Africa Awakening 

By Brigadier-General Morgan Mzilikazi

BRIGADIER-GENERAL Morgan Mzilikazi’s trilogy: Africa Awakening looks at the genesis of African power (with Zimbabwe on the lead), making it clear that the people of the Bible’s Genesis were Africans whose history was hijacked by Europeans. 

We learn that Noah, Abraham, Solomon and Jesus, just to mention a few, were black. 

The overall import of this knowledge about great volume is to empower Africans with their history and that Zimbabwe can take a lead in the spiritual recovery of Africans.

The author indicates that a correct understanding of the people’s identity is the source of real power.

Mzilikazi reveals that the real power of Africans, which was targeted by our erstwhile colonisers, is the power of spirituality. 

According to the writer, the usurpation of our spirituality was achieved through the defilement of our sacred shrines and the systematic murder of our spirit mediums.

They even proceeded to demonise and legislate against the practice of African divination through such laws as the Witchcraft Suppression Act which subsists in Zimbabwe to date.

Volume Three, Time for reckoning; Spirituality and Intelligence, focuses on intellectual liberation and the need to connect spirituality to creativity and innovation. 

The emphasis on technology as God-driven is loud and clear. This resonates with President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s clarion call for upping science and technology to achieve industrialisation and modernisation to realise Vision 2030 targeting an upper middle-income economy for Zimbabwe; thus witnessing Zimbabwe’s leading role in Africa’s reawakening. 

In fact, the whole trilogy is informed by the philosophy of Africa-centred metaphysics.

It is a product of divine revelation. 

It is an important piece of Zimbabwe’s spiritual realignment process which is key to the country’s economic turnaround. 

It clearly foregrounds the metaphysical, which is in fact the major missing dimension in Zimbabwe’s economic recovery discourse. 

This is the fundamental gap which this trilogy contributes to in a profound way.

Perhaps a brief background to the claims of the trilogy may be worth visiting before situating this prophetic trilogy in Zimbabwe’s recovery agenda. 

I will begin by stressing that there is no disputation in global scholarship about the leading role of Africa in world civilisation. 

That civilisation evolved out of an understanding of the cosmos, as well as the valorisation of the metaphysical author of cosmogony is privy to the Africans of the ancient times, something that has escaped the lost sheep of our generation. 

Appreciation of metaphysics created a stable and balanced cosmos. Everything, including technology, was designed to celebrate order in the universe. 

That is what begot the first civilisation. 

Civilisation then meant living in harmony with fellow mankind, with the environment and with the cosmos as a whole. 

It was based on a clear understanding of the interdependence between the departed as well as the organic relationship between man, animal and nature. 

Now, there is a yawning gap between civilisation and technological advancement. 

The metaphysics of hunhu/ubuntu, as enshrined in the living law of Ma’at (Mwari) (as practised in the First Civilization) sank under the weight of capitalism; that unbridled pursuit of profit regardless of any moral price (Jeremiah 6: 13). 

Technotheism and moneytheism combined diabolically to unleash chaos into the world. 

Universal politics is now dictated by the desires of a few who stop at nothing to create a world order where humanity is reduced to a commodity. 

Wars and more wars have become the order of the day, threatening the whole world with extinction. 

Is it not time to reflect; to call reason to account? 

Indeed, this trilogy is now rethinking Africa and indeed Zimbabwe’s position in world civilisation.

Awakening means the author is sensitive to the fact Africa was once a giant which was then dwarfed but needs to recover its spirituality which begets inspiration for invention and innovation; conditions that are key to Zimbabwe’s recovery and its reclamation of its once pole position.

This trilogy traces how Africa, in particular, has lost its metaphysical locus as a result of several foreign-induced imperial interventions culminating in the present intellectual, moral and cultural cacophonies that tear Africans apart. 

The trilogy advises that Africa can restore its glory as the citadel of civilisation by returning to the ‘the way’. 

It is hoped that the whole world would also take a leaf, as it has done before from Africa’s return to ‘the way’. 

The Trilogy contends that the metaphysics of hunhu/ubuntu has this divine role to heal the world of various types of sickness: social, cultural, spiritual, intellectual, psychological and material.

Surely, up to now, humanity spends all their time living movie-style lives while the real world remains hidden from their view, all because of conditioned psyches.  

Below are examples of Western institutions which continue to fracture the African consciousness.

Pillars of global imperialism 

Hegemonic institutions

– Religion

– Education

– Media

– Technology

– Foreign-styled constitutions

– Foreign-styled political ideologies and configurations

– Food

– Sex

– Foreign-styled Music and

– Money

Coercive institutions

– Cartography

– Political manipulations

– War

These are touched in some detail in the trilogy as a reminder of the things that continue to be used by our erstwhile enemies to continue to sacrifice us on the altar of ignorance. 

Africa needs to wake up from this slumber and proceed to reclaim its leading role in civilising the world. 

We should be wary of the fact that people who are in a state of fear and powerlessness switch off and become the sheep they are encouraged to be; thus remaining in thankful subservience to their otherwise cold and mindless aggressors. 

The only way to a true return to ourselves is to pierce this veil of imperialist mind and spiritual manipulation. 

Hence, to control your destiny Africa, remember – man, know thyself!