Primitive toilets, the UPND government and sustaining racist colonial beliefs about us- Azwell Banda

Primitive toilets, the UPND government and sustaining racist colonial beliefs about us

By Azwell Banda,

I cannot stop thinking about the primitive colonial toilet and President of 60-years-old “independent” Zambia Hakainde Hichilema “commissioning” apparently thousands of them, by cutting a ribbon on one of them.

I have to mentally jolt myself out of my disbelief at this singularly defining act of the continuing colonial mentality in Zambia that regards the majority of the citizens of Zambia as sub-humans who, in this day and age of touch free electric toilets, still celebrate small colonial and primitive toilets located outside, and at a distance, from the “house” it serves.

I actually feel extremely sorry, for pathetic Hakainde Hichilema, as a fellow African: having surrounded himself by White consultants with deep roots in their racist cultures and backgrounds. Hichilema has no clue about how his White consultants and White masters laugh at his stupidity for imagining that his White consultants and White masters think he is different, unique, and not as African as the Zambian Africans whom he, Hichilema, is now sustaining in their ever growing material and cultural poverty, and confirming all the racist tropes White Supremacism and White racism have historically used to justify their oppression, dispossession, domination and exploitation of Africans.

The picture of my President, Hakainde Hichilema, 60 years after our “independence” commissioning a most primitive toilet in an African “township” will remain etched in my mind forever. We are yet to win the struggle against colonialism and its inferior status it assigned to Africans: that primitive colonial toilet in the rich Copperbelt and Hakainde Hichilema “commissioning” it, is one of the greatest proofs of just how backward, materially and culturally impoverished we still are, 60 years after our independence.

This “toilet” is “commissioned” by Hakainde Hichilema in the same period when the UPND government is still celebrating the handing over of huge chunks of our copper and other minerals to foreign money, on the Copperbelt. Globally, our copper has transmitted electricity which has lit homes, villages, towns, cities and many countries. It is now used to transmit electricity to electric toilets. Our copper and other minerals have contributed to powering the industrial development of the US, Europe, Japan, China, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and many other countries. Our copper has made countless millionaires and billionaires scattered all over the world. And yet, 60 years after our “independence” a whole President of Zambia, eager to be presented as working and doing things for “poor” us, “commissions” a small primitive toilet, on the rich Copperbelt.

Someone in the UPND has said something to the effect that slavery should never have ended, we need it if we are to develop. The UPND government Minister of Finance Situmbeko Musokotwane has said currently Zambians in the rural areas are happier and better off than those in urban areas, because they no longer need money which they only needed to pay school fees because they eat food which they make themselves. And yet our rural areas have a humiliating massive 80 per cent poverty rate. At the peak of the cholera pandemic Hakainde Hichilema said people should not come to town “without a plan”. Hakainde Hichilema has also encouraged all of us to grow our own food, completely oblivious to the fact that no modern country has ever developed that did what he said: specialisation and a complex division of labour are what make for developing and developed societies and countries. During the cholera pandemic, a minister in the UPND government was heard lamenting that some of us do not know how to use toilets.

During the same “working visit to the Copperbelt” Hakainde Hichilema has volunteered that he sometimes asks his wife if Zambians do listen to what he says. Could this be Hakainde Hichilema loudly echoing perhaps his White masters and White consultants’ pseudoscientific belief in the biological inferiority of Africans, a belief which claims that Africans are inherently less intelligent, less capable, and less evolved than white Europeans? Hakainde obviously does not regard himself as stupid as the majority of us who somehow cannot appreciate his “superior logic” and “wisdom”. Hichilema has asked Zambians on the Copperbelt to support him, because he is working, for them. He has now gotten into the habit of constantly reminding his Zambian audiences that he is working for Zambians, whom he “loves”. He has even wondered where Zambia would be if he had been voted into government earlier. And yet the current mass suffering in Zambia is proof that Zambians were very right to keep him in the opposition, where he should have stayed.

And yet the continuing racist colonial attitudes to Africans are sustained by exactly “how hard” Hichilema is working for Zambians: parcelling huge chunks of our minerals to foreign buyers while pretending that all we Zambians need are jobs and tax, from such foreign companies. No country has ever developed because it supplied diminishing and cheap labour to foreign investors, and collected tax. Development happens when huge chunks of the surpluses, the real profits after cost inputs, wages and taxes have been paid, are ploughed back into the country to grow and develop a revolutionary agricultural sector, a thriving finance sector, value add and other manufacturing, to fund infrastructure development, to fund social development and so on: this is only when and how real “development” happens.

