Thinking through Zimbabwean and Western differences

Whether one is culturally inclined to adopt an organic metaphor for human development and human society or a mechanical one is a difference at the source of much international (and intercultural) misunderstanding. For, when it comes right down to it, what I am doing when I try to move into a more Zimbabwean consciousness, is that I adapt to an organic metaphor for human life.

When I must move back into a more Western mode, in order to explain events or realities, I find it incumbent on me to adopt a mechanistic mode of thinking. It's the difference between answering the following question in two different ways. If I adopt the organic metaphor, my answer to the question, "why can't somebody do A or B?" is to be related back to their situation, their relationships with others, as well as their natural propensities perhaps. If I try to answer the same question in a more machine-like mode, the answer as to why someone cannot do something is put down to their identities, the principles they must adopt with an organisation, their compliance with a set of principles entomed as rule of law.

The two modes of consciousness can overlap in practice, but they are still different -- two layers of thought, perhaps, but never mutually inclusive.

The lack of acknowledgement for rule of law in Zimbabwe today is probably true to form in terms of the organic principle (organic means relationships -- in this case, tribal affiliations, not democratic per se). The black and white, moral right and wrong perspective of Western consciousness in its perspective on the antics of Mugabe is predetermined by a mechanistic perspective, which sees that there are no other importante layers of affiliation to be morally regarded, apart from rule of law. Thus Mugabe digs in his heals and so indicates that the practices of voting for a leader have something to be rejected as tendentially "Western". Affiliation is not to be mechanistic but organic.

By virtue of the same moral principles of organic affiliation, Mugabe's point of view can be toppled. After all, if he is against "the West" with its great, overwhelming whiteness of race, he might be more inclined to accommodate Tsvangarai's MDC, despite the fact that Tsvangarai is of a different tribe than he is. That would at least be better than killing his own maShona (as he is doing ) and thus doing the masterful work of the terrible white race.

The mode of mechanical affiliation -- which leads to postmodernist anomie and alienation from one's organic roots -- might have something going for it, up to a point. It introduces an antiseptic and relatively content-empty mode of existence, but this mode of existence is also largely purged of hateful passions, including murderous aggression.

No! Zimbabwe must maintain its African character, but it would do well to integrate some aspects of rule of law and mechanistic observance of right and wrong in order -- paradoxically -- to maintain its viability as a nation-state, and thus to maintain most of its autonomy and African character. Failing this approach, it makes itself open and vulnerable to Western mediation and Western invasion.