The people of Zimbabwe never stopped fighting for their freedom one way or the other, including taking up arms against colonialism says Cain Mathema in his book, Why the West and its MDC stooges want Zimbabwe’s Defence and Security Forces reformed, that The Patriot is currently serialising.

By Cain Mathema

COLONIALISM and white racism violently opposed the independence of the country right up to the end.
Any form of resistance and struggle against British colonialism and white racism faced extreme violence and savagery that resulted in the carting away to Britain of bodies and body parts of some of those who resisted British rule; their bodies or body parts are in British museums, in British homes, theatres and laboratories for the whole of the British public to see and romanticise about British colonialism and white racism in Zimbabwe, for the British public to “see and accept the good and special qualities of the British people,” for the British people to see and appreciate “the role played by the British in civilising the black savages of Africa.”
Commander Mgandane’s body parts, for example, were carted away to Britain.
But then the colonialists carted away to their countries not only dead bodies and body parts of their slaves, but also live colonial slaves so that the people back home could see how successful the colonialists were out there in the colonies that were full of “savages that needed to be civilised.”
Let us have an example from Claire Prentice (Sunday Times, South Africa, August 3 2014).
Prentice says in part:
“In 1976, the staff of the Musee de l’Homme in Paris dismantled an exhibit which had been on show since 1816 and dispatched it to the storage vaults.
“The macabre display, which consisted of the cast of a woman’s body, her skeleton, pickled brain and genitalia, was all that remained of Saartjie Baartman, better known as the Hottentot Venus, a black woman whose ‘enormous’ hips, ‘oversized buttocks’ and enlarged labial had thrilled and scandalised Georgian London.
“Baartman had been brought from her home in South Africa to England in 1810 and put on stage wearing a flesh-coloured leotard, African beads and ostrich feathers.
“Scientists studied her voluptuous proportions and theorised about the voracious sexual appetites of ‘savages’, while the public paid a shilling to ogle and hurl obscenities at her.
“Putting Baartman on display was one of the earliest and most famous examples of a phenomenon that became known as the ‘human zoo’.
“Nineteenth century Britain was fascinated by the strange and the exotic.
“Human zoos, which displayed people from far-flung corners of the globe in a ‘natural’ or ‘primitive’ state, became a popular form of mass entertainment.”
Such human zoos were found not only in Europe, but also in the United States of America as well continues Prentice.
Prentice gives an example of the Bontoc Igorrotes.
In 1905, the Bontoc Igorrotes, “were taken from their homes in a remote part of the northern Philippines to the US.
“There they were put on show at Coney Inland and billed as ‘head-hunting, dog-eating savages’.”
One of the reasons why Bontoc Igorrotes were treated this way was that the US government, “which recently colonised the Philippines, hoped to drum up support for its policies by showing the voters that the ‘savages’ were far from ready for self-government.”
Now back to our resistance against the British.
To the utter confusion and disbelief of the colonialists, the people of Zimbabwe never stopped fighting for their freedom one way or the other, including taking up arms against colonialism.
The first national war against British colonialism was waged in 1893.
This war was led by King Lobengula.
Let us remember that when Rhodes’s Pioneer Column invaded Zimbabwe in 1890, the ruler of the country was King Lobengula.
He ruled from the west of the country and east of the Kalahari Desert sharing a common border with King Khama of the Tswana, up to parts of what we refer to as Manicaland today sharing a common border with King Ngungunyana of the Soshangane kingdom; and from the Zambezi River in the north up to the Limpopo River in the south.
King Lobengula succeeded his father, King Mzilikazi, in 1870.
His father became king while in South Africa, even establishing his rule in and around what today are the Mpumalanga, Gauteng and North West provinces of South Africa.
King Mzilikazi established his rule in Zimbabwe along a line east of King Khama’s kingdom, northwards west of today’s Hwange National Park up to the Zambezi River, down south up to the Limpopo River, eastwards up to Mutare and northeastwards up to Muzarabane, and had his headquarters in and around what today we call the City of Bulawayo, the City of Kings.
When King Mzilikazi first arrived in this country, the country did not have one polity or one leader in the geographic area we have just described above, he found independent Shona, Khalanga, Nambya, Tonga, Suthu, Tswana, San and Venda polities or chiefdoms that accepted his rule; and parts of Manicaland and Mashonaland East then were parts of the Gaza polity founded by Soshangane which stretched from Dela Goa Bay up to the Zambezi River.
King Mzilikazi created a nation that eventually became known as the Ndebele out of the peoples that he came into contact with from Zululand up to here, he himself never called his people ‘Ndebele’, to him they were ‘aMahlabezulu’ or ‘uMthwakazi’.
The core of Mzilikazi’s nation were the Ngunis of Zulu stock like himself, with, of course, the Khumalo clan, his own clan, being the royal clan, right in the centre of the Nguni core.
Let us also remember that all our tribes came into being in a similar way, with one group or the other incorporating into its ranks those or some of those it came into contact with, or itself being incorporated by one group or the other all the way from Egypt, east Africa, west Africa and central Africa; this is why those we call the Shona today even created a kingdom and a culture across the Limpopo with Mapungubwe in what is South Africa today as its capital at one time.
It is the Mapungubwe polity and culture that eventually enabled us to build the beautiful and majestic Great Zimbabwe and Khami City near Bulawayo.
The San gave us the ever vivid and active fine art (or was it writing?) that has decorated our rocks, have been communicating with us in our rocks, for the past thousands upon thousands of years, long and long before any current European nation or language or culture and art ever came into being; and our Tonga people were the first Bantu people to settle in this country from around 100 AD, long before the Shona, who arrived here around 800 AD.
That is us, that is Zimbabwe for you!

To be continued