On the psychology of oppression: blame me on history!

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Brilliant Mhlanga

While the soldiers were being adventurous with the young women and girls, we were forced to sing and dance beside a bonfire. Suddenly, one very old and sick man was brought before us to be tried in a kangaroo court on the other side. This kangaroo court was known for its nefarious failure to be lenient. This man's sin was failure to attend the gathering. He was found preparing porridge by the soldiers while patrolling, and forced to pour it all in his pocket, hot as it was, before being forced to attend the meeting. He was genuinely suffering from malaria. He was quickly sentenced to death and tied to a big log, readying him for the usual human roasting process. On what later happened to this man, your guess is as good as mine. The escapade with the young women and girls continued unabated until morning. Mid-morning, as usual, a call for general accusations was made. This time my pregnant cousin-sister who had been raped the previous night was arraigned before the 'kangaroo court'. Her husband we all knew was labelled a dissident; since he worked in town and was not present, she had to pay for his sins. This time a betting game was hastily arranged. Two soldiers moved the motion that the foetus in her womb was male, while the other two argued that it was a girl. This argument continued for about five minutes. They each produced 10 cents and gave it to the adjudicator who then ordered that her womb be ripped open to prove which group was right. Eventually, she died of excessive bleeding and pain. The foetus too, later succumbed.

Having been a victim of all these forms of injustice at a tender age, I set my focus on giving this narration someday. This is the story that shakes the foundations of humanity, when people are made to lose their sense of worth. Its demeaning trajectory lasts forever, particularly when people have to live, internalise and possibly rationalise their state of being. This is the story that Robert Guest (2004) would present as the picture of the shackled continent of Africa whose past, present and future remain unknown. During this melee I recall my young brother asking my mother when this thing called 'independence' would end. Independence and liberation were, for the Ndebele people, synonymous with suffering. We had been turned into beasts of burden and we understood the true yearning for freedom. We still yearn for it. I saw death written on young and old people's faces. Some girls who were raped bore children whose fathers are not known to this day. Like many I acknowledged the coming of new babies in my extended family, but these babies epitomised the spirit of social death and decay. They became symbols of past and present victimisation--manifestations of forced loss of virginity, morality and a suppressed sense of humanity. People stared death in the face. We walked simply because our limbs could move us from one point to the other. Orlando Patterson (1982) aptly discussed this creation of social death in a slave scenario. His thesis fits neatly in this case where it had become clear that total personal power had been taken to the extreme by Robert Mugabe and the soldier as the third person. It was a contradiction of the very essence of political reorientation. Instead, it created conditions for social death, when people began to feel their dislocation, social and natal alienation (Patterson 1982: 8). The major form of dislocation and alienation was an ethnic one. It further confirmed the psychology of oppression. To date, most Ndebele people have had their spirits subdued. They have reached a stage of mental warping, a type of mindset that Viktor Frankl (1984: 39) describes as passing through relative apathy in which the torture victim achieves emotional death and attains gradual social retirement. Frankl was giving a painful narrative of his lived experiences inside German concentration camps. My heart grieves. This mindset, he adds, derives from being exposed to suffering accompanied by the witnessing of death on a daily basis. An individual then undergoes self-actualisation, based on the fact that 'my death, too, is coming'.