The best strategy for destroying a people’s potential is to rob them of their unity of purpose by dividing them, writes Andrew Wutawunashe in his book, Dear Africa-The Call of The African Dream that The Patriot is serialising.

“Behold the people is one, and they all have one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” – The Almighty.

IN all religion, it is generally agreed that God is the all-powerful Creator whom mere humans, like you and me, can never begin to rival in thought, word or deed. This is why the story surrounding the above quote of words attributed to God Himself, has puzzled ordinary believers and religious scholars alike.
Apparently, when His mortal creatures, endowed with one language, decided in unity of purpose to build the Tower Babel — an edifice which would reach heaven, God Almighty and His heavenly council sensed the possibility that, in this mode, men would achieve the powers of unlimited accomplishment which would rival even the divine agenda.
The solution to this unprecedented problem would be to divide their languages, and thus defeat their undesirable unity of purpose — we presume mischievous purpose.
Herein lies one of the most important, indeed critical, frontiers of the war to restore black people and ‘African-ness’ to the place where black people worldwide can retrieve their heritage and competiveness, and make their unique contribution to all mankind.
This critical frontier is perhaps the most important battle of all which black people must fight — the war for African unity, that is, the unity of black people both on the continent of Africa and worldwide.
Indeed, the divine tactic stated above is fail proof.
The best strategy for destroying a people’s potential is to rob them of their unity of purpose by dividing them.
Both during the days of subjugation, and when the black people began to shake off the shackles of slavery and colonialism, a powerful and devastating weapon was fashioned against them by their former dominators — ‘the weapon of divide and rule’.
This of course was a well-chosen weapon, considering its origins in divine strategy against human mischief.
Only, in this case it would be used as a predator’s strategy against black peoples’ right and legitimate struggles to rebuild their shattered nationhood, identity, dignity, sense of self-worth and competitiveness among nations.
The state of division and failure to work together purposefully among black people at various levels is all too obvious.
What is not clear to many is that the pervasiveness of these divisions is too systematic to have been spontaneous.
It was orchestrated by oppressors as a weapon they knew would sustain their stranglehold on black people long after their political liberation would have been accomplished.
When you study the history of nations, power, wealth and competitiveness have always been a result of the ability to come together, dwell, work and trade together in unity of purpose.
The word ‘united’ in most cases preceded the names and description of nations and peoples who attained meaningful greatness and competitiveness — United States of America, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, European Union, and so forth — unity and working together always precedes greatness.
Consider, if you can the nature of black people’s divisions.
First of all the borders of African ‘nations’ are bizarre and unnatural legacies of colonialism which in all cases cut unceremoniously through the lands of great African peoples, dividing them so that parts of the same people would be fractured into different colonial ‘nationalities’.
Today Africans passionately preserve borders which were created not by them, but by those who subjugated them.
No wonder the Berlin Conference of 1884 is historically titled ‘The Partition of Africa’.
To partition simply means to divide and cut into small pieces.
This is what white nations in Europe deliberately did to Africa often within those ‘nations’, the white people ensured future enduring division of black people by patronising one tribe against another.
The Belgians, for example, fashioned a notorious distinction between the ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ tribes which after their departure ensured the genocide witnessed in Rwanda.
Then of course, by the use of the most lethal weapon of division — language — the Europeans dismembered Africa into a sustained political, social, economic and cultural Babel which would always be pulled apart into three main directions — English, French or Portuguese, depending on which country was the former colonial power.
Simultaneously, by forcing their respective languages on colonised black people, they ensured a bizarre form of unity through which partitioned African peoples are forced to identify more with those who colonised them than with fellow Africans. The effects are endemic, sustained and involuntarily devastating.
The African businessman in English-speaking Malawi will find it easier to do business in far away United Kingdom than in neighbouring Mozambique, while his Mozambican counterpart will find it easier to trade in Lisbon, Portugal, thousands of miles away and across seas than in Blantyre, only a few hundred miles away!
Congolese Africans will find it easier to deal with France than with Angola right next door.
The economic losses to back people resulting from these grotesque divisions are enormous!
In Yamassoukro, Ivory Coast, a few years ago, I attended a workshop of African ecclesiastical leaders in which men of the cloth were firmly divided into three opinions which were determined not by the issues, but by whether the African nation they came from was Anglophone, Francophone or Lusophone.
You see, the colonial Babel does not exempt even the church.
Never mind the fact that people of the same tribe divided between Zambia and Congo regard themselves as ‘English’ and ‘French’ respectively — their cultural environment also suffers alienation from each other.
I understand fully the stance of former white Europeans in countries for example, like South Africa who have real commitment to Africa and regard themselves as African in an African ‘rainbow’ nation.
Yet because of the bizarre effects of colonial division, the colour black, coming from any place outside the artificial colonial borders, has no place in the rainbow — denied not by white people, but by fellow black people who regard their fellow Africans as stark foreigners.
In recent bouts of the madness born of these fostered divisions, Africans in South Africa demonstrated such passionate hatred and hostility to fellow Africans from outside the colonial drawn borders that they literally set fellow Africans on fire.
Black children were made to watch this blood-thirsty spectacle, entrenching a legacy of division into future generations of black people.
Some clever white intellectuals, sensing these attacks as the successful harvest of the seeds of division sown among Africans by their progenitors, swiftly and cunningly christened this fraternal blood-letting of Bantu blood as ‘xenophobia’. Ironically the true meaning of that word is, “aversion to anything that is foreign or does not look like you.”
There is really no strangeness between two black people.
The right term for it, heavy with irony and contradiction though it may be, is Afro-phobia — Africans loathing Africans.