Scott urges Zambians to be proud of their past
By Mwala Kalaluka
Sun 26 May 2013, 14:01 CAT
VICE-President Dr Guy Scott says Zambians should celebrate the Golden Jubilee of African freedom without forgetting that barely 20 years had passed since the last shots were fired in anger in one of its neighbouring countries.
And tourism, arts and culture minister Sylvia Masebo says Africans should free themselves from foreign domination and oppression by embracing and developing their rich and diverse culture.
During festivities to mark Africa Freedom Day and the Golden Jubilee of the African Union at the Lusaka Showgrounds yesterday, Vice-President Scott urged Zambians to be proud of their past and continued liberation efforts in the southern African region.
"This is the climax of the week of celebrations for Africa Freedom Day," said Vice-President Scott who had earlier joined ordinary Zambians on stage to dance to a Luvale song titled 'Ng'oma Yami' performed by the Green Buffaloes Band. "Zambia has itself been nearly independent for 50 years."
But he said although Zambia's struggle for liberation from colonialism may have ended in 1964, it continues to contribute and suffer as a result of its neighbours experiencing fighting.
"It is not nearly 20 years since the last shots were shot in anger in the southern African region," Vice-President Scott said. "Let us be proud of our contribution and our continuing contribution to this cause."
He said even as the country was struggling to liberate itself from poverty, it was imperative that the forefathers that rendered personal sacrifices to liberate Africa were appreciated.
He urged Africans to clearly understand their past.
"So that we face our future with a great sense of determination," said Vice-President Scott. "Since I am from a minority ethnic group, there are some people from the minority group like my father Alexander Scott, Simon Zukas who also contributed."
And during a cultural night gala held on the eve of Africa Freedom Day at the Mulungushi International Conference Centre in Lusaka, Masebo wondered why the audience looked like people who were in mourning when the event was about celebrating Africa's birthday.
"I think that the Lusaka provincial minister Freedom Sikazwe was right. We don't seem to be in a celebratory mood. Surely this is a very important event where we are celebrating our 50th birthday," she said.
"We are gathered here so that through the arts we can celebrate and recall the revolutionary decision taken by 32 individuals."
Masebo said the fore-runner of the OAU, the African Union AU had come up with a Charter for African Renaissance and that part of it documens thematic areas that build the capacity of the continent's cultural sector.
She noted that apart from its objective of eliminating all forms of alienation, exclusion and cultural oppression, the Charter for African Renaissance seeks to promote freedom of expression and cultural democracy.
Masebo said cultural democracy could not be separated from social and political democracy and she said the government had completed the process of drafting the art, culture and heritage bill that would culminate in the formation of an art, culture and heritage commission.
Masebo said these efforts coupled with the soon-to-be established New Media and arts college in Chilanga district were not only the government's tangible commitment to the development of the cultural sector but also a vehicle for job creation.
"Without our cultural identity Africa will have nothing to contribute to human diversity," said Masebo.
Labels: GUY SCOTT, HISTORY, SYLVIA MASEBO
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Zimbabwe: When Rhodesia coils through lasting myths
Friday, 13 April 2012 23:23
Today is April 14, a mere four days away from yet another 18th April, the day we commemorate our birthday as an independent, sovereign nation.
The year for that momentous event was of course 1980, a year that, read against the pain of a long war of liberation, seemed ungraspable, seemed unreal, quite unattainable. There is something so enveloping about a war, something so abridging about the life you live under conditions of war, that a day is long enough time, long enough planning horizon. Life gets that basic, that practical, that immediate, that circumscribed, that you hardly vision beyond your little life grinding tragically on, towards an uncharted, uncertain end.
Struggling against challenged masculinity
By time age, I had just broken past boyhood to become some teenager, barely 17. The year before, I had struggled with my chest which threatened to turn me into a woman. My nipples were growing, in fact bulging to great self-mortification.
To achieve greater certainty to my own claim to masculinity, I tackled both nipples with the sharp mubayamhondoro thorn. A weeping opening once established, you then pressed the hard, round tissue inside the nipple, itself the source of all your woes, until it wept itself dry, initially as clean tears, then cloudy white puss-like stuff, and then white stuff discoloured with a bit of blood. You kept pressing until the hard ball softened, collapsed, often to weeping nostrils. Without realising it, you had bent your neck, your head for far too long, all in a bid to reclaim your masculinity which inevitably faced challenges from your peers, each time you ventured into the school bathroom for a mandatory early morning shower.
In the shadows of Afrikaners
Makumbe, the school I went to, was not very sophisticated. It belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, a religious sect whose roots lay in the truculent Afrikaner tradition. Strangely, these missionaries of Afrikaner extraction — vanaMuneri — as they were called, had incorporated into the curriculum a spartan element which made schooling quite some endurance.
Makumbe never had a modern bathroom system. I hope it does now. But never in our days which for people in my stream had started at the break of 1976. The bathroom was one long row of peeping shower heads, all of them made from silver, possibly to reduce the maintenance bill. Silver endures rust quite well. So each morning would see a row of black figures, all nude, standing under these spitting shower heads, towels of various shades, at various stages of time-induced shredding, stretched across wriggling bodies, all aspiring for cleanness. And the guy next door would always steal a glance at you, primarily to establish whether you had ripened to manhood, and then generally to inspect the rest of your mien. The zone around your loins would always set you free from charges of boyhood.
When you got violated
Woe betide if your chest was found adorned with some two cylindrical, or is it conical hills! It was not just derisive laughter that pelted you; you also got fondled, the whole violation legitimised by a sissy name elder boys would have cast on you. Often, the name stuck and girls would soon know which amongst us was breaking from boyhood.
Of course pimples also aided the detection, but mercifully sparing you the agony which a nubial chest always brought onto your humble but runaway person. And since the charge was always led by older boys, there was very little you could do is self-defence. To avoid such comeuppance, you always worked extra hard to “subside” your own womanish chest. You did so during school holidays, away from the madding, mocking school crowd.
Meeting the boys
I said by time-age I was 17 when Independence came. By experience I was much older. Towards the end of 1977, the war had reached the schoolyard, transforming all of us in the process. Madhara Chihombe and his group of heavily armed fighters were the first to arrive, to find the whole school in the cathedral. The group included fighters like Tambaoga, the diminutive Chillus Kadiki, Zvadzudza who carried an LMG, poto yaMbuya Nehanda (Grandma Nehanda’s pot) as it was popularly called. It had earned this name from its round magazine, as opposed to the banana-shaped magazine of an AK.
Zvadzudza impressed me. His whole body was strapped with a charged machine gun belt. The coiled belt emitted a rattle each time Zvadzudza made a footstep, with each rattle adding to our wonderment. And this young guerrilla had the gaiety and poise that gave his whole person a silhouette of formidable people’s power which impressed and reassured all of us. We were safe, very safe. Or so we naively thought, even daring Rhodesians to “start us”.
Laughter in times of war
Zvadzudza walked with a bodily tilt, as if burdened by this precious cargo of liberation, our liberation. Then there was Elmond Wangu, a soft-spoken guerrilla who hardly stitched together a coherent Shona sentence. Clearly he was Ndebele and his broken Shona gave a new mystique to the war and its lingo. Looking back, I think Chihombe Madhara had brought with him a specially assembled unit of fighters for our own purpose.
Later I would meet a good number of the guerrillas leading different units as section commanders. Later too I would see Madhara as an officer in the then Prime Minister’s Office, this time known as Jonah Chimuka, a veteran from Nyazura. This was after the war when I was already working on my first degree. Tragically he would perish in a car crash, but having tested a few years of our Independence.
Others like Jimmy Mashiriapungana I would meet again well after Independence, serving under the Presidential Guard. This particular comrade had this strange way of mocking death. “Ndipei sadza nenyama maPuruvheya andiwane ndakanuna,” he would say, before falling upon his own portion of sadza with resolute zeal. Those would be lighter moments of a cruel war, rare, treasured moments of grim laughter.
Ugly, ugly war
By mid-1978 most of us had witnessed horrid scenes of war. We had seen dead bodies; we had survived skirmishes; we had carried badly injured comrades like Mukoma Terence who had to be evacuated from the legendary Gwirambira Mountain where he had been shot, evacuated under fire all the way back to the rear.
But we had also witnessed serious and even bloody contradictions and betrayals so common in wars. Including an incident in Masamha Village where differences and rivalry between Cdes Utsinye and Nharo MaGuerrilla cost the latter his dear life. Nharo was addressing us when Utsinye lobbied a grenade at him. His whole bowels just dropped to the ground in an instant, to clear, terminal agony. The grenade had ripped him open, ripped him apart. As he fell he uttered words that haunt me to this day: “MaComrades mandiurayireiko? Pamberi neHondo! Pamberi neHondo!” Before long he expired, a clenched fist in the air.
We buried him to great grief. He was a humble fighter, hugely built, always quiet.
Then the hunt for Utsinye followed and after a week on the run, the rogue guerrilla was finally accounted for. He, too, died a very violent death. It could never have been otherwise. The comrades just went crazy at the thought of a fellow guerrilla who dared take the life of musoja wepovho, musoja wenyika. Still I cannot tell which blow, which bayonet stab actually finished him. War can be ugly, very ugly.
The issue we take for granted
Today, four days away from Independence I accuse tyrannical time of prettifying an ugly war, making us all forgetful of it even. Today we are all guilty of enjoying the plumage of Independence while forgetting the bird that died. Independence has become a fact of life: natural, too natural to be grasped, to be quantified. It is taken for granted and many in our midst are wont to view it as uneventful, as inevitable, as something we were owed by the generation that sacrificed for it. To many of us, it carries no price.
We even taunt that generation which won it, deride it as “O” Veterans. One youthful MP once challenged war veterans to take back Independence to where it once lay tied, to see if the current generation which include him, won’t free it again!
Kudzai who perished
I have given just vignettes of my own experiences as a student-war collaborator. They are gory enough, yet insignificant relative to the experiences of the men and women who actually fought through countless battles, both at the rear and at the front. And there was a deliberate policy to protect students from undue exposures, which is what saved most of us, but never all of us.
I remember the tragic story of Kudzai Mhiripiri from Gutu. She was part of my class — Form Two class of 1977. We parted for holidays, hoping to meet again when schools reopened. We never saw her again, together with her young sisters. They perished in an all-out attack at a “base” not very far from Mupandawana.
A few years ago, the public media re-ran the story of Kudzai and the many girls who perished in that attack. The father of Kudzai provided the narrative of such gripping pathos that memories were stirred.
Horror of re-enactment
Many horrid things happened in the war of our liberation and just this week Alexander Kanengoni gave us a slice of the anguish felt by a guerrilla who witnessed the death of a colleague in that war, but who bore the burden of keeping that tragedy from parents and sisters of the dear departed. Until he could not keep the burden any longer. He broke down uncontrollably.
I have heard many similar stories, including layers and layers of horrid memories that stir and start souls in sleep. Alexander, at least purges such memories through his eloquent pen. Many can’t. They remain mute, yet haunted. A few find refuge in drink, others in spurts of inexplicable anger. Yet others in raging minds that relive the horrors of a war which a good 32 years later, should have gone quiet, gone cold. This is where time baffles.
To those who find life after 1980, the war happened a long time ago. Why inflict it on us, they opine. Yet to those who participated in, or witnessed it, it is a fresh horror, a horror that won’t go away, a wound that suppurates and will not heal any time soon.
Peace appears to give war an ideal environment for its horrid re-enactment. Much worse for this group, it is a reminder of what might have to be endured yet again if we become too causal about our Independence.
Nations and myths
And there is lots of evidence of that nowadays. Not many of us realise that nations are not made; they are invented. They come about through narratives, whether of woes or of grandeur. Nations rest on the foundation of myths and myth-making. And if we did not have myths, we would have had to invent them to found ourselves as Nations.
