LAST week’s article revealed that our children are being forced to learn about Europe and not about Africa, that half of the ‘O’ Level syllabus is about European history.
This obviously is a form of aggression on them, on their conscience, their self-esteem, and their selfhood; ultimately it is a form of aggression on our hopes and our aspirations as Zimbabweans and as African people.
In exactly seven days we celebrate our 34th anniversary of independence, on this day we celebrate our victory against settler colonialism, a victory which came about after years of a bitter armed struggle.
But this victory is not ours alone, it is also a victory for the whole of Africa, for all the African countries who were the midwives of this independence.
This victory was against Britain and its European allies, who financed and armed the Smith regime.
It is these same Europeans who sanctioned the inhumanity that poured napalm on children in the camp schools in Mozambique and Zambia.
Do our children know this?
It is not by accident that the study of European history does not talk about what they did to support the Rhodesian regime and therefore how they fought us so that we would never be a free people, so that they would have permanent access to loot our resources while we continue to languish in dire poverty.
It would make a big difference to our children, if they knew this because then they would never think that Europe and its history are anything worth learning about.
They would throw such curriculum out through the window.
So the Europeans colonised us, and we fought and defeated them.
Facing defeat, they promised to pay for the land which their grand-parents had taken away from our forefathers at gunpoint but when time came for them to pay up, they refused to pay and when we took the land and distributed it among ourselves they cried foul and imposed evil sanctions on us, for taking what is ours.
This is the history of Europe that our enemies do not want our children to know because the children would become permanently insulated against Europe.
When these Europeans saw that their plans would never work, and we were relentlessly moving forward with land reform, they sponsored a puppet party to erode and overturn our state of independence, reverse the land reform and reverse everything we ever fought for.
The Europeans ruthlessly continue to fight us on the diplomatic front.
The intention of covering up for Europeans in the teaching of history to our children, is therefore to betray our independence because it makes the children vulnerable to these Europeans and their machinations in their war against us as a people, in their endless wheeling and dealing to rob us of our resources.
The Africa which is not covered in the syllabus in question, on the other hand, is the midwife of our independence.
Mozambique was there for us during the liberation struggle, so was Zambia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Botswana, Egypt and others.
Through the OAU Liberation Committee African countries channelled resources to the liberation movements, thus African countries provided logistical support for the liberation struggles in Southern Africa.
They provided rear bases where the freedom fighters could be trained and from where they could launch attacks.
The Frontline States such as Tanzania, Mozambique, Botswana and Zambia, had infrastructure destroyed, and their people killed for the sake of our struggle.
On the diplomatic front, African countries stood their ground and refused to bow down to Western European pressure, they insisted we had to be free.
Without their moral and material support, our struggle for liberation would have been more bitter and certainly would have taken longer.
So it is Africa that was the midwife of our independence and yet we send the message to our children that these brothers, these friends who helped us liberate ourselves are not important but those who colonised us, the Europeans.
This is betrayal of our cause as a nation, the cause of independence, freedom, prosperity because at the end of the day it violates these young persons and militates against their role as heirs of Zimbabwe and Africa and yet these youngsters are the architects of the future of our nation and continent.
Our children need to know the origins of the African people, how they have evolved over the centuries, what they have achieved, what problems they have faced and how they have resolved them.
They need to know and understand the tapestry that weaves us together as a people and why we must never allow ourselves to be separated.
The ties that bind us go beyond our African genes, we have deep spiritual and cultural ties that distinguish us as a people and our children need to share in this cultural heritage so they can carry the African mantle.
If this does not happen we will become extinct as Africans, what will be left is the genetic signature but our African souls will be no more. We will be black skins in white masks.