EDITOR – LAST week we had a traditional function in our rural area in Murehwa. 

Apparently some of my relatives, both distant and close, did not come because they claim to be ‘Christians’. 

According to their so-called prophets, they are not supposed to take part in ‘some of these traditional ceremonies’. 

Jesus and the Bible do not allow them to do so, so they say. 

I write to you Editor and kindly ask you to publish this abridged letter from King Leopold II that he wrote to missionaries to Africa in 1883. 

It’s said the letter was discovered in the Congo in 1915 in a second-hand Bible bought from a Belgian priest who forgot the speech in the Bible. 

I hope it knocks some sense into ‘Christians’ not only in Zimbabwe, but world over:

“Reverends, Fathers and dear compatriots: The task that is given to fulfill is very delicate and requires much tact. 

You will go certainly to evangelise, but your evangelisation must inspire above all Belgian interests. 

Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already. 

They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba and what else I don’t know. 

They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie and to insult is bad. 

Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already. 

Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world. 

For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty in their underground to 

avoid that they get interested in it, and make you murderous competition and dream one day to overthrow you. 

Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering, and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like: ‘Happier are the poor because they will inherit the heaven’ and, ‘It’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God’. 

You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us. 

The children have to learn to obey what the missionary recommends, who is the father of their soul. 

You must singularly insist on their total submission and obedience, avoid developing the spirit in the schools, teach students to read and not to reason. 

Evangelise the niggers so that they stay forever in submission to the white colonialists, so they never revolt against the restraints they are undergoing. 

Recite every day – ‘Happy are those who are weeping because the kingdom of God is for them’.  

Convert always the blacks by using the whip. 

Keep their women in nine months of submission to work freely for us. 

Force them to pay you in sign of recognition — goats, chicken or eggs — every time you visit their villages. 

And make sure that niggers never become rich. 

Sing every day that it’s impossible for the rich to enter heaven. 

Make them pay tax each week at Sunday mass. 

Use the money supposed for the poor, to build flourishing business centres. 

Institute a confessional system, which allows you to be good detectives denouncing any black that has a different consciousness contrary to that of the decision-maker. 

Teach the niggers to forget their heroes and to adore only ours.”

Editor, it is time for people to wake up. 

Blacks, in particular, have been brainwashed to alarming levels. They have forgotten who they are. 

We have a lot of work on our hands Editor.

Mutiro,

Harare.