The colonial project was thorough: it produced a dehumanised impoverished native
By Azwell Banda
As we say goodbye to October 2022, our independence month, it is useful to remind ourselves what the colonial project was all about, and what it has produced in Zambia, 58 years after independence.
As a country and a people we have come full circle: today in Zambia, in Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND, we have Zambians who are the darlings of our enslavement, colonialism and impoverishment. Nothing best sums up how still colonised we are than the words of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken when he says, on our Independence Day, that Zambia stands as a beacon of “democratic resilience and economic revitalisation”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Antony Blinken knows very well that Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND have handed over Zambia’s economic and financial sovereignty to the IMF, and through the IMF, to the US government and its oligarchies who control the IMF. By begging to be placed under the tutelage of the IMF in exchange for paltry sums of foreign exchange from the IMF and the hope that this would open a floodgate of foreign money into Zambia even as we continue to fall deeper into debt, Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND in government have, in exchange for this singularly painful betrayal of our struggle for economic and political freedom, sold out our independence. What is this “democracy” Zambia stands out for, as its “beacon”? Anton Blinken, US Secretary of State, knows full well that HH and the UPND government hid from Zambians the full details of the negotiations with the IMF; Zambians have only recently been able to see the signed agreement. Blinken knows this would never happen in the US. Nor, for that matter, would such a process occur in any of the countries of the European Union. It is now known that in fact Hakainde Hichilema and his close friends in the UPND began talking to the IMF long before, very long before they were elected into government.
Our politicians, including Kenneth Kaunda, all of them, by failing to use the state to abolish the domination of foreign money in Zambia have guaranteed that Zambia will, until this relationship is destroyed, forever remain chained to foreign money, thereby throwing the majority of Zambians into a state of permanent malnutrition, impoverishment, unemployment and grotesque inequalities. To be absolutely fair, only Kaunda fully understood how dangerous and enslaving this dependence on foreign money meant, and tried as best as he could, to fight this new form of colonialism, after our independence. His passion and commitment to education was also driven by the desire to produce a Zambian who could fight this evil foreign financial domination of Zambia. Sadly, he too failed to liberate us from domination by foreign money.
All our politicians, including Frederick Jacob Titus Chiluba who openly campaigned and championed neo-liberalism after ditching his version of socialism, never fully abandoned Zambians to foreign money – when Zambians cried to their government for help, Chiluba vacillated and heard the cries of the poor. In Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND, we have a mean, extremely selfish, cold cash book mentality bunch of politicians who constantly remind Zambians that the poor and vulnerable cannot be helped without first the rich growing their wealth. This is what Anton Blinken means when he says in the face of generational challenges, Zambia “has prioritised lasting solutions over quick fixes and committed to ideals over expediency.”
Antony Blinken knows very well that no US government would survive one day if most of its people were as impoverished as the majority of Zambians are today: any US government would prioritise urgent quick fixes even as it simultaneously constructed a foundation for long term solutions to respond to the cries for help from their government by such a majority of impoverished Americans; or face an armed revolution. It is in fact for this reason that US President Joe Biden recently released vast quantities of US reserve oil onto the US market to artificially boost supply and lower the prices of pump prices of fuels. The US government subsidises oil, food, medicines, education and many things, to cushion US citizens from the cruelty of the capitalist markets. Recently Biden has cancelled the education debts of millions of US citizens. Biden, Antony Blinken’s boss, openly criticised now deposed British shortest lived Prime Minister, for prioritising lowering taxes for the rich and punishing the struggling British masses. HH has done what Liz Truss wanted to do. Truss was only advancing the core tenants of capitalism: small government and all wealth to the rich! Her mantra was “people should keep their money!” She is history.
The colonial native, however, is “resilient” to poverty, is used to suffering extreme poverty, and must wait for “lasting solutions” and the fulfillment of “democratic and economic ideals”, for them to receive relief from their government. The native, you see, is also not armed and dangerous! The native fears violence and war. Hakainde Hichilema and his right hand man, Situmbeko Musokotwane frequently remind Zambians gasping under the heavy weight of their poverty that help will come only when “economic growth” takes place, when the rich can make more profits and therefore create employment for the poor. As to when this will happen, they say it may be soon, or somewhere in the future.
And yet they won elections on the fiction and cruel lies of immediately upon forming government, lowering the cost of living and doing business, creating employment especially for our majority young people, protecting the poor and therefore making democracy real for millions of Zambians. One year into government and the US government is praising them for prioritising “lasting solutions” the US government itself would never preach to its dangerously armed citizens!
In the “Wretched of the Earth” (1959), Frantz Fanon says this about the Colonial Project: “Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women.”
Anton Blinken should know that our poverty has its roots in the cultural obliteration which colonialism inflicted on us. Colonial occupation by the British was enforced by the introduction of new legal relations, thus banishing us to the periphery of the colonial occupier’s economy and society. Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND, by openly embracing colonialism and imperialism, and thus meriting glowing praise from the world foremost colonial and imperial power, are further entrenching us in our impoverishment, by the same colonial and imperialist powers.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: Hakainde Hichilema, the UPND and US Secretary of State Anton Blinken can fool some of the Zambians all of the time, and all of the Zambians some of the time, but they cannot fool all of the Zambians all of the time! There are a growing number of Zambians who refuse to be bullied into silence, to acquiesce to the humiliating ideology of new colonialism, and to accept that the majority of Zambians who have been thrust into artificially constructed and violently enforced poverty by colonialism and its local agents must wait for the money bags to become fatter before they can have food to eat, decent houses to live in, clean water and air, modern clinics and hospitals, good schools and universities for their children all the while the world is experiencing an explosion of science, technology and untold wealth.
At 58 years, Zambia is old enough to know and understand that our national poverty even as we are a very natural resources rich country has its roots in past and present forms of colonialism, and imperialism, of which the US is the foremost champion. A year after the UPND were elected into government, and in the month they have actually proved their contempt for our cosmetic liberal constitution, laws and state institutions, as demonstrated by their behaviour in the Kabushi and Kwacha sham by-elections, it is not surprising that the US government whose interests the UPND champions in Zambia is praising us. We are all too familiar with this sick history, in the so-called post-colonial world.
For Zambia to be truly free, we must overthrow and cast away colonialism and its local agents.
Send comments to: banda.azwell@gmail.com.