And there are what are known as founding myths which shape and form our claim to nationhood. Munhumutapa, Kaguvi, Lobengula; Nehanda, all these have faded in time as personages. But they have been reborn as founding patriarchs and matriarchs. In them we trace our collective being, in them we anchored our struggle against imperialism.
The 1893, 1896 umvukelas/chimurengas, all those became the cornerstone of myths that kept us going. Hondo yemadzinza, the war of ancestors, we called our second Chimurenga, thereby establishing some cognate link between the two wars of resistance.
Cry my beloved history
But we find exactly the same process taking place on the other side, the Rhodesian side. And this is where I cry for my beloved Nation. There is little recognition that we do not build our founding myths on a blank page, unhindered, unchallenged.
This belief that the world shall leave us to rework our own myths and identity, rework our nationhood in our own space, in our own time, at our own pace. That national identity-making is uncontested! Much worse, that royalty like, Rhodesia software by way of its historiography and other narratives shall pour forth upon us so we select and summon what we need, want, in forging our own identity.
And the Rhodesians have been providing lots of material in our name — Zimbabwe — with us as players. We think they are beneficent, a huge helping hand to our own identity formation. My goodness!
Myths of atrocities
Do we realise that today, 14th April, 2012, we the victors, we the independent, we the sovereign, have no history of our own? Have no narrative of our own? That we are a nobody, a non-people, non-actors whose role in life and history is as mercifully assigned to us by those we defeated? In fact do we realise that the fact of reposing our history in the efforts of Rhodesians who, amazingly, continue to live after they have lost territory, rekindles the old myths of the white man’s civilising mission?
We are stuck in the founding myth of Rhodesia, the myth that the white man makes and interprets history. The Rhodesians are writing about us, have been since before 1890, in the process creating a climate for our conquest and eventual occupation.
Rhodes needed atrocity stories to sway Britain to grant BSAC a Royal Charter. He mobilised missionaries — men of conscience — to supply lurid accounts of Ndebele atrocities against a supine, peace-craving people called the MaShonas.
Listen to the First Superior of the Zambezi Mission, one Henry Depelchin, S J writing to his church superior on 8 October, 1879, 11 years before our colonisation: “As I write these lines, I can see Lobengula’s army passing, 200 yards from our wagon. The soldiers are armed with shields and assegais (lances); and one or two with guns. They are off (one does not know where) to attack some poor tribe, massacring the innocent, making slaves of them and seizing their flocks. What brigands they are! These are crimes which cry to heaven for vengeance. When, dear God, will we be able to put a stop to so much cruelty and depravity? When will we be given the strength to overthrow and destroy the work of the devil; to purify in the blood of Jesus this accursed and crime-soiled land and to establish at last, throughout the length of Africa, the glorious kingdom of Jesus Christ? Fiat! Fiat!”
Atrocities myth updated
Read all this against what would follow, namely the conquest of both the Ndebeles and the Shonas alike; their brutal subjugation under company colonial rule, the misappropriation of their land, forced labour, taxation, and you ask yourself whether this was the “glorious kingdom of Jesus Christ” craved for by Father Depelchin for Shonas.
Much worse, ask yourself if this same myth-making has not replayed itself still under the holy auspices of the Church by way of the regrettable conflict of the early 80s which has now been reworked into an elaborate myths we now know as Gukurahundi? If yesterday it was Lobengula and his Ndebeles set against the Shonas, today, a good 25 years after the 80s conflict, it is Mugabe and his Shonas against the Ndebeles.
Either way imperialism makes and deploys myths against us as a people. And in such we repose our history?
When white death is an abomination
Or another seemingly hidden myth which has just been reworked. As with the aforementioned one, I trace it back to colonial times. With the Ndebeles up in arms again in 1896 after their initial defeat in 1893, Rhodes whose ill-fated Jameson Raid had exacted a heavy cost on him, was with his Matabililand Relief Force and a Detachment of the Bulawayo Defence Force under then Colonel Plumer, hoping for a nailing blow against the Ndebeles encamped at “Thaba S’ Amamba”. With him was one Vere Stent his chronicler and myth-maker.
In due course the Ndebeles were routed but not without extracting a heavy price on Rhodes’ force. I defer to Stent for what followed: “At sundown a sad little procession set out, carrying 18 dead. Eighteen white men; good men; men of courage. It cut Rhodes to the heart. Eighteen white men in a country that needed white men so badly. Soldiers of fortune, if you will; having their faults; no plaster saints; 18 men of the legion that never was listed; not too overburdened with human considerations; they asked for no quarter; they probably would have given none. But they were the men that Rhodesia wanted to smooth her rugged ways; to break her in. Their lives were the price of victory and the price was heavy . . . There had been a good many natives killed too. But the death of the rebels who had murdered white women and children did not come home to us as the death of these eighteen of our own kind and colour.”
When history never retracts
This is as colour blind, as balanced as the very historiography we repose our whole trust in is. The deep humanity of Rhodes is asserted. The contrasting worth of the two lives is dramatised, in the process commissioning the sanctity of the white man’s life in colonial and post-colonial conflict. Need we wonder then that a whole nation, a whole people, came under crippling sanctions as recompense for the death of six or so white farmers in the Third Chimurenga?
A good 32 years later, we remain a people in history but with no history. We remain suffocatingly coiled in Rhodesian myths from which we derive a negative identity. And these myths are being reworked afresh, redeployed to carry Rhodesia’s current needs.
Much worse, to demolish real leaders while ornamenting mediocrity, while tantalising us with a fake leadership of containment paraded as the change we need. We get a false sense of forward movement, in reality a huge leap backward.
It is such gullibility on our part which shall get us to taste another war. Man, know thyself. After all history recurs; it never retracts. Icho! — nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: HISTORY, NATHANIEL MANHERU, RHODESIA
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Declare April Zim history month
Wednesday, 04 April 2012 14:58
IN February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands” in which he urged the US to take up the “burden” of empire, as had Britain and other European nations when colonising Africa.
Theodore Roosevelt, later to become president, described it as “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.” However, not everyone, particularly in the developing world, was as impressed as Roosevelt. African-Americans, among many others, rapped the notion of the “white man’s burden.” And one of the prominent responses to Kipling’s poem was “The Black Man’s Burden,” written by African-American clergyman and editor Hubert Johnson and published in April that same year. Hubert Johnson argued that the mistreatment of brown people in the Philippines was an extension of the mistreatment of African-Americans at home. There was nothing noble in imperialism.
The bottom line is the black man has a burden of ensuring that his history, which has over the years been misconstrued as being synonymous with the history of the white man’s arrival in Africa, is corrected and captured for posterity. It is a history of not being seen nor heard; a history of being manipulated and subjugated.
The onus is on us Africans to correct the historical distortions.
I flew this kite before in 2006, and I raise it again this year in the hope that someone in the high offices takes note and does something about it. In spite of having a rich history of stolid, defiant resistance to all forms of colonial or neo-colonial domination, we Zimbabweans are notoriously modest. We do not seem to celebrate this history except waiting for days or events. Why don’t we, for instance, have even a Zimbabwe history month to mark the milestones that helped define us as the nation we are today?
I have said it before and I will say it again. If ever there is a month that deserves to be called Zimbabwe history month, it is April, a month littered with numerous milestones stretching from the First, Second to the Third Chimurenga wars.
One hundred and fourteen years ago, on April 27 1898, the architects of the First Chimurenga War, Mbuya Chahwe, the medium of the Nehanda spirit, and Sekuru Gumboreshumba, the medium of the Kaguvi spirit also known as Murenga, were hanged by the settler regime for daring to challenge colonial dispossession. It is from the Kaguvi spirit, that was alternatively known as Murenga, meaning “war spirit”, that the name Chimurenga was derived.
Mbuya Nehanda along with Zindoga, Hwata and Gutsa wrongly stood accused of murdering a brutal white native commissioner, one Henry Hawkins Pollard of the British South Africa Company who lived near Mazowe and terrorised people in that district.
Rhodesian legal documents classified Mbuya Nehanda modestly as a Mashona woman residing at Chitawa’s Kraal in the Mazowe District; Zindoga as a native kitchen boy residing at Nehanda’s Kraal; and Hwata and Gutsa as native hunters residing at Hwata Kraal.
The four along with Sekuru Kaguvi were arraigned in the High Court of Matabeleland that sat in Salisbury on February 20 1898 and were subsequently convicted on March 2 1898 in a case entered as “The (British) Queen against Nehanda”.
They were sentenced to death by hanging.
The execution was authorised by the (British) High Commissioner for South Africa, one Alfred Milner, and endorsed by the (British) Imperial Secretary on March 28 1898. The presiding judge was Judge Watermayer, with Herbert Hayton Castens Esquire, as “the acting Public Prosecutor Sovereign within the British South Africa Company territories, who prosecutes for and on behalf of her majesty”.
The warrant for Mbuya Nehanda’s death commanded that she be executed within the wall of the gaol of Salisbury between the hours of 6 and 10 in the afternoon. A Roman Catholic priest, one Fr Richertz, was assigned to convert Mbuya Nehanda, Sekuru Kaguvi, Hwata and Zindoga. It is said the hapless Catholic priest failed to make headway with Mbuya Nehanda but managed to convert Sekuru Gumboreshumba, whom he baptised as Dismas, the ‘‘good’’ thief.
Gutsa, Hwata and Zindoga were also converted and similarly hanged.
According to Fr Richertz’s account, Mbuya Nehanda “ . . . called for her people and wanted to go back to her own country Mazoe and die there . . . When I saw that nothing could be done with her, the time of the execution having arrived, I left Nehanda and went to Kaguvi who received me in good dispositions. Whilst I was conversing with him, Nehanda was taken to the scaffold. Her cries and resistance, when she was taken up the ladder, the screaming and yelling disturbed my conversation with Kaguvi very much, till the noisy opening of the trap door upon which she stood, followed by the heavy thud of her body as it fell, made an end to the interruption”, he wrote.
Fr Richertz, however, conveniently forgot to mention the other words Mbuya Chahwe said to him, that “Mapfupa angu achamuka (my bones will surely rise)”.
Fr Richertz may have considered it heresy, especially from a woman who had refused to be converted to “Christianity”, but he did not know that the settler regime had just killed the mediums of the Nehanda and Kaguvi spirits but the spirits proper remained to influence the war effort.
Sixty-eight years later, Mbuya Nehanda’s prophesy came true when seven of her bones rose up in style on April 28 1966 to fire the first shots of the Second Chimurenga war.
They struck just five months after Smith announced his Universal Declaration of Independence (UDI) and 20 months after the Rhodesian regime banned the nationalist movements Zapu and Zanu in August 1964.
[AMBUYA Nehanda]
AMBUYA Nehanda
It is not clear whether it was by design or providence that the seven cadres intended to hit on the exact date Nehanda was executed but were somehow delayed by logistical problems and did so a day later.
The seven cadres — Simon Chingosha Nyandoro, Godwin Manyerenyere, Christopher Chatambudza, Arthur Maramba, Chubby Savanhu, Godfrey Dube and David Guzuzu — who entered the country from Zambia struck near Manyame River in Chinhoyi.
Their aim was to destroy power pylons to cut off electricity coming from Kariba Dam and plunge the country into darkness. This was supposed to be the signal for other groups that were strategically placed in towns like Mutare, Rusape, Chegutu and Mvuma that the war against the Smith regime had begun.
Lack of proper equipment and explosives saw the cadres fail to bring down the pylons near Lions Den, the Rhodesians got wind of the operation and descended on the people who were harbouring them.
But the gallant fighters, who had retreated to Golden Kopje, dared the Rhodesians to come out and fight, and the cowardly Rhodies came complete with helicopter gunships and all sorts of weapons to face seven men armed only with AK-47 assault rifles.
