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April 08, 2002

No one can ever free anyone but themselves

A: Tell me what is the final integer, the one at the very top, the biggest of all?
B: But that's ridiculous! Since the number of integers is infinite, how can you have a final integer?
A: Well then how can you have a final revolution? There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite.
(From We, Evgeny Zamyatin, Soviet writer)

An opportunity has come for Zimbabweans to reclaim what rightfully belongs to them - freedom from a repressive state run by a platoon of geriatrics who hold nothing but contempt for the common Zimbabwean. That fallacy that "we fought for your freedom" which has been peddled by the powers that be right from 1980 up to now must be consigned to the political crematorium. No one ever has, and no one ever can or will fight for anyone else's freedom. Any individual under a repressive system fights the system not to free posterity but free themselves, thus the act of fighting for freedom carries an immediacy that only serves to kick start the process of reclamation of one's rights to free existence as a human being. It can not be extrapolated to the future so that future generations are made to feel indebted to the generation that fought for freedom in the past. No need for false talk. While the struggles of preceding generations maust be accorded the respect and place they deserve in any nation's history, they should by no means be allowed to be used as means by which later generations are held to ransom.

Each generation has got its own ideals and conceptions of freedom (defined by its socio-political environment) to fight for and it can not claim its own struggles for freedom are greater than any other generation's. The struggles of those who took up arms to fight colonialism can therefore not be in anyway greater than the struggle of people who are now struggling their right to good governance in Zimbabwe today. One notion that has blighted most African liberation movements is the false belief that the struggle for freedom ends with the defeat of colonialism. Nothing can be further from the truth. African have always had to struggle to liberate themselves from the asphyxiating 'freedom' of the people who claim to have liberated them, and they shall continue to do so in infinite numbers. Their revolutionaries shall never be finite.

When one generation becomes so preoccupied with its own history that it will not pass on the inkpot for the next generation to author its future, this can only be described as the case of a species in the throes of an aberration that confounds even anthropologists. What is that generation afraid of? What has it got to lose apart from its misguided notion that it is the custodian of the future and the proprietor of the new generation? Lets lock them up all in one big room with closed circuit TV, where they can watch themselves to their hearts' content while we get on with life as we ought to!

Brian X

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