The reason culture remains the underlying theme of all these issues is simple. In North America, Black-Americans are discussing the need to take control of their culture after realising that one man, in this case President Barack Obama, could not change a 237-year-old institutionalised system of racial bias. In Southern Africa, the average Joe has no idea of the tsunami of Westernised capitalist destruction that is about to hit them, because they haven’t dealt with or come to terms with their own culture issues in a modern world.
The seed of racism
Zimbabwe blacks and North American blacks, two different cultures nevertheless the same race, are being influenced by the same system in different ways. As people celebrated Nelson Mandela’s birthday, very few media outlets pointed out that this man had formerly been listed as a terrorist during his time with Umkhonto weSizwe, a group that believed in strategic bombings in order to achieve change. What happened to cause this man to suddenly become a darling of Western culture? Does it have anything to do with him having given up on ever defeating such an entrenched system and instead working within it? Racism is a seed; what keeps this seed growing is its institutions, organisations, policies, education and taxation.
In Harare, the issue of cremation has cultural undertones that hit home to all Zimbabweans. In Diasporan homes, Zimbabwean families have to make a decision about whether to ship a loved one home as a corpse or as ashes due to cost, without forsaking the cultural significance. These debates often fail to highlight the elephant in the room – westernisation and its offspring, capitalism.
According to George Friedman, author of “The Next Decade”, the United States refuses to acknowledge that it is an empire yet the facts speak for themselves. According to him:
“When American economic culture touches other countries, those affected have the choice of adapting or being submerged, the definition of free-trade simply means an international system that permits the vast American economy entering; to most if not the whole world”.
In other words, if your society has not yet fixed its own cultural systems before the tide of Westernisation hits you, you are screwed.
Zimbabwean sensitivities
Paraphrasing Steve Biko, once the Zimbabwean disregards his own “Zimbabwean Sensitivities”, he or she is opening up, or at least prone to, incorporating other culture’s sensitivities and beliefs to fill that vacuum. In North America, black people are very sensitive about how white people address them, this is important especially in a web-world where all the racism and bias has migrated to the institutions and capital systems. What of Africans who only know systems given to them by Western culture?
From a Zimbabwean view black consciousness can be simply defined as: “The ability of the Zimbabwean Consciousness to break away from the past Zimbabwean attitudes of the liberation struggle and to set a new style of self-reliance and dignity for Zimbabweans as a psychological attitude leading to new initiatives. At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realisation by Zimbabweans that the most potent weapon in the hands of globalisation is the mind of a Zimbabwean”.
Beware of change; those not prepared for it are often swept away in its filth. To the elders within Zimbabwe obstinately sticking to values they refuse to revise or accommodate in a globalised world, I assure you that other cultures have died from a lack of adaption. – mugaradzakasungwa@gmail.com
Post published in: News