The seven commandos gave as much as they took as the battle lasted from about 9am to around 4pm. Eyewitness accounts say several helicopters and scores of Rhodesian soldiers were gunned down and littered the battle scene when the seven cadres were finally wiped out. It is important to note that they were only overcome because they had inferior weapons and ran out of ammunition, while the enemy was armed to the teeth and had the advantage of going back to base to replenish both ammunition and manpower.
The bodies of the seven cadres were never seen again after the Rhodesians took them.
The nationalist leaders learnt a lot from the battle of Chinhoyi and future incursions inflicted heavy losses on the Rhodesian regime that was finally brought to its false knees in 1979.
In the intervening period, another milestone again occurred, on April 4 1975, when Cde Robert Gabriel Mugabe, who had just been released from an 11-year incarceration by the Smith regime, crossed into Mozambique in the company of Cde Edgar Tekere.
The following is the verbatim account of the crossing that President Mugabe gave during an interview with Power FM ahead of his 82nd birthday in 2006.
“It was on Saturday morning and we decided to leave in the afternoon of that day. Old Tangwena, late now, Chief (Rekayi) Tangwena at whose home we had slept was instructed by his wife to lead us. Mai Tangwena vaisvikirwa, vakati zvanzi izvo iwe Tangwena pachako tungamirira vana ava. So he accompanied us. There we were, we had two young men carrying our bags and I think there were five of us and we decided to cross the border.
“There was this big boundary road they called Bhinya. It was also so called after the name of the person who was chief native commissioner . . . I will think of it. We had to cross the broad road, not tarred, but just a dirt road, gravel, not tarred because it was meant to facilitate the vigilance that the Rhodesians kept on the people.
“So we crossed that, after looking at both sides of the road, we moved on and at night we had to cross rivers. There was a small river that we crossed and upon putting our shoes back, I could not distinguish the right from the left. Ndakaita sambuya vangu vaimbouya kuchurch vakapfeka matennis vachiti yekurudyi yoenda uku (laughs indicating his left foot). Ndakatozoona zuva ratobuda kuti that was the disaster that had attended my feet.
“You know the Tangwenas had been fighting for Gaerezi Ranch. It was that resistance, vaivingwa from time to time vachipfurwa. Ndiro chaidzo dzaiboorwa nemabullets kuti vabve, their children were all taken away to a school somewhere, but they resisted. We got to a village where two headmen vekwaTangwena decided to get away from this problem and settled on the Mozambican side, and two headmen had remained. So they were four.
“We were drenched, very wet and we needed fire, so early in the morning fire was lit for us outside. I noticed that my shoes had done harm to my toes and we were not prepared to continue. So we remained there for quite some time. Kwakanga kusina masoja eFrelimo akawanda, so we had to relay our presence to them, and
from that place word was sent ahead that we were there and we then got to a base that was close to Tete, this place was called Vam-Vam.
“We were at Vam-Vam for quite some time that’s where we met vana Mao and others who had been recruited in Highfield. From there we were taken along a road in the direction of a town yaimbonzi Villa Guveya, now Katandika. It was while we were at Vam-Vam that Mozambique celebrated its independence. We stayed at Katandika for a month or two. From Katandika we were taken to Chimoio, and there we met many more and now we were moving with other comrades that we had met along the way.
“That is where we met vanaChamu (Oppah Muchinguri) vachiri vadiki and many others. We had some students from university, vana (Zororo) Duri, vana (Christopher) Mutsvangwa vana Gula Ndebele, vana (John) Mayowe, who had left university, we met them there.
“There were about 5 000 to 6 000 of us kuChimoio. It was a little outside the town, and then the governor decided that some of our cadres who had been trained who were in Tete should be informed about our presence. There were about three ladies and mukuru wavo akavatora ndiMai (Joice) Mujuru, and there were about four or five male cadres. So they came and saw us and came back, and we asked them to take control because they were trained cadres.
“So that was the journey, and all the while we were with Chief Tangwena, right up to the end taive naChief Tangwena, and when we came back, we came back with him also. He was quite a gallant cadre, very strong,” President Mugabe said.
The President was to gallantly lead the war effort from Mozambique for the next five years. He participated in all the peace initiatives up to the Lancaster House
Constitutional Conference of September 10 to December 15 1979 that paved way for the first democratic elections in March 1980.
It was a month later, again in April, that the new Zimbabwe was born on April 18.
This was the month that the Union Jack was pulled down and the Zimbabwean flag, as we know it, rose majestically in its place at midnight on April 18 as the heir to the British throne Prince Charles and Governor Lord Soames saluted the new nation and its people.
This was the day that defined us as a people as the then Prime Minister-elect, Cde Mugabe, laid out the policy of reconciliation in his maiden address, much to the amazement of terrified Rhodies who thought they would be made to account for their war crimes.
That is April, a month that traces a century of resistance, from Nehanda to Mugabe.
Labels: CAESAR ZVAYI, HISTORY, INDEPENDENCE, RHODESIA
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COMMENT - This is what the coward Zahi Hawass tried to hide. And why he hasn't released the haplogroups of the Egyptian mummies yet. Ancient Egypt was an African civilisation, perhaps the most influential one, that gave rise to the civilisations of Phoenicia and Greece, and indirectly, Rome. The letters that we use today (these letters) were introduced into Greece from Phoenicia, which used an alphabet based entirely upon Egyptian Hierogplyphs. These DNA results, much of which are still kept hidden to protect modern Egypt's self-image as an Arab culture - Zahi Hawass still has to release the haplotypes of the mummies - show what is nowadays accepted more and more, that the original Ancient Egyptians populated the Nile Valley from the Black populations of what is now the Sahara Desert and farther South. The DNA of King Tutankhamun matches most closely with the DNA of the people of Central Africa. (See the tables and photographs in the original document.)
From DNA Tribes:
IntroductionHello, and welcome to the January 2012 issue of DNA Tribes Digest. This month’s article features an analysis of several mummies, including the famous King Tut and his relatives. These individuals lived in a unique time more than three thousand years ago: the “Amarna period,” which has left a vivid archaeological record of life in pharaonic Egypt.
Best regards and Happy New Year,
Lucas Martin
DNA Tribes
Last of the Amarna Pharaohs: King Tut and His RelativesHistorical BackgroundDuring the exploration of Egypt, a puzzle emerged along the Nile River: a singular ancient city that had been hastily abandoned to the desert. The site dated to the mid 1300’s BCE (the height of New Kingdom Egypt) and became known as Amarna (named for the local Beni Amran tribe).
Unusual discoveries here included cuneiform tablets (the Amarna letters), written in a “peripheral Akkadian” vernacular spoken in the Levantine cities of the former Hyksos and their relatives to the north.
Even more unusual was the “Amarna art” found in the city. Unlike the idealized royal icons customary in ancient Egypt, Amarna was decorated with naturalistic portraits emphasizing the individuality of the king’s family and retinue.
Absent from Amarna were images of Egypt’s ancient pantheon. Instead, this abandoned city had been dedicated to the more abstract “Aten,” symbolized by the sun’s orb extending its rays.1
Examination of texts and monuments revealed this as the lost city of Akhetaten (“Horizon of the Aten”), freshly built for the “rebel pharaoh” Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. The iconoclastic Akhenaten had opposed the wealthy and influential priesthood of Egypt by closing temples, removing the names of the gods from monuments, and even forbidding use of the plural term “gods.” Known in life as “Living in Ma’at” (Justice or Truth), he was later remembered only as the “Criminal of Akhetaten.”
After Akhenaten’s rule ended in unknown circumstances, his name was erased from all future king lists. Traditional polytheism was then re-established under Tutankhamun (“King Tut”) and the former vizier Ay.2 Despite helping the return to Egyptian customs, the names of Tut and Ay were also omitted from Egyptian records for their association with the “rebel pharaoh.”
Shortly after it had been built, the city of Akhetaten was abandoned. Ironically, the ruins of the “City of the Horizon” became an archaeological time capsule. The Egyptian desert preserved the city’s documents, naturalistic art, open air building designs, and urban layout as a testament to an innovative moment in ancient history.
The end of the Amarna period marked the conclusion of the Thutmosid 18th Dynasty of Egypt. King Tut and his relatives were to be the last descendants of one of the ancient pharaonic families, sometimes said to have ancestral links with the Land of Punt (near the Horn of Africa).3
Archaeologists have discovered several royal mummies linked to the Amarna period. These include not only the famous mummy of King Tut, but also his mother KV35YL and relatives Amenhotep III and Yuya. However, the association of the mummy KV55 with the iconoclast of Amarna remains uncertain.
KV55 has been tentatively identified as Akhenaten; however, it is still debated whether this is the “rebel pharaoh” himself or instead the remains of another relative (such as Smenkhkare).
1 During Akhenaten’s reign, the “Aten” was represented as a phonetic name and inscribed in a cartouche, suggesting an abstract yet personal concept of deity sometimes compared to the Abrahamic traditions. For instance, some scholars have compared Psalm 104 with devotional poetry found in the ruins of Akhetaten.
2 Ay was “Overseer of All the Horses of His Majesty” and possibly the father-in-law of Akhenaten and related to several studied Amarna mummies.
3 More recently, some archaeologists have compared the Predynastic Naqada culture of Egypt with the “A-Group” culture of Nubia (located south of Egypt along the Nile River).
Genetic Analysis of Amarna Mummies
Geographical analysis of the Amarna mummies was performed using their autosomal STR profiles based on 8 tested loci.4 Results are summarized in Table 1 and illustrated in Figure 1. Maps for individual Amarna mummies are included in Figures 2-8 in the Appendix.
Discussion: Average MLI scores in Table 1 indicate the STR profiles of the Amarna mummies would be most frequent in present day populations of several African regions: including the Southern African (average MLI 326.94), African Great Lakes (average MLI 323.76), and Tropical West African (average MLI 83.74) regions.
These regional matches do not necessarily indicate an exclusively African ancestry for the Amarna pharaonic family. However, results indicate these ancient individuals inherited some alleles that today are more frequent in populations of Africa than in other parts of the world (such as D18S51=19 and D21S11=34). MLI for World Region Thuya Yuya KV35EL Amen-hotep III versus the likelihood of occurrence in the world as a whole.
4 For original data, see http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/303/7/638.full.
Conclusion
Results indicated the autosomal STR profiles of the Amarna period mummies were most frequent in modern populations in several parts of Africa. These results are based on the 8 STR markers for which these pharaonic mummies have been tested, which allow a preliminary geographical analysis for these individuals who lived in Egypt during the Amarna period of the 14th century BCE.
Although results do not necessarily suggest exclusively African ancestry, geographical analysis suggests ancestral links with neighboring populations in Africa for the studied pharaonic mummies.
If new data become available in the future, it might become possible to further clarify results and shed new light on the relationships of ancient individuals to modern populations.
Labels: ANCIENT EGYPT, BLACK HISTORY MONTH, HISTORY
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COMMENT - Mayan ruins found as far north as Georgia
Ruins in Georgia mountains show evidence of Maya connection
Richard Thornton
Architecture & Design
Examiner
December 21, 2011
Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap, near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside. Visible are at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures. Much more may be hidden underground. It is
possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.
BLAIRSVILLE, GA (December 21, 2011) -- Around the year 800 AD the flourishing Maya civilization of Central America suddenly began a rapid collapse. A series of catastrophic volcanic eruptions were followed by two long periods of extreme drought conditions and unending wars between city states.
Cities and agricultural villages in the fertile, abundantly watered, Maya Highlands were the first to be abandoned. Here, for 16 centuries, Itza Maya farmers produced an abundance of food on mountainside terraces. Their agricultural surpluses made possible the rise of great cities in the Maya Lowlands and Yucatan Peninsula. When the combination of volcanic eruptions, wars and drought erased the abundance of food, famines struck the densely populated Maya Lowlands. Within a century, most of the cities were abandoned. However, some of the cities in the far north were taken over by the Itza Maya and thrived for two more centuries.
