Citizen of Zimbabwe: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai

Traditional Culture, Modernity & Democracy

Citizen of Zimbabwe: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai 70 The paragon, the darling, of the Africa-essentialist left is the Tanzanian academic Issa G. Shivji. His use of Marxist vocabulary and analysis is such that his vision of an Africa, uninfected by Western, bourgeois, and imperialist influences, is itself infected by European socialist influences . Moreover, his emphasis on peasant mobilisation is drawn from a Chinese Maoist influence – so that the ‘purely’ and authentically African nature of Shivji’s ideal state has nothing to do with historical culture as such, but everything to do with what the masses, particularly the rural, village-based peasant masses might seek to create as they move into a revolutionary phase. It is an irrepressibly romantic vision. It suffers in cases such as Zambia, where more of the population is urbanised than rural; and even in Zimbabwe after the land seizures and redistribution, where there will shortly survive many more commercial farmers and their workers than peasants. Even so, the impulse behind Shivji’s work is immaculate. If Africa can somehow rid itself of the legacy that colonialism has brought, and renegotiate to Africa’s advantage all the international links that are now imperialised, then the continent could start again. It is also a highly moral work, since the emphasis on peasants leading the fresh start is necessarily against the present corrupt ruling classes who benefit from the developing economies that the West needs for its own international purposes. But it is an archaic outlook for, without development, what Shivji really proposes is a pastoral Africa where, somehow, there will also be a Westminster -free democracy. ZANU(PF) intellectuals have been selective in appropriating parts of this vision. They would themselves inhabit what Shivji calls a ‘developmentalist’ state, but the peasants would somehow grow enough food, happily and democratically enough, to feed them in the city universities. They would endorse the seizing of land without knowing the complexities required to farm it. They would reject the imperialism of the West while benefiting from its grants and leisure technologies. They would repudiate Western democracy but insist that, one day, an African democracy will allow the peasants to make the decisions. In the meantime, they will do that within a vanguard Traditional Culture, Modernity & Democracy 71 Traditional Culture, Modernity & Democracy party. Even Shivji is not so idealistic he would endorse the ransacking of his ideas by people who ransack more widely. What, however, is Shivji’s idea of an African democracy? He is, as noted above, committed to the belief that there will be a rural revolutionary phase, what he calls ‘the battleground of the countryside’.1 One can almost see ZANU(PF) theoreticians abstracting that into their justifications for the land seizures. Shivji, however, is also committed to the safeguarding of human rights. These are not suspended in the mass struggle forward. But his instruments of democracy are tame and insipid. They follow on from his concept that democracy should cascade upwards. However, it does this from the base of ‘village assemblies’ forming ‘electoral colleges’.2 By the time each electoral college has elected the next one above it, and the process culminates in the election of the president – or even, as in post-Tito Yugoslavia, a collective presidency3 – the village peasant will have been left several cascades behind. I do not mean to belittle Shivji’s work. So many people have written critically, not so much of the Western democratic model, as the fact that it was imposed. Very few have tried to devise an alternative model. Whatever model emerges as ‘African’ will have to be, all critics agree, constitutionalised. Here again, there are very few drafts of what such a constitution might look like. Finally, at this stage anyway, the panAfricanist search for an essentially ‘African’ form of democracy has been rhetorical and abstract. Tsvangirai knows this, but he rejects also the imposition of artifices such as NEPAD, and the assumption that only the Western model will measurably suffice in the international politics of today. We cannot have a pastoral democracy. I think Africa has to skip some of the stages of the developmental path because of the advances that have been made, the exposures to technologies. Africans have even been exposed to new methods of social life. You cannot avoid those. However, I don’t think that human rights, or democracy, can be defined in terms of African contexts – or any particular contexts. I think these are...