudu was ambushed and attacked by hunting lions. I watched it gallop desperately, I watched it eventually be brought down. But somehow it escaped, with its entire flank exposed, chewed away, the ghastly naked flesh and its secret inner workings exposed. Somehow, despite sure death, it kicked and fought and wrestled for its life, but died eventually. I wonder all the time about survival. Even in the times that I faced and desired sure death, I imagined myself to be like that kudu: A desperate animal, kicking and kicking and kicking away from death.

Assisted suicide seems at first, to be a dignified way for people to ease out of their own suffering. Across the world it is slowly beginning to be incorporated into legislation, and becoming socially acceptable. The State itself now plays a role, with some facilitating these services. But this brings me back to the question of whether suffering is pure, pathological, an act of nature, or a created phenomenon. But created by what? I tend to lean towards political philosophy for the answer to this question.

Once I began to really ask myself, and investigate what truly was the cause of my pain and suffering, I found it was not very internal at all. I was not predisposed to thunderous mood swings, to extreme self-hatred, to suicidal ideation that bordered on obsessive and delirious. I simply hated the conditions of my life. I felt they were almost pathological and interwoven into my being. And being a person naturally prone to curiosity, trying to understand the state of the world nearly drives me mad. It appears senseless, strange, a knot which when untied, only tangles up again.

Man begins to see himself only in terms of his oppressed identity under a capitalist system. Poverty is inescapable. Disability, a sentence to a lesser life filled with pain and suffering. The only ‘natural’ way to end such pain is to end one’s life.

It begins to be difficult to understand that these conditions are not natural at all, but a result of a methodically organized system: One that is so calculated that it lies under several layers of deceit, far from detection and blame.

Action versus Passivity

A character in a book I started reading recently committed suicide1. His reasons (on the surface anyway), were that he felt it was an exercise of will, to remove himself from a life he was thrust into by some cosmic accident. It is a common thought that our existence as intelligent beings, our even being on earth, is the result of some terrible mistake. Certain philosophical arguments for suicide advance that life occurs to a person, and they participate in all its processes passively. We are born by some cosmic accident that remains unexplainable for the remainder of our lives, and from the moment of our births, we immediately begin the process of following the paths that have been created for us through socialization, history, culture. There is a kind of passivity in this. In allowing all these unwanted unknown things to happen to you. It is better to take control over your life, by ending it. In some cases, it is even your right, because it is your life and yours alone.

I have different thoughts. On the surface I’m inclined to agree: it does feel as though I am the passive victim of circumstance. I have no real control over my own life. I am merely a symbolic figure in my own existence. Yes I have a name, a family, a life. But I don’t understand why, nor where it comes from. These are not things I have any particular control over. In fact, I would argue that I have very little control over anything. No thought is my own. Perhaps my feelings belong to me, but even the method in which I express them comes from some external teaching.

It would, in some way, be better to get it over with and end my life. But then, as a leftist I am inclined to examine this from a political lens. Isn’t true passivity, allowing myself to be conquered by conditions which when closely examined, are fully controllable? Would I be happier under different circumstances? Different conditions? Would I be willing to fully embrace life, to exercise my free will and find joy if everything was set up differently?

Perhaps this is fueled by a certain egoism: A belief that although we are all victims of the same injustice, somehow it weighs on me more heavily than other people, and I am burdened to thrust it off my back: The idea that this kind of life is somehow specially intolerable for me. I wrestle with the two notions: to passively end my suffering, or to actively fight against the conditions that have made it so. This question becomes more complex when one realizes there is no purity in suffering. I then stop being a victim of circumstance but the conquered object of a brutal system. Humanity has been seized with fables, starring heroes and villains for millennia. I want to be the hero of my story, that noble knight who valiantly protects their honour, their kingdom, their life, their love. Perhaps one of my most shining opinions of Marx is that he is a very hopeful writer. “This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the works themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.2” It is a little easier to believe for a time, that perhaps I can triumph over my own life.