In 1839, English architect, Frederick Catherwood, and writer, John Stephens “rediscovered’ the Maya civilization on a two-year journey through southern Mexico. When their book on the journey was published in 1841, readers in Europe and North America were astounded that the indigenous peoples of the Americas could produce such an advanced culture. Architects in both continents immediately recognized the strong similarity in the architectural forms and town plans between southern Mexico and the Southeastern United States. Most agronomists were convinced that corn, beans and tobacco came to the natives of the United States and Canada from Mexico.
In the decades since Catherwood’s and Stephens’ book, archaeologists have not identified any ruins in the United States which they considered to be built by a people who had originated in Mexico. This was primarily due to their unfamiliarity with the descendants of the Southeastern mound-builders -- tribes such as the Creeks, Alabamas, Natchez, Chitimachas and Choctaws. In particular, the languages of the Creek Indians contain many Mesoamerican words.
Historians, architects and archaeologists have speculated for 170 years what happened to the Maya people. Within a few decades, the population of the region declined by about 15 million. Archaeologists could not find any region of Mexico or Central America that evidenced a significant immigration of Mayas during this period, except in Tamaulipas, which is a Mexican state that borders Texas on the Gulf of Mexico. However, Maya influence there, seemed to be limited to a few coastal trading centers. Where did the Maya refugees go? By the early 21st century, archaeologists had concluded that they didn’t go anywhere. They had died en masse.
The evidence was always there
In 1715 a Jewish lass named Liube, inscribed her name and the date on a boulder in Track Rock Gap. When Europeans first settled the Georgia Mountains in the early 1800s, they observed hundreds of fieldstone ruins, generally located either on mountaintops or the sides of mountains. These ruins consisted of fort-like circular structures, walls, Indian mounds veneered in stone, walls, terrace retaining walls or just piles of stones. Frontiersmen generally attributed these structures to the Indians, but the Cherokees, who briefly lived in the region in the late 1700s and early 1800s, at that time denied being their builders.
By the mid-20th century many Georgians held little reverence for Native American structures. Dozens of Indian mounds and stone masonry structures were scooped up by highway contractors to use in the construction of highways being funded by the Roosevelt Administration. Providing jobs and cheap construction materials seemed more important in the Depression than preserving the past.
During the late 20th century, the Georgia state government took an active role in preserving some of the stone ruins. Archaeologists surveyed a few sites. One of the better known ruins became Fort Mountain State Park. For the most part, however, the stone ruins remained outside the public consciousness.
In 1999 archaeologist Mark Williams of the University of Georgia and Director of the LAMAR Institute, led an archaeological survey of the Kenimer Mound, which is on the southeast side of Brasstown Bald in the Nacoochee Valley. Residents in the nearby village of Sautee generally assume that the massive five-sided pyramidal mound is a large wooded hill. Williams found that the mound had been partially sculpted out of an existing hill then sculpted into a final form with clay. He estimated the construction date to be no later than 900 AD. Williams was unable to determine who built the mound.
Williams is a highly respected specialist in Southeastern archaeology so there was a Maya connection that he did not know about. The earliest maps show the name Itsate, for both a native village at Sautee and another five miles away at the location of the popular resort of Helen, GA. Itsate is what the Itza Mayas called themselves. Also, among all indigenous peoples of the Americas, only the Itza Mayas and the ancestors of the Creek Indians in Georgia built five-side earthen pyramids as their principal mounds. It was commonplace for the Itza Maya to sculpt a hill into a pentagonal mound. There are dozens of such structures in Central America.
The name of Brasstown Bald Mountain is itself, strong evidence of a Maya presence. A Cherokee village near the mountain was named Itsa-ye, when Protestant missionaries arrived in the 1820s. The missionaries mistranslated “Itsaye” to mean “brass.” They added “town” and soon the village was known as Brasstown. Itsa-ye, when translated into English, means “Place of the Itza (Maya).”
Into this scenario stepped retired engineer, Cary Waldrup, who lives near Track Rock Gap. In 2000 he persuaded the United States Forest Service to hire a professional archaeologist from South Africa, Johannes Loubser, to study the famous Track Rock petroglyphs, and also prepare a map of the stone walls across the creek in site 9UN367. Waldrup and his neighbors felt that the stone structure site deserved more professional attention. They collected contributions from interested citizens in Union County, GA to fund an archaeological survey by Loubser’s firm, Stratum Unlimited, LLC.
Loubser’s work was severely restricted by his available budget, but his discoveries “opened up the door” for future archaeological investigations. His firm dug two test pits under stone structures to obtain soil samples. In conjunction with the highly respected archaeological firm of New South Associates in Stone Mountain, GA he obtained radiocarbon dates for the oldest layer of fill soil in a test pit, going back around 1000 AD. He also found pottery shards from many periods of history. Loubser estimated that some of the shards were made around 760 AD – 850 AD. This is exactly when Maya population began to plummet.
Loubser described the 9UN367 archaeological site as being unique in the United States, and stated that examples of such sites are only found elsewhere in the Maya Highlands and South America. However, he did not present an explanation for who built the stone walls. He was in a conundrum. The Eastern Band of Cherokees had labeled Track Rock Gap as a “Cherokee Heritage Sacred Site.” He had been led to believe that the area had occupied by the Cherokee Indians for many centuries, yet he also knew that the Cherokees never built large scale public works. In fact, the Cherokees established a handful of hamlets in the extreme northeastern tip of Georgia during the 1700s, but the western side of Brasstown Bald Mountain, where Track Rock is located, was not official Cherokee territory until 1793.
Shared research between scholars
The People of One Fire is an alliance of Native American scholars (and their archaeologist friends) that was formed in 2006 after the Georgia Department of Transportation refused to retract a press release which blatantly contradicted several studies by nationally respected archaeologists. Much of its research has focused on tracing the movement of people, ideas and cultivated plants from Mesoamerica and Caribbean Basin to North America. By instantly sharing research rather than hoarding information, very rapid advances have been made in the past five years concerning the history of the indigenous people of North America.
The archaeological site would have been particularly attractive to Mayas because it contains an apparently dormant volcano fumarole that reaches down into the bowels of the earth. People of One Fire researchers have been aware since 2010 that when the English arrived in the Southeast, there were numerous Native American towns named Itsate in Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and western North Carolina. They were also aware that both the Itza Mayas of Central America and the Hitchiti Creeks of the Southeast actually called themselves Itsate . . . and pronounced the word the same way. The Itsate Creeks used many Maya and Totonac words. Their architecture was identical to that of Maya commoners. The pottery at Ocmulgee National Monument (c 900 AD) in central Georgia is virtually identical to the Maya Plain Red pottery made by Maya Commoners. However, for archaeologists to be convinced that some Mayas immigrated to the Southeast, an archaeological site was needed that clearly was typical of Mesoamerica, but not of the United States.
In July of 2011, Waldrup furnished a copy of the 2000 Stratum Unlimited, LLC archaeological report to People of One Fire members. Those with experiences at Maya town sites instantly recognized that the Track Rock stone structures were identical in form to numerous agricultural terrace sites in Chiapas, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Johannes Loubser’s radiocarbon dates exactly matched the diaspora from the Maya lands and the sudden appearance of large towns with Mesoamerican characteristics in Georgia, Alabama and southeastern Tennessee. Track Rock Gap was the “missing link” that archaeologists and architects had been seeking since 1841.
Archaeologists have been looking for vestiges of “high” Maya civilization in the United States, when all along it was the commoners “who got the heck out of Dodge City” when wars, famines, droughts and almost non-stop volcanic eruptions became unbearable. The Itza Maya middle class and commoners became the elite of such towns as Waka (Ocmulgee National Monument) and Etalwa (Etowah Mounds) Just as happened in England after the Norman Invasion, the separate cultures of the commoners and nobility of the indigenous Southeast eventually blended into hybrid cultures that became our current Native American tribes.
A personal note from the author:
I am astounded by the interest in this article. Normally, I am followed by a modest cadre of progressive archaeologists and Native Americans. For unknown reasons, I was not able to comment on my article, but I would like to respond to some of the comments, since it is obvious that several readers are reading the comments rather than the article. The situation is getting out of hand, with numerous web sites on the internet debating comments to this article as if they were the article. Being a writer for Examiner.com, I must stay in the realm of journalism and not get into pre-adolescent cat fights and personal attacks that have become commonplace in the world of blogs and social networking.
Let it suffice to say that since the simultaneous passing of several absolute giants of Southeastern archaeology in 1979, the profession has increasingly stagnated, become cult-like and lost its desire to gain new knowledge. I personally heard one of the archaeologists state at a Society of Georgia Archaeology meeting, "We have learned all there is to know about the Southeastern Indians. It is time to move on to other things." Yes, it IS time for them move out of the way.
Please note that I specifically stated that the archaeologists mentioned in this article DID NOT recognize the Maya connection in the sites they surveyed. Neither was trained in Mesoamerican architecture like I am, and shouldn't be expected to know this.
The first "real" archaeologist to realize a direct connection between Mexico and the Southeast was Dr. Roman Piña-Chan, Director of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia de Mexico . . . and also one of the greatest archaeologists, who ever lived. I was just a dumb Gringo student and he was the coordinator of my fellowship. I sat in his office many a time in complete awe, as he pointed out such things as the copper crown worn by the "Great Suns" in Southeastern towns being identical to the crown worn by the Maya Sun God. Among his other observations was that the turbans worn by the famous marble statues found at Etowah Mounds, were exactly like the "badges" worn by Maya slaves. In fact, the first time he noticed the connection was with this comment, "Ricardo, why did your Indios make marble statues of slaves?" It is a shame that more "real" American archaeologists didn't stop by his office when he was alive.
There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever of a Maya presence in Georgia. He is typing on this computer right now. Like most Georgia and South Carolina Creeks, I carry a trace of Maya DNA. I think you will find that some branches of the Seminoles and Cherokees also carry Maya DNA. There are many Maya and Totonac words in the Creek languages. The Creek house (chiki) was identical to the Totonac house (also called chiki.)
The people whom Georgia archaeologists call Hitchiti Creeks, called themselves, Itsate . . . pronounced It-zja-tee. The people that are generally called today Itza Maya, formerly called themselves Itsate . . . pronounced It-zja-tee. On my desk are site plans produced by archeological teams from several major universities that describe pentagonal earthen mounds built by the Itza Mayas in Chiapas and Belize, which are identical to those in Georgia, such as the Kenimer Mound. In short, if it builds the same buildings as the Itza Maya, says the same words as the Itza Maya, and has the same DNA as the Itza Maya . . . by golly, it must be an Itza Maya.
Getting There
The Track Rock Gap Archaeological Zone and Petroglyphs are owned by the citizens of the United States and protected by the United States Forestry Service. The archaeological zone is open to the public year-round and may be accessed by a network of trails requiring rigorous hiking. Both the Creek and Cherokee Indians consider this place to be a very sacred, so please be respectful. By Federal law, the ruins and petroglyphs may not be disturbed in any way.
Winter is the best time to view the stone structures, but the region can get significant snow storms. Check the weather report before leaving home. To obtain information on the hiking trails contact either the Chattahoochee Forest Visitors Center in Blairsville, GA at 706-745-6928 or the main office of the Chattahoochee National Forest in Gainesville, GA at 770-297-3000. Information on accommodations near Track Rock Gap can be obtained from the Blairsville Area Chamber of Commerce at 877-745-5789. The region is a major tourist destination, so there are plenty of restaurants, motels and bed & breakfast homes available.
If you have questions about Native American history, please contact Richard at NativeQuestion@aol.com. These questions will be answered on his Native American History page.
