HomeOld_PostsAbout security sector reforms....church, media roles as tools of colonialism

About security sector reforms….church, media roles as tools of colonialism

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In Zimbabwe the biggest Anglican Cathedral is the only church building whose walls abut the walls of the Parliament building, writes Cain Mathema in his book Why the West and its MDC stooges want Zimbabwe’s Defence and Security Forces reformed that The Patriot is serialising.

WHILE white priests (who were the overall leaders of the churches) preached to black congregations, black priests were never allowed to preach to white congregations and black congregants could not mix with whites.
I was born and bred at Sipepa in Tsholotsho and I attended both Sipepa SDA Primary School and Gwayi Methodist Primary School.
But never did I meet white people worshipping at both schools’ churches.
Only white priests came to Sipepa SDA camp functions to preach with thunder in English to the congregation with an equally thunderous Ndebele priest translator, or may be as schools inspectors.
In any case, the church buildings were not good enough for white priests.
They were hovels of primitive mud bricks, yet the whites had the best cement and stone church buildings far away in Bulawayo or at the church farm local headquarters, like Solusi Mission farm which was given to the SDA church by Rhodes; the occupation of Soluswe area of Chief Mlevu was followed by the eviction of black people from that farm, many families, for instance the Mlevus and some Mathemas, were evicted from that area to the sandy and mosquito-infested Gwayi African Reserve, today’s Tsholotsho District.
What we are saying is that Christianity was introduced in Zimbabwe for one, and only one, purpose – for the colonisation of the country for the Portuguese and British ruling classes and their churches; and the official state church in England has been the Anglican Church while its Portuguese counterpart has been the Roman Catholic Church.
The Anglican Church was founded by King Henry VIII in the 16th Century as a breakaway church from the Roman Catholic Church after the pope then had refused to allow the English king to marry for the sixth or so time!
In Zimbabwe the biggest Anglican Cathedral is the only church building whose walls abut the parliament building.
That is god’s inspiration for you!
It is therefore no wonder the church in Zimbabwe went out of its way to be at the ideological forefront in forcing the colonised to forget their glorious past, to forget themselves.
One more critical element of the Rhodesian state was the news media.
This was not accidental.
Any state has to have a news media that is, at least, on its side, that is, a news media that defends and promotes all the activities of the state.
But then the state is a class instrument; therefore the interests and activities of the state are the interests and activities of the class that owns it.
The state needs a media that fights the media of its class’s enemies.
The state of exploiting classes needs a news media that justifies its brutality on the exploited classes.
The Rhodesian state used both the public (that is, its own) media as well as the private and the non-government organisations news media, and the information produced and transmitted by individuals through letters, word of mouth and books that they wrote and published.
What I am saying here is; there is no independent news media anywhere in the world and there is no neutral news media either.
Therefore, the news media is class-based, period, even if the classes that exploit other classes try their best to portray their news media as neutral and their state news media as ‘public’ news media, meaning that it serves everybody, just like they try to make us believe that the state is a ‘public’ institution serving the interests of the exploited and those of the exploiters!
Right from the start, in his relations with King Lobengula towards colonising the country, Rhodes did his best so that only what he wanted to be heard and read about in Britain about what he was doing in the country left the country.
That is why, when he was lobbying for his company to be granted a Charter, he made sure that King Lobengula’s letter to Queen Victoria took longer than necessary to reach London.
At the time, the High Commissioner of Bechuanaland was Sir Sidney Shippard, whom Africans referred to as the father of lies.
Sir Sidney (whose deputy was John Smith Moffat, son of Robert Moffat and an LMS priest too, and was one of those who lied to King Lobengula when he, John Moffat, negotiated for what became known as the Moffat Treaty) was a friend of Rhodes.
In the frantic days of negotiations and treaties between the king, Rhodes, Rhodes’ representatives and Queen Victoria, King Lobengula sent a letter to the British queen protesting about the queen’s people in Zimbabwe.
The letter was sent through Sir Sidney Shippard.
Sir Sidney, as a friend of Rhodes, “feared that the Queen might be swayed by Lobengula’s pleas (so) he deliberately delayed King Lobengula’s letter to her. Rhodes needed to buy time to put his case for a Charter to the Queen, however fraudulent, and his friend Sir Sidney Shippard obliged once more,” (Gazi, 2004). About the same time, another letter from A.E. Maund (another friend of Rhodes’) pleading for the Charter was sent to Victoria.
Maund’s letter took 47 days to arrive in London, but that of King Lobengula’s, through Shippard, took 100 days to get there, long after Maund’s letter (Gazi, 2004).

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