From before independence to date, serve partially for the period when Kenneth Kaunda was in government, it is foreign firms that have mined and exported our minerals, and benefited from its surpluses, not Zambia! While irreparably damaging our environments through mining operations, Zambian governments have facilitated the foreign extraction of our minerals and their export. We have even been made to believe that we are an “exporter” of minerals when in fact the minerals, mines and profits do not belong to Zambia. Our local banks in fact have very little connection with large foreign mines banking transactions. Recently we have been told by Zambia Revenue Services that it is only now that real capacity to audit and track what is happening in the mines is being developed. We have had no capacity to audit large mines.

The majority of Zambians are hungry, culturally and materially poor because 60 years after independence, it is still believed by our politicians and their fellow elites that we are primitive and uncivilised, we lacking sophistication and intellect compared to Europeans, and therefore can neither own and run large mines, nor do we really need so much, from our minerals: a primitive toilet is among the things we celebrate, when it is donated to us. We are still regarded as savages and barbaric and very inferior to Europeans. Today, it is our African political elites and their fellow educated and professional liberal counterparts who perpetuate such beliefs, illustrated by our President opening a primitive toilet so that we should cheer him.

More than 700 Zambians have died from cholera and some are still dying, today. Colonialists propagated the idea that African cultures and civilisations were inferior to European ones, dismissing our rich cultures, histories, traditions, and contributions to world civilisation. Our political elites, while in the opposition, promise us modern sanitation, decent housing, clean and safe water. In government, like our colonial masters, they abandon their promises, and begin to commission primitive toilets: like our colonial masters, our elites think that we need very little in our lives and therefore we are content with backward things such as the toilet Hichilema commissioned, on the very rich Copperbelt!

The UPND, like our White colonialists, have often lamented that we are lazy and lacking in ambition, have no entrepreneurial acumen, and therefore we are inevitably hungry and poor. Such people obviously, on the rich Copperbelt, deserve the toilet Hichilema commissioned; we are not fit yet, for modern toilets. And yet it is our political elites and their foreign masters who are responsible for our material and cultural poverty.

In the opposition, all our politicians are nice democrats promising to restore all our human, constitutional and political rights. In government, they fear us, just as much as we fear their governments: for almost three years now the UPND government of Hakainde Hichilema who promised us more democracy, constitutional rule and the “rule of law” has banned opposition party mass events, sometimes including press conferences and church events. During the colonial days, Africans were frequently depicted as dangerous and menacing, thus perpetuating fear and justifying colonial violence and oppression as necessary for maintaining order and security.

There is a video clip of a UPND adult male chanting “Daddy dololo, daddy dololo, daddy dololo” as Hakainde is around and smiling, while he was on the Copperbelt. During the disgusting colonial days, Africans were portrayed as childlike and dependent on White colonialists for guidance and civilisation, further reinforcing the paternalistic attitudes of colonial rule. The UPND fake deification of Hakainde Hichilema perfectly mirrors this behaviour.

Lately, Hakainde Hichilema has become a public marriage counsellor. At the Copperbelt University he advised students to put off marriage and focus on studying. Colonialists often sexualised African men and women, portraying African men as hypermasculine and predatory, and African women as exotic objects of desire or as promiscuous and immoral. Today, some in the West and in the UPND argue that we are poor because we breed too much, without due regard to the cost of raising children. Hakainde was told that the university needs approximately15,000 bedspaces and it currently has only 3,000 spaces. There is no time table for when one may meet a marriage partner.

The primitive toilet commissioning by Hakainde Hichilema on the Copperbelt perfectly symbolised and captured the colonial view that Africa remains primarily a source of natural resources to be exploited for the benefit of Europeans and others, while contemptuously disregarding the material and cultural needs of Africans. None of these repugnant and racist beliefs have any scientific basis. They were constructed to serve the interests of colonialists and were not based on any objective truths about African peoples and their cultures. But they perfectly served the needs of the colonisers to impoverish Africans and put them in “their place”. Today, our elites like Hakainde Hichilema reproduce these beliefs and practices in order to sustain us in now our new colonial status.

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