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I am sure many wondered what it is I was getting at, and in so many words.

The aim is a very simple yet a so vital one.

I called our Diaspora ones the fraction we cannot name. I implied we have not been able to name it to our own detriment, and against our own historical experience and character as a people.

For us, as indeed for many peoples and communities in the world, “the exile is a universal figure”, to use the words of George Lamming, himself a personification of permanent exile, forced African exile, by way of the slave trade.

He made a deeper point. Exile need not refer to physical removal from one’s born-habitat, one’s natural habitat.

Exile could be a state ofmind: that fact of non-belongingness triggered by a complex set offactors, some internal, others external to an individual.

Lamming and the Headquarters
“We are made to feel a sense of exile by our inadequacy and ourirrelevance of function in a society whose past we can’t alter, andwhose future is always beyond us.

Idleness can easily guide us intoaccepting this as a condition.

Sooner or later, in silence or withrhetoric, we sign a contract whose epitaph reads: To be an exile is to be alive.

When the exile is a man of colonial orientation, and his chosen residence is the country which colonised his own history, then there are certain complications.

For each exile has not only got to prove his worth to the other, he has to win the approval of Headquarters, meaning in the case of the West Indian writer, England . . .”

When age mattered so much
Lamming is not writing in the era of Manheru. As a matter of fact, the above thoughts come off his 1960 essay, “The Occasion For Speaking,” through which he reflected on his experiences as a West Indian writer living abroad.

The epoch was not mine, the place so far away from Zimbabwe, both geographically and culturally. But the “mother country” was the same. Britain of course! But the experience was the same.

Colonialism of course! But the condition was the same, is the same.

Self-exile of course, or whatever you choose to name it! In 1960, I still had two more years to come into this world, into this life, and three more years to be recorded as a black human being in official colonial records. I am not blaming the understatement of my age (by a whole year) on colonialism. My parents were party to it.

Unsure of my intellect at birth, quite sure that only books would overthrow the indigence they themselves had been born to, and were fated to pass onto me unless, unless, black parents under Rhodesian settler colonialism, always understated a child’s age, to allow that child to repeat, repeat and repeat Grade Seven many times.

Grade Seven was itself a formidable cipher, the first bottleneck at which many ambitions wilted and withered.

And once a certain age crept past you, you could not repeat, You would be stopped, thrown out of school on account of over-age. You then had to trek to the city, or better still to white-owned farms where you would wizen and finally die a home-shunning pauper.

The bearded school kid
For all this, the colonial authorities went by your birth certificate records, strictly.
It worked for many of us, although not for me personally.

I did not need to be salvaged by false age, even though my parents had taken the precaution to arm me by it. It worked for many of my contemporaries and I am sure, many more before my generation.

You could grow, spot a small tuft of beard even; you could break your voice, indeed show other bodily symbols of adolescence, and yet still be a pupil of ten, school-going you’re your physiognomy did not matter. That allowed you to sit for exams, wodonha, sit again, wodonha, until through a bit of habit, lots of rote learning and a bit of luck, you finally made it to J.C. Form One and, with that mighty crossing of the Rubicon, you definitely raised hopes of your lineage, improved prospects for your clan! But that’s to wander off the point on wandering.

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Caught by same tricks?
Why hasn’t reality changed for colonials since Lamming’s 1960s? I myself would wander off too, stay abroad for slightly over a year.
Abroad, quite naturally meant the Headquarters . . . Britain’s London.

Thirty-plus years later, why do I find Lamming’s description so relevant to my own experiences?
Maybe relevant to your too, dear comrade in Surrey, Cardiff or Edinburgh?

Does it mean our relations with the Headquarters have fossilized, have not evolved since Lamming’s 1960s?
Or if you are like me — a creature of conspiracy theories — does it mean Britain’s strategies against us have not evolved, changed?

If these strategies have not changed, does it suggest we have not learnt anything at all as victims of those strategies?
Does it mean we can’t learn enough, evolve enough to respond differently so as to make Britain’s neo-colonial subterfuges dated and obsolete at the very least? If we cannot defend our resources, at least let us create a few headaches for the emperor, surely?

Why would we be caught by the same trick, the same trap?
Have we not been resisting and has not those myriad forms of resistance been effective enough to cause the empire to rethink, to re-strategise? Not even our dying?

We surely could not have been that charitable to those responsible for such heinous acts against us, against our countries?

