By Dr Irene Mahamba
THE West knows that you cannot defeat a people as long as they know who they are and they believe in themselves.
Sooner or later they ask who you are and what makes you think you can loot what is theirs.
The West has lost too many military wars and they realise it is best to use soft power to strangle the soul of a people.
With soft power you need not go to war, you just defeat them without the complications and expense of warfare.
In Zimbabwe we defeated the British and their allies militarily, ending a 90-year reign of terror in our land.
However, they have not given up, they have set up many instruments of soft power.
In previous articles, The Patriot has detailed the machinations of people such as George Soros, seeking to control our minds and souls thorough infiltrating institutions of learning, among others.
NGOs from the West have carved out a niche for themselves from which to attack our people so that they lose who they are, unhu hwavo.
The work of these NGOs is to make our people accept that there is nothing to believe about themselves and so allow the West to redefine them. Women and children are their primary targets.
It is not by chance that they focus on women and children, these are critical components of a society.
Women are the custodians of culture, ndivo musimboti of any people.
When women are on track, a community, a society keeps on track.
Women raise children, they ingrain what is correct or what is wrong in the future generations. Women are therefore the foundation and building blocks of a people, now when you attack them, if you destroy womanhood in any society, wapwanya ruzhowa.
Women are the perfect instrument to attack the family, to disintegrate it and therefore destroy the community and the society, if you get them on your side.
A major thrust of their strategy is to make women see males as their primary enemy, as predators, preying on them and their girl child.
They have whipped up women emotions and drove them to hate men blinkering them not to see the ravages and evils wrought by capitalism.
Their strategy is that women should feel that they can never be important as long as males are left standing, that their stature as women grows in proportion to the degree to which they bring down the male.
It is made to look as if as long as there is a single male standing, women can never be worth anything, the males are presented as their anti-thesis.
So much aggression is whipped up against the male, that women are made to feel they have to keep fighting until they ‘stand over’ every male.
In this strategy there is no room for co-existence with the male, there is no room for complementarity with the male.
Women are trained to be suspicious of everything the male does, because he always has a sinister motive, it is underlined, never trust a male, you only do so at your own peril, they are schooled:
If you both work don’t allow him to load it over you after work, share the chores, we both have been working
They are told roora means you are being bought for enslavement, beware, be your own person
If you both work don’t’ allow him to touch your pay, he has to look after you and the children, after all he is the bread winner
What! He just bought you a car, without consulting you to make a choice, what does he think you are, if he wants to buy you a car, he should allow you to choose, iye anochuzirwa nani
Iwe usapfugamire munhu zvakaexpire, ndezvaana mbuya
Don’t trust anyone, usanyeperwe, they all sleep around
Don’t be overwhelmed with his relatives, bring in yours and balance it out
Don’t take second place, anoshamisei, kune maequal rights
And hey, watch out he just might rape you, kushungurudzwa kwepa bonde is against the law
Unomudini rombe iro anokupei, tsvaka varume wakasvinura
It is heart breaking, something so, so, special has been poisoned. These are not the views of our people, they are from the West.
In their crusade for the destruction of our people, these NGO’s are the first line of defence for prostitutes, a scourge which among our people is anathema, which we fight very harshly as a cancer that destroys communities and ultimately the nation.
These Western sponsored NGOs pay their legal fees, afford them legal representation, they have fought that instead of prostitutes accurately being called mahure, pfambi, bvevi, mhombwe, they should be called ‘sex workers’ an attempt to sanitise the act.
There has been a raging debate on the issue of the age of consent.
For us the correct place for sex is in marriage, outside marriage it is adultery.
Why should a girl be granted the right to consent to sex, what are we doing to the soul of the young girls, consenting to sex as who, for what purpose.
Our people, our values teach that as a girl you are raised properly, you look after yourself, you protect yourself, you choose the man you want to ensconce with ‘moyo muti unomera paunoda’ we are taught.
The girl follows all the steps, kusunga mukarati, kupana nduma kwatete (engagement) thus you and the man of your choice officially announce your relationship and intentions to babakadzi, vatete.
In time the girl’s suitor finds a friend of the family to represent him in marriage proceedings to your family, he pays lobola in front of your whole family and he brings key members of his family to this day, primarily his fathers and you are ensconced honourably, there is ululation and celebrations.
Something is underlined, that this is serious business as key members of both families give their endorsement.
Even then, you still remain with your family until your family officially hands you over to the man’s family.
This is not done overnight, there is adequate preparation, there are provisions for you to use when you get to the new family, you also take presents to your new family.
All this time you and the young woman are the celebrant, you are made to feel special by both families and you begin your new life on cloud nine, you are consecrated to go and start a new life, to extend and enrich your new family and you feel proud, you have achieved something.