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Action is necessary to bring about any kind of material change. Any real and meaningful action can only be brought about through the collective efforts of all people. For Marx it is the proletariat. I see myself now as being not just one person, but a piece of a collective whole. A whole that is fragile. A whole that needs me and whatever I can provide in order to survive. And perhaps that too is ego, a deluded belief in my own self importance. But it is mostly a belief in the role I play in my own community, and how important these small individual efforts are when brought together for collective good.

Isolation and loneliness are two vital emotional weapons utilized by a capitalist regime. I must believe that I am alone always, that my struggles are my own, totally unique to me, and totally incapable of being understood by other people. I must suffer alone. Obviously, such a life is intolerable and impossible. I look then to suicide, to get rid of my loneliness. But you will soon come to realize the inter-connectedness of all people’s struggles, realize the sheer responsibility we all have collectively to wrest our autonomy, our happiness, our lives from the bourgeoisie.

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A Time To Kill

Whether suicide itself is a morally justifiable act is neither here nor there for me. It simply is. I understand its utility, in a world where the real solution to one’s problems are never addressed. A society that exists under capitalism suffers from a failure to look its problems (self created) in the eye. It is incapable of being direct. It must dance and dance and dance dizzyingly around its ills.

What matters to me is that suicide seems in modern times, to be the symptom of a much deeper troubling sickness. Now I will turn fully to the topic of assisted suicide.

I fear that in a world driven by greed, where it is not uncommon, and in fact is predictable, that those pushed towards the fringes of society are viewed as discardable, things like assisted suicide become legalized ways to covertly target and get rid of undesirables. These are symptoms of the sickness that is capitalism.

It is fairly obvious that the people who will seek out this service (or have it advertised and targeted towards them), are people who are in pain. People whose lives have only known stability in suffering. Whose identities under a capitalist system become inextricable from their own inner identities: Homeless, poor, disabled, queer. People who are pushed towards the fringes, rendered to animals, scavengers, living lives with no dignity. Rather than ask why there exist people without housing, why disabled persons are pushed out of existing in public (and private) spaces, why there are simply no basic resources to ensure a human being can at least attempt to self-actualize, to find their own happiness, the new solution seems to hack violently away at any and all avenues of critical thought. Here lies that cowardly inability to look problems in the eye. Dehumanization and disenfranchisement begin by failing to directly look at something, to see it for what it is. We scuttle past bodies lying dejectedly on the street, we refuse to look at people whose identities we don’t understand, we turn away from children whose entire skulls are blown open, or children buried under collapsing mines.

In the aftermath of the murder of Jordan Neely, a black homeless disabled man, I saw many people attempt to give passive non-violent solutions towards dealing with mentally ill persons in public spaces, with the main piece of advice being: Don’t look them in the eye. Or in other words—Pretend they don’t exist. This applies everywhere I think. On my journey home we stopped at a service station that was full of roving homeless young people. I watched people resolutely stare ahead, as the children cried out over and over again “Please can I have money to buy food” or “I’m hungry.” I found this jarring. We are incapable of true depth (and true feeling) and I sometimes fear this is the true barrier to class consciousness.

I am suspicious of such a solution, that comes at a time of global recession, of unending war and strife, of sky-rocketing poverty, alarming conservatism and a rise of fascist ideology. I worry that this takes advantage of the affliction that has been thrust upon people, whose pain they desperately want to stop. This is preying on the vulnerable and unprotected. It is no better than sending horses to the slaughterhouse when they cease being useful. The fate of the carthorse Boxer in Animal Farm comes to mind. I read Animal Farm when I was very young, and I remember being disturbed that poor Boxer, who was earnest and pure and gullible, who worked day and night in service of the farm, was so easily discarded by the pigs when he grew old and he couldn’t provide any more labor. His life reduced to his worth in terms of output. Sent to the slaughterhouse so quickly, to be turned to glue. The dogs who were drowned when their sense of smell and eyesight waned. I then learnt later upon analysis that Boxer represented the working class, the people who have been fooled into believing that after enough slaving, a reward awaits them.

