THREE years ago I wrote the following paragraph;
Many a time I have had to pose and ask myself, am I a racist? Do I hate whites? Even among friends and family I have been taken to task over The Patriot’s presumed anti-white stance. In heated exchanges I have heard the land reform, the indigenisation efforts and celebrating our history faulted for being racist. I have tried to argue that an African can never be a racist except perhaps against fellow Africans. Racism is essentially white prejudice against blacks. I have shown how racism has been ingrained in European languages, cultures and religion for millennia. The association between black and evil is as old as this racism. To call a black person’s reaction to racism racist is no different from labelling the resistance of rape victims as sexual violence. It’s that sad. Yet my argument has fallen on deaf ears. Racism is ever present. You see it in mixed marriages. On the road you will come across racist rage. You will hear it in black/white conversations. I have tried to point it out only to be told I am a victim of my obsession with the past. I have retorted, yes I am a victim of a very racist past!
To the last sentence maybe I should add…a very racist present as well. A few days ago I reminded myself of the above view during a short discussion with a friend of a colleague.
This friend is an economist and a veteran of our liberation struggle. He spends most of his time making money in African development.
He genuinely believes he has a duty to contribute to the development of Africa. But he is no philanthropist; he knows the colour and value of the greenback.
He develops and sells development projects, and their financing models, to willing African countries, for a handsome commission. In his consulting firm he has included a couple of junior white economists for, in his own word, ‘credibility’.
It is wisdom acquired over time. He had a frustrating beginning; bureaucrats would listen to his proposal but besides labelling it ‘interesting’, they never committed themselves to his ideas. Until he went to Sierra Leone one day and was told by a senior official to go back and bring a whiteman with him.
He did, and clinched a lucrative deal. Now with his junior whites at the fore he retraced his failed engagements in East Africa, including Zimbabwe, and his bank balance has kept swelling.
The experiences of my colleague’s friend are no different from those of many of us. A friend of mine owns a company in the agriculture sector.
For a month she had been seeking an appointment with a lady pastor who owns a good farm in Glendale to discuss a partnership proposal. The farmer pastor was very elusive until she finally managed to get through over the phone.
In very rude vernacular she was told off for disturbing a church session and asked to send the proposal on WhatsApp! My friend was almost giving up when one of her managers, a muzungu, offered to try his luck. In typical ‘udza mwana odzoka’ style she gave him the number with the expectation he would get a tongue lashing. An hour later the muzungu had secured an appointment and subsequently, a business deal.
In spite of the above examples I am still persuaded that black people can never be racists. In fact it’s a display of white racism recruiting black people into its ranks!
Racism is a racial superiority complex; it is prejudice against other races viewed as inferior.
Racism has historically evolved into a prejudice pyramid with whites as chief perpetrators at the apex and blacks as chief victims at the bottom.
It is a mental condition resulting from corrosive exposure to imperial and colonial influences over millennia. In our local situation the first recorded white people came here in the 16th Century as traders and missionaries.
These Portuguese met stiff resistance especially to their evangelical mission and gave up. It was not until the 19th Century that European missionaries re-entered this country and with British imperial support they eventually became part of the victors in the colonisation of the region.
The colonial enterprise was a racist enterprise seeking to completely dominate a perceived inferior black civilisation.
This could only be achieved through total subjugation.
Indigenous peoples were subjected to total deprivation in terms of land, economy, culture, spirituality, history and politics. Part of the deprivation as in land, politics and the economy was through brutal force while culture, spirituality and history were freely traded for ‘superior’ offerings.
Whereas the liberation struggle forcefully brought back land and political autonomy, the economy has remained bitterly contested terrain.
The real tragedy has, however, been in the cultural and spiritual spheres where our meek resistance is resulting in total surrender. Mass media, the education curriculum and Christianity have been potent weaponry for our adversaries
We envy Western economic structures, their culture, spirituality and history. The temptation to fight for ‘white privileges’, the urge to be modern and therefore ‘white’ remains strong among some of us.
We take pride when our offspring lose their balance in terms of our culture and language. Vana vave varungu chaivo. Colloquial for employer is murungu meaning white person. And murungu has its roots in Mulungu, God in some Bantu dialects. We create healing powers for ‘misa’ conducted by fata vechirungu.
Clearly signs of enslaved minds. Nothing short of force can correct these mental misalignments. It is therefore illogical, under such a state of affairs, to talk of black racists.