Governments of black ruled nations must, as a matter of urgency, direct their education departments to completely overhaul their education and training syllabuses from kindergarten to higher education, writes Andrew Wutawunashe in his book, Dear Africa – The Call of The African Dream that The Patriot is serialising.

BLACK people’s dependency syndrome is born out of the powerlessness that was forced on them through slavery and colonialism.
Even churches and other religions came to black people with handouts instead of arming them psychologically to have confidence restored in their minds that they can create their own solutions and help themselves in all situations.
The man who gives you a fish impoverishes you.
The man who teaches you to fish empowers you.
One Western leader inspired his people by telling them, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.”
Many black countries are paralysed by a national culture of a people who expect everything to be delivered to them by the government.
Communities which could organise themselves easily to develop neighbourhoods for example, by digging a simple drainage canal, will watch their children playing in the sewage effluent until the government one day comes to dig the trench.
Train young black people, starting with little children in the home with charity piggy banks, to make donations to help other suffering peoples around the world.
Governments must require young black people to do national service in the form of time given for community help programmes.
Self-reliance as well as being of benefit to others are concepts that must be taught heavily in order to combat dependency syndrome.
Governments of black ruled nations must, as a matter of urgency, direct their education departments to completely overhaul their education and training syllabuses from kindergarten to higher education.
The predator class which purpose-designed colonial and other education systems for black people were very diligent in ensuring that the education would subjugate the black person’s mind in far reaching ways.
It is therefore alarming that in most emerging black nations, only cosmetic changes, if any, have been made to syllabuses.
It is a tragedy of monumental proportions that a graduate of a high school in a black nation still knows more about Napoleon and Vasco da Gama than he does about King Tshaka and Kwame Nkrumah.
Powerful think tanks must be convened to redesign the materials that schools teach, with the aim of recovering all that has been hidden or distorted concerning black people, and of restoring the dignity and self-worth of black people by telling them the simple truth about their history and heritage.
I am persuaded that African culture contains the richest deposits of what should be taught in sociology, psychology and other related disciplines.
There is no social system more mentally, materially, morally and emotionally supportive of the human person than the African extended family system and the humane, inclusive and compassionate social philosophy of ubuntu.
Black intellectuals and educators must draw from these deep wells of African-ness and enrich the whole world with social models that are a clear answer to the disintegration, cynicism and moral decay we see in the societies of the so-called ‘developed world’.
I really should spend the rest of the day talking about that multi faced, all powerful mega vehicle known as the media.
The media — entertainment, television, radio, newspapers, publications — have for ages been used as ‘weapons of mass deception’, as one discerning African politician put it, to the mental disadvantaging of the black person.
Images, from newscasts to entertainment continue to be used to enhance inferiority into the minds of black people.
Political editorialising for example, will melodramatise the mistakes of an African President while sanctifying massacres initiated by leaders of powerful white nations.
The tragedy lies not so much in the unfairness as it does in the fact that black people themselves end up accepting this judgment.
As a result, they harbour an inordinate despising of their own leaders while carrying an irrelevant and ill-placed admiration of even blood-thirsty leaders of far away peoples.
Black nations must take a serious view to the overhauling of the content and editorial leanings of their media.
The media has the frightening ability to daily, hourly and even minute by minute, shape the minds of people in any nation.
Leaders and professionals who want to work for the renewing of the minds of black people must with urgency set out to change the content of the media to which their people are exposed.
A delicate balance must be struck in emerging black nations between the concept of legitimate freedom of speech and protection of new national values from financially powerful media houses owned, run or serviced predominantly by former oppressors who still hold on to their former values or those of former colonial masters.
In many cases the editorial lines of these media houses hold no African national interest in their values, but are brazenly determined by whatever are the current Western, especially right wing, editorial lines.
Cartoons of black leaders are drawn up, not for wholesome political satire, but for a deliberate and sustained ridiculing of African leaders designed to caricature them as inferior clowns unfit to govern countries.
All this is hypocritically passed on as freedom of speech.
To one and all let me say: the wars and struggles for liberation of black people did not bring liberation.
They brought the opportunity to begin to set our people free.
The most important frontier in the war to set black people free is the frontier of the mind.
This war must be waged by all black people and their leaders — whether political, religious, social, economic or intellectual — with an even greater shrewdness, tenacity, ferocity and determination than that employed by the predators who enslaved the minds of black people.
It is not international aid packages which shall change the disadvantaged face of Africa and black people everywhere.
The key lies in changing the way of thinking in the minds of black people everywhere.
This is where the battle should be fought, and every black man, woman and child needs to enlist as a warrior in this battle.
Easily the most powerful statement in the Bible reads,“… you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
And if that is too deep for you, just learn from the African village dog.
“It’s time for black people to go on a journey of their own thinking.”
It begins with a renewed mind.