This feels to me a desperate feature of a system that is trying to save itself. It cannibalizes itself strategically, to save the most vital parts. But eventually there will be no leftover parts to discard, and the wounded animal of itself will be weak and trapped, backed into a corner. It also feels to be an attempt to pander to the illusion of choice: The philosophical argument of action versus passivity. Instead of forcibly taking your life, as is done under colonialism and imperialism, with their use of outright force, this is more covert. Rather than kill you, I will make the conditions of your life so unbearable that you will do it yourself. Really it is I who has killed you, only I have weaponized poverty, unhappiness, and any other tool at my disposal to force your hand.

This essay is the first part of a series on capitalism and societal impact. Next I will probably discuss my thoughts on capitalism and its effect on the evolutionary processes of human beings. As time goes on and I read more and come across more information I will come back to edit this essay, as a living piece of work.

And yet, as Sharon Olds writes in her anthology Stag’s Leap, “…the men are gone and I’m back with mom, I always feared this would happen.” ‘This’ being the forced return to the halls of mother, where all the walls are made of mirrors and I must face myself.

The return to mother is riddled with shame and defeat; An admission of my own humanity and my incapability to be the best at everything. Throughout one’s childhood, their mother is the focal point around which everything revolves. When I fell and scraped my knee my first cry was to my mother. My natural instinct is to turn to my mother when I fail. Though through the fabrication of my own self-reliance I may force my mouth shut, it still rips open and I shout and shout and shout like an infant for my mother.

I view going back to mother as a transitional plane. My mother and I sit in silence sometimes; not talking. Sometimes I have nothing to say to her. We drive places together, to town, to the shops, and still, the enduring silence. It allows me to think. Neither of us have the urge to fill this silence, it is companionable and amniotic; the silence of the womb.

When I was first left by a man who loved me, she found my body all curled up and crumpled on the floor like crumpled tissue. I remember her look of sympathy; I fought harshly against it. I remember how in our moments together in the months following, when I cried staring out of the window at the trees and the grass, she left me alone. She let me shed the veil of my shame and my hurt in my own way.

It is said our love of men is driven by our closeness to our fathers but I feel mine stands against the screaming backdrop of what I feel for my mother. I feel so much for her that at times I feel I have to get away from her. Otherwise I am choked with feeling. I can only truly get away if I find this nurturing of hers in someone else. For a time I find it but I always have to go back to mother. I have to admit my defeat.

But of course the other loves will always be poor and partial. I have known her for longer than anyone. I will always have known her for nine months longer than anyone else. We were one person once. This one-ness I have tried to find elsewhere, but consistently I have failed.

I feel I have failed because mother is supposed to be the rich soil from which the gainly, pretty flower of my life blossoms from. When I return to her, I feel like a seed stuck in the sand, claustrophobic, unchanging, stubborn, malformed and misshapen.

In Stag’s Leap, an anthology of poems inspired by her divorce, delving into themes of love, loss, regret, betrayal and identity, Sharon Olds writes about finally telling her mother “my husband is leaving me.” In the beginning of “Telling My Mother”, the narrator is riddled with anxiety, and battles feelings of shame. But underneath this shame and this anxiety, also rests a finality. Returning to mother, represents the end of something; The end of her marriage, the end of that life. Permanence. Each time I told my own mother about a man I loved was because I hoped this act of telling, of talking about it, was casting a spell of permanence to bind them to me.

Of course I should feel shame that after believing staunchly that I had broken free of the restrictive, claustrophobic, amniotic soil, it turned out I was still just a little seed returning to be buried in the soil. At the end of “Telling My Mother”, the narrator says “I thought it would be a pure horror, but it’s just home, Mom’s house.”

In Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”, the narrator decides to return home to her mother and father after a harrowing break up. Although the narrator’s mother is unveiled to be criticizing, she is still who the narrator defaults to for safety. The narrator chooses to escape the city and all its memories of her past lover Law, to return to the quiet rural landscape of her mother’s house.

At the end of the film “Lady Bird”, Ladybird finds resolution to her girlish conflict with her mother. She realizes they are both just women. In a similar way, I have stopped feeling caged and suffocated by my own mother. What a gift it is, that there is someone who knows me so intimately, and made me. Mother is my Creatrix in this way, for isn’t it in the depths of her being that I was carefully woven together?

Although I may feel shame, that I am always sent back crying to my mother with my tail in between my legs, rejected, mother does not receive me with shame. In ‘Class of 2013’ Mitski writes about an intimate moment of returning to her mother’s house in the face of her declining mental health. She asks her mother if she would bathe her and wash her back just once, and this to me represents the never ending cycle of return that we have with our mothers. Although seeds grow into trees, although they break away from the soil, they are still rooted in it. A tree that falls, falls back onto the ground and is swallowed up by it in the natural process of decay. Mother remains, grounding.

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I remember being a child and being angry. Angry all the time at the conditions of my life. Angry that I couldn’t change them. I wished all the time, viciously, that I could grow up, because I associated age with freedom and what I wanted most was to be free. The book Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga is the first that comes to mind when I think of literature that accurately recognized the emotions of children. The opening line of the book reads “I was not sorry when my brother died, nor am I apologizing for my callousness.” The protagonist of this book is a young Zimbabwean girl, around 12 or 13 years of age who navigates feelings of anger, disappointment and resentment towards her family and the people in her life in pre-liberation Zimbabwe. I was transfixed. It was the first book I saw where a child’s criticism of the adults in her life was not minimized, but rather validated. As you read the book, you find yourself agreeing with Tambudzai; her assertions that her father was not sensible were true, her belief that the adults around her were foolish, also true. It validates the child-like feeling that all the grownups in your life are a little mad.

Oftentimes when I was younger I felt that from all corners, from all the adults in my life, I was not listened to. We hardly ever treat children like they are fully formed human beings in their own right, with their own thoughts, feelings and emotions. We do not respect them. We do not care for them in a way that matters. We neglect them. This neglect leads to them lashing out.

The existing family structure creates a cage in which children are trapped. They are left to the mercy of caretakers who may abuse them. At its core children are the victims of our domination. I remember a visit in primary school that I made with my mother after school to a friend of her’s house. When my mother and I arrived, naturally I went off with the other children, but eventually I wandered back to sit with my mother, only to be told by her friend that the children in her house where actually not allowed to sit in the living room, for whatever reason. I remember thinking that this was very strange. At my house, my mother never restricted me or my sisters from being anywhere and doing anything for arbitrary reasons. As I grew I realized my relationship with my parents was vastly different from that of others. While my parents maintained a certain level of strictness I would associate with patriarchal beliefs and notions, they were fairly liberal. My parents never infantilized me. If I asked a question about death, about politics, about art and literature, I would get an answer.

I had a conversation with a friend about the practice of beating children in Southern African culture and found that it was common for many people, at least once, to have been physically set upon by their parents. The older I get, the more absurd and totalitarian the practice seems. That an adult should use their entire physical force against a child, who cannot defend themselves, either because physically they are overpowered, or because socially they have been made to believe that in this gruesome play their role is to be subservient and dominated upon, is upsetting to me.

Of course like all other African children my parents did strike me, but this was a rare occurrence, and what I found to have been different in my experience is that my mother could actually apologize to me. She could actually be truthful for a time and say there was no material reason or purpose for my being beaten, but that she was projecting her own feelings of frustration onto me. I knew of many children who were not allowed to feel angry at their parents, who had to ceaselessly perform gratitude in exchange for their needs being met.

