IT’s good to be back dear patriots.
Like 2016, 2017 is our year.
A year of no lamentations and apologies; a year we continue to celebrate being Zimbabwean and our Africanness.
The backlash we received after our last issue on Christmas was not just interesting, but alarming to say the least.
Some said we denigrated the birth of Christ, if not Christ himself.
Others argued Christmas was indeed a Holy day, while others labelled us heathens.
But it’s not unusual.
We are used to it because the tragedy we face is, there are many people who have been brainwashed to the extent of forgetting who they are.
And there are a combination of factors, the major being Christianity.
That Christianity played a leading role in colonisation is not a secret.
The letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to the first missionaries in Africa in the Belgian Congo in 1883 is quite revealing.
Part of it reads:
“Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already.
They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don’t know.
They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie and to insult is bad.
Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already.
Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world.
For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty in their underground.
Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like: ‘Happier are the poor because they will inherit heaven’, and: ‘It’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God’.
Your action will be directed essentially to the younger ones, for they won’t revolt when the recommendation of the priest is contradictory to their parents’ teachings.”
Apparently this speech came to light in 1935 after one Moukouani Muikwani from Congo bought a second-hand Bible from a Belgian priest who forgot it (the letter) in the Bible.
It is such information that our former colonisers do not want black people to know because their deceit would be exposed.
Today, many blacks, and Zimbabweans in particular, have abandoned their indigenous ways.
They dismiss their culture, values and norms as archaic.
Some have completely forgotten about their ancestors.
They have forgotten who they are.
Ndezvevadzimu, ndezvemashavi, they say!
And no doubt there are some cunning people in our society using the same colonising tool (Bible) to hoodwink fellow brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers?
In this era of social media, the most interesting are those who upload their so-called prophets’ and prophetesses’ portraits as profile pictures.
It is the status of the people who do this that baffles the mind.
‘Ndiri mwana wemuporofita handidi naye’, ‘My man of God’ ‘Papa munodadisa’, ‘Amai vangu ndimi mega’, etc.
The question is, do we really know our fathers, mothers, grandparents and ancestors?
This 2017, we must challenge ourselves to dig deeper into our history as black people in order to understand who we really are.
Only then can we raise a generation that defends our culture as black people; a generation that knows that being black is a blessing and not a punishment from God.