The power of naming . . .
I also implied another point which I must draw up more explicitly now. That fraction we cannot name has been named for us, more accurately against us.

Naming is an act and an art of power over reality, indeed power to organise reality the way you want and the way you want the rest of the world to read it. Soon after the defeat of my family by the British South Africa Company, and this in the context of the Second Chimurenga, the whole clan went into navel licking.

Instead of projecting bitterness outwardly against Powlett and other Native Commissioners, the family took to breeding with fury, possibly to replace all those who had fallen, eaten in the white man’s war.

The family had made the abomination of capturing a white woman, then turning her into a twenty-something wife of the chief. But not before shaving her bald, tattooing her as befitted women who married into the clan, in addition to many other discreet rituals that made a woman eligible for the nuptial bed of the chief of the vaHera clan to which I belong.

The consequences soon came.
There was plenty of grief for the family, tremendous grief as the Company strove to cleanse the white race of this abomination by cheeky natives. The whole country had to know that you do not reach the inner recesses of a white woman and still live the morning after to visit the next village for a beer party. I have written before about what befell my clan and I do not need to repeat it.

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Naming history
I said my people moved from resistance to inward bitterness, and, of course, making up for their lost numbers through furious breeding.

Maybe that is how the taint of polygamy, most personified by Makiwa — the late Chief Nyashanu — himself a cousin of Chiwashira, dogged our clan. And of course the feat of “running” many wives implies knowledge of very potent herbs that work on an otherwise tired, okra-like back.
It is a despicable habit we must and are beginning to shake off.

But we bred, bred and bred, to compensate for our losses after the First Chimurenga. And this brings me to my point, the point of naming as an expression of owning power, organising power.
The Almighty smiled on the clan and many sons were born to my multitudinous great-grandmothers and grandmothers.

Their husbands took a far-reaching decision to narrate their collective woes through names they pasted on their children, on family scion.
The first one was called Wurayayi, a name spelling the family’s resignation to a cruel fate of the massacre they endured by way of white reprisals.

The second was called Tazvishaya, itself a marker of a family still bemused by the tragedy, but beginning to search for meaning. It was a dash of existentialism, tinged with stoicism.

Then came my father — Musungwa — to capture the persecution that followed.
His brother was (D)Torongo, again to reinforce the idea of incarceration which must have been a great pain to my forebears. A third child would still be named in commemoration of that incarceration.

He is late and he was babamunini Mujere who died in 1980 in a fatal crash at a John Sisk construction site in Harare.
He died a staunch ZAPU cadre. The family had two other sons: Musasa and Maraini, both of them now late. When the BSACo launched reprisals, the family scattered.

My grandmother gave birth to a son who arrived at midnight, a strange blessing for a family buffeted by flight from mortal danger. Babamunini “arrived” in a makeshift home the family had erected in one of its detours amidst a long flight towards Ziro in Gutu.

A makeshift home is a “musasa”, which is how this “little father” got his name, itself a record of place and circumstances.

Nickname as surname
Tired from running away, the family decided on a subterfuge which gave all of us a lasting disfigurement.

It changed its name to keep the Company off-scent.
To this day, I carry that name, which is why the notion of “darkness” is so key to my sense of identity, much of it forged in family flight. We had to manage a black-out on family history, to evade arrest and reprisals.

We gave ourselves a nickname that became a permanent surname. We became a new creature, a new family a new identity.

Sizwe Bansi was dead! In order to be politically correct under the new colonial administration, the family went and tucked itself into a new village designed by the colonial authorities.

Those villages were designed in straight lines, presumably for purposes of accessing amenities easily. Since no amenities ever came, one wants to think that these villages were meant to make the “pacification” of natives easier. After all, the colonial administration had survived a “rebellion”, barely! Those lined villages were then called “maraini”, itself the name of the clan’s last son.

We shall fight some day
But there was one son who arrived between my father and his younger brother Musasa. He never made it to teenager-hood.
They tell me he was quite brainy. Sekuru called him Ticharwa, “We-shall-fight-someday” in English. I am not sure why sekuru called him thus.

Or why Sekuru soon lost him to the earth. Did that suggest the futility of ever getting the better of the white occupier?

