Lost dignity

Start with how we speak. We used to speak quietly, slowly, calmly. Only boers shouted. Izwi rashe idiki because his authority doesn’t come from the strength of his lungs, or armed men backing him up. He spoke with the moral authority of long tradition, so he didn’t need to shout. He spoke with the moral authority of one who listens, not only to the tradition of the ancestors, but the feelings of the living. At least, in spite of all the efforts of colonial administrators to make the chief a part of their system of control, many chiefs I remember still lived true to this tradition. Leaders like this formed the character of an older generation.

But now leaders, including government-appointed chiefs, shout, threaten and try to undermine the people’s sense of dignity and self-worth. What the leaders do, their rag-tag armies on the streets copy. This shows in their use of language. We were taught that an older person was to be addressed with respect, by his mutupo, or as Baba waSo-and-so (naming his child) and always as imi, not iwe. Now I admit all languages are different, and they develop, so some, like Swahili and Tswana, don’t have that plural of respect, but have many ways of showing respect as well as equality. In English, the plural ‘you’ has become the correct form for everyone, and the implications of that deserves longer discussion another time. But now those angry young men call their elders iwe and make you feel they’d get more angry if you answered with iwe. That is not about equality. It is not about respect for everyone, which means building everyone up, but about pulling people down to their own very low level.

Examine them a bit more closely and you will probably see that, as so often happens, lack of respect for others reflects the very low respect and esteem they have for themselves. They are victims of the system too.

How did it happen that our struggle, which began, in the words of some older men I remember, as an attempt to rebuild wounded dignity, should end with this bunch of clowns and crooks, certainly with no sense of their own dignity, trying to trample the very idea of dignity and self-respect out of the rest of us?

Yes, we have memories of past suffering: Shona at the hands of Ndebele, both at the hands of white settlers, everyone at the hands of some party or other in the second Chimurenga, Ndebele at the hands of Shona in Gukurahundi, poor people deprived of their homes and livelihoods by Murambavanhu and more recent assaults, right down to the way our self-styled liberators treat their own supporters. It’s not just meanness, its an insult to bus supporters to the airport and “forget” to provide them with transport to get home, but they’ve done that before, bringing mobs to their rallies or into Harare from remote rural areas to vote and then leaving them to find their own way home. It is as if the leadership, having kept their sense of historical grievance alive despite the great power and wealth they have amassed, cannot rest if they are not punishing someone for that sense of grievance that they refuse to put behind them.

Next time, we must remember we are our own liberators. Yes, we need political parties (though I have serious doubts about many of the husband-and-wife parties that have sprouted recently like mushrooms after the rain; remember only 10% of mushroom species are edible, 10% are poisonous and the rest have neither nourishment nor poison in them.) and political parties need leaders, but it’s not fair to the leaders if we give them uncritical allegiance. We abandon our own dignity if we don’t exercise our right and our duty to watch and correct our leaders. That’s why countries have constitutions, and our present one does set some standards we should insist that our rulers respect. If we blindly accept any new liberator, we will only have ourselves to blame when that liberator becomes our oppressor.