IT is early evening, mbuya nasekuru are just seated at home entertaining their ‘muzukuru’ who arrived earlier that afternoon.
“Muzukuru anevana here?” Mbuya asks Sekuru who is more knowledgeable about their relative.
“She is not yet married,” Sekuru replies.
I take a deep breath of relief, it feels good to be reminded that Zimbabwe still has people who honour our age-old values.
Among our people, it is against the norm for daughters to have children before they are married.
So some of us remember who we are, but so many others don’t.
Colonialists came and in order to secure their control over us, attacked our value system viciously in order to reduce us to a people without a soul because people without a soul will dance to any tune and yet among our people today are found some of the staunchest defenders of this evil erosion of our mores.
Our traditions were trashed and we were told the whiteman’s ways are the correct way to be and yet today so many of us seem still so oblivious of this.
The virtues of chastity have been severely undermined among our young, especially those most exposed to the whiteman’s world by living in the cities and through schooling.
Hard work has been derogated to mean white collar or bookish endeavour.
Work has been diminutivised to exclude productive work which yields man’s means of survival.
Our very sense of self-esteem has been severely damaged to the extent that many of our women do not feel good unless they dress and make themselves up the white woman’s way, complete with flowing hair, bleached yellow skin and silver grey contact lenses.
Today, chaos reigns in our homes, prostitution, and prostitution-born disease, mistrust, resentment, continue to destabilise the family.
It is a thing too strange to say to those raised after the whiteman’s heart that they should abstain from sexual relations until marriage.
This has long been thrown out of the window as archaic, too backward for any normal person.
The Western morality which makes it so simple that multiple sexual partners pre-maritally and extra-maritally are not an issue is making serious inroads among our people.
And with this ‘gospel’ of moral laxity comes attendant evils.
The resulting low moral threshold makes it easy for so many moral and ethical boundaries to be broken down.
The child’s psychological and social virginity is destroyed long before it can read or write.
The invasion of the child’s sanctity is carried out through the audio and visual gadgets it is subjected to from the very early ages.
Radio, TV and the rest of the ICT’s are all dominated by the whiteman’s ways.
The child is violated so early it becomes a joke to make so much noise about child sexual abuse.
How should a child feel violated when someone touches it inappropriately, when it daily sees people dressed inappropriately, people talking inappropriately, people touching inappropriately?
So what you are saying to the child is that; ‘Sexual permissiveness is incorrect, but for adults only’.
Can you ever say to a child; ‘Stealing is wrong, but for adults only’?
If not then how is it possible to say to children: ‘All that they see and hear that is sexually inappropriate is wrong, but for adults’?
This is a violation of children’s rights.
Children should not be exposed to what is so evil, so perverse then told only until you are older.
This hypocrisy and this irresponsibility is what is destroying our children.
You are driving at night in the Avenues and a whore suddenly opens her ‘dress’ revealing all her horrid nudity.
Children, young persons, see this, what does it say to them?
They know it is wrong, it is evil, but adults love to indulge in such, that is why they leave it to flourish.
Tomorrow you herd the children, the youngