BiAS 7 – The Bible and Politics in Africa
ceeded because it has connected the three mapfiwa of legitimacy in the
rural African community: It has linked the spirit media, the mambo
(chief), and the mhondoro’. This is an intersection of spheres or circles
of relational power which produce a new reality where they all
meet.^52 And this for Mahoso is not the case in the other camp, that
group of ‘Africans with disks full of white memory’. In Mahoso’s her-
meneutics, since Jesus is identified with ZANU PF’s pan-African ideol-
ogy it follows that the devil is identified with the MDC, since they are not
connected to the masses like Jesus (ZANU PF). The legitimacy of Afri-
can leadership as Mahoso observes, ‘derives from its capacity to re-
member or reconnect relationships disrupted and disconnected by the
evil forces of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism and neo-
colonialism’^53 and this is what ZANU PF stands for.
According to Mahoso, the worst thing that ever happened to Zimbabwe
in the last years is the willingness of leaders of the MDC formations and
the supposed intellectuals and activists supporting them to lie about and
against Zimbabwe in exchange for money, sponsorship and other West-
ern inducements.^54 Blessing Miles-Tendi, observed this trend among
academics in Zimbabwe, who always misrepresented or exaggerated the
negative situation in the country for financial gains.^55 Such people, for
Mahoso are not worth of being leaders, as they are not rooted in the
masses like Jesus.
Under the conditions Zimbabwe was subjected to, even some staunchest
African liberationist scholars were forced to reconsider their positions
for survival, hence were rewired. It was only the few scholars like Ma-
hoso, who never recanted their pan-Africanism. In a country, where the
shock that was deployed upon its people could be described as unprece-
dented in history, Mahoso believes that the failure of all the strategies to
bring about the much desired results of regime change, even after flood-
ing the disks of many with white memory, was because God protected
Zimbabwe. In deed it is even difficult to understand how people of Zim-
babwe managed to survive in a nation whose grocery shops were literally
(^52) Mahoso, ‘Flush white disk from an African memory’.
(^53) Mahoso, ‘Flush white disk from an African memory’.
(^54) Mahoso, ‘Wikileaks confirms the puppets in the MDC that we already knew’. AFRI-
CAN FOCUS: The Sunday Mail. 05 December 2010.
(^55) Cf. Blessing Miles-Tendi, Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectu-
als and the Media. Britain: Peter Lang, 2010, 59-60; Mahoso ‘Wikileaks confirms the
puppets in the MDC’.