Richard Thornton has written a book on the Archaeological Site 9UN367 and the evidence of the immigration of Mesoamerican refugees to North America. It will be available from the publisher in early January 2012, and is entitled, “Itsapa . . . the Itza Mayas in North America.” The book includes over 250 full color, virtual reality images and photographs, including pictures of identical Maya agricultural terrace sites in Chiapas, Guatemala, Campeche and Belize. Indiana film maker John Haskell is also producing a documentary film on the Maya diaspora.
The previously unknown story is fascinating. For example, the famous “eye on hand” motif found on Native American art throughout the Southeast and Midwest is the symbol of the Maya’s supreme deity, Hunab-ku. For information on reserving or ordering Thornton’s book, go to www.historyrevealedmedia.com.
Dec. 23 Update: The article headline was revised to clarify that the connection between the Georgia ruins and the ancient Maya is still a matter of debate rather than universally accepted fact.
Labels: HISTORY
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‘Depict Africans as creators of their destiny’
Tuesday, 06 September 2011 02:00
Herald Reporter
PRESIDENT Mugabe has challenged African historians to write history that depicts the people of the continent as creators of their own destiny. Launching the Pedagogical History of Africa Project in Harare yesterday, President Mugabe said non-African historians have often painted a wrong picture about Africa.
"The history that must be written by our African scholars and academics here is the history that focuses on African people in struggle as creators of their own destiny rather than mere consumers of stories written about them by passive on-lookers who oftentimes happen to be non-African outsiders," President Mugabe said.
He said there was a clear distinction between history as a narration of past events and history as a lived experience of a people in struggle.
"Real history belongs to a people in struggle and not to the interpreters of history. The people themselves are the makers of history and therefore the real historians. The interpreters are mere raconteurs of history and not the actual history-makers as is often wrongly implied," President Mugabe said.
He said when writing or teaching African history, historians should reflect on "whose world view is used to represent or interpret that history".
"Only this way can we avoid history written by colonialists as ‘winners'. Our real winners are the people, whose real history or struggle the so-called winners would like to distort and suppress," President Mugabe said.
He added: "You cannot be a historian of African people if you do not share their cry or their laughter. No. The African sensibility, reflected in African culture and worldview, is the only accurate compass to guide a historian who is genuine about writing African history."
President Mugabe said slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and efforts by the West to re-colonise Africa had resulted in a systematic disruption and distortion of African history.
"Slavery and colonisation do not themselves constitute African history. They disrupt and falsify the trajectory of African history. They dehumanise Africans to fit into the scheme of European capital. The ideology of racism is created as a parallel process to rationalise the oppression of Africans," he said.
President Mugabe said Europeans were bent on destroying African civilisation and knowledge system.
He said the age-old lie of white supremacy should be exposed and "our children must understand that the Europeans needed to take the African out of humanity and history to ensure their socio-cultural, political and economic domination of Africa."
The President said the distortion and the unprecedented corruption of a people's history should be urgently reversed.
"I need not stress that it is imperative to edify educational systems, which embody the African and universal values so as to ensure the rooting of youth in African culture in the context of a sustainable and participatory development. This way we continue to foster the spirit of unity in Africa as embodied in the African Unity Charter," he said.
The workshop was organised by Unesco.
President Mugabe applauded Unesco for its bold decision to continue to fund the teaching of history in Africa.
Labels: HISTORY, ROBERT MUGABE
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Let’s document liberation history
By Stephen Mpofu
A SEASONED Zimbabwean author watched the launch of former United States of America President George W. Bush’s memoirs the other day with much salivation.
In Decision Points, Bush justifies his unjustifiable invasion of Iraq in 1993 on a trumped up claim that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein harboured weapons of mass destruction. Not mandated by the United Nations, the illegal invasion resulted in the ouster and execution of Saddam.
However, the US and its British and other allies found no trace of the alleged weapons.
Bush’s book deals also with his war-mongering points in Afghanistan and no doubt offers Americans a rich harvest of his other decision points during his tenure in the White House.
The world is aware now that the invasion of Iraq, apart from taking a heavy toll on the lives of American and other invasion forces, has left that Arab country unstable and virtually ungovernable.
Zimbabweans will no doubt recall that it is the same Bush, now sunning in the glory of his memoirs, who once told the United Nations General Assembly that Zimbabwe was a threat to America’s foreign policy, his remark betraying a veiled threat of invasion on this country if he had his way to do so.
Be that as it may, George W. Bush embellishes American history with his offering after leaving office. But what have Zimbabweans to show as justification for waging a justifiable war of liberation which freed this country from white minority, racist rule and ushered in majority and democratic rule which has unfortunately made some Zimbabweans so drunk with freedom as to thumb their blocked noses on the revolution that has made them what they are, human beings who walk with heads high, like other citizens of the world who enjoy independence and sovereignty.
All this in spite of our people touting themselves as some of the most educated citizens of Africa. Does the loud, pervading silence of the pen suggest that Zimbabweans are incapable of immortalising the story of where this independent country came from and how?
Why then, are the living heroes of the long and bruising war of liberation not telling their story not only to enrich Zimbabwean history but to correct introverted perceptions about the liberation struggle, such as that demonstrated by a certain maverick Zimbabweans diplomat in Australia who forbade the singing of parts of the Zimbabwean National Anthem that instil the virtues of the liberation war?
As things stand, there is no liberation war history library to talk of in Zimbabwe today. Yet our libraries should be stocked with a wide range of titles by war veterans telling the story of their participation in the freedom struggle with much aplomb.
Apart from David Martin’s The Struggle for Zimbabwe, there is really nothing that one can hold in one’s hand and wave to the world at large as a demonstration of how the war that brought this country into being was fought and won.
Martin is now late but thanks to him for the historical legacy that he left behind in his book, which ought as matter of fact, to inspire living, Zimbabwean journalists to put pen to paper and fill the yawning gap in Zimbabwe’s history.
The country is running out of time and people and this article should be seen and read as a call to pens to capture the rich treasures in accounts of the war of liberation of which the country might be robbed when time takes its toll on the heroes of our liberation struggle, as it has already done on Zanla’s Josiah Tungamirai and on Lookout Masuku of Zipra among other stalwarts of the revolution.
David Martin did not bear a gun in Zimbabwe’s war of liberation. He was a journalist resourceful enough to research and put together a compelling historical read for Zimbabweans and the outside world.
This country is endowed with seasoned journalists probably capable of providing historical tapestry of liberation war extents because of their much closer association with the sons and daughters who fought the Rhodesian forces and also because of their very personal and deeper interests in their native country’s history.
Where is Charles Ndlovu the freedom fighter and journalist? Of course, he is very much alive as Media, Information and Publicity Minister Cde Webster Shamu who should tell more about Zanla’s persecution of the war from the Eastern, Mozambican, front not to mention others with a similar ability and dexterity with the pen.
On the western front, why, for instance have journalists such as Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu and Obert Mpofu, Minister of Mines and Mining Development, both remained rather shy in telling the world about Zipra’s execution of the war from across the Zambezi in Zambia?
Mpofu participated in the bush war before going over to Zambia to complete his secondary education, in Livingstone, train and work as a journalist in Lusaka before proceeding to India to study Commerce.
This writer knows Mpofu as a competent journalist and knows Gwakuba, too, as a veteran scribe and prolific writer with whom I once shared an office at the Zambia Star in Lusaka in 1965 before the Catholic Church Newspaper, edited by an American Tony Dralle, ceased publication for lack of money.
Gwakuba’s pen has remained loquacious on other topics but rather reticent, even mum, on Zipra’s activities to the West and North of the country. Why should Gwakuba and Mpofu for instance not tell the world how PF Zapu’s military wing and Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of South Africa’s African National Congress, fought jointly from the western front to try to dislodge a combined force of Rhodesian and apartheid Pretoria’s soldiers.
Pretoria deployed its troops to help rebel Rhodesian troops check any advance of Umkhonto weSizwe into South Africa to end apartheid there. The war fought on both fronts should not be treated with shyness as though it were a mother-in-law and yet the silence that Zimbabweans writers and others have kept would appear to suggest to some people that silence is an apparent apology for fighting to liberate ourselves from racist oppression and illegal rule.
This reader is dying to consume the military exploits of Teurai Ropa Nhongo or Joice Mujuru in the rugged terrain in the Eastern fronts as well as those of Oppah Muchinguri who was also secretary to the late Zanla Commander, General Josiah Magama Tongogara and of other women of valour.
Both Cde Mujuru, Vice President, and Cde Muchinguri were not fast tracked to their positions in the government and in Zanu as a way of appeasing Zimbabwean women; they bore the AK 47 side by side with their men folk and so merited every step up the rungs on the ladder of the party’s leadership to where they are today in the Women’s League and in the government respectively.
Now, if because of their heavy schedules they and other veterans of the war have little time left to tell their story, why cannot other people tell it for them and for the country’s benefit.
What Zimbabweans have heard in the 30 years after the war ended have been snippets or excerpts culled from interviews with leaders who were involved in the liberation struggle.
But Zimbabweans need a complete story told about how the gallant sons and daughters of the soil ran the gauntlet of mosquitoes, snakes, capricious weather conditions and worst of all Rhodesian soldiers in wait for them in the bush and in the air sometimes with the assistance of black sellouts with a dim idea of how blacks liberated from under the boat of white racist could shape their own destiny.
Producing an authentic history of the liberation struggle should perhaps be regarded as a compelling, natural duty so that those with a story to tell, and they are to be found all over the country, but are not talented writers themselves, would make time and record their story into a dictaphone.
Those with a flair for writing history, such as Anneas Chigwedere, Governor and Resident Minister of Mashonaland East province, and the like of author Phathisa Nyathi in Bulawayo can then transcribe and then turn the material into history books for schools and the general readership.
Perhaps, one veteran or veteran journalists in the person of Dr Nathan Shamuyarira of African Daily and also a senior Politburo member of Zanu-PF should add to his repertoire of national responsibilities the task of supervising a group of chosen Zimbabwean writers to produce a veritable history of Zimbabwe’s war of liberation.
Such a cadre of writers can be assembled from the country’s many educated and learned journalists, including such articulate and prolific scribes as Presidential spokesperson and Secretary for Information George Charamba.
They will feast on a gem of accounts about the atrocities of Rhodesian forces in villages across the country, as exposed by New Ziana’s electronic broadcast of tales given, by villagers to enrich the war history.
And why not in addition to setting up a desk for writers, have a chair of liberation war history at any selected Zimbabwean universities to enrich our national history with historians such as Midlands State University academic and Vice Chancellor Prof Ngwabi Bhebhe, helping in that respect?
Today, some born-frees and others probably regard accounts of the armed struggle as cock and bull tales, out of their blissful ignorance of the war history and the two political parties, Zanu and Zapu, which jointly waged war on the illegal Smith regime as the Patriotic Front, are likely to be judged harshly by history for failing to eradicate that ignorance by providing true accounts of the war.
They are racing against time and time’s life-harvesting sickle to accomplish that imperative and noble task and should not let themselves be hamstrung by their strange bedfellows some of whom are known vociferously to rubbish the liberation struggle and use their tongues as paint brushes to caricature and lampoon former freedom fighters at the most opportune time, to placate their imperialist masters who still regard former freedom fighters as "terrorists".
The above is one sad scenario regarding the making of Zimbabwe. Having said this one comes to another equally depressing scenario which poses the question of who will read any new books about the war of Zimbabwe’s liberation.
The question is prompted by a paucity of a reading culture that should epitomize one of Africa’s most literate nations, or so as Zimbabweans regard themselves as such, supported by international statistical data.
The Bulawayo based writer who watched the launch of Bush’s book spoke of a long queue of people waiting to buy the memoirs — one of them having waited for 18 hours — with some of them buying as many as five copies each for friends and having them autographed by the author.
The writer bemoaned a virtual lack of such a reading culture in Zimbabwe and was last week strongly supported in Bulawayo by high school teacher and marker of the English language and by a Chief Executive of a Harare-based book publishing company.
