HomeOld_PostsWhy take so long to bring back our bones?

Why take so long to bring back our bones?

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THE heaping of skulls and skeletons of our revered leaders during the First Chimurenga into British museums demonstrates the extend to which our colonisers were determined to alienate us from our cultural past.

This, they hoped, would permanently crush any resistance to colonialism.

However, the imminent return of these bones can be seen as the final stage in the failure of our colonisers to completely subdue our aspirations.

For it was the belief of our colonisers that our leaders, like Mbuya Nehanda, Sekuru Kaguvi, Chief Chinengundu Mashayamombe and Chief Chingaira Makoni, among others, were the custodians of our traditional beliefs.

From these traditional beliefs our ethos to resist outside invaders had its roots.

It is this, among other key pillars of our culture, the colonialists were determined to crush. 

The colonisers were not impressed by the rallying of the colonised  behind their leaders in ceremonies that enhanced their unity. This included their bravery in facing the enemy armed with maxim guns while they only had their spears, bows and arrows.

To the these imperialists, it didn’t matter how callous their means to justify the end was. 

Their slave ownership mentality made them see no harm in treating blacks as if their lives were not worth that much. The disintegration of the collective willpower of the blacks was a priority.

Chopping off the heads of our leaders and taking them as trophies to the the British crown makes a mockery of a people who claimed to be torchbearers of Christianity and civilisation. They had to be destroyed into oblivion, if possible, like they later did to Patrice Lumumba of the then Belgian Congo.

Fear that burial sites of our Chimurenga heroes might be turned into shrines which would remind their followers of their resistance was uppermost in the designs of the imperialists. But then, this is always their modus operandi. For instance, the Libyans, to this day, don’t know where their late leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was buried. The imperialists dumped his body somewhere in a desert. We might as well consider ourselves lucky that the skulls of our heroes and heroines found space in their museums.

Not that these colonialists don’t know how sacred the bodies of the dead are. We have Cecil John Rhodes, the coloniser-in-chief of our beloved country. They had to show him all the respect even in his death at the expense of the blacks they lowly regarded. The British colonisers knew our holiest national shrine was at the acropolis of Njelele, where we gathered for rain making ceremonies and worship.

It was therefore the height of damaging insolence by the colonialists to desecrate this important shrine by planting Rhodes’ grave there.

It would give the false impression that blacks had been converted to worshipping Rhodes if they continued gathering there for their ceremonies. 

That’s what they wanted. The ultimate return of our leaders’ skeletons and skulls is ample evidence their effort to disunite us and have us forget our heritage has failed dismally. Let alone the unity we showed in defeating the imperialists in the Second Chimurenga, despite the superiority of their arms.

Not that the British were alone in their finding pleasure in desecrating the skeletons of Africans by scattering them in their museums. Other European powers were also like-minded.

The Germans, whose hands are still dripping with the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews are reported to have perished, were no exceptions.

Some German scientists are reported to have collected skulls and skeletons of thousands of blacks, and placed them in their museums for purposes of study and exhibition. Although the repatriation of the remains of our First Chimurenga leaders appears to be imminent, we will never forgive the British for this heinous crime for at least two reasons.

Why did they do it in the first place?

Secondly, why have they taken so long to bring back the bones of of our revered leaders?

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