Between the years 1983-1996 I grew up in what is now a very expanded surburb of Waterfalls in Harare.
In an area that still remains referred to as Cheviot as one approaches the former Irvines chicken farm which was also relatively close to the still famous Frank Johnson primary school where there used to be a refugee camp.
I do not remember the official name of this refugee camp.
Save for the fact it housed those cdes that we later learnt with hindsight, were from South Africa, Sudan, Namibia, Ethiopia and also Mozambique. Remember this was in the late 1980s.
My sisters, brothers and I were in primary school in the same late 1980s.
And there was for some reason adults queing with us for Lobels bread at the height of Zimbabwe’s economic structural adjustment programme (ESAP) that closed many local manufacturing companies.
This, in our angry young minds, when we thought they should be at work while we were on school holidays and hunting bread to eat with green vegetables!
Except that when we shoved and pushed each other in the queues, we would not understand the multitude of languages being used either to swear or plead for the limited loaves of uncut bread delivered on the day.
(If you have read thus far, please tell your children they are in bread heaven!)
It would be Zulu, Swahili, Chichewa, Tsonga, Venda, Ndebele and Nyanja mainly because the cdes of the ANC and PAC were mixed like that at that time. But we didnt know the languages. I am only writing with disputable hindsight and memory.
This was by the one supply Lobels Bread lorry for the shops at Cheviot, Malvern or Zindoga (believe it or not, yes that sprawling commercial area next to Magaya’s church used to be relatively decent.)
When our parents would come back from work we would be asked if we managed to get bread?
Sometimes we would triumphantly say yes! Most times we would have to say no, and be asked to join the bread queue again tomorrow.
But when we watched the ZBC ‘8 oclock PM news’ which was compulsory before being ordered off to bed, we would see not only images of the Cheviot, Waterfalls shops and the fenced refugee camp next to them with a story about the fending of an apartheid regime ‘bombing attempt’ against the ANC or the PAC.
We did not understand much of it in the immediate until our parents and also the Mvengemvenge music programme with songs about freeing some country (in our young minds) of a country called Azania. Especially, if I recall correctly, a song by the late great Robson Banda and the New Black Eagles titled ‘Soweto’ was played.
Today, that rich history of pan-African solidarity is overshadowed by xenophobia, exposing a deep collective amnesia regarding South Africa’s liberation struggle.
A song that asked God and African ancestors to liberate as it implies the people of Soweto and also ‘Azania’.
We had an idea that while we were going to primary school, there were bigger issues about Soweto and Azania that we always had to remember.
This music TV show always preceded the same 8 O’clock news as read by Joseph Madimba, Noreen Welch, Tsitsi Vera, Jestina Mukoko who would outline the struggle of the black people of Africa to free Azania (now South Africa) and also South West Africa (now Namibia).
To this day I still think the ANC of South Africa should have named the country they took over in 1994 as Azania! But thats a debate for when they at some point manage to regain a majority government and also find Hani ways of dealing with global financialised capital in their ‘revolutionary’ midst.
The key point however cdes is that Zimbabweans and all other Africans have always been at the heart of South Africa’s liberation struggle, independence and envisaged prosperity.
What has been happening in recent years around xenophobia does not come alone. And I agree with former President Mbeki who has recently been correctly arguing that any anti-Pan-Africanism that we are witnessing today has a nefarious or imperialist foreign hand to it.
Not because Zimbabwe has done better economically or politically. In fact Zimbabwe’s “better” development over and above Zambia or Malawi is a legacy of late colonialism as borrowed from Mahmoud Mamdani
Moreso via the historical bias of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland as determined by British colonial foreign policy via proximity to the then apartheid South Africa (Azania). And fortified by Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) which gave us limited options but to embark on a painful struggle for liberation.
So all this xenophobia that we see from South Africans against our people from Angola, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Somalia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and others being hounded out of the still settler colony that is South Africa is completely ahistorical.
It reflects a fundamental problem with our fellow South African Africans’ “inferiority complexes”
For example, as shown on social media how does on accept a white European cde as ‘one of us’ yet you are chasing a longstanding Somalian hardworking cde from a spazza shop?
They need to go back and re-read, re-think their own national liberation heroes in no order of preference (whom they dont know are also ours) such as Biko, Sobukwe, Shaka, Mandela, Tambo, Winnie Mandela, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Govan Mbeki, Albert Luthuli, Clement Kadalie (yes he was Malawian), Mac Maharaj, Chris Hani among many others!
Then they need to crossover and overcome their pride to the mainstream leaders that insisted that all of Africa should help liberate them. And I will list a few in no particular order. Nkrumah, Nyerere, Machel, Ben-Bella, Gaddafi, Nasser, Kaunda, Neto, Nujoma, Cabral, Mugabe, Nkomo and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
This article was first published by Takura Zhangazha and it is published here with permission of the writer.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity
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