HomeOld_PostsGreat Zimbabwe civilisation..…where did we lose our momentum?

Great Zimbabwe civilisation..…where did we lose our momentum?

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“Ndinoshamiswa kwazvo nebasa ramajuru,
Twunhu twuduku-duku kwazvo mukutarisa,
Twunotoonekwa waita zvokukotama
Nokuti twunhu twusina nematuro ose.
Asi chitarisa kamukuriro wechuru!
Hona kusvinyangwa-svinyangwa kwevhu rechuru
Tarisa kutsvenengerwa kwacho nomuvuzo!
Nokukurungirwa kwacho zve nehurungudo!”

THAT is the first stanza of the late J.C. Kumbirai’s poem ‘Majuru’.
One day in 1985 I was in Kumbirai’s Shona poetry class at university.
An argument broke out between Kumbirai and a student, Jasper, over which nationality the poet had in mind in writing the poem.
Jasper insisted the poem spoke to the industriousness of the Chinese while Kumbirai remained adamant he had the Koreans in mind.
The argument degenerated, much to our discomfort, into a slanging match over Chinese and Korean achievements.
We had scant information about the two.
The Chinese had contributed immensely to our liberation struggle and Chairman Mao had iconic status in the struggle narrative.
After independence, the giant National Sports Stadium stood as a monument to the friendship bond.
The Koreans, the Northern half, had also been our friends during the struggle and their ‘Great leader and his Juche ideas’ were revered here.
The National Heroes’ Acre stood as testimony to that comradeship.
Today China is the world’s second largest economy and only a matter of time before it scales the summit.
Backed by a large and rich land mass, world’s largest population and an industrious work ethic, the Chinese have staked a claim to Kumbirai’s ‘Majuru’. And to add to that is the depth and breadth of the Chinese civilisation, meaning recent greatness is built on an age-old tradition of greatness.
So, naturally for years I had always thought Kumbirai got it wrong in his interpretation of his own poem, ‘Majuru’.
That was before I got to Korea a fortnight ago via the aptly named Samsung Station in Seoul.
I only got as far as the South and the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ).
The country was divided into two using the geographic 38th parallel north to demarcate Soviet Union interests from American interests at the end of the Second World War.
In 1948, the 38th parallel became the boundary of the newly-established North (DPRK) and South (RoK) Korean republics.
In 1950, civil war broke out between the Korean republics and the resultant ceasefire in 1953 confirmed the new occupation zones roughly along the 38th parallel north as the new United Nations (UN)-recognised boundaries for the Koreas.
If Kumbirai had Koreans in mind when he wrote ‘Majuru’, he clearly would have been referring to the pre-1945 unitary state.
The depth and breadth of its civilisation rivals any ancient civilisation.
Koreans take pride in the well-documented invention of their own alphabhet, the Hangeul, in 1443.
This development had been preceded by construction of the Gyeongbokgung, the iconic Joseon Dynasty Palace built in 1395.
Interestingly, both developments took place during the maturity period of our Great Zimbabwe civilisation.
I keep wondering where we lost our momentum.
In my fly past tour of heritage in the South of this great nation I was particularly impressed by Jikji, a book that is renowned as the world’s oldest surviving evidence of metal type printing.
This fact was acknowledged in 1972 when curators at the National Library of France, where it was kept, acknowledged that the book, printed in 1377, was 78 years older than Gutenberg’s Bible!
Further research has since shown that movable metal type printing was actually being practiced in Korea 200 years before the Gutenberg press!
Fittingly Jikji has been on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register since 2001 as testimony to the antiquity of Korean and world documentary heritage.
Moving around in Seoul, whether in the spick-and-span underground train (tube) or in the extremely punctual buses and as you gaze at the imposing, but traditionally-inspired modern architecture, you cannot miss the feel of being in a developed country.
Developed country status is first and foremost a lived experience then a formal designation. Korea achieved the official status in 1996 after more than three decades of rapid and sustained growth in the field of electronics.
Where others boast natural resources endowment, they boast manmade resources, that is adding their intellectual signature to others’ natural resources.
Aren’t we endowed with both?
At the end of the Second World War there was nothing to materially separate Korea from the average African country except that the former had just attained ‘liberated’ status.
In 1965, as Ian Smith declared Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and most African countries had become independent, South Korea was opening up big time to Foreign Direct Investment.
America’s KOMI and Motorola set up shop to manufacture transistors and semi-conductors respectively, taking advantage of cheap labour rates in Korea.
In 1975, Korea Semiconductors became the first Korean company to produce integrated circuits (ICs) and transistors.
In the village and at school in Unyetu, we were listening to Literature Bureau book dramas or Government radio lessons from transistor radios probably carrying Korean intellectual signature.
Old Makombe, from our neighbouring village had, however, by then mastered the art of repairing broken down transistor radios.
In 1982 Samsung took the deep plunge into high tech industry when it produced Korea’s first 64Kb DRAM (direct random access memory).
Around that time our own ZEC radios had hit the market.
This phenomenal achievement was recognised in 2013 with designation of the 64Kb DRAM as a Korean Registered Cultural Heritage.
Today, ZEC is unrecognisable as a museum piece and our own mbira is still to be designated as a Zimbabwean Cultural Heritage, several centuries after we invented it here!
By 1992 Samsung Electronics had become the first company in the world to develop 64Mb DRAM.
In 2013 this Korean company went further and became the first world company to mass produce the 3D Vertical Nand.
The exponential growth has resulted in Samsung annual turnover approaching the US$40 billion mark, a true Korean treasured heritage!
Korean heritage is about Samsung and much more.
It is also home to global brands like Hyundai and KIA.
Korea is also about divided families, nations and the Cold War.
During a tour to one of the ‘invasion’ underground tunnels, the guide spoke about the shared rituals between the peoples north and south of the 38th parallel in Korea. She had a bizarre anecdote on how the Hyundai founder, Chung Ju-yung, stole a cow from his father to finance his journey to the south in the 1930s and paid back the transgression with 1001 herd of cattle donation to the north in 2000.
Korea became a global Silicon Valley on the foundation of Korean arts, culture and heritage.
Probably Kumbirai was right that these were his ‘Majuru’.

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