"The reading culture in Zimbabwe is very poor due to a lot of things," said the teacher whose name is being withheld for professional reasons. Children of today as well as adults spend most of their time glued to the television, stuck on the computer and play games on their cellphones.
"This has robbed them of their precious time to go to the library, get a book and sit down and read it. Most of them say that books are boring and do not offer the entertainment which the television, cellphones and computers offer them."
The teacher added that in rural areas a lack of books had led to a poor culture of reading as people there have no access to libraries.
"To develop a culture of reading, libraries should be built in communities and schools should equip their libraries with good books for children to borrow and read. Competitions on various books should be held in order to encourage pupils to read and attractive prizes should be given. In schools there should be compulsory supervised library periods," she said.
A spokesperson for the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association could not immediately be reached in Harare for comment on what effect the poor reading culture had on sales of books that are not school textbooks.
However, Mr Ben Mugabe, managing director of College Press, a member of the association also located in the capital, gave a story that is no doubt represents a situation faced by other book publishers.
Mr Mugabe concurred with the Bulawayo school teacher that the reading culture in the country has seriously declined and he attributed the drop to a downturn in the country’s economy.
When the economy was vibrant, he said, the message on a need to cultivate a reading culture, especially among young Zimbabweans, had been well-received in schools and by parents who bought general reading books for their children.
But when the economy nosedived due as anyone should imagine, to illegal Western economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe, parents, Mr Mugabe said, had to make a painful choice between buying a book or food and other necessities for their children
When the economy was buoyant schools stocked their libraries with general books in addition to school texts. For instance, a teacher kept a small library in a classroom that lent general books to pupils to try to pep up their interests.
This was an addition to the larger school library.
Mr Mugabe said he hoped that as the economy picked up and schools and parents get more money to spare, so also would books of general reading interests be made available to catch the children young and develop a culture of reading.
On the needs for a credible history of the war of liberation, Mr Mugabe sighted David Martin’s book as probably the only one providing the history of the Zimbabwean revolution and agreed with this writer for an urgent need to augment Martin’s accounts of the struggle for Zimbabwe with more books by Zimbabweans who went into battle against soldiers of a regime that wanted to keep Africans under its thumb ad infitum.
"We are running out of time and people," Mr Mugabe said referring to the passing on of Tungamirai and other heroes of the liberation struggle before telling their story to a waiting reading audience.
"Tempus fugit," they say in Latin meaning that time flies. And this should ring a bell to Zimbabweans to wake up and write the story of their freedom before time obliterates potential sources of information but any new liberation war history will be incomplete if it does not include the pivotal roles played by Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and also Botswana under Seretse Khama in the liberation not only of Zimbabwe but also of other countries in Southern Africa that still remained under white minority rule.
That history will also make the world understand that the relationship between Zimbabwe and post apartheid South Africa did not start in 1994 when the ANC ushered in democracy to South Africa but that the solidarity began way back in the bushes of Western Zimbabwe between freedom fighters from both countries and was enhanced by the support that the independent government of Zimbabwe provided to cadres of South Africa’s liberation movement waging the struggle from Zimbabwe to liberate their own country.
Aluta continua.
Labels: CHARLES NDLOVU, HISTORY, LIBERATION, SAUL GWAKUBA NDLOVU
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Zimbabweans must author own history
THE only way to avoid a “weapons of mass deception” regarding our history is to ensure that we the people are its own authors.
When we write our own history factually, we ensure that there are no loopholes for misinforming. Revisionist historians might also try to distort issues and events, but, as long as there are primary sources, those who seek the truth will always refer to those sources.
However, when the primary sources are not available, and people continue to rely on oral evidence in the age of writing, then there is a serious problem.
Hildegarde faced this historical challenge while writing a piece on the 44th commemoration of the battle of Sinoia (Chinhoi). Since this was a well-known historical event, there was every need to verify some of the information, especially the names of the seven gallant heroes who fought that battle on April 28,1966.
Here is why the writer had problems. There were three sources. All the three had seven names. The first source had the following names: Simon Chimbodza; Christopher Chatambudza; Nathan Charumuka; Godwin Manyerenyere; Peter; Ephram Shenjere and Daniel Guzuzu.
The second source had the following names: Simon Chimbodza; Christopher Chatambudza; Nathan Charumuka; Godwin Manyerenyere; Arthur Maramba; Ephraim Shenjere and David Guzuzu.
The third source had the following names: Christopher Chatambudza; Simon Chingozha Nyandoro; Chubby Savanhu; Godfrey Manyerenyere; Arthur Maramba; Godwin Dube and David Guzuzu.
The discrepancies in the three lists are quite apparent. After wide consultations, and for purposes of progress, names on the third list were used.
Nomenclature was key to the liberation struggle. That the seven could have used variant names was quite understandable since the young men and women who joined the liberation struggle assumed new names.
However, the million-dollar question was: Though there is agreement on the number seven, were these one and the same people? The names used, were they their family names or they were their liberation war names?
Why has the anomaly not been rectified, 44 years after the famous battle? This historical problem is not confined to the Battle of Chinhoyi. Libraries, as custodians of the nation’s literary assets do not have the answer, and neither do they have meaningful collections on the war of liberation, written by Zimbabweans.
Not that they do not want to have these narratives as part of their collections. Their answer was that, “there are very few historical books on the war of liberation. The bits and pieces of material that we sometimes have are journal articles, which in a number of cases are not written by Zimbabweans historians, let alone the men and women who fought the war”.
These questions led to more questions. However, before posing other questions, this writer moved around bookshops in Harare’s Central Business District to check on the availability of locally published books and other multi-media materials on the war of liberation.
If the historical narratives were available it was important to see who the authors were: war veterans; Zimbabwean citizens with a passion for history or foreigners?
It was a very unpleasant surprise, which confirmed the situation in most libraries. With the exception of a few autobiographies, there is nothing on the history of the liberation struggle to write home about.
There is hardly any historical text on the Second Chimurenga. None at all! However, this writer is aware of various historical texts on the First Chimurenga, and that these are historical narratives written by non-Zimbabweans.
The absence of historical texts on Zimbabwe’s revolutions means that both Zanla and Zipra combatants have not seen it important to ensure that the history of the liberation struggle is properly recorded, published and organised for public consumption. The same with war collaborators (the Mujibhas and Chimbwidos); the restrictees and detainees, for the war had various elements.
Over the years, the education system has produced a critical mass of competent writers who can carry out the research and produce the material. This is a responsibility that cannot continue to be ignored.
Thirty years after independence, there should not be a dearth of historical texts on the war of liberation, and the primary producers of those texts should be Zimbabweans.
People in academia understand very well the importance and/or difference between primary and secondary sources. Thirty years after independence, there should be blockbuster movies and documentaries, using these primary sources for scripting.
If we cannot be the primary producers of our historical narratives, who should do it for us, and at what price - both literally and figuratively? If we continue to have gaps on historical accounts, how should the anomaly be addressed?
But more importantly, how will this impact on future generations? Why have both Government and the publishing industry not prioritised the writing of Zimbabwe’s history?
The following are excerpts from Jonathan T Chin, a global history student on http://ezinearticles.com/ on the importance of history, which should help Zimbabweans understand the need to professionally record historical events, all the time.
When we study about what has happened in the past, we always look at important figures, important events, important groups, ideas, and movements. History is so broad that it can include everything from what has happened in Latin America, China and Europe.
Learning about history is important because some of it should be common knowledge. By knowing a bit about what has happened in our world, you can help see why things are the way they are as of know, what will happen in the future, how great minds work, how evil people work and much more. It doesn’t hurt to know too much about history.
One basic importance of history is to know enough to do well because your knowledge of it is tested. It can be in the classroom, it can be in the UN, or for a historian meeting. If you do not know enough, then you put yourself at risk of not achieving what you can…
“When you understand history, you understand basic concepts and ideas. You will learn about cause and effect, relationships and human nature. Since history is mainly about what causes the next event or action, people can clearly understand how things are related to one another.
When you also know about history, you can understand what it really means to be in someone else’s shoes. We all live our own separate lives and choose to be affected by what we see around us. We can take action or we can remain passive.
When you read about the history of various countries, you can understand the pain, the joy and more that people feel when they do something difficult or amazing. You can understand what it means to have no food, or what is means to be rich and without love.
Just like reading a book, history is a big book filled with many real stories. Know you can picture what it is like to live in China during communism or what it means to be an American.
By understanding history, you can understand why things are they way they are right now. Many of the past events and histories in the world have shaped what we are as of now.
By understanding what has happened in the past and the current situation of today, we can better understand what can happen in the future. By looking at what has happened, we can understand what we should avoid and what we should make better.
l Feedback: tendai.manzvanzvike *** zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: HISTORY, NEOCOLONIALISM
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Should De Klerk be in prison with Eugene?
On February 2 1990 ,the last president of the repressive nationalist regime FW de Klerk stood before parliament and made this important and long overdue announcement: “I wish to put it plainly that the government has taken a firm decision to release Mr Mandela unconditionally.”
The announcement of the release of Mandela marked a crucial turning point in the political history of black people in this country. Many lives had been lost in the persistent fight against the repressive system of apartheid. The death of apartheid was inevitable. The evil Nationalist regime had recognised that the tide was shifting, that the global climate was unfavourable to the continuation of such a demonic system such as apartheid.
De Klerk had no other choice but to respond positively to insurmountable pressures internally and internationally. There may be those who wish to attribute some measure of heroism to De Klerk for unbanning political parties and paving a way for the negotiations that led to the new dispensation for all South Africans but the reality is that he did what he needed to do and what was the right thing to do and had been for a long time.
It was evidently clear in his speech before parliament that the decision to release Mandela was not inspired by the genuine willingness to secure the freedom of the oppressed black people but other interests. His government’s decision to release Mandela was a further response to the revolutionary wave that swept across Eastern Europe towards the end of 1989. Communism was staring the end of its relevance as the people of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria rose against the rule of authoritarian oppression.
For a protracted period during the liberation struggle against apartheid, the Nationalist government suffered from chronic paranoia of “die Rooi Gevaar” to the security of the white minority. PW Botha once proclaimed that “the free world wants to feed South Africa to the Red Crocodile [communism], to appease its hunger”, “Die Groot Krokodil” as Botha was commonly known was obviously ignorant to the fact that indeed black people in this country could no longer contend with spasms of hunger for freedom. The liberation of black people was necessary, by any means.
While the West had pretended to hold a moral high ground when it colonised Africa, the Soviet Union had taken a principled position to support the cause for the liberation of Africans. Vladimir Shubin wrote that “according to the USSR Constitution ‘supporting the struggle of peoples for national liberation and social progress’ was regarded as one of the aims of the Soviet foreign policy”. The Russians and the Cubans were with Africans. not against them nor conniving with the apartheid regime against them.
The fall of communism in Eastern Europe must have brought a collective sigh of relief among the Afrikaner Nationalists because liberation movements across Africa had enjoyed unwavering support from the Soviet Union. The support by the Soviet Union for liberation movements such as the ANC under Mikhail Gorbachev was faltering. De Klerk along with his Afrikaner Nationalist cronies was imbued by these developments and opportunistically moved to unban political parties and “unconditionally” release Mandela and other political prisoners.
In his speech to parliament he warned that “those who seek to force this failure of a [communist] system on South Africa, should engage in a total revision of their point of view. It should be clear to all that is not the answer here either”.
He knew very well that communism was a direct threat to the accumulation of illicit wealth by the white minority at the expense of the oppressed masses. His posturings were in the interest of the preservation of economic interests of the white minority. If indeed he had real interest in the freedom of the oppressed masses, he and his cronies should have immediately prepared for the first democratic elections without the need for a negotiated settlement. They were negotiating to preserve whose interests? They were not negotiating for the greater good of the oppressed masses. The dream of Afrikaner self-determination was at the core of this pursuit of a negotiated settlement.
