Jenni Williams please get off your moral high ground.
“You took our farms and we kept quite. You went after businesses and we remained silent again. Now you want to go after our religion, that we cannot sit back and remain silent again,” you said Williams.
However, your statement is profound and refreshing in its truthfulness.
All the resistance and noise we are hearing about the National School Pledge is just the West resisting a move that will render them ineffective.
Is it not Richard Dowden of Britain’s think-tank Chatham House who said the last hope they have in subverting and having their way in Zimbabwe is through the schools?
Our children must be taught to hate who they are, according to Dowden.
And anything that teaches them to value themselves as a people, value their history and value their identity must be abhorred.
You hold fast to what your forefather King Leopold II of Belgium taught the first missionaries who paved the way for colonisation and destruction of everything African.
And you are alarmed that the National School Pledge will derail your plans, it will burst plans that have been carefully cultivated over the years.
You brought us your religion which was tailor-made for Africans, designed to cripple Africans.
You want us to see God through your lens, as if we did not have a God before colonisation.
In his letter to colonial missionaries in 1883 King Leopold II instructed:
“The task that is given to fulfill is very delicate and requires much tact.
You will go certainly to evangelise, but your evangelisation must inspire (our) interests.
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.
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 industrial, 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.
To avoid that they get interested in it and make you murderous) competition and dream one day to overthrow you.
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 the heaven’ and, ‘It’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God’.
You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us.”
And the National School Pledge which acknowledges God on our terms is problematic for Williams because King Leopold said:
“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 parent’s teachings. The children have to learn to obey what the missionary recommends, who is the father of their soul.
You must singularly insist on their total submission and obedience, avoid developing the spirit in the schools, teach students to read and not to reason.
Evangelise the niggers so that they stay forever in submission to the white colonialists, so they never revolt against the restraints they are undergoing.”
We have been taught and many have accepted religion is everything that is European and white.
The truth of the matter is the so-called Christians against the National School Pledge are charlatans not following the teachings of Christ, but those of Europeans bent on effecting regime change in order to plunder our resources and keep the African down.