My debate with Blessing-Miles Tendi
Who is Blessing-Miles Tendi? He’s a DPhil student at Oxford and he writes for various publications, including the Guardian. He reviewed the film Mugabe and the White African for the Guardian and I commented on my blog upon his review. Apparently, I “wholly misunderstood” this review, according to a response to my blog made by Blessing-Miles. This sparked a debate between us, which you can read below my original blog. I’m not sure I have ever been so publicly and strongly put down by a budding public intellectual. But, then again, I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a public intellectual with whom I disagree as much as Blessing-Miles. While I feel I have contributed as much to our debate as I feel inclined to, it has been quite an experience to lock horns with him.
Dear Jonathan
I followed your debate with Blessing Miles Tendi with a lot of interest. What can be dicerned from it is that the Eauropean and African perspective are far apart as ever! Mr Todd, as a rule Africans resent the hypocritical virtue that is often displayed by some Westerners in their simplistic analysis of Africa and of the Zimbabwean issue in particular. For example the UK had 100 years to introduce democracy to Zimbabwe but never did. Instead they introduced brutality and most of the current problems the country is going through can be traced back to 1890. Indeed most of repressive statue that Mugabe uses today goes back to the colonial era! This fact weaken your moral indegniation as it would appear pious. The problem of Zimbabwe has to be understood in its totality. That is, the issue of land, race, violence and the negative role played by Britain past and present has to be factored. To omit this is to tell an incomplete story. To attempt to white wash this is to indulge in self deception. After all, despite the condemation and villification, Zanu-PF is still in power and unfortuinately likely to be for the forseeable future because powerful nations refuse to see the issue as it is. They are worried about what they might see. This, I think is Blessing Miles Tendi’s point.
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