After I left home for university, the dynamics in my family shifted in a way that surprised me. On my first visit home, I found that my sisters now called my mother by her first name and sometimes my father, and they never found this offensive or an act of disrespect. My sisters could express frustration, anger or disappointment with my parents without fearing they would be lashed out at. Many children are repressed and many children are not loved in a way that matters. They are not allowed to represent and defend themselves.

I find the family to be a crucial focal point in driving capitalism because, as pointed out by Engels, the modern family exists to create a workforce that produces capital. The psychological bonds created when children are forced, day after day, to live with those who oppress them, subconsciously allow them to enter a workforce where they are mistreated, but they can never recognize this mistreatment because it looks so much like the mistreatment they received in their homes. At a cousin’s wedding event some years back I sat around a fire with my mother and a few female relatives, and the conversation eventually shifted to how much labor girls in the home should perform. My mother must have looked like Karl Marx, because she argued with futility, that girl children should allowed to be children, unburdened with work and the responsibility of taking care of their families. The women shouted her down and steadfastly defended their borderline cruel treatment of their daughters, almost insinuating that it was useless to have female children if they didn’t work. This unveiled to me the true selfish nature behind having children for most people. Children are viewed as the means to some end; they are labour, they are legacies, they are proof of two people’s love, they are salves for broken relationships, they are treatments for loneliness. But they are not people in their own right.

When teenagers speak of mental illness, they are met with the condescending question “But what do you have to be depressed about?” I believe mental illness such as depression in young children is a symptom of a malfunctioning system. Somewhere something is broken. In current times a growing epidemic is drug use in young children. In the West this is more commonly seen in the use of vapes, or cigarettes, and in Southern Africa, among lower class children, the use of ‘glue’ or other substances.

In a high density suburb a young boy of not more than 11 or 12 years of age was caught smoking “glue”. He was apprehended by a crowd of adults, who under the guise of “disciplining” him, proceeded to take turns slapping and humiliating him, with the desired effect of dissuading him from participating in that kind of behavior in future. I asked myself what on earth this crowd of adults was hoping to achieve by abusing him so publicly. Children are not even afforded mercy and dignity.

I suspect that as the machinery of late stage capitalism begins to fall apart and break down, children feel the most adverse effects. They are the most neglected and isolated, when their parents, in the pursuit of earning enough to live as wage laborers, become increasingly exhausted from overworking. The children have nowhere to go. They have nothing to do. There are no recreational after-school programs for school going children. We have lost the art of play. Online children’s spaces cease to exist and real life spaces are vanishing rapidly. The modern child is a Frankenstein-ian creature that is half child and half adult. They have been forced into adult spaces and mimic adult behaviors because they do not have the spaces to navigate their own lives. Where spaces are given, they are not appropriate and do not accurately reflect what they go through.

We often make mimicry of being a teenager and feeling misunderstood, but I feel it must be recognized that teenagers are misunderstood. That they are bullied out of their feelings and that we never take the time to sit down and understand them. My mother is one of the few adults I have seen take some time to unlearn her own biases and listen to my adolescent sisters and honor their feelings. Helping raise three siblings from their infancy until now has taught me that often when newborn babies cry, there is a reason behind it. They cry because they are uncomfortable, because they are hungry, because they are anxious. So too do toddlers, young children and teenagers behave. They act out because there is a reason to act out.

It’s important to remember that children do not ask to be born. They do not ask to be under our care for nearly 2 decades. They do not choose which homes they come into and which families they join. We have to make things worth their while. We should be grateful to them, that they bring innocence, joy and wonder into our lives. bell hooks writes in ‘All About Love’ that when asked to define what love is, all children, even those abused, feel in some way loved by their caretakers. We should be grateful that we are loved by them. We should be grateful that they see the best in us, and that in fairness, we return what they give to us by treating them well.

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