By Farayi Mungoshi

AS time moves and the world turns, people change, dynasties rise and fall while kingdoms come and go.
What was once a great city now lies in ruins and almost forgotten, where a great river once flowed freely to the ocean, the land now lies dry and sandy.
Great civilisations of ancient past are now but just a figment of most peoples’ imagination.
Ancient Egypt, its Pharaohs and many gods and religious practices are now more myth than fact and we now struggle to recap the true events of what transpired when Egypt once stood tall and mighty.
Some do not even recall anymore how the pyramids were built and argue about it.
Some even argue whether the inhabitants of Egypt today are the true inheritors of the land.
Were the ancient Egyptians as light-skinned or of Arabic origin like the ones we see today or were they just as black as the rest of the African children?
We also even have arguments like: Who built Great Zimbabwe? Some Western historians argue it was built by the Arabs, when we all know our forefathers built it.
Whichever way we look at it, there always seems to be some collective effort by Westerners to make the world believe that Africans are useless and lazy and that they have never invented or built anything of relevance in the world today.
And the saddest thing is that most of us actually believe them.
Tariq Nasheed in the documentary Hidden Colors writes that it was not until he was watching the History Channel one day when he realised that they (European/Western rulers) were going out of their way to omit certain facts pertaining to the African presence in the Americas before the European explorers.
He writes that he knew right there and then that he had to do something about it instead of ‘waiting for someone else to tell our story’.
In the documentary, some African-American academics come together to explore, reveal and inform the world on hidden truths about the history of the African man and his achievements that the Europeans have tried to omit through the ages like the presence of African monuments built by African architects all around Europe, Asia and even the US, revealing that Africans were sailing the globe a long time before Christopher Columbus even set sail for the Americas.
It is a must-watch documentary which will build up the self esteem of any African man or woman who watches it, urging them all to go out there in search of the truth pertaining their history because what most of us believe in today is a lie fed to us through television and books about Africa written by Europeans.
The question today is: What are you as an African doing about the African story?
What do you believe in?
Do you believe that we, as a people, are doomed and can never get out of the doldrums of poverty we find ourselves in?
Do you believe that we just got here by chance or that there was a conspiracy by other world rulers to land us here today in this very position we find ourselves in?
How did we become so consumed by greed that we now go against our own beliefs and hunhu/ubuntu philosophies? Nothing can be resolved if we live in denial that there is something fishy with the current world system which seeks to make slaves of us all through the banking system.
We were not always like this.
We are an ancient people.
We believed in the Creator (Mwari) long before the missionaries came.
We believed that all men were created equal and deserve to be given their due respect regardless of colour, creed or where they come from.
It is because of this understanding that white settlers managed to manipulate us.
We gave them access to our land and secrets which they in turn took and used against us.
We were made vulnerable because we did not believe that someone could devise such an evil plot as to rob Africa of its greatness and resources for personal gain.
It is therefore vital that in this day and age, we do not repeat the same mistakes our ancestors made by allowing European settlers (whose hidden agenda was to colonise us) to come into our land on the pretext of spreading Christianity.
We must guard our resources and children jealously, being cautious that they too do not get polluted to the extent of forgetting where they came from and where they ought to be collectively headed as a people.
Recently, my nephew in Grade Six asked: “What is our culture as Zimbabweans?”
It wasn’t a hard question, but at that moment I was reminded that cultures are dynamic; that what once was our culture can easily be replaced by another more dominat culture.
Hence the greater need for us to put as much material out there on television, social media platforms and internet concerning who we are and our pride.
When I asked my nephew why he was asking me this question, he said everybody was talking about the carnival and the samba dancers and that it was a cultural event.
He then went on to talk about Zodwa Wabantu (the entertainer famous for not wearing underwear).
He wanted to know what the big fuss was about.
I knew the next thing he was going to ask was if it was proper to go around with no underwear.
I tried to avoid the topic as much as I could.
I felt that these were issues meant to be discussed later when he was a bit older but with the ever-increasing use of social media platforms, I was faced with an inescapable dilemma.
What was I to tell him?
In the end we are left to ask: What is our culture then as Zimbabweans?
What do we teach our children in this so-called global village? Our actions today will definitely impact our future.
We might not be alive then to see it but what we allow into our homes and what we deny entrance will define us and set us apart from the rest world.
We need to throw our weight behind such ideas as children learning agriculture from primary school level because when they grow up, they are bound to do a better job with the land than we did.
Let them learn film and television production in school, perhaps later they will also know how to speak positively about their own country and continent, thereby doing away with the negative images about Africa strewn across certain television networks.
The power is in our hands.
While it might take time, we have to start believing now that Africa will be great again.