Mr. Bob Herbert writing in the New York Times of 16th January 2009, submitted an opinion article titled “Zimbabwe is Dying” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/opinion/17herbert.html . That article was a brilliant enterprise. It was very brilliant in the way it repackaged the unexamined narrative presently making waves in the metropolitan conceptual schemes, as the truth of the Zimbabwean situation. It was superlative in the way it suppressed the fundamental problem with Zimbabwe in other to highlight the demonization of Mugabe, which was the objective of his article. In the process he showed some corrugated partisanship and a surprising disregard for balance. He did not lay aside the arrogant and proud stubbornness of ignorance that litters many submissions on Zimbabwe. His is nothing but an attempt at manufacturing consent and opinion. His enterprise here consolidates the position of those who view journalists as those who write with the certainty and conviction, which profound ignorance breeds.
Most mercenaries in this mould allow their laziness to unmoor them from reason as they take up the refrain of their paymasters. This drives them to the shipwreck of peddling agreeable rumours as facts. Most of them anchored their submissions on second-rate conjectures, which reason cannot substantiate or facts corroborate. Most of the opinions they advance on these issues were primarily the logical fall-outs of their worldview, which stand most times impervious to reason and facts. This is what they hawk around unchallenged, as facts. The congenital instabilities of these conjectures conspire to reveal them as wandering minstrels of cant, easily carried away by the official narrative. They avail this narrative the vehicle of their prose to market this mainstream propaganda to gullible audiences.
But it remains rather a splendid blasphemy whenever a journalist, whose august vocation and dignities recommend truth, take liberties with the truth under the pretext of a necessity, which is neither necessary nor justifiable. It blows the heart and scandalizes reason, whenever one allows his craft to degenerate into a knee-jerk marketing of cheap stereotypes. It smacks of scurrility. But I don’t blame these guys. I blame ignorance. I blame intellectual laziness as well as willingness to pose a nelson’s eye to facts. Such an attitude comes from the paternalistic conceptual scheme, which many Western journalists and experts on Africa suckled on, and consult blindly whenever Africa comes to their surgical theatres.
For decades, Africa and African issues have been pontificated upon by Western experts, who amply armed with an insular view or what I may call the Joseph Conrad’s vision of Africa, sit in comfy offices in DC or some cosy hotels in Johannesburg to condemn a continent to the hells created by their impious ignorance of the continent. African voices and other voice dissenting or protesting this arrant hawking of stereotypes are neglected; shouted down with a deluge of manufactured facts and figures; treated with formalized disdain and relegated to the peripheries of irrelevance.
On another occasion that called for our intervention, we laid out a trend, which the so-called Western experts and their surrogates subscribe to while addressing issues concerning Africa and the global south as a whole. We contended that whenever they make pronouncements on African issues; scarcely are views from the peripheries entertained or allowed admittance. Though, “local peasant uncontaminated by scientific orthodoxy knew better”, the experts always claim to know how the patient is supposed to be feeling, with the kind of certainty which only profound ignorance breeds. Mainstream thought and expert opinion essay assiduously to eclipse and becloud the realities. Never are the voices of the victims of history, who are sitting on the sidelines of major historical processes; those who are on the frontiers and frontlines of the circumstance, even those that affect them, their destiny and their posterity considered. Even in those areas where their local knowledge supersedes and makes the loftiest armchair theorizing, look carelessly pedestrian; they are never given the attention their competence holds out in crafting solutions to their predicament. To this end, the experts keep on advertising the sublime ignorance, born of the alchemic crosspollination of arrogance and paternalism, which neither ameliorates the situation nor provide credible solutions, but succeeds abundantly in creating, fostering, and reinforcing negative stereotypes about those on the periphery as fundamentally helpless.
Today most of the major voices dominating the Zimbabwean debate are as usual mainline ultra-specialist champions, peddling and propagating their insular wares, with inspired mediocrity. This debate has lacked every element of objectivity since Mugabe sacked White farmers from the land their ancestors seized from the black natives, murdering them in the process. The major contributors to this debate have been hawking the metropolitan viewpoint manufactured in White hall and peddled by BBC as its most vocal mouthpiece. The Mugabe debate is increasingly showing Western media as the propaganda ministries of their various governments.
I have always known that Noam Chomsky is eternally right.
For instance, when the West wanted a final solution to the Sadaam Hussein problem in Iraq, the media was co-opted into hawking the manufactured intelligence, which were all doctored to drown every other voice of reason, attesting to the innocence of an accused bad guy. The western contributors to this debate and craze to sack Mugabe all come from the narrow pedestals availed them by their stereotypes. The narrowness of conceptual haughtiness comes in handy to endow them with the necessary blindness, which seduces theory with gusto. This empowers them to becloud and magnificently misinterpret the issues at stake in the deepest possible way, while empirical evidence writes itself into prominence daily in the lives of the people at the receiving end of the policies, which their verbal darts strenuously evade.
It is edifying to note that for Bob Herbert’s cause, righteousness stands aloof. He had forsaken the ethics of public discourse. One reserves the right to his opinion, but that opinion must not be a surgical suppression of truth, in service to one’s prefabricated conclusions. His opening lines identified Zimbabwe as hell on earth. I have had cause to use the same description when I was randomly interrogating the Nigeria situation. Here, I believe we share some love of picturesque metaphors. Our ways diverged when the issue comes to depth. His was a monosyllabic sculpting of Mugabe as the trouble with Zimbabwe. That is a lazy oversimplification!!!
