Association of Concerned Africa Scholars
Analysis and Action on Policies Impacting Africa

Mamdani’s Enthusiasms

By David Moore | March 2009

Cape Town is 2182 kilometers south of Harare. At the Iziko Gallery, just beside the houses into which much of Zimbabwe’s sovereignty has been deposited, one of philosopher-artist William Kentridge’s stupendous works is on display. The filmic I Am Not Me: the Horse is Not Mine (‘a Russian peasant expression’, Kentridge explains, for denying guilt) is a combination of Kentridge’s take on Gogol’s The Nose with a disturbing rendition of Nikolai Bukharin’s 1937 trials. As Kentridge puts it in his textual accompaniment to the shadows on the walls, the tale of Bukharin’s last gasps exemplifies the ‘comedy of a world at odds with itself … of inversion … where logical argument is a sure sign of duplicity and lying is explained away as strategy’. The trial’s transcripts are ‘as if a mordant comedy is writing itself out’. The shadows of dancing, searching, marching, climbing and exegesis were reminiscent of the academic and activist discourse around Zimbabwe. Harare’s and New York’s renditions of Zimbabwe’s crisis bore uncanny resemblance to Kentridge’s rendition of the end of the Stalinist — nay, even the Leninist/Bolshevik — dream. And Professor Mamdani may have lost his nose as the dreams of African ‘difference’ evaporated: only to find it with a higher rank than he.

Zimbabwe: Failing Better?

By David Moore | December 2008

The words of Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho fit Zimbabwe. If the process of ‘democratisation’, liberalisation, and all those other aspects of capitalist modernity is ‘westward,’ then Zimbabwe under a challenged Mugabe has been heading there in almost the worst conceivable way. But for the democrats struggling to enlarge their space the words of the ultimate tragic optimist are appropriate too. More than three decades (including the liberation war after the mid-seventies) under Mugabe have meant those attempting to widen space for their democratic desires being doomed to repeat Beckett’s injunction: “ever tried? Ever failed? No matter, try again, fail again, Fail better”. It’s hard not to “throw up for good” in such a struggle, but they haven’t yet. The problem, though, is finding a way to combine parliamentary and extra-parliamentary roads to that end.

An Academic’s Journalism in the Zimbabwean Interregnum

By David Moore | June 2008

The following journalistic efforts are those of a political scientist-political economist who has been following Zimbabwean politics and its history since emerging into political puberty in 1971.1 Mixing scholarship and journalism is not always successful: journalistic deadlines are often missed, our articles get cut with no mercy, teaching and administrative wars at the university intervene, and power and phones are off and on in Zimbabwe so contacts are difficult to reach. Articles are sent out hit and miss to editors unknown (not that careful efforts to cultivate allies always work: if a deadline is missed by even an hour, it’s too late; if a word-count is exceeded the editors would rather spike it than cut it down to size, meaning a look at my correspondence with the Mail and Guardian is a woeful experience!) colleagues across the region help and hinder – and one wonders what political toes are being stepped on too hard. Perhaps worse, the titles are never our own.