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It's time to evolve the language to use when talking about African politics

Wednesday February 22 2017

A recent episode of the American satire show Saturday Night Live made fun of President Trump’s naiveté and indelicacy in matters of international relations.

Part of the skit showed him calling President Mugabe — whom they termed the leader of some “random little country” — to show him who is boss. The piece ends with Trump getting thoroughly tongue-lashed as a consequence.

It made me nostalgic for the days of Ze Komedi when Tanzania had a weekly satire show of credible wit to help us talk about our social foibles. Good times, good times.

I have to admit that SNL caused me a little offense with that bit. Some of it is unabashedly provincial: Nobody in America who is not Trevor Noah should ever attempt an African accent of any variety.

We’re talking UN convention levels here, violation of cultural identity or something. Also Uncle Bob is a unique African phenomenon, and if anyone is going to tease him, it should be someone with appropriate respect for the superb vintage institution that he is.

Suggesting that Trump can even aspire to the same league as him simply because they are both old male heads of state who have opted for autocracy is an laughable conceit on the part of Americans.

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But seriously, about still calling African countries “random” and “little” in 2017? No. The world is changing; it is time to expend some effort evolving a language that can be used when talking about contemporary African politics beyond “basket case.” For kicks, I am going to try to make the case for this from the very country that was so clumsily dismissed by SNL.

After years of wanting to do so I am finally on pilgrimage in the land of the houses of stone, the decayed bread basket of Southern Africa from whence Uncle Bob has for so many decades launched caustic, grammatically impeccable invective at the former colonial powers and the West in general.

Coming to Zimbabwe was about answering a deep curiosity about those things that can never be conveyed on paper. In the 1980s, Harare was painted as magnificent, even better than Nairobi. You may understand what a deep and lasting effect this had on a young girl whose experience of big cities was a Dar es Salaam where “high-rise building” meant anything with more than four floors, though rarely 10, and soap was hard to come by let alone paved roads.

And indeed, as I suspected, the so-called basket-case that is Zimbabwe is a deeply fascinating country with a political system that is far more nuanced and progressive — yes, progressive — than can easily be perceived outside of the beautifully maintained tree-lined boulevards of Harare.

If Dar es Salaam is growing with the hormonal vigour and chaos of a muscular adolescent urbanity, Harare is a grand old dame, aware of her consequence and clutching her make-up case and her dignity with some fierceness. I find the commonalities and contrasts instructive.

I never quite managed to embrace the Africa Rising trope; it struck me as too fabricated, perhaps because I am of the African Renaissance bent myself. You know, Africanism, engagement with our reality.

Rooting current emergence to deep historical trends, tracing the political tectonic shifts, finding the common links between the success stories of Rwandese technological pioneering and Zimbabwean democratic shifts and Gambian optimism after two decades of whatever the hell Jammeh was.

There is a political thread that runs through this that I am trying to allude to: Big men and leadership quality and the continuous, domestic work on progress that we Africans are engaged in. It is contradictory and complicated, so much of it happening under the radar.

Altogether too subtle for a hashtag-friendly self-aware movement like Africa Rising, which seems to have dropped off the radar both locally and globally in the past year. Trends, eh? Can’t depend on them.

Ultimately Zimbabwe did gift me with a way to express an optimistic hunch I have been harbouring. Watching America cope with Trump all the way from Harare has reaffirmed that nothing should ever be dismissed, or taken for granted, since as the saying goes, the only constant is change.

As the quality of US democracy deteriorates, some “random little country” may just end up providing them lessons not on how to autocrat but on how to do things better in about a decade. And wouldn’t that make for a delicious Ze Komedi skit?

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: [email protected]

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