By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE process which the President of Zimbabwe hinted at on November 30 2012 was documented to some extent by Bertram Hutchinson in his article in volume 26 number 2 (April 1957) of Africa Journal.
The article demonstrated that:
l African leaders first had to separate the real purposes of settler and missionary teaching from the stated purposes.
l African leaders also had objectively to separate and weigh the real advantages of the package of colonial and missionary education from its risks for African society as a whole.
l African leaders were distinguished by their insistence on reading the real world, reading real situations, instead of relying only on the literal reading of written texts.
The task of the intelligent African leader in such a situation then was to take the skills which colonial and missionary education offered and attach them to his own value system while rejecting the white value system sold with the same skills.
This task, this struggle, remains to this day.
A typical example is the potential of indigenous language once it is reduced to writing in terms of the alphabet. According to Hutchinson:
“As the real purpose of the missionary became clear, many chiefs recognised that (the missionary’s) political advantages (for the chief) were more than counterbalanced by his subversive influence upon the Bantu community. Opposition to Christian teaching became widespread… Bantu men enjoyed and were accustomed to argument and discussion. Instead of finding human material readily receptive to his teaching, the missionary … found himself obliged to defend his faith against the reasoned arguments which his Bantu listeners (at their own bases) brought against it.”
Therefore positionality reinforces the mediating function of the dariro. Hutchinson found that the format of missionary contact with Africans was different inside the newly founded mission stations and classrooms from what it was outside in autonomous African communities.
This point is critical because it confirms that much of what is called education in formal schools is more etiquette and socialisation.
Where African leaders were in charge and the African relational approach prevailed, the missionary or teacher was compelled to join the African dariro and become a discussant through darirologue or darelogue rather than monologue or dialogue.
“Outside the mission stations preaching was very often carried on in the form of a discussion.”
Hutchinson then cited the words of a Wesleyan missionary who said the Africans “disputed every inch of ground with us; they were willing to go into inquiry, but we found them very different in that respect from the (Khoi Khoi and Khoi San) in the Colony, who always receive with implicit credit what is stated to them by their teachers. The Caffres (vanhu) exhibited considerable powers of mind, and were not willing to receive any dogma until it was proved to their satisfaction.”
It is difficult to lead without original ground on which to stand and from which to lead.
The Western regime change approach is to change ground rules and for imperialism to appoint and install itself as the permanent mediating force mediating on its own behalf.
As Henry Ford once wrote in his paper the Dearborn Independent:
“The method is one of disintegration. Break up the (whole) people into (multiple) parties and sects (and declare them to be constitutional). Sow abroad the most promising and utopian ideas and you will do two things: You will always find a group to cling to each idea you throw out; and you will always find this partisanship dividing and estranging the various groups… Not one idea but a mass of ideas are to be thrown out (simultaneously into the crowd), and there is to be no unity among them. The result of this will be vast disunity, vast unrest — and that is the result aimed for.”
Ford was warning against the fanatical ideas and methods of terror which eventually led to the Hitler wars.
In the late 1990s, as the 1960s, imperialism divided African leaders between those who accepted being led by the G8 and those who were disliked by the G8, especially by Britain and the US.
Those who accepted being led by the G8 were labelled “new African leaders” and offered the leadership of the so-called New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) into which Britain and the US inserted a neo-colonial provision called the ‘African Peer Review Mechanism’ in which Britain and the US invited all donors to impose themselves as ‘peers’ entitled to inspect all aspects of African ‘governance’.
Throughout the period 2000 to 2004, there were concerted moves to turn the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) into an anti-Zimbabwe right-of-inspection charter.
Dividing African leaders in the 1990s between ‘new African leaders’ and so-called dictators and despots was similar to what imperialism had done in the 1960s, when it sought to divide African leaders then between the so-called Casablanca Group (radicals) and Monrovia Group (collaborators and liberals).
What is striking from the perspective of kuparura, kushaura and kutaura is the truth of African leadership philosophy:
Some of the so-called ‘new African leaders’ are the ones who betrayed Libya and opened Security Council doors for NATO to invade and occupy Libya in 2011.
Some of the ‘new African leaders’ betrayed former Liberian President Charles Taylor and handed him over to Europe for kangaroo trials at the so-called International Criminal Court. Then they collaborated with the US and Europe to install Madame Ellen Sirleaf Johnson as President of Liberia.
The installation of this former executive of the World Bank and New York’s Citibank was sold to Africa as a new dispensation, as the dawn of democracy and human rights in West Africa, until the Ebola catastrophe struck and exposed Sirleaf Johnson’s bankruptcy.
In the context of terror and chaos in Libya; war and terror in Central African Republic and Mali; Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea; and terror and confusion in Nigeria — no one seems to remember or care any more about the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) or the African Peer Review Mechanism or the new African leaders.
This is because neither NEPAD nor the APRM originated from the African dariro.
The cost of the 1990s divisions are clear when one looks at Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Libya, Mali, Central African Republic and Nigeria.
The costs of the 1960s divisions were staggering.
The biggest potential rear-base for the Pan-African revolution, the Congo, was lost to imperialism together with its leader Patrice Lumumba.
The formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 was watered down to a weak comprise because white settlers and imperialists influenced the Monrovia Group to be suspicious of the Casablanca Group.
One of the lies perpetrated against Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah was that he wanted to become emperor of a United Africa.
This provoked petty jealousies and suspicions against him.
It weakened the OAU. Similar divisions and anti-African models of leadership continue to hobble the OAU’s successor, the African Union, to this day.