The ANC bent over backwards to appease paranoid Afrikaner Nationalists, compromising the immediate prospect of real economic empowerment of black people. Fifteen years in, the ownership of the JSE by black companies is still dismally low, hovering below a shameful 5% though the control of market capitalisation is slightly higher. The ANC policy of black economic empowerment has not assisted much as it served only to dispense patronage to the politically connected. Technically, black people have been screwed!
Now on the 20th anniversary of the release of Mandela from prison, there are those who seek to exalt De Klerk as a hero who the black people should be eternally indebted for ushering their freedom. De Klerk had no choice. Apartheid had to end. It is an insult to heroes of the liberation struggle to seek to credit De Klerk with the freedom of the black people. It was even more of an insult to Mandela to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize which he had to share with De Klerk. The period of black-on-black violence between 1990 and 1993 is a serious indictment on De Klerk.
The then Kenyan president, Daniel Arap Moi, on his visit to South Africa pleaded with De Klerk to stop the senseless cycle of violence which had engulfed the country and resulted in great loss of life. De Klerk did nothing to stop the ferocious violence among black people. It was reported that his police force was training and arming supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party to launch a violent offensive against supporters of the ANC.
Mandela had very harsh words for him during the 1991 Codesa negotiations: “I have said to him: You have got a strong, well-equipped, efficient police force and defence force. Why are you not using that capacity to stop this violence. I have pointed out to him that the perception that exists amongst our people is that in the forefront of this violence, are elements of the security forces. No doubt. It is common knowledge that organisations like the CCB, their main task is to eliminate freedom fighters in this country. So many activists have been killed, without trace. The killers have never been traced, or hardly ever traced. And in those massacres not a single member of the National Party was even grazed with a spear. It is all activists who are in your position who fight apartheid … we could never give our arms to a government which we are sure either has lost control over the security forces or the security forces are doing precisely what he wants them to do. I can’t see any head of government who would allow such a culture of violence to take root, without interfering.”
Mandela also said “even the head of an illegitimate, discredited, minority regime as his, has certain moral standards to uphold”. It had become apparent to the ANC that De Klerk and his cronies were not negotiating in good faith while South Africa burned.
It is important that as we celebrate an important occasion in the history of our country we do not distort which side of history De Klerk stood. It must be remembered as De Klerk attempts to endear himself to the nation that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that while he claimed he was never aware of the full extent of the human-rights abuses, he very well knew about the 1988 bombing of a building in Johannesburg used by several anti-apartheid groups.
De Klerk should be sharing a jail cell with Eugene de Kock for presiding over one of the most violent periods in the struggle of our people for freedom. He is no hero, neither to black people nor the progressive section of the white minority.
Labels: HISTORY, LIBERATION, SOUTH AFRICA
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The rise of African nationalism
By Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa
THIS is the second of a series of articles in which AMBASSADOR CHRISTOPHER MUTSVANGWA traces the foundations of Zimbabwe and how four centuries of Zimbabwe-Europe interaction have served to sap the country of its ability to chart an independent and prosperous course in global affairs.
Soshangana and the Shangani in the East
Another Nguni offshoot, the Shangani moved into the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border. Here they fought great anti-colonial battles against Portuguese rule under the great chief Gungunyana.
The British and modern Zimbabwe
The present-day Zimbabwe is a product of British imperial rule for over 90 years. Unlike other African countries where the English sent administrators, Zimbabwe was turned into a home by the colonisers.
The fertile soils, the equable climate off the plateau was simply too enticing to the new European invaders thus vindicating the great sense of human geography in the original Shona who had made the plateau home at about the same time as Vikings invaded England and well before the Norman conquest of the British Isles.
At their population height in 1970s, the white settlers were less than 3 percent of the total population. Yet they wielded great power concentrated in a racial minority.
Their numbers have dwindled mainly because of lack of allegiance to Zimbabwe.
Britain, the metropolitan power, has consistently and persistently manipulated their loyalty to serve a selfish, neo-colonial and increasingly outdated agenda of pernicious influence on the Zimbabwe body politic.
The British tradition continues to wane as their numbers have decreased in the aftermath of their military defeat a decade before the 21st century. But their influence in ushering in the concept of a modern state to the Zimbabwe nation is still there and will endure long after their present if flippant sulkiness.
The English language and international
discourse
Besides the management of a modern economy, advanced commercial law and other aspects of a modern state, the enduring contribution is the usage of the English language in national discourse.
With the emergence of the USA as the dominant superpower of the 20th century and beyond, Zimbabwe could ride on the world-wide acceptance of English as the premier lingua franca of international interaction.
The liberal democratic tradition
Another remarkable feature of English colonial rule was the introduction of the liberal democratic mode of governance.
At home, British rule had done its part in advancing constitutionalism as a mode of modern governance. Yet as it went abroad, British imperialism practised class discrimination that would lead to rebellion by the American colonists. Worse, it was the pioneer and practitioner of modern racism against the people of colour.
Nevertheless, with the eventual demise of the imperial adventure, the concept of liberal democratic governance has been avidly adapted by the former subjects.
In Zimbabwe, it took one generation before the black majority shook off the stupor of the shock of military defeat by British conquerors at the end of the 19th century.
Agitation for workers’ rights in the new towns soon coalesced with rural demand for stolen land.
The aftermath of the Second World War saw this political activism morph into the demand for the non-racial voting and majority rule.
Political parties were formed in the face of growing resistance and increasing white minority settler repression. This was the incubation of the future political leadership that would culminate in a successful military challenge to British imperial rule.
Heroes and the anti-colonial tradition
Just as Walter Rodney postulates in his celebrated book, "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa", the natural development of Zimbabwe was stunted and even temporarily arrested by aspects of its negative interaction with Europe.
Changamire Dombo of the Rozvi
The Portuguese who had set up legation at the court of Munhumutapa did not take long to see an opportunity in occupying the well-endowed Zimbabwe plateau for their far away king.
Through the ruse of dabbling in local succession politics, the Portuguese interlopers did not take time to ensconce themselves as imperial arbiters of the Munhumutapa Kingdom.
Though outnumbered with stretched supply lines, they soon turned themselves into rulers taking courtesy of their advantage of superior firepower. However, their imperial adventurism was very shortlived as the Shonas from the interior organised a counter-offensive.
Changamire Dombo of the Rozvi was the first great hero in the long history of painful encounter with European imperial invaders. His warriors drove Portuguese armies away from the interior plateau to the Indian Ocean coastal zones.
He thus spared the country the fate of present-day Mozambique which became a colony of Portugal for so many centuries.
The respite of freedom was to be challenged by more modern and better armed British imperial troops. Under the guise of dubious and deceitful treaties, Rhodes and his Pioneer Column occupied present-day Zimbabwe in the wake of the 1884 Berlin Conference on the Partition of Africa.
Lobengula and the Ndebele War
This brazen act of imperial conquest forced King Lobengula of the Ndebele nation into a war against the marauders.
Though he was defeated, the spirit of resistance took another dimension when both the Shona and Ndebele organised a joint resistance that would stretch the new occupiers.
Nehanda and the First Chimurenga
Nehanda, Kaguvi, Mashayamombe, Chingaira and many other Shona and Ndebele chiefs carried out co-ordinated attacks at isolated settler outposts all over the Plateau. Facing stark prospects, imperial Britain had to dispatch fresh reinforcements from Port Elizabeth to go to Zimbabwe through Beira in order to save its embattled settlers from imminent annihilation.
European advances in military technology such as the Gatling gun and the invention of dynamite tilted the equation against native peoples who still fought with spears. Their numbers were rendered useless against such firepower and the war of resistance collapsed into painful defeat.
Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo and modern nationalism
The defeat of the people of Zimbabwe cowered a whole generation into submission as fear gripped the land and white settlers did as they wished. They appropriated large estates for themselves while forcing the majority natives into marginal lands.
Indentured labour was the order of the day. So were onerous taxes and other administrative measures intended to force the majority into a new proletariat designed to serve the new masters. Working conditions in new urban centres, farms and mines were as appalling as the low wages.
The sheer weight of oppression was such that it could only revive the spirit of resistance. By the 1930s the people had taken to strikes and agitation against colonial excesses.
The outbreak of the WWII forced a stretched Britain to recruit Africans and other colonial subjects into its war effort against Hitler’s Germany.
The battle cry of freedom had a resonant effect. At the end of hostilities, many were demobilised without as much as a thank you by a broke and penniless England.
To their consternation they noticed their erstwhile battlefield white colleagues being rewarded with even more land which was being expropriated from fellow Africans. The resultant anger and alienation fuelled the spirit of popular resistance even more.
In the meantime, missionary education had nurtured a more conscious African elite, which could eloquently articulate the issues of concern to the black majority.
This new elite also benefited from interaction with other Africans when they went to South Africa to further their education.
After all, South Africa had the oldest liberation movement, the African National Congress, which had been founded in 1912 in reaction to nascent apartheid as the British co-opted Afrikaners into a white ruling condominium.
Joshua Nkomo, the Father of the Nation, became the voice of Zimbabweans as he articulated their grievances and formed political parties that urged majority rule and one man one vote.
Robert Mugabe, an uncanny intellectual, austere revolutionary and visionary statesman started his political career as Joshua Nkomo’s lieutenant but came into his own as the demands of the drawn out struggle rose.
The two combined into a formidable duet that scaled new heights in the fight for freedom. They did not hesitate to the ultimate choice of armed confrontation with the entrenched settler minority in order to dislodge it from power.
Repeated proscriptions of political parties, imprisonment and detention of the leadership, brazen violence meted out to the agitating populace exposed the futility of non-violent confrontation of the entrenched settler minority.
The nationalist movement came to the painful conclusion that to win freedom and sovereignty, the people had to organise their own defence against the colonial state machinery.
Zimbabwe had to reverse the defeat of Nehanda, Kaguvi and others before they could once again come into their own.
One man one vote, majority rule, a people’s constitution and all that go with the trappings of a modern democratic state were only possible after the people had been organised to answer the settler insolence and intransigence with potent armed power. A terrible new beauty was about to be born.
Herbert Chitepo, J Z Moyo and the People’s War
The challenge to chart the new territory of founding a revolutionary army fell on two, on lawyer Herbert Chitepo of Zanu and Jason Ziyaphapha Moyo of Zapu.
In the relative safety of exile in newly independent Zambia and Tanzania, both took it upon themselves to embrace current thinking on national liberation theory and practice.
They rightly deserve the credit of the formation of an armed political cadreship for the defence of a people under colonial bondage.
This army was built on the bedrock of love of the country and its people. Those who were its initial cadres sowed a tradition were the well-being of the individual was subsumed to that of the nation.
The prospect of one’s life was subordinated to that of a country and its people for eternity.
Good schooling, rewarding work, marrying and bringing up own family as well as quest for self-actualisation, including any anticipated fame: all these were to pale in significance and value to the call of patriotic duty.
A great calling that could not reward the self. It inevitably led to maiming, loss of sight or hearing.
Most horribly, it often ended with the brutish claim of that invaluable, once only gift of life. And for the survivors there is the lifelong trauma of war and the consequences of foregone opportunity in a competitive society.
It is no wonder that their invaluable philosophy and praxis of nation building so frightened the enemy that he dedicated all his effort to the personal elimination of both Herbert Chitepo and JZ Moyo among many others of their proud ilk.
Josiah Tongogara, Nikita Mangena and the Samora Machel generation
Zimbabwe’s military genius came into its own under the command of the incomparable Josiah Tongogara of the Zimbabwe African Liberation Army (Zanla) and Nikita Mangena of the Zimbabwe’s African People’s Army (Zipra).
Their military mettle came to the fore courtesy of a new wave of recruits who left the country at the inspiration of the political and military exploits of Samora Machel and his Frelimo of Mozambique.
