“It is not I who needs forgiveness from God but you who came and stole my land.” – Mbuya Nehanda.

MBUYA NEHANDA’s epic declaration indicts us all today because we refuse to own up to who we are. 

We deny the travesty that the whiteman came and took our land by force of arms. 

We deny that we were criminally wronged, that this travesty we should not take lightly, nor forget. 

Instead, we refuse to tell our children the truth; that the whiteman from England is a thief who came and stole our land as Mbuya Nehanda equivocally and categorically stated. We train our children to be like the whiteman — in manner, dress, language, looks, demeanor and even the heart. 

This is a travesty of unimaginable proportions. 

This is why her heroic avowal is such an indictment on us.

‘It is not I who needs to be forgiven…’

It is not us who need to be ‘forgiven’ for being who we are; for being Africans, for our curly African hair, for our dark chocolate skin, for our very human culture, for our decent culture, for our kind peaceable manner and for our fear of Musikavanhu. 

It is not us who should apologise for being us; not us who should mimic the white armed robber. 

It is us who should despise the white robber’s pretentions at being superior when in fact he is no more than just a robber.

It is not us who need to be forgiven for honouring Musikavanhu by insisting, like Mbuya Nehanda, that this land is ours, eternally God given. 

It is us who, like Nehanda, should honour Musikavanhu by accepting responsibility for the land of Zimbabwe and all it is endowed with.

‘It is not us who need forgiveness from God…’

It is not us who should take spirituality lessons from the whiteman from the West. 

It is him who needs lessons from us who know God and live by His precepts. 

Our God does not countenance murder, theft, adultery, dishonesty, covetousness, but the whiteman has yet to wean himself from these vices which are embedded in his DNA.

The whiteman is not at peace with himself nor the Creator. 

‘Love thy neighbour’ is a precept they preach, but does not exist in their dictionary. 

It in no way affects their operational behaviour. 

Their credo of individualism ordained by capitalism cannot coexist with the precept of ‘Love thy neighbour’. 

It is not possible to be at peace with the next person when you see in them nothing more than an object of exploitation. 

‘Love thy neighbour’ is only a smokescreen to hide the sharp jagged edges of capitalism which are inimical to the very concept of humanity. 

‘Love God’, which they preach, does not exist for them either; for God created each people with their land and their own resources. He created them sovereign, with dominion over this land and their resources on which they are to subsist, but the whiteman does not recognise any boundaries, respects no land as designated for anyone. 

It is not us who should mimic a people who are ruled by greed and lust; it not us who have any spirituality lessons to learn from such.            

‘It is not I who needs forgiveness…’

We should not be forgiven for going about with a begging bowl to those who have plundered and looted our wealth. 

It is the looters and plunderers who need our forgiveness and that of Musikavanhu. 

It is us who, like Mbuya Nehanda, should claim our heritage and own our resources and dictate terms to anyone who wants to do business with us.   

It is a travesty, unconscionable that those of the West who have plundered and looted our resources for centuries should act offended when we develop indigenisation policies. 

That they should be offended by, and take exception to, our indigenisation policies about resources that are not theirs but ours is utterly misplaced.

You do not get offended about what is not yours. 

When you do that, you are actually claiming that what belongs to others is yours, you purport jurisdiction over what belongs to others. 

Would we be willingly taken back to the days of Cecil John Rhodes and his marauding mercenary invaders? 

It is unacceptable! 

It is us who have all the rights to our wealth, no-one else.

Thus, it is not us who should dress ourselves (including our new born) in cast offs from those of the West. 

It is those who came and took our wealth who should be in those shoes. 

How can we dress in their cast offs when they built their economies with wealth looted from us? 

The time for reparations and compensation is long overdue. 

It is correct that it should continue to be so. 

They are the paupers, we are the richest, yet the reverse is true in our lives.

‘It is not I who needs forgiveness…’

It is not us who need forgiveness for ruling ourselves, it is divinely ordained. 

It is the whiteman who needs our forgiveness for seizing power from us by force of arms and forcibly ruling us for 90 years until we drove him out through the barrel of the gun.

It’s not us who need lessons on rulership from the white usurper. We cannot learn anything about rulership from thieves and murderers because there is nothing to learn from such. 

It is the whiteman who needs to learn from us how to co-exist with others on this planet. 

We qualify to teach him lessons on rulership because we never aggressed him. 

We never took anything from him even after we defeated him. We only took what is ours, what we had liberated with our own blood.

It is the whiteman who needs lessons on rulership from us because although he is guilty of genocidal murders against our people, we did not commit genocide against him; he is guilty of war crimes and atrocities but we never visited the same on him.

We are the morally superior force. 

We have no lessons to learn from those who are morally bankrupt and who can never learn to respect others although they are never harmed or wronged in any way, though they are forgiven the unforgivable.

Mbuya Nehanda was correct and Father Richartz was wrong. She would not be baptised into a shameful religion which neither knows nor respects God nor man.