WE are in the season of graduation ceremonies.
Our brilliant sons and daughters of the soil are being capped at various institutions of education in the country.
And the country has in the last decade and a half followed an exciting history.
As the nation went through the land reform and resettlement, many detractors foretold its demise and continue to believe so, even as the nation continues to relentlessly pursue policies that indigenise and empower its people.
We hope that these various institutions are churning out graduates that will sooner rather than later put their hands on the plough.
We are not yet out of the woods as the nation continues to grapple with the various challenges induced by the sanctions imposed on the country by Britain and its allies.
Jobs will not be readily available but Government has put in place policies that will empower the innovative and hardworking among us.
Government has created opportunities for those willing to create employment.
I appeal to our graduates to take up and be actively involved in our discourses, to be part of the agenda of shaping our nation to become a force to reckon with.
We are all in the process of rekindling the Zimbabwean spirit, of restoring confidence in ourselves, we want to be ourselves in the family of nations and not apologise for who we are.
Our youth leaving institutions of learning must have a strong sense of purpose and patriotism.
I have highlighted in the past and expressed concern over Zimbabwe’s intellectual space. We are on the threshold of a new struggle, a Chimurenga for intellectual space.
I call it the ‘Quad-Chimurenga’ because it follows hot on the heels of the Third Chimurenga.
This new struggle is intensely celebral, calling for the highest level of intellectual endeavour, mastery and excellence in scholarship. Some people will ask, but do we eat words, theories and ideologies?
I agree, but in order to own those resources that bring food to the table, we must have a vision of where we are going and what we need to do to improve our lives. We have to ideologically and intellectually engage the same enemy whom we beat in the battle field.
We have to intellectually engage the same enemy who retreated from our farms and now engages us from the safety of publishing houses, research institutes and cultural centres in various parts of the world.
This adversary is producing copious amounts of reading material constantly lamenting the demise of Rhodesia and the loss of vast tracts of land conveniently forgetting that their own forefathers usurped the same pieces of land from our own ancestors and nobody sympathised with them.
We will always defend it with our sweat and blood and indeed we will take the struggles to a higher realm. We will take the struggles of Chimurenga to new intellectual trajectories and this will ensure that future generations will continue the rich legacy of our struggles from the Changamires of vaRozvi, our Mzilikazis, our Maponderas and our Tongogaras.
It is in this spirit that we must tap the rich resources of Zimbabwean scholarship as it exists today. Zimbabwean scholarship should set the appropriate research agenda, an agenda celebrating our Zimbabweanness, our heritage, cultures and instill the pride in us as a nation.
We should research, document and celebrate our own knowledge systems, others call them ‘indigenous knowledge systems’.
As I have said in the past our scholarship should create new theories and new thinking which builds upon the monumental achievements of our Paulo Frere, our Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral: this is why the nation looks for academic leaders who will create sufficient space for young scholars to lay down the solid foundations and this will constitute a solid bedrock for the Quad-Chimurenga.
Let us not be made to feel bad because we are ‘too educated’.
There are tonnes of think-tanks in the West superintendent by scholars that are shaping the discourse of their nations.