Mugabe is a deranged tyrant that deserves every pellet of wrath that our anger and disappointment can command. He is a political debauchee and a dinosaur that should have been retired into a political museum long ago. He neither attracts my envy nor respects. But in allegiance to the truth, there are things that should never be concealed from the charity of reasonable mankind. The lessons and parallels of history should never be allowed to suffer effacement at the hands of revisionists on a mission. Never before, since after Biafra, until this present crucifixion of Zimbabwe, have the perfidies of a rogue empire, the false grandeurs of a presumptuous press, the ingenuities of profound propaganda, the subtleties of an exploitative power, and the rash impunity of consolidated greed been so combined to brutalise and bludgeon a nation into submission to the will of neo-colonial birds of prey.
Mugabe is not the trouble with Zimbabwe. He is a part of the problem, but not all of it. Sidestepping the fact, by converting a part to the whole is a classical symptom of propaganda. And this is the kind of propaganda one should never allow to stand. Such articles written from the snug comforts of an office in New York or elsewhere are capable of doing prodigious mischief. Zimbabwe is dying. And the reason why the country is dying being Mugabe only is such a nauseous oversimplification as to warrant any serious consideration.
Mugabe like all other Dinosaurs in African tribunes of power is in reception of our greatest reprehension. We reprehend all rogues in African power corridors and the international consortia of collaborators that help them in the plunder of the continent. But our disagreement with submissions, such as Herbert’s, lies in the fact that these tyrants were primarily inventions or creature of the imperial enterprise. They were used by the imperial powers, even against the interests of their own people, until they outlived their usefulness, or became expendable embarrassments to their handlers in London or Washington, then the machinery was set in motion to eliminate them with unemotional economy, like the Orwellian Napoleon shipped off boxer, the workhorse to the abattoir, after he succumbed to infirmity, working his life off for this clever rogue.
The question is: Why do these guys want Mugabe out at all costs? Why now? Where were they when Mugabe converted Zimbabwe into his private real estate? They gave him a knighthood. But once he took over white farms, he became dangerous. All the time that blacks were in reception of his tyrannies, the world looked the other way. But once it came to the issue of white farm land which British perfidy worsened, Mugabe became the bad guy, and sanctions which were meant to punish him was tightened on the economy wasting further the potentials of this country. What did these guys do to other African examples, when Africans themselves screamed at their vice-like stranglehold on power? The West armed them to suppress their own people. What did Western journalists do to Mobutu? Many of them contributed opinions to the narrative that canonized him as the pedestal of stability in central Africa, and sang his praises to high heavens, even when it was crystal clear that he was raping and plundering his country for good measure.
Bob Herbert in this article did an excellent job of unlocking the reservoirs of contemporary prejudices resident in the Western conception of Africa. His hatred for Mugabe pushes him into a historical amnesia, which he ameliorated with sidestepping facts to suit his conclusions. This guy is not reporting from Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a country blockaded on all sides. How can a country so blockaded survive? Democracy peddled by the west is now the smokescreen to deal with governments who refused to succumb to neo-colonial intimidations or those that refuse to take orders from Whitehall or the Whitehouse.
As the article unfolded, Bob Herbert showed himself as possessed of competences that dwarf the laughable pretensions of Goebbels. And The New York Times lent its podium to such a spectacle giving this mockery of our sensibilities a wide audience. Propaganda has now a new advocate. He set out to make a case for the decapitation of Mugabe. He fulfilled his ministry with an audacious competence that has been the hallmark of mercenaries. Suggesting that such a pen is purchasable is a very lame conclusion. We wouldn’t succumb to that. His disposition simply shows an inadvertent victim, caught in the web of a pseudo-imperial narrative that sees the whole world as raw materials for its wellbeing. Zimbabwe is now the favourite material for that narrative. To that end, they are busy churning out apocalyptic Jeremiads seasoned with large doses of mainstream propaganda, to justify a decapitation, which should be visited on Mugabe, like the one visited upon Sadaam Hussein, even when it was apparent that the bad guy was being sacrificed to give Halliburton and other members of the American military-industrial complex, a canvass to try out the doctrine articulated by Naomi Klein as the Shock Doctrine.
The West should lift their sanctions on Zimbabwe. Mugabe is not Zimbabwe. He does not feel the effect of the sanctions. It is the people who bear the greatest brunt of it. Western sanctions have never worked anywhere to overthrow a tyrant. Ask the Cubans. Ask the Iraqis. It rather toughens them and creates cheap propaganda fodder for the tyrant. The sanction on the people of Zimbabwe is criminal. The only thing needed to disguise and justify this crime against the Zimbabwean people is the invocation of Mugabe’s name. These apologists forget that Mugabe was propped up for donkey years in power by British perfidy.
Mugabe is a dangerous fool. The Zimbabwean people should find local solutions to the Mugabe problem. But Zimbabwe does not need Western intervention to sort out her political problems for her. Britain is too tainted in this regard to be a voice of reason. She has a vested interest. Besides, the West will always miss in action whenever their actions are needed. They disappeared in Rwanda as the Hutus massacred the Tutsi, although many Western governments had advance knowledge that the Hutu militias were stockpiling Chinese machetes to that effect. Darfur is still bleeding and Western governments are posing a nelson’s eye to that. These areas require attention as well. That the British government hates Mugabe and have been working assiduously to install their lackey in his stead is so apparent that they now seem to be conscripting the services of the New York Times to this inglorious enterprise.
The journalist should never be a servant of propaganda. I hope the relevant parties are listening.
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