I don’t know. Or whether he would re-incarnate in a woman-guerrilla fighter — Pemberai — who would represent the family in the Second Chimurenga?
I do not think this naming tradition is unique to my family. I think many post-1896/97 families did the same, to come to terms with the trauma of resistance and eventual defeat.

The same way the temporary lull after this defeat — itself an epoch of the Church — gave rise to many Christian names most of us carry to this day. The priest, the teacher, the church had replaced the nyamukuta, the father and the village.

Reality had to be organised differently, by other hands, for other ends. Names and naming belonged to the white victor and we bear that scar to this day.

Of course the Second Chimurenga challenged that, introducing a new naming tradition, all of it part of the war effort. Twarai Tipone, Tinhai Mabhunu, America Mudzvanyiriri, Muchadura Mabhunu, all these and many more became new names nome de gurre for fighters engaged in a new effort at second liberation.

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Defining the new exile
Names matter. Naming asserts ownership, asserts a world view. We have allowed Europe to rename our children, to rename our brothers and sisters in the diaspora.
But in naming them, Europe and America have also renamed home, renamed it in apposition to Zimbabwe’s children who have left. We have been exiled, both as diasporans and as those who remained home, but with a different name and identity. And modern

naming is no longer a word, a compressed sentence. It is research. It is a paper by a think-tank or by an NGO purporting to be acting in our name. Naming is an envoy of a “mother country” — of the Headquarters — pretending to describe us, pretending to represent us, indeed pretending to highlight our so-called predicament to the rest of the world.

When donor countries use the UN to make a consolidated appeal for Zimbabwe, they are renaming us, are they not? We are the poor. We are the hungry. We are the needy. Is that not so?
And when UK and USA pose as leading donors on Zimbabwe, it makes Zimbabwe, makes all of us beneficiaries of Anglo-American goodness. Does it not?

After that how then do you convince yourself and the world that Britain is such an evil country, America an occupier? Or that Zimbabwe is a victim of Anglo-American sanctions?
Naming is knowledge generation, knowledge deployment and knowledge control.

Having lost control of the outward fraction — itself a human marker of our national boundary beyond our physical territory — we also lost our power to socialise it. And a man who does not come home early to talk to his children, will one day find his children with the tongue of his neighbour. Here is an example.

Worse than Haiti
Two weeks ago, a Zimbabwean professor staying in America, one Ken Mufuka, did a piece which spelt out how sorry he was for Zimbabwe, his country. But this was not self-deprecation.

This was contempt, absolute contempt for the soil that carry his umbilical cord. He narrated how his class confounded his “mistaken” belief that Haiti was the world’s poorest country.
His class roared in disagreement, respectfully telling the Zimbabwean-born don that quite the contrary, Zimbabwe — his Zimbabwe — was in fact the world’s poorest country.

Mufuka leaves us to deduce what he did not do for his country in its hour of greatest need, hour of assault when that allegation was made by what in all fairness are his knowledge minors.
And he leaves us to deduce this from the massive attack he launches against his country and those in charge of it, presumably for ever creating this classroom embarrassment for him.

He proceeded to cite HIV/Aids prevalence statistics, claimed statistics of Zimbabweans in need of food, hospitals he had read had run out of drugs and all some such indexes an average European and American ambassador are wont to reel out in support for claims of western infinite goodness towards the starving and debilitated native.

Things the professor would not say
Of course he did not tell us he was quoting sources like the CIA Fact-sheet or some such western source. Nowhere does the professor talk about knowledge that is purposively value-laden towards a given set of objectives.

Nowhere does the professor talk about Zimbabwe’s natural resources and how these have been used to underwrite borrowings and debts of more powerful nations, indeed how these have been exploited by his western hosts without improving the lot of his “brothers” here.

The professor does not talk about sanctions passed against his country by Europeans and what is more, by his hosts who have gone further to represent this assault on his country by way of a whole law we call ZDERA, a law which a professor must at the very least be literate enough to know it exists, never mind its real provisions.

For him there was no causal link between sanctions which start in 2001, and Zimbabwe’s alleged decline which “fortuitously” starts about the same period, against decades of meteoric rise under the same leadership he execrates.

Of course for him the land question does not exist. Of course for him any claims against a country, however motivated, must be true. After all is it not coming from Americans, his hosts?
How to measure performance of countries; how to measure the wealth and welfare of its people, all that is straightforwardly given us by the West.

Which is why the issue of land ownership is not a factor of welfare measurement, unless of course that land belonged to some white farmer or white investor!

