THE story that has been doing the rounds during the past week, courtesy of the attention given to it by almost all Western diplomats in Harare, is that of Itai Dzamara who ‘disappeared’ on March 9 2015 and has not been heard from since then!
Although the police are investigating the case and expected to publish the final results of their investigations when they complete them, Western embassies have rushed to make insinuations implying that the Zimbabwean state itself is involved in Dzamara’s disappearance.
Specifically the French ambassador, Laurent Delahousse, had this to say about Dzamara during recent celebrations of French national day: “I do not know that man, all I know is that he was peaceful and fighting with his words to express his ideas.
“Some people took him for that and he has not been found.
“This man has become a symbol, I will not let him down.”
He went on to recount how evil was ‘happening all over the world, with innocent people being killed’ and how the French government had been working tirelessly to prevent such ‘assassinations’.
The overall impression created by Dalhousie’s theatrical performance, reinforced as it was by the solemn presence of Dzamara’s brother, wife and child is that the French government is waging a ‘holy war’ against ‘evil people’ and systems and that it stands on the side of the innocent and the good!
As if not to be outdone on the Dzamara issue, the American Embassy together with those of Canada and the European Union (EU) have gone on to issue their own well-sequenced statements about the Dzamara issue, in the hope of piling up more political pressure against the Government of Zimbabwe.
The West is politically milking the seemingly tragic issue of Dzamara to score political points against Zimbabwe.
Should we take the French seriously because a certain Mr Delahousse says the French are the good guys standing on the same side with the Dzamara family and vowing not to let down Dzamara, whatever that means?
How many other people have gone missing in Zimbabwe in particular and in Africa in general and were the French there standing for them in the same way they are standing for Dzamara today?
Or is it that they know something about Dzamara’s disappearance which we do not know?
Should we trust the whole Western lot because they say they are nice guys who stand for human rights, for democracy, good governance and freedom of expression?
We all know by now that their good words concerning our fate have never been in short supply ever since they set their eyes on Africa in 1884/5 at the Berlin Conference.
When the British invaded Matabeleland in 1893 and ransacked Lobengula’s kingdom, King Lobengula went missing and has never been found.
He remains up to this day a missing person.
Where were the French then, when a whole king was made to disappear by the British who today masquerade as friends of French in order to gang up against the Zimbabwe government?
While we know that the same British murdered Mbuya Nehanda, Sekuru Kaguvi and Paramount Chief Makoni and many others in 1898 we also know that up to his day all these remain missing persons because their graves have never been located!
Where was the self righteous French government then when all these dark deeds were being perpetrated by their British friends?
The same story applies to Dr Edison Sithole who in 1975 disappeared and has never been found ever since.
Again what did the French do to the British settler regime responsible for the disappearance then?
The answer is a resounding no!
Why?
Because the British were only doing what the French were also doing in West and North Africa, killing Africans by the hundreds and thousands in order to colonise Africa and to continue looting its resources indefinitely.
And then there is the Algerian War of independence (1954-1962) during which the French army slaughtered over 1, 5 million Algerians, most of them civilians, while more than 50 000 civilians went missing, never to be seen again!
Up to this day, France has not accounted for all those people who disappeared in a territory it controlled then.
When we go beyond the colonial story there is also the fact that modern France, like Britain, Spain, Portugal etc, is built on the foundation of the blood and sweat of African slaves who between the mid 15th century and the mid 19th century provided the cheap labour on the basis of which Europe industrialised!
The point here is that France became a leading player in the slave trade and captured hundreds of thousands of Africans who subsequently perished while crossing the Atlantic Ocean, packed like sardines in French ships.
The result is that the Atlantic Ocean has the dubious distinction of being the largest water cemetery under the sun and that if it were to be emptied dry, one would find through DNA that most of the skeletons which lie at the bottom of that same ocean belong to blacks from Africa, thanks to the French and their European allies!
The French, like their European counterparts, have never bothered to apologise for slavery; they have never bothered to pay reparations for slavery, a well-documented crime against humanity!
Is it not ironic that Laurent Delahousse has the guts to pose as a good Samaritan of legend while the French as a nation are still steeped in a huge crime against humanity?
At present, the Frenchman, like most of Europeans, has no moral basis to lecture us about human rights and freedoms until they pay reparations for their enslavement of blacks for centuries.
They are, like the Americans, morally bankrupt and not qualified to deliver sermons on anything remotely related to human rights, democracy and good governance, the very things they denied Africa for long, until Africans fought hard and long for the same.