By Anthony Guchama

INFORMATION and knowledge equal power. 

If you can control information, you can control people. Zimbabwe, just like most African countries, is still under the yoke of library colonialism which is the domination of Africans by Western nations through the use of information power. 

This remains one of the deadliest weapons of neo-colonialism, considering that the majority of libraries in Zimbabwe, be they school, public or research libraries, are all pregnant with Eurocentric collections. 

The books (including e-books) which have been deliberately and strategically placed in academic, school and public libraries to be consumed and internalised by the Zimbabwean young, innocent and talented minds are largely Eurocentric which therefore perpetuates reproduction of epistemological blindness that silences other knowledge systems and ways of creating knowledge. 

As Steve Biko said: “The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” 

This probably explains why university graduates from Zimbabwe are, ironically, defenders and agents of the Western world as years of spending time in the library or researching is equal to years of Europeanising themselves hence they become compliant clients of the Western capitalist system. 

A true African library is one that Africans and others can walk into in order to experience the realities of the African world view. 

American libraries exist to meet the needs of Americans. British libraries exist for the British, while African libraries, because they are both American and British, have neither an African clientele nor services. 

They were not primarily founded to preserve the African oral tradition, but to collect, organise and make available to Africans the racial transcript of the Western tradition. 

If one is to walk through the shelves of the Bulawayo public library today, there is virtually no Ndebele ‘voice’. 

Walk through the shelves of the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) library and — there are no Zimbabwean ideas there! 

I remember, during our university days, when given an assignment which would need contextualisation and since there was only one book authored by a Zimbabwean in our Department, we would therefore read about Canadian and Australian experiences then replace with Zimbabwe. 

If you would ask me about local challenges in relation to my profession, even during my days as a final year student, I would be blank but ask me about American, Australian and British challenges, ini mwana weZimbabwe would know more about Western challenges than local challenges. 

But why! 

It’s because all the books that I consulted in the library as part of my studies came from those countries. 

Therefore, this kind of collection in libraries ensures that students end up ignorant of most of their world, particularly Africa.

If truth be told, some of Africa’s major challenges are usually authored by the very same class of people who are also writing books which we consult. 

Indeed, Kenneth Kaunda, the former President of Zambia, once warned Zambians that they were heading for intellectual bankruptcy because of the poor state of the nation’s bookshops and libraries. 

He called the absence of good books ‘a national tragedy’.

In my village in Chikomba, if you ask about a person’s intelligence, you are likely to get the reply: “He/she has the intelligence of books, but is not intelligent.”  

What this response means is, although the person understands readily what he/she learns in school or university, he/she is found wanting on basic things African or Zimbabwean. 

The education is Eurocentric.

Noam Chomsky explained that Eurocentric information provision is subject to filtering for profits, as well as advancing the hegemony of an elite ideology and protection of corporate interests. 

One can observe that when urbanites excoriate the rural population for voting for a political party which they know will never reverse the gains of the revolution, it is only because of uncontaminated wisdom which the rural population possess; part of which is passed orally versus the Eurocentric brainwash from their urbanites who everyday consume Eurocentric ideas. 

Library and information practitioners should do something about utilising this pure wisdom from the living librarians in the countryside. 

One author explains that the colonisation of the mind presupposes the intervention of external force on six levels: 

• the coloniser’s intervention in the psyche of the subjects – the colonised,

• the intervention affects the mental sphere of the subjects,

• the effects are long-lasting and hard to remove,

• the result is asymmetrical power relations between the parties,

• parties can live aware or unaware of the new acquired relations, and

• parties can participate in the relations voluntarily or involuntarily.

The process may take place through the transmission of mental habits and other social structures over a long period of time. 

Social acts such as education and religion can serve as a crucial means of depositing colonial traits into the minds of victims. 

We all remember when David Coltart was the Minister of Primary and Secondary education in the GNU. 

He tried to fill all school libraries with Eurocentric books, of course with a covert agenda. 

As usual, some urban parents praised Coltart, oblivious of the hidden agenda. 

Some brainwashed librarians also ululated for this unexpected bounty. 

That is the tragedy we face as black people. 

As long as you are not ideologically progressive, Thomas Sankara would say, you are potential traitors, maybe unwittingly. 

I say this because we, as librarians, have this conviction that we are in a ‘helping profession’, a profession that empowers people and society to develop.

What Zimbabweans need to know is that the United States Information Agency (USIA) presents about 1,2 million books and periodicals every year to foreign institutions and individuals. 

It stimulates the export of American books in a variety of ways and fosters the translation of about 400 books a year. This could pass for bibliographic philanthropy if it had not been conclusively demonstrated that the USIA has propaganda as one of its main functions and is one of the most important and sensitive arms of the CIA. 

The US in particular, and the Western world, in general, are using library power as an invisible tool of ideological confrontation, which explains why the Iranians did not discriminate between librarians and militarists. 

There is always an outcry in Zimbabwe whenever books are held at our national borders before they are allowed into the country. 

I think there is no book which should find space in any shelf in Zimbabwe before the State is satisfied that its content is not poisonous to society. 

We should stop being merely grateful to donors and instead direct our scepticism and scrutiny at their activities. 

This is because information resources are useful weapons for the entrenchment and institutionalisation of the Western tradition — nay laboratories for brainwashing Africans.

Vltchek (2015) observed that there is a war, ‘The great humanistic war’, the war over people’s brains and hearts, not over territories. 

It can also be called the ‘Information War’, a ‘detox war’ or a war to bring human beings back to life from their intellectual intoxication, from their slumber or servility. 

A war for a much better world that would put knowledge above diplomas and stamps as well as human warmth and kindness above violence and aggression while upholding the sanctity of human beings’ inalienable rights (hunhu/ubuntu) above profits and money.