WE might be tempted to blame characters like Cecil John Rhodes or Ian Douglas Smith etc for the colonial ills subjected to our country and yet in reality, all the blame must be laid squarely at the door of Britain.
From the days of slavery, the condescending attitude of the British and other Europeans towards blacks has never changed.
It doesn’t matter from which part of Africa.
In our case, when Rhodes brazenly cheated King Lobengula into signing the Rudd Concession which purported to give the British unlimited authority over both the Shona and Ndebele, her Majesty Queen Victoria behaved like a shrew.
But what else could be expected from a Barbarian descendant!
King Lobengula even sent some emissaries to plead with the queen.
He had been cheated and he wanted the so-called agreement to be shredded.
Instead, the queen gave it her blessing and gave Rhodes a Charter that turned out to be the precursor to all the colonial subjugation we endured.
Even though the Rudd Concession was between Rhodes’ representative and King Lobengula, the queen pretended to be blind to the fact that Shonas were not under the jurisdiction of Ndebeles.
Through the notorious Charter, Rhodes used the British South Africa Company (BSAC) to rule over both Ndebeles and Shonas.
What this meant was the naked exploitation of our minerals, looting of our cattle and the arbitrary displacement from our land.
The slave mentality had no respect whatsoever for the black indigenes.
The subjugation born out of Queen Victoria’s Charter was not only physical, but also mental.
And this was expertly done through Christianity and education.
The generic term used by the queen, herself an offshoot of the Barbarians, was ‘civilisation’.
For people who already had architectural skills like putting up a structure the size of Great Zimbabwe, you would expect the highest level of such ‘civilisation’.
But no, this was not to be.
The Christian religion meant forsaking African religious beliefs as something for the ‘uncivilised’.
Christianity was meant to soften us so that we would willingly submit to the whims of our coloniser who would use police and stiff laws to enforce compliance.
Education, on the other hand, was meant to make us internalise the colonial culture and despise our own, including our own language.
When we could not stomach this, our First Chimurenga was crushed because of the superiority of their weaponry.
Even the Shona, who were initially thought to be cowardly and compliant, were also active participants in the First Chimurenga.
Successive British governments, who were benefitting immensely from the country’s natural resources, encouraged more settlers to occupy the country.
Meanwhile, the colonialists, by virtue of Queen Victoria’s Charter, entrenched their privileged occupation through institutionalised racial segregation.
But this could only go on up to a point.
And when this point was reached, there was greater determination this time to turn the tables on the descendants of Queen Victoria.
We were defeated in the First Chimurenga because we did not have guns, in the Second Chimurenga, we met fire with fire.
The gun was no longer an exclusive privilege for the colonisers.
Elsewhere in this edition, there is an account by a Rhodesian intelligence officer of how armed ZANLA forces wreaked havoc on Ian Smith’s army.
Although it’s something which still hurts, the British and their kith and kin were defeated on the battleground by their former ‘slaves’ only to be saved by the Lancaster House Conference.
But we are still not safe, for the British and their Western allies are keen to effect regime change as revenge.