By Farayi Mungoshi

“WHAT has ubuntu/hunhu ever done for me?”
Those were the words uttered by a student from Midlands State University sometime last year in October on the set of the film Makunun’unu Maodzamoyo we were shooting in Chihota.
I recall taking these words to heart, disturbed not only by the words he’d uttered, but by the attitude with which he’d said it; a screwed and mocking face, decorated with a shrewd smile of a person who thinks he knows it all.
Looking at him, one could conclude that he was not over 20 years of age, yet the tenacity with which he supported Western philosophies and attacked ubuntu/hunhu, describing it as a dead or dying philosophy, left me scarred.
Even though his mentor came in to correct him, I decided to share with others the experience and a week later, The Patriot published my story titled, ‘What has ubuntu ever done for me?’
Now almost a year later, I find myself reflecting on the number of times I have had to walk past certain headlines displayed at newspaper stands, street corners and traffic lights at most roads heading into the capital.
Also in other towns across our Nation, we have these headlines screaming from local papers, printed in bold letters and displayed in such a manner it is not possible to miss them or to feel like buying a paper and find out more about the headliner.
Mostly it is sexual stuff; the prophets and their repeated failure to keep their pants on, defiling the name of God and making everybody else who professes to be a Christian look bad.
It is about the latest ‘celebrity’ and university students whose lurid sex tape has been leaked.
The list goes on and it leaves a lingering distasteful taste in the mouth and mind asking the question: ‘What is happening to our ‘intellectuals’?
Is this the future generation?
Were we always like that?
What will become of us as a Nation?
Back in the days when we would go to the river to bath, the moment we knew women were bathing at our favourite spot, we would back down and let them finish and of course there was always that peeping Tom but he knew what was in store if ever he got caught.
It is while I am thinking of this that I am reminded of the young student on the film set last year.
It is clear he valued European history more than African history.
Everywhere he looks, he sees cars either made in Japan, America or the UK.
When he turns on the television, there is also foreign material, everywhere he goes, everywhere he looks.
When he talks in English, he must talk with an African-American accent, unaware that the people he is trying to copy have just been moved from slaving on the cotton fields, to slaving inside prisons – and that the freedom they are made to see is not really freedom, but just the illusion of television.
Back then when everybody was staying in the village, children had more time with their parents and not just their parents alone.
They had time with other children in the village and the relatives who lived there.
These are the people who would protect us and teach us to respect one another, especially our elders – not because the people who taught us these things were now the elders, but rather there was an understanding of order, from the youngest to the eldest, even to the dead – there was protocol.
Occasionally families held meetings (dare) to chart the course and path of its members, to solve problems between siblings and the same meetings were held at community level with the chiefs and elders.
These were held to maintain order.
In present Zimbabwe, the family unit is struggling, having been dealt a blow by the migration of its people to different countries.
Now we have children-headed families in Zimbabwe, with parents in the Diaspora, without guidance and sometimes with a bag of money sent from overseas.
And ever since the family unit in Zimbabwe has disintegrated, our children, the next generation, have had no one to actually teach them the ways of our people.
With a closely knit family unit that meets regularly, just as we did in the old days, it is not easy for one to indulge in wayward behaviour.
It’s time we revisit the importance of the family institution in line with hunhu/ubuntu.