What Haiti means
Above all, the professor had no time to tell his students what Haiti means to African/black historiography. Or why repeated US forays and invasions into that country, including the latest one in the name of disaster relief, leaves the country poorer, its population wrecked by cholera as if under Zimbabwe-like sanctions. The professor had no time to explain why a country as high up the welfare index as Botswana is among the highest by way of HIV-prevalence. For him matters are straightforward, straightforward the American way.

With facts, but without conclusion
The good professor made a follow-up instalment entitled: “More sanctions on the way.” Of course I took off in joy to learn that barely a week later, the professor now knew that Zimbabwe is under sanctions, and was now being threatened by more American sanctions. But I was also happy to discover the professor knew that Haiti has been under western sanctions since 1805 “after it confiscated French slavers’ properties.” “Though it paid US$120 million in 1830, sanctions were never lifted,” the professor helpfully informed his readers. He also covered Cuba which has been under sanctions since 1960, not just for confiscating American properties, but also frustrating

“12 000 prostitutes working for American mobster, Lucky Luciano.” Then the professor’s narrative takes a stunning turn.
“Zimbabwe has earned a place on the sanctions list for similar reasons,” proceeds the professor citing “US intelligence sources”.

Quoting US intelligence
He discloses, on the strength of those US intelligence sources, that the US Government is preparing more sanctions against Zimbabwe: “These sources say that a highly classified document has been stolen from Zimbabwe and passed on to the imperialists. The author (himself) has been given a version of this secret document,” he says, proceeding to summarise the contents of the purported document. He confirms the US and European interests are motivated by the wish to control Zimbabwe’s diamond fields. Further, he counsels his country and “mukuru” not to court a frontal attack by imperialism by insisting on indigenisation. Big companies like Lever Brothers must be left alone, and indigenisation must be trimmed to refer to distribution and supply companies, “leaving the big Lever Brothers and their allies alone.”

When headquarters creeps into the head
My mind quickly raced back to Lamming’s words: “For each exile has not only got to prove his worth to the other, he has to win the approval of Headquarters . . .”

The approval of Headquarters. The approval of Headquarters. How do you relate to a fellow Zimbabwean who is available to “US intelligence sources”? How do you relate to a well-educated Zimbabwean who suspends tools of critical analysis if only to gladden his hosts, themselves taking a position against his country? How do you relate to a Zimbabwean who seems to have the right facts of history, but the wrong disposition for shaping a new history, a new trajectory for his country and people? A Zimbabwean simply frightened by US acts of imperialism elsewhere in the world, too frightened to draw moral lessons from them?

A Zimbabwean who counsels acquiescence? A Zimbabwean so frightened that he begins to doubt his own people and country’s right to take charge of its affairs and resources, nay, begins to incriminate such a wish, castigating as buffoons any associated with such a struggle?

Trimming up for American notice?
For me that is the real tragedy, the tragedy of being a Zimbabwean ill-equipped for this phase of aggressive imperialism. And I must hasten to add that such a predicament has nothing to do with where you are geographically, as I hope to show by another case, home-based case, next week. It has everything to do with how we acquire, use and deploy knowledge, indeed how we name our world, including the one we take on as temporary home. When home becomes far-away land of the other, powerful other, we begin to prefer its chores to homely ones.

And when the outsider we prefer to home says home is a dungeon, we help him relay the message home, relay a message against our own people, a message meant to dispirit them and to sow a sense of self-doubt about ourselves and our entitlements. And when the outsider says his pawns here are not good enough to lead his neo-colonial project here, we begin to do all those things that can attract his attention: falsely clear a throat, shift in your seat, crane your neck, coxcomb-like continuously adjust your jacket affectively, all to trim into a figure of princely deportment.

You want America to see in you it has a heir apparent to those it has mistakenly chosen as leaders to her project. And of course you also have a package for those back home, those soon to be subdued and turned into American subjects, Haiti-like. They must know you are well-connected What a better way to do so than by drawing from “US intelligence sources’? I said a few weeks before it is important to know what plans the empire has for you as a Zimbabwean, wherever you are. I still repeat the same, the same way I will always insist we must manage our knowledge, deploying it purposefully so, Caliban-like, we know how to use it to curse Prospero, the Elizabethan precursor to the seemingly benevolent imperialist.

Icho!