All this time you are chaste, you have protected your virtue, you have looked after yourself all your life and you bring your husband your greatest wedding present, your chastity, and he does the same.
Chaste until marriage, you both have respected that and something special happens when you become man and wife, it is cause for true celebrations. These are the ways of our people.
Ways we are now forced to view as archaic.
What a far cry from the sordid views from the West.
Why would a man who has married you so honourably ‘rape ‘ you.
This is from another script. Anyone married so honourably has so much recourse from the family set up to attend to any problems without altercations harmful to the special marital ensconcement.
Why would you treat a man who has faithfully followed all teachings of his people and honoured you so especially, why would you treat him with suspicion as a competitor, as a predator? This is from another script.
The West teaches that there is no need for any controls, you meet, the man is attracted by the shape of your body, and you like his money or car, and you jump into bed.
Later you call it marriage, on what basis?
The West tells you there is no need for abstinence until marriage, chokumirira hapana, tadana tadana, but then there is so much hypocrisy, lust is not love and you cannot build anything enduring on lust.
The hypocrisy of these Western sponsored NGOs never ceases to amaze.
Once I was in an HIV prevention workshop focusing on the girl child.
I was representing the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education.
Western sponsored NGOs also attended the workshop.
The Ministry position was that we should teach the young girls abstinence as a critical way to protect them.
A woman representing one of the NGOs who later became an MDC MP fought us very harshly that we should not insist the girl child should abstain until marriage, she chided us that we were overrating marriage, it was not so special,
‘What if she never marries, are you saying she must never have sex. l found this rather crass but we stood our ground. Surprisingly this same woman just a few years down the line was comfortable becoming a second wife, after trashing marriage so viciously.
But we know where this is coming from, that after a certain age a girl is free to say I am entitled to sex, with or without marriage. What does this mean? These are not the ways of our people.
Our people teach us to desist from lust, it is something that is condemned in the strongest terms, as a cancer that will eat into a community, a society until it disintegrates.
The West itself has nothing to show for this belief in lust, people marry four, five times, sleeping around is rampant, there is no morality to talk of, almost every one comes from a broken family, this is the ‘model’ the West wants to recreate in this land.
Tina Turner sings: What’s love got to do with it.
Yes in the West love has nothing to do with it. It is all transactional, based on capitalist relations of production, it is based on capitalist production, it is all consumerist, primarily sensual, it is all materialist but then love is spiritual and when it is reduced to such, the laws that apply do not work.
In the West it has nothing to do with the intrinsic worth of the other person. It is the calculator that matters.
But the truth cannot be hidden, each person who feels that they are not valued for their intrinsic worthiness is not happy, deep inside is not at peace, for this reason relationships based on materialist considerations cannot work.
Chitsvukutsvuku kana chitematema, is not what matters in the selection of a spouse among our people.
It is the character, tsika dzemunhu, hence ‘ndinoda kuti uve muroora wamai vangu,’ choice by character is the cardinal and principle of enduring relationships.
A friend confessed to me once, that he got married to a ‘trophy wife’ and now he was going insane because there is nothing between them, the solution he has decided on is to keep her credit card loaded so that she shops until she drops, that way she leaves him alone, and he consoles himself by drinking the most expensive beer.
The only thing that keeps him going is his three-year-old daughter.
He was planning to build a mansion facing the Mazvikadei Dam. ln my heart I asked him ‘to share it with whom?’ children grow up and find their own way.
The specialness of a person is determined by what is inside them not what is outside and a family will always stand by someone special.
Whenever things go wrong, the solution should be sought from our culture, from the ways of our people and not from the ways of foreigners.
The answers are there in our culture.
The prescriptions of the Western NGOs are snaking their way into our way of life, causing dangerous disruptions, women dissipate their strength fighting every male in sight and in marriage there is no peace.
No strong families arise from this, they break, the children suffer, the males are constantly harassed and derailed, the family fabric is weakened, the society is disturbed.
There is no time for young men and women to grow up to be pillars of society.
Embroiled in perennial fights with each other, power struggles, sexuality brawls and debauchery, broken families, broken children, the society is ripe for implosion.
The carpet is being pulled from under the feet of each gifted Zimbabwean girl, who can achieve so much for the community, for the family and for the society.
When the strengths of the male and females are positively combined, it is a powerhouse, an incredible one, the West knows this, thus their urgent intervention in our way of life so as to diffuse this potential, let it waste away and the nation is poorer.
We have a special heritage as Zimbabweans, we are a people with everything to be proud of, a way of life which has protected us from predators for centuries.
People whose force is depleted through immoral debauchery cannot protect themselves, they do not have a leg to stand on, their will always is swayed by what can satisfy their lusts.
The land of Nehanda and Chaminuka was never like this, the land of Munhumutapa was safely ensconced with Musikavanhu and without moral rectitude no-one can come before His presence.