Keeping Matabeleland interests safe and secure is a priority and everybody’s responsibility. We want a future oriented Matabeleland, but it appears we will need to deal with the historical trauma that has left us self-hating people always waiting to pass harsh judgement on our people. To keep high standards for our creativity, innovation and wisdom is important for the development and growth of our political space, but we need to realise that it is impossible to have high standards without good discipline.
Years of abuse from ZANU PF have shaped how people of Matabeleland view themselves. We have become subservient to Harare and fearful of outdoing the ‘master’. Subconsciously, we feel our safety is threatened each time one of our own pushes an agenda that threatens boundaries set by the bully. Typically, our people are very aggressive and hostile towards anyone who is seemingly threatening the bully’s comfort zone.
There are no shortcuts to development; it is important for our growth that we set ourselves high standards and remove any real or perceived limitations. But, keeping high standards entails embracing a set of responsibilities, and being fair to oneself is one of them. This means standards we set for ourselves must be fair – expectations being contextually appropriate. Matabeleland people need to recognise and stop holding their own people to unrealistically or disproportionately high standards that do nothing but set them up to fail.
Raising expectation and demanding better from our people is fine but those standards need to apply across board. Double standards that see us lowering the threshold or accepting lower standards from our abusers are unacceptable in as much as they perpetuate the abuse from Harare whose only interest is power over us.
We are all for discipline and people being held to account for their actions, but we reject the setting of barriers on people for nothing other than that certain members of society are uncomfortable with the action, that is neither fair nor progressive. To blame Tshabangu for the CCC’s incompetence without quizzing Chamisa’s culpability is plain wrong just as blaming Welshman Ncube for the MDC split without scrutinising Morgan Tsvangirai’s role is naïve. We need to ask ourselves who are the beneficiaries of such a political stance.
Before raising questions of morality against Tshabangu and others, we need to ask how we find ourselves in a position where we have become wilful Mashonaland apologists constantly doing their bidding and sabotaging legitimate actions by our own men and women?
How do we justify defending mainstream political institutions that openly discriminate against us? Let us invest time in unravelling this issue and set our minds free to find true freedom.
Our problem stems from powerlessness bred by political persecution in a Shona supremacist regime. We suffer from betrayal trauma triggered when our Shona liberation war allies turned independence from a white minority government into a tribal supremacist regime which effectively became a tyranny of the majority that presided over the Gukurahundi atrocities — a deliberate murder operation of unarmed civilians, erosion of the rights and liberties of people of Matabeleland. That indicated trauma has changed who we are.
We have become a shadow of ourselves and whatever little is left of us is never confident to stand alone, many of our people have normalised seeking approval from Harare. Whenever some of our own people try and challenge the status quo, we fear for our safety and act in ways that seek to distance ourselves from any action likely to contradict or bruise Harare’s ego hence we are harsh and unrelenting in our criticism of anyone from our region who dares question ethnic Shona leaders’ authority.
Gukurahundi has shaped people’s lived experience in the independent Zimbabwe; people of Matabeleland have endured a life-altering shock, and we must understand we are likely living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms— hypervigilance, flashbacks, and bewilderment—with broken trust, lack of confidence, depleted self-esteem, self-blame, self-doubt, the inability to objectively confront day-to-day challenges, and with the loss of our creative minds.
Extreme circumstances require extreme coping mechanism. Whatever strategies we adopt to develop a form of mastery over the intractable sociopolitical environmental difficulties, we ought to refuse the choice to be addicted to the Gukurahundi pain and we must never enjoy the victimhood position.
Your abuser will not loosen their grip on you just because you have chosen to be kind to them; appeasement does not work because the very objective of a bully is control over you, so ceding to our abuser only strengthens their resolve. The solution is not withdrawal but the confrontation of the abuser.
Do not be quick to judge, take time to understand the origin of the pain. We need to understand that as people of Matabeleland, we are victims of ZANU PF extremism and bullying tactics. And protecting our abusers is symptomatic of victims of abuse, but that is a position we need to free ourselves from. Supporting our people brave enough to confront the status quo is vital for our individual and national freedom.
MTHWAKAZI INDEPENDENT 