HomeOld_PostsReclaiming our African identity: The key elements

Reclaiming our African identity: The key elements

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HEROES killed in the First Chimurenga were secretly buried.
The same thing happened to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.
The white imperialists feared his burial place would become a physical rallying point for the people of Libya where they would gather to commemorate and invoke his spirit to fight for the restoration of the Libyan State.
Where is King Lobengula’s grave?
Was it the whites who buried him in an unmarked grave so the Ndebele people would not use his burial place as a rallying point in their fight for liberation from white domination?
Decapitation of African heroes by white invaders was a common practice.
Mbuya Charwe, the spirit medium of Nehanda, Sekuru Gumboreshumba, the spirit medium of Kaguvi, Chiefs Mashayamombe, Chingaira and many others reportedly had their heads cut off and sent to England as war trophies.
We understand that Government, through the National Museums and Monuments, is negotiating for the return of these skulls as well as other cultural-religious artefacts stolen and shipped to Europe.
Why has King Mzilikazi’s grave not been properly built up and the place protected?
We know where the grave of Cecil John Rhodes is located – right at our most sacred Mwari Shrine in the Matobo Hills in Matabeleland South.
It is at this shrine that Murenga authorised and ordered the people of Zimbabwe to wage war against the invading forces of the ‘kneeless’ people in both the First and Second Chimurenga.
Readers may want to be reminded that the white colonisers only came to fully appreciate and recognised the enormous spiritual powers of our Mwari/ Musikavanhu over time.
They learnt quite early in the First Chimurenga that the command to rise against the white invaders had come from Musikavanhu, relayed through the great ancestral spirit Murenga, who spoke from the rock or cave at the Njelele Shrine (Matonjeni).
Imperialists proceeded to kill in cold blood Sekuru Soko/Ncube, the custodian at the shrine.
They pursued and murdered all the spirit mediums who they suspected to be spreading the message of Murenga to rise against the invaders.
This is why Mbuya Charwe, the Nehanda spirit medium and Sekuru Gumboreshumba, Kaguvi’s spirit medium, were murdered.
The power to resist foreign domination was clearly understood by whites to reside in the spiritual domain of African people’s existence.
King Leopold of Belgium understood that spiritual power derived from the people’s link to their God through the ancestral spirits.
Hence the deployment of the missionaries who until today are still working relentlessly to destroy African spiritualism, condemning it as demonic.
As a starting point, African governments must strengthen our African cultural-religious and spiritual foundations through promoting hunhu/ubuntu.
We must respect and support our African traditional values, customs, foods, medicines, music and musical instruments as well as other components of our material culture.
Our Constitution partly addresses and provides for this important aspect.
University departments must develop strong focussed research and development programmes aimed at strengthening African indigenous knowledge systems.
Traditional values can and must be promoted through the formal school system and not left to accident.
Schools and colleges of African medicine must be established based on sound scientific research into the wide range of traditional medicines available.
Ways must be found to accommodate and enhance the African ‘intellectual property protection’ systems based on secrecy.
This must be done to gain access to the rich and diverse medicinal materials and knowledge resident in the physical and spiritual dimensions of African society.
Traditional foods that have sustained African health for thousands of years must be thoroughly researched, documented and mainstreamed to sustain lives and generate marketable goods and services.
The same goes for our other material and intangible cultural assets.
African universities must break out of the colonial mode where they are extensions of European and American institutions.
The education curriculum must include compulsory components that speak to us as Africans with a long and illustrious history, a rich and diverse culture and strong traditional governance and conflict resolution strategies.
Our African researchers must dig deep and document our indigenous knowledge systems.
From these, we should be able to glean all that is positive in terms of putting us in a competitive position against other cultures and traditions.
In other words, we Africans should deliberately fight the tendency to accept and passively absorb, without question, foreign cultures and ideas.
We are being made to pay for and consume large amounts of foreign garbage through various media.
Passive consumption of television, film, social and other media content is destroying our identity as a people.
We Africans must fight to retain our identity.
The great spirit Murenga specifically detailed the style and fighting tactics.
Yet up till now, we have no monument to commemorate our great ancestor, Murenga Sororenzou.
The name Chimurenga comes from this Great Ancestor.
So we call on the Government and all progressive forces to mobilise the people to effectively reclaim our identity through strategies outlined below.
We must give our children African names.
African-Americans did it to great effect.
We must give meaningful African names to our towns, suburbs, streets, schools, farms, local rural councils and districts across urban and rural localities.
We must construct and maintain appropriate monuments to our fallen heroes in all our liberation wars as well as those of our founding fathers such as Murenga, Mambiri, Tovera, Nehanda, Kaguvi, Mzilikazi, Lobengula and Mwenemutapa, among others.
That will give Zimbabweans a great sense of history.
These monuments will act as rallying points in times of national stresses and challenges.
Monuments built by our colonisers to their own heroes must be relegated to museums and be relocated away from prominent public places as part of removing visible physical symbols of foreign domination.
Renaming schools is part of that purge to allow our born-free children to grow up in an African environment.
The reform of our school curriculum must be intensified, especially the need to inculcate appropriate social and practical life skills, especially in agriculture and mineral extraction.
We must relegate foreign languages like English to lower levels and raise the status of local languages in recognition of the African majority’s interests.
Let English be a medium of communication; not an instrument of elitism for those lucky to finish formal schooling!
Zimbabwe must ban the slogan ‘Five ‘O’-Levels including English’ and replace it with ‘Five ‘O’-Levels including a local language’ to encourage growth of African self-esteem among school children.
African universities must be re-configured to become primary workshops for researching and finding solutions to African social and economic challenges and not extensions of colonial institutions enjoying an ivory tower status.
The new slogan in universities and schools should be: ‘There are no academic subjects; all subjects are practical, to develop skills to solve challenges of life’!
As Africans, we must reclaim our identity and take charge of our own destiny!
We owe it to our founding fathers and to our future generations!

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