By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

PROFESSIONAL demonisation plays an important role in military aggression, genocide, conquest, illegal regime change, justification of illegal sanctions, racism, violence against women and apartheid.
Professional demonisation means the organised and systematic defamation and scandalisation of a country, people, race, group, person or a leader using trained professionals who hold qualifications which are presumed to give them authority to issue condemnations or judgments against certain groups, peoples or countries without proof or evidence.
The condemnations or judgments are presumed and often accepted as self-evident only because of the supposed ‘professional’ qualifications and ‘authority’ of those issuing them.
The professional demonisation of Africa and Africans by well-trained Catholic authorities was largely responsible for the paradox which still exists to date.
Abraham, Joseph, Jacob, Moses and Jesus himself were all welcomed in Africa (Ancient Egypt) as refugees, as economic migrants running away from drought, hunger and starvation.
Mary and Joseph took the infant Jesus to Egypt in order to save him from being assassinated by agents of Roman imperialism in Palestine.
So, in fact, Joseph, Moses and Jesus were educated in Egypt by Africans. Evidence that ancient Egyptians were as dark as today’s Sudanese is overwhelming.
The paradox is that the image of Africa and Africans in Western Catholic history and religion is bad, not consistent with Africa’s role in the Bible, Africa’s contribution to the scriptures we call the Bible today.
And yet whole books, whole chapters of the Christian Bible today are in fact exact copies of the original Egyptian-African texts.
How then did the Catholic Church develop the worldview which cast Africa and Africans as enemies of Christ for whom the worst forms of pillage and slavery were justified?
In 1452, Pope Nicholas promulgated his papal bull called Dum Diversus, which gave the Portuguese the spiritual and political right to invade, conquer, overcome, subjugate and hold the states of “any Saracens, pagans and other infidels and enemies of Christ whatsoever.”
This was read all over Europe as a licence for the enslavement of Africans, opening up the floodgates of chattel slavery.
But the art or science of demonisation which explains the bad picture of Africa and Africans did not start with Dum Diversus and Pope Nicholas’s call to enslave Africans.
It was started in Europe by the same Catholic Church during the period of the Inquisition in which Catholic professionals tortured and exterminated groups, especially women practising traditional medicine and midwifery.
These were condemned as witches and burned alive.
According to William Monter in European Witchcraft, there were three phases in the witchcraze: the period before 1230, when the Catholic Church and the European State fought against what was called harmful magic in its old traditional form and definition; the period after 1230, in which popes, priests, scholars, lawyers and other so-called specialists were instigated to study so-called witchcraft in order to allege its connection to demonic forces and conspiracies.
“Then under the aegis of the Popes, the simultaneously-founded inquisition against heresy made these possibilities real by earmarking magic acts as heresy. In this manner, the disastrous collective term “witchcraft” was created (coined) from originally scattered (unrelated) features.
It is not surprising therefore that even in the 19th Century, the label ‘witch-doctor’ was used in Africa to condemn and lump together African healers, herbalists, bone-setters, midwives and spirit mediums.
The second phase is after 1430.
The process of study, theory and strategy was completed, imagining a huge conspiracy against church and empire supposed to be driven by a set of sorcerers and witches allied to devil.
A similar process today is the practice of sending bogus ‘fact-finding missions’ whose reports are rigged to support a pre-determined position.
The third and final stage was publication and propagation of pamphlets and books across Europe, using new media, cheap books and pamphlets coming out of the new printing press.
The counter-revolution against Zimbabwe relies heavily on newly printed scandal sheets not different from white missionary tracts.
In the Catholic tradition, the publications are usually formulated as pastoral Letters.
William Monter refers to the most effective and most destructive of the Medieval Catholic publications, called Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches).
“This oldest and most successful of all handbooks is a horrible and fascinating work. It climaxed a sustained investigation into witchcraft during the 15th Century, when at least a dozen treatises were composed on the subject, most of them by Dominican Inquisitors like Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer. The Malleus distinguished itself from its predecessors by its completeness and its practicality. It advanced slowly (in its argument), disposing of possible objections along its route and with a confident logic.”
The object then, as now, was to purge, to purify, the body of the empire, by smelling out and hammering its enemies.
It turns out that many of the women burned as witches by stakeholders were popular midwives and healers who competed with church-sponsored ‘doctors’. The original experts or professionals employed by the Catholic empire were popes, bishops, priests, scholars and lawyers.
The empire has since added journalists and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to the list.
As already pointed out, imperialism has been consistent since the Holy Roman Empire under the Catholic Church.
Uses of the so-called expert or professional by imperialism
The Anglo-Saxon onslaught on Zimbabwe, like the Medieval Catholic terror against heretics and independent communities, must rely on the creation of specialised orders or single-issue orgnisations and ‘professionals’.
It is no accident that the Anglo-Saxon onslaught on Zimbabwe in the last 15 years has capitalised on multiplying the members and organisations who not only claim to hold a stake in Zimbabwe’s destiny, but also claim the purity of being experts, professionals, specialists and consultants on everything to do with Zimbabwe’s fate.
The combined message of these busybodies as professional ‘stakeholders’ is that:
l Zimbabwe should not have allowed a spontaneous African land reclamation movement to take land from white settlers without the blessing of a blue-print conceived by experts and funded by donors.
l Zimbabwe cannot hold elections without first bringing in experts to design a voters’ roll, forge a roadmap and define its media policy.
l The status of Zimbabwe’s diamonds on the global market should not be defined by Zimbabwe, its allies and the normal Kimberley Process. Rather it must be defined by foreign-sponsored ‘diamond rights experts’.
lZimbabwe should not hold elections before turning its defence forces into ‘professionals’ who, like consultants and mere technicians, should not be concerned about the close link between security, patriotism and the political direction of the nation and its leadership. This is to say, Zimbabwe should reform its defence forces into a mercenary outfit which will obey anyone who promises the most money and best benefits.
Ivan Illich is an Austrian-born priest, scientist and historian.
He understands the link between capitalist repression through the use of ‘professionals’ on one hand, and the repression carried out by the Catholic church-empire through the use of similar experts and professions in Medieval times.
For 20 years Zimbabwe has been besieged by the desperate fringes of the panicking priesthood of a dying Anglo-Saxon empire.
But the fight against the imperial crusaders is also about ideas.
Therefore our ability to fashion our own language to explain our experience to ourselves is critical.
The desperate fringes of the dying Anglo-Saxon empire must therefore be exposed.
As Illich said, in the face of such an onslaught, the control of language is a war objective.
“(The) mutual dependence (of the empire’s priesthood) as tutor (on the people as) charge has become resistant to analysis because it has been obscured by corrupted language. Good old words have been made into branding irons that claim wardship for (imported) experts over home, shop, store and the space and ether between them. Language, the most fundamental commons, is thus polluted by twisted strands of jargon, each (shard) under the control of (yet) another profession.”
This foul and alien language is everywhere: diamond rights expert, human rights defender, free and fair election, pro-democracy demonstrators, open society initiatives, democratic process, democratic change, transition to democracy, international best practice, universally accepted benchmarks, key stakeholders, the list is endless.