LAST week’s Shepherd Manhambara’s history lessons for British Ambassador to Zimbabwe Catriona Laing are just what the doctor ordered.
They underline how pathetic and pathological racism is.
When the British butchered schoolchildren at Chimoio in November of 1977 without any compunction, and still sought to finish the survivors a few months later in July of 1978 at Gondola, they revealed their barbaric nature, that they are completely devoid of any morals or ethics.
No sane person kills children.
The fact that we did not retaliate in the same coin is testimony to the principled nature of our liberation struggle, to the moral and ethical values that underpinned our struggle.
This quality of our struggle is what ensured that this nation was not plunged into a bloodbath after independence as happens so often around the globe.
We fought for a purpose and when that was achieved we made strenuous sacrifices to maintain peace.
We even extended a hand of reconciliation although that hand was spurned.
We, the victors, extended the hand of reconciliation, that’s our calibre, our stature.
Our struggle was there to end injustice, gross human rights violations by the British perpetrated against our people and who is taking the British to the International Criminal Court?
It is not that we did not know where to find white schoolchildren.
The education system was so segregated it would have been easy to kill white children without any black children being caught in crossfire, but ours was not a racial war, it was not a war of hatred or revenge, it was a war to end injustice and that cannot be achieved by perpetrating injustice.
If we could penetrate the enemy’s security system and attack the regimes fuel reserves in Southerton, surely it would have been easy to target white schools and kill white schoolchildren, but then that would have made us as vile as Ian Smith and his British masters and our struggle would have been meaningless.
Throughout our war of liberation we never targeted defenseless civilians, least of all children.
The British did this with impunity over and over again from the time they raided our land and usurped our sovereignty in 1890, throughout the liberation struggle and up to this day with their evil sanctions and illegal regime change conspiracies.
Now, if after such a clean record on our part, and such a bloody one on their part, the British, through their ambassador, still think they can accuse us of human rights violations, it is a revelation of their pathetic, pathological racism.
When they murdered us brutally in order to take away our land and all its riches, they justified this heinous crime by saying we were savages who needed to be civilised.
Thus their position was that there was something wrong with us as a people and they the civilised had the right to take away our land and then enslave us.
When we would not accept this position and fought to defend ours, we were labelled murdering rebels, we were killed, imprisoned, tried and hanged in the enemy jails for seeking justice.
When we took up arms in the Second Chimurenga, they labelled us ‘terrorists’ for fighting a war to end injustice, the injustice of the British.
When we defeated the British and, as part of their terms of surrender, the Lancaster House Agreement required them to pay for the land they had earlier stolen, they reneged for nefarious reasons.
When as a result of their intransigence, we, led by the same liberation forces who had fought and liberated the land through the barrel of the gun, repossessed our land, the British and their European relatives labelled us all sorts of evil names and imposed illegal sanctions against us.
Today, after we have survived the terrorism of their sanctions, and their evil bid to impose a paid puppet regime on us so that they could siphon wealth out of this country without opposition, they still dare to put human rights as a red herring before us.
They neither apologise for the illegal unjustifiable sanctions nor for the shameful act of seeking to remove a constitutionally elected government and imposing their puppet regime albeit a black one.
This kind of racism is pathetic and pathological.
This kind of attitude reflects a total contempt of Zimbabweans as beings of any worth.
Their message to us is that: “No matter what wrong they do, they are right because they are white, and, no matter what we do that is correct, we are always wrong because we are black, Africans.”
Izvi ndizvo zvakaita kuti vanhu vaende kuhondo.
Instead of apologising and paying reparations, they add insult to injury.
They don’t apologise for waging genocidal wars in order to take our land and all its riches at the turn of the 19th century because we are uncivilised and they had a mission to civilise us so they were right!
In what court of justice?
They do not apologise nor pay reparations for the thousands they killed during the Second Chimurenga because we were terrorists who wanted to reverse civilisation saka hapana nyaya?
They don’t apologise for refusing to pay up for the land as were their terms of surrender embodied in the Lancaster House Agreement, and instead impose sanctions on us when we finally take matters into our own hands and repossess our land.
What kind of people are they?
Something boggles the mind because it is so preposterous it borders on the insane. Why would we listen to the British in the first place?
They are not our relatives and they have always been inimical to us.
Why should we still be insulted by the British today?
That evil mindset that is so utterly contemptuous of others as beings of worth, is why the world can never be at peace because each people are worthy and correct as who they are, and as long as this inborn worthiness is challenged, those so despised will rise and fight to defend their inherent human dignity.
We have never terrorised anyone, not even the remnants of the British who continue to live in our land this day.
We never went on rampage killing whites after our struggle when we attained independence.
So what is the basis of this bigoted mindset?
This kind of temerity belongs to the dark ages, and Zimbabwe is light miles away from the dark ages.
We will not succumb to racism, not now, not ever.
We shall continue to dismantle the edifice of mental colonisation that daily stalks us, seeking to dehumanise us and make us feel as though eternally cursed with inherent inferiority.
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.