THERE is a misconception about our relations with our former colonisers, it seems some people among us have not only forgiven them for colonising us, but are prepared to submit to them, almost to apologise to them for having taken up arms to dislodge them, stopping just short of asking them to come back again.
There was someone from The Daily News last week suggesting that in order to please and endear ourselves to our former coloniser, we should stop calling the different phases of our revolution ‘Chimurenga One’, ‘Chimurenga Two’, ‘Chimurenga Three’ because the word is confrontational and conjures images of war.
Imagine the extent of appeasement and self-denial!
The word ‘Chimurenga’ is a critical part of the description of who we are and the experiences we went through and continue to go through in the process of defining ourselves.
There are people who don’t want us to remember how the white man came and how he took away our land; people who don’t want us to remember the gallant fight that our forefathers put up and subsequent other wars we engaged the white man to get back our land.
In their short-sightedness, they cannot see how desperate the British have become after the thrashing of the MDC in the July 31 general elections last year and how they suddenly realise they have been left behind as we fight our way forward.
Chatham House, that British foreign policy think tank, is back with its manipulative reports that some naive people among us take as gospel truth.
In its latest report on Zimbabwe titled: ‘Zimbabwe’s international re-engagement: The long haul to recovery’, the report is calling for another GNU only this time as a permanent feature until the country’s economy has been stabilised.
They want to create the impression Zimbabwe is sliding back to 2007, but the problem for them is everything is pointing the other direction.
The shelves in the supermarkets are not empty as was the case in 2007 and thanks to a generally good rainy season in agricultural input support mechanism, the country could have a bumper maize harvest; tobacco production keeps rising, this year almost to year 2000 white commercial farmers’ highest level — 200 million kilogrammes.
Industry is slowly getting back to its feet with some companies reportedly operating at 60 percent of 1999 levels.
The informal sector has grown in leaps and bounds, overtaking the formal sector in employment creation.
So what is this horrible forecast coming from Chatham House and the increasing refrain from Morgan Tsvangirai calling for another GNU?
It’s another attempt by the British to get involved with Zimbabwe.
Because when everything had been said and done, after the garments have been taken off and thrown away, the British need us more than we need them. This is the Rubicon river that some of our friends must cross before they are able to accept the fact they are equal to the whiteman.
We have the option to deal with other people and other countries as we are already doing with BRICS and other developing economies.
The British cannot turn their backs and walk away from billions of dollars of their investment in the country, a country with huge untapped resources, a country they sentimentally came to refer to as their ‘Little England’.
The British acquired their Great Britain status largely by exploiting resources from their huge empire that spawned the globe.
And they want to continue doing so to improve the welfare of their citizens back home.
Anybody who cannot understand it is entangling themselves in unnecessary sophistry.
There is no sophistication or impenetrable complexity about nationalism and everyday affairs of the state.
That was the first political lesson we received in the bush during the liberation war and we understood it easily because it is the definition of colonialism.
How long will it take some people to understand that our relationship with our former colonisers was founded and anchored on brute force and that there was no way the British could deal with us on an honest basis?
On the same note, The Financial Gazette’s Cabinet Files CZ’S Notebook of April 3–9 wrote:
“There are people in this country who sincerely believe that in the bush war that ended with the signing of ceasefire at Lancaster House in December 1979, it was the British who were beaten by our swashbuckling guerrilla army. They also believe; illegal sanctions imposed by the West are responsible for the economic mess we are in… just as the same lot believe that our Land Reform Programme was a success. That is what propaganda can do.”
Because the Rhodesians rebelled against the Crown on November 11 1965, the Notebook could be right, we were fighting the Rhodesians and not the British, but one can bet their last dollar that is not what he meant.
To him, the issue of the British or the Rhodesians is neither here nor there.
His point is that the blacks could not have defeated the white man.
It is an insult to the 70 000 people who lost their lives to free the country from British colonialism or Rhodesian racist fascism, whichever way one looks at it. That is the way colonialism programmed us to think, that the white man was invincible.
We have to cross personal Rubicon rivers in our minds to rid ourselves of this debilitating inferiority complex.
As for the Land Reform Programme being a failure, it’s hard to understand what he is using to measure it.
The whiteman peddled the myth that blacks can’t farm yet when they came in 1890, they survived on the crops and the meat from the cattle that they forcibly took from our forefather and this is documented.
And during colonialism, by impounding our cattle and then legislating to leave households with a mere two or three, by pushing us to the dry and barren parts of the country, the whiteman effectively destroyed our capacity to farm.
Today, renowned scholars from their own universities in England, like Professor Ian Scoones, have produced reports that the Land Reform Programme has been a success or else we could be accused of beating our own drum.
The question whether sanctions are real or a creation of ZANU PF in the face of its alleged failures, we would ask him to tell us how the American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Chester Crocker hoped in 2001 to make the Zimbabwean economy scream, how he hoped to get the people to chase their leaders on the streets.
Zimbabwe’s economy was already in a mess before Cuthbert Dube awarded himself a salary of a quarter of a million dollars.
Prophet Emmanuel Makandiwa’s prophecy of the good times lying ahead for Zimbabwe is a confirmation of the inevitable results of ZANU PF’s empowerment programmes.
What does it take for one to see that the British need us more than we need them?
We have already taken off from ground zero without them and that scares them.