By Dr Vimbai Gukwe Chivaura

ZUMA is right.
Africa is a thousand years away from spiritual, cultural and intellectual emancipation.
As long as Africans live in Johannesburg, Rhodesville, Grahamstown, Queensdale, Borrowdale, or Warren Park, “We are not living in Africa or thinking like Africans.”
Europe, not Malawi or Zimbabwe, continues to be our reference point for salvation and progress.
This is what Smith inadvertently implied when he said: “There will be no black majority rule in Zimbabwe in a thousand years!”
Zuma’s statement does not apply to South Africa alone, but to Africa as a whole.
Smith’s statement does not apply to Zimbabwe alone, but Africa as a whole.
We are in this ship together.
And this ship is surely sinking.
We either swim together to safety or sink together to our doom.
Zuma’s blurred vision is Africa’s blurred vision.
The mote in Zuma’s eye is the mote in Africa’s vision.
There is no need to point fingers at a single man.
We are all living in glass houses that the white man has constructed for us in Africa today.
These houses are fragile.
We are also unsafe and must stop throwing stones at one man who has had courage to come out in the open and show the hollowness of African spiritual content in us as children of Africa.
We may have got our political independence, but we are not spiritually independent or African. We may have reclaimed our land and its resources back from the white man, but we are not governing them or running them and defending them and protecting them spiritually and culturally as Africans.
We are continuing to govern them as Europeans do in Europe and America and as Rhodesians did in Zimbabwe and as Boers did and are doing in South Africa today.
The difference is that the governance system in South Africa is overtly white.
The continued white governance system in Zimbabwe is covert and subliminally subtle.
Yes, we may be black, but not yet Africans many years after political independence and our impending economic emancipation.
Of course, Africans are black people but to be black is not the same as being African.
Indians are black, but they are not Africans.
Maoris are black, but they are not Africans.
The indigenous people whose land was taken by whites and called America are black, but they are not Africans.
To be African is not measured by colour but the content of a people’s spirituality, culture and values rooted in the soils of their own land.
We yearn to be white spiritually and culturally.
No amount of reasoning or rationalising can wish this truth away.
The struggle for spiritual and cultural independence has never been taken seriously anywhere in Africa after independence.
African culture and spirituality have been left as matters of individual choice and conscience.
The true religions throughout Africa today are those brought by whites.
African religions and cultures are administered by African governments as mere curios to entertain visitors and tourists.
This explains why Muchongoyo, a war dance, is abused as a welcome dance for visitors.
Its true purpose is that of an integrated dance into the security consciousness in the upbringing of the African child and love for his land and preparedness to die in defence for his land.
But this is never taught in school.
The focus is on it as a mere exciting acrobatic dance which displays amazing flexibility and subtlety of the African body as a savage before the white man came to rescue him from ignorance and darkness.
This explains why the African idea of a saviour is the white man.
The kind of education that Africa is still pursuing today is to teach the African not to master his own environment for his own purpose but to emulate the white man.
This is why the present approach to African education is failing to produce satisfactory results for African spiritual emancipation and cultural survival.
There is a great confusion in Africa on the difference between education and schooling. Education leads to self-knowledge and boosts self-esteem and pride in a people.
Mere imparting of information and skills is not really an education.
One can teach a dog certain skills and an elephant to dance.
But no one can say such a dog or elephant is educated.
Such is the continued thrust in African education in Zimbabwe and Africa today.
The information that Africans are taught about themselves make them to be ashamed of themselves and run away from themselves and look up to the white man as their God and Saviour on Earth.
Jesus in our churches in Africa is white.
We bow down to him as a white man.
A white man died for us and came to deliver us from our sins.
The implication is that if Jesus is white, then God, his father, is white.
A white father begets a white son.
The other implication is that if God is white, then Adam and Eve as the first man and woman that God created after His own image and placed in the Garden of Eden must also be white.
And since they are the mother and father of all humanity, including Africans, then all humanity as descendants of Adam and Eve were white in the beginning.
Africans became black as a result of sin.
To be African is therefore to be cursed.
Africans must run away from being African and become white if they are to be saved.
Why therefore blame Zuma.
Zuma is all of us.
We carry the white man silently in our minds, hearts and souls as Africans.
We are the tortoise.
The white man is our shell.
We all assume that we will perish without the white man as our shell to shelter us from doom.
This is the education we impart to our children.
The toyshops in Africa are full of dolls of white babies for our children to play with and carry on their backs as their children to love and kiss and pamper and embrace and comb their silky hair as angels.
Zuma is not to blame.
All of us are to blame.
As long as our cities in Africa continue to be called Johannesburg, Mablereign, Malborough, Queensdale, Prince Edward, King George, Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, Mount Darwin, Glendale and so forth – Europe continues to be our point of reference and image of Heaven for our spiritual salvation and progress – for a thousand years or more.