The armed victory of the people of Mozambique that helped foment a revolution against fascist Portuguese rule was to fire the imagination of youth in the whole of Southern Africa.
All the classrooms of the region starting with those of Soweto burst into open defiance of colonial rule spilling into the streets to demonstrate.
More potently, thousands others melted into the African bush to trek to neighbouring independent countries to seek the much loved gun. Defying the prospect of imminent death they fervently embraced arms with the sole desire to train and go back home to settle the final score with a well-armed and dug-in armed racist oppressor.
Cuito Cunavale and Mavonde battles: racist military invincibility shattered
The armed forces Marxist coup of 1974 removed the forces of Fascist Portugal from the Southern Africa war theatre.
At the same time it triggered heavier military commitment and co-operation by the racist regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa. Armed intervention into the black-ruled states of the region translated into open conventional aggression especially in Angola.
An alarmed West came to the logistic assistance of their increasingly cornered kith and kin. Angola had no option but to call in Cuban help with Russian weaponry to stem the tide of invasion.
The encounter was to culminate in the battle of Cuito Cunavale in 1978 in southern Angola, when South African forces of occupation were soundly defeated by allied Cuban, Angolan, Swapo and ANC forces.
With this rout, the myth of the invincibility of white racist forces in confrontation with black Africans was effectively shattered.
On the eastern front in Zimbabwe, this piece of military history was to be repeated in the 1979 Battle of Mavonde at the border between Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and Mozambique.
As the British supervised truce talks went on at Lancaster House in London, the beleaguered Rhodesian forces decided to mount a last-ditch offensive to break the back of Zanla.
The express aim was to militarily humiliate the guerrilla army and force the black nationalists into abject surrender at the negotiating table.
Alas, they had not reckoned with the cunning Josiah Tongogara and his meticulous battle planning. The Zanla High Command had chosen a strategic stronghold in the mountainous border region as their staging base for a final onslaught on the racist edifice of Rhodesia.
Taking a leaf from the Viet Cong book, they proceeded to build an elaborate defence structure based on intricate tunnels. They then deployed their best firepower cocksure that the day of reckoning would surely come.
Sure enough, November 1978 saw attacking Rhodesians hurl full force into what would turn out to be the mother of all battles. But their luck of yesteryear when they would use superior arms to wipe out hordes of spear wielding Africans had finally met its match.
Their ground assault with heavy guns ran into tenacious resistance of military riposte. They then roped aerial bombardment. But all to no avail as volleys of anti-aircraft bullets sowed sure death on any pilots who would dare to approach the Mavonde military complex.
The time was up for racist Rhodesia. Zanla carried the day. General Peter Walls, the crest-fallen commander of the Rhodesian Army had to pack his bags and fly to London for ignominious face to face talks with Josiah Tongogara and his Zipra counterparts.
The chastened British military did not lose time to confer their formidable foe with the status of a full general notwithstanding the fact that he had never gone through the paces of the famed Sandhurst military training. With that came the honour of leading the discussion of the all-important military aspects of the ensuing ceasefire.
It is worth noting that Rhodesia disappeared from the map of history without ever having issued a military communiqué of the final outcome of the Battle of Mavonde or "Monte Casino" as they had christened it.
The Battle of Mavonde victory and history
The Zanla victory at Mavonde sealed the fate of the Lancaster House peace talks and led directly to the independence of Zimbabwe.
Britain was forced to finally assume control of its wayward Rhodesian kith and kin. It now had to do its best to pull any chestnuts it could out of the colonial bonfire they had recklessly lighted for themselves through arrogance of misguided intransigence.
But it had a more stunning if numbing effect on apartheid South Africa and its military industrial complex.
The ferocity and tenacity of the Zanla defenses at Mavonde had finally sounded a death knell to wafted tales of the inane military superiority of the white men in the region.
And in this instance, the Zanla victory was totally homegrown. At the battle of Mavonde, there had been absolutely no involvement of Cuban internationalist forces or any other outsiders in the fateful encounter.
The faith of apartheid politicians in the invincibility of white generals had gone up in military smoke.
The watchword was that it would be folly for white South Africa to allow military confrontation to take its unfettered course. Eschewing the defiant extremism of Rhodesia’s Ian smith, it became more prudent to bargain existing military superiority into political concessions.
After all, memories of the 1974 demise of fascist Portugal were still fresh. The military and political victory of Samora Machel had spawned a new revolutionary dynamism in the sub-region. The respite of Zimbabwe’s negotiated independence had to be leveraged for sub-regional accommodation with the potent force of African nationalism. The political grounds of the peaceful surrender of apartheid were thus sown.
Zimbabwe and wounded British imperial pride
Starting with the so termed Kaffir Wars against the Xhosa, on to the Nguni Wars in Zululand, then the Shona-Ndebele Wars, and indeed the Anglo-Boer War, the rampaging British imperial marauders had tasted occasional battlefield losses but never lost a war in this sub-region and in sub-Saharan Africa.
The lasting effect of the victory at Mavonde was slow to be fully absorbed by those of the English who still harbour imperial nostalgia of the British Raj. That explains why London–Harare bilateral relations are apt to be so easily sullied. Military defeat at the hands of Africa is a painful new lesson to permanently scribe into the history of a bygone but once proud empire.
Independent Zimbabwe and its contribution to Africa and beyond
National reconciliation and nation building
The new Republic of Zimbabwe pleasantly stunned the white former foes by announcing a policy of national reconciliation as opposed to the justifiable retribution that would have merited their genocidal excesses during the national liberation war.
Notwithstanding its absolute parliamentary majority, a Government was formed by Zanu-PF out of all national stakeholders including the white losers.
The new Government went on to perform the miracle of minting a new unified army out of the three military factions who had so bitterly fought each other.
The Zimbabwe model of national reconciliation was to be avidly embraced by the United Nations in its invigorated role of conflict resolution and nation building.
Conscious of the Shona and Ndebele as the population pillars of modern Zimbabwe, the two national leaders, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe tirelessly worked for a new national cohesion. The Unity Accord of 1987 brought in a new dimension to the politics of national accommodation.
Independence also saw migrant workers from all sub-regional neighbours being granted citizenship. This still has to be emulated elsewhere in the Sadc region.
Zimbabwe has also benefited from the domestication of faith based institutions. Much as metropolitan Europe and America have tried to abuse the Christian church for neo-colonial ends, the faith-based institutions have tended to evince patriotism. This has come in handy to assist cohesive national political discourse.
Zimbabwe used the opportunities of independence to make extraordinary advances in education that has seen it top all sub-Saharan Africa.
Only Tunisia is ahead on the continent. The massive educational drive has proved a boon in many ways that may not have been anticipated.
When the HIV and Aids pandemic struck, the country could still find itself with a rich human resource pool that withstood this national calamity.
And when the mean West opportunistically imposed illegal sanctions to pauperise the nation, Zimbabweans skipped into the Diaspora where their high quality skills and dependable work ethic found ready demand.
Their remittances would provide a lifeline of sorts to those who remained in the beleaguered economy at home. Now with internal stability returning and more promising economic prospects, the ingrained patriotism shall seem a return of all that treasure of varied skills and global exposure.
Pan-Africanism and regional solidarity
True to the tradition of anti-colonial Frontline States, the new state lost no time in shouldering its share of sub-regional responsibilities. Zimbabwe’s foreign policy and military engagements became premised upon the need to stem the northward counter push of apartheid as it preyed upon a war weakened Mozambique.
Soon after internal peace was assured, the Zimbabwe military was deployed in Mozambique to fend off apartheid sponsored Renamo, which was on the verge of toppling the Frelimo-led government.
With relative stability achieved in Mozambique, Zimbabwe’s diplomacy became the bastion of the fight against apartheid colonialism that would lead to Namibia’s independence.
It went on to stand full-square in the struggle against apartheid until the freedom of Nelson Mandela and the peaceful demise of apartheid.
As South Africa was still consolidating its peace and democracy, Zimbabwe allied itself even more closely with Angola to thwart the irredentist ambitions of Unita, until the latter was finally defeated.
Driven by a desire for a peaceful sub-region that would provide an environment conducive to economic development, Zimbabwe together with Angola and Namibia led a military push to arrest Rwandan-Ugandan territorial expansionism in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The British riposte and illegal economic sanctions
This military action was to open a fresh wound in the toxic relations with imperial-minded Britain and other Anglophonia. All of them including Bill Clinton’s Washington would have wanted to profit from the dismemberment of this important country at the heart of Africa.
They also would have opened a rear front for the express purpose of the destabilisation of the emerging Southern African bloc that was prone to be assertive in dealing with Europe and the West.
After Zimbabwe’s successful foray into Congo-Kinshasa, London had a new reason to be fervently anti-Zimbabwe and to seek to bring President Mugabe and his Government to heel.
Labourite London wasted no time in adopting the same strategy that imperial Portugal had used to weaken the Shona and their Rozvi Kingdom after their humiliation in the 17th century.
Bin Laden’s 2001 attack of New York World Trade Centre would turn out to be the perfect excuse for vindictive policy of regime change under the umbrella of Pax America.
Harare was now in the gun sights of the ambitious builders of a new empire. But the painful aftermath of military adventurism in Iraq ended up checking the neo-imperial pretensions of Tony Blair and George W Bush.
In the meantime, landlocked Zimbabwe has had to be severed from all economic links to the outside world even to the extent of ill-fated attempts to invoke United Nations Sanctions. With China and Russia wielding veto power that goal proved impossible.
But even then, of immediate use was the riot act of the West-dominated economic order of the Bretton Woods system read out on Zimbabwe. Misery wrought upon the populace through financial strangulation and opportunistic divestment by traditional economic co-operating partners became the basis of a push at orchestrated regime change.
Surviving illegal sanctions: triumph through unity
For a decade, Zimbabwe has laboured under a very onerous sanctions regime that would have felled any third world country of lesser resolve.
Yet the people of Zimbabwe remained unflinching and their spirit refused to be bowed down. Instead, it led them to be more soul searching until a new found internal political cohesion was found with the help of regional solidarity.
Admittedly the country’s cohesiveness has been severely tested. The label of pariah state and instability became the badge of a contrived, externally driven dishonour.
For the record, the internal political debate at times took a more vigorous twist.
Yet to the relief of all Zimbabweans of goodwill it ended up shunning the temptation of fawning to foreign interests, let alone the cardinal sins of treachery or treason.
Thus when our fellow African brethren entered into the fray as peace-brokers, they were positively surprised to find themselves working on fertile fields of ready political compromise for the good of the nation
And that national discourse, aided by the effort of regional neighbours and the goodwill of Africa as well as the sympathy of progressive humanity carried the day.
The beautiful tale is that all Africans ended rejoicing in the signing of the Global Political Agreement by President Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Professor Arthur Mutambara under the contented gaze of President Mbeki of South Africa and other regional leaders.
A genuine national middle class is the road to national prosperity
The sources of the Zimbabwe tradition have clearly shown that the four centuries of Zimbabwe-Europe interaction have mainly served to sap the country of its ability to chart an independent and prosperous course in global affairs.
Wars and economic sanctions have stunted the development of a national middle class. Colonial occupation wanted to make sure that Zimbabwe, and indeed Africa would never follow this normal route of national evolution.
With the successful recovery of our land and its resources, Zimbabweans are once again poised to follow the well-trodden path of nation building that will lead to prosperity.
The history of national genius is about to write yet another more glorious chapter in the tradition of great granite citadels at Great Zimbabwe and elsewhere. The heroes of the past can once again smile in the gaze of the departed.
The only noble reason to write a new constitution is to create a socio-political environment that achieves this great end of national social progress to the glory of the nation for all generations to come.
Any other argumentation is the height of frivolity and should be dismissed with the contempt it deserves. The train that is Zimbabwe which had been derailed for a good four centuries is now firmly back on its proper tracks.
ENDS
Labels: HISTORY, INDEPENDENCE
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