WESTERN Europeans consider themselves to be organised into nations and states.
When they come to Africa and other developing countries, they refuse to accept them as kingdoms and nation states.
Instead, they use demeaning descriptive terms such as tribes, ethnic groups, traditional and indigenous peoples.
These terms are deliberately loaded to reduce the status of these societies to lower social strata.
The colonising regime also strives to inculcate a sense of inferiority in the targeted communities.
This is done through education and the media, both print and electronic.
All these are part of the coloniser’s strategy to psychologically place his victims into a lower class, thereby forcing them to accept his assumed superiority.
While Europeans have perfected this strategy, some African elites have used this ‘labelling’ strategy to exclude sections of their societies from power and influence.
In Zimbabwe, and perhaps Africa in general, some population groups have sought to abrogate power to themselves by relegating other groups to lower status through tribal labelling and deliberate marginalisation.
Much of this strategy exploits the limited historical knowledge among local populations.
Some historical texts say the Great Zimbabwe Empire collapsed on the back of succession wars between rival siblings, children of the Mwenemutapa.
Great Zimbabwe was abandoned when none of the contending parties could claim and retain the seat of power at Great Zimbabwe.
Current generations of Zimbabweans must take lessons from our history.
We need to teach the true African history of Zimbabwe and of Africa.
The challenge is to consolidate national unity.
More recent developments in Zimbabwe have seen certain groups using their political and social connections to powerful individuals to marginalise others and to seek to accumulate power and influence at the expense of the generality of the common people.
The history of Zimbabwe is one where the spiritual and human dimensions have been closely intertwined.
Both liberation wars, the First and Second Chimurenga were inspired, authorised and executed under the direction of the great ancestral spirit Murenga Sororenzou, after whom they are named.
A strong bond of unity developed between the people and their fighting units, the freedom fighters.
Recent attempts by agents of Western imperialism to rubbish the liberation history and hijack the revolutionary party ZANU PF, have been thwarted because of the deep-rooted bonds of co-operation between the liberation fighters who now constitute the leadership of the armed forces and the masses of Zimbabwe.
Part of the tactics used to marginalise genuine liberation cadres included tribal labelling meant to sow disunity among citizens originating from different parts of the country.
We cannot afford to destroy the unity that was born out of our protracted common struggle, a struggle in which we refused to allow our diversity of origin to detract from our purpose; to fight and liberate Zimbabwe.
During the liberation struggle it did not matter where you originated; what mattered was that one was committed to fight the common enemy, the white colonisers.
The fighters adopted Chimurenga nom-de guerres (war names) to hide their identities in case of capture by the enemy who was in the habit of harassing the parents left behind.
District of origin or tribal affiliation of an individual did not matter.
They were all comrades in a common struggle.
Pungwes were organised and long hours spent teaching the masses on the justification of the war.
The freedom fighters aimed at putting all the masses on the same political page.
They did not seek to divide, but to unite.
The freedom fighters sought to ensure buy-in into the struggle by local village populations.
Unity of purpose was emphasised.
At the pungwe, the task of providing political education to the masses was officially assigned to the ‘Political Commissar’ but in practice, all the comrades took turns to educate the masses.
Today when politicians mobilise women and youths at rallies (modern version of pungwes), do they give them the ideological teaching that emphasises unity?
The pungwe message must be about principles and practices; matters that affect our common interests and destiny.
The Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology should have been operationalised right from independence.
Our comrades in the armed forces seem to have done this to ensure the young men and women joining the armed forces bought into the liberation ethos.
But the same was not done to the rest of our youth, hence their exploitation by regime-change agents within ZANU PF to champion counter-revolutionary agendas.
For a few pieces of silver, sometimes non-existent assets or a few litres of opaque beer, many youths have been mobilised to support dubious programmes meant to sow disunity and weaken and ultimately destroy the revolutionary party.
Due to lack of caution or experience, some young cadres also dive into issues for which they have little or no understanding.
That is how they are used as cannon fodder.