On the psychology of oppression: blame me on history!

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Brilliant Mhlanga

In 1987, the genocide ended. Today we are still confronted by the stasis of Zimbabwe's power relations. I bear witness to the succession of negations of mankind, and an avalanche of murders (Fanon 1967: 252). These are the pitfalls of post-colony. Will it be wrong to say this is the African condition to which Mazrui (1980) refers? Further, I concur with Basil Davidson who says nationalism is a Janus-like creature: two faced, masked in the nation-spirit that 'demanded freedom with one face and denied it with the other' (1992: 10). Davidson's discussion of the curse of the nation-state presents a contradistinction of ethos. I bear testimony to this, having been raised without a sense of hope for the future.

I recall my professor (Keyan Tomaselli) telling me a surprising story about his knowledge of one of my heroes, Themba Nkabinde, whose death we mourn to this day. Tomaselli reminded me that he had anxiously warned Nkabinde about the possible consequences of his writings, which together with his political activities led to his death in a car crash. I wish to acknowledge that having journeyed this far, from the University of Zimbabwe where I became a direct victim of the ZANU-PF regime through a series of suspensions and expulsions, I recognise the validity of Tomaselli's cautions when he points out that the same might happen to me. But for the sake of Nkabinde and many unsung heroes, it is my duty to cautiously persist in the telling of the story of the Ndebele. In this regard I therefore embrace Emile Durkheim's (1958) dictum that ideas, once born, have a life of their own. An idea whose time has come, cannot be suppressed. Nkabinde started long before me to write about the cause of his people, the Ndebele. His writings, like those of many of our martyrs, continue to reverberate in our minds and hearts. His was a story of a vision he had. He envisaged a different society, not one which moves on the margins of extinction and the psychology of oppression. I seek to continue his vision.

This is my narrative as a sojourner, a scholar in temporary exile, whose sojourn in Durban, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and in London is part necessity and part circumstantial.

The basis of necessity is want of knowledge, as a way of buttressing my principle, which is to tell the truth all the time. It is through this endeavour that my reflections have helped me discover the meaning of the psychology of oppression. This is the realisation of the alternative of dehumanisation; the vocation of negation as a form of oppression (Freire 1993). In my reflections I have conclusively discovered how an unjust order that engenders violence in turn dehumanises the oppressed. It creates a distortion of being fully human. The psychology of oppression, then, becomes a phenomenon derived from the state where the oppressed, given their existential experience, adopt the attitude of 'adhesion' to the oppressor (ibid: 45). Freire adds that under these circumstances the oppressed cannot consider their situation clearly and objectively in a bid to discover themselves outside the spectacles of their oppressor. As discussed earlier, the oppressed rationalise and internalise their suffering. Their state of mental warping makes them appear as walking symbols of conformity. Such conformity makes them reject their enlightened brethren whom they tend to perceive as 'trouble makers'. To them anyone who advocates change of their state of being is likely to bring them more trouble, as they cannot know the likely outcome. They fear change. This is the state of people who have lost a sense of hope in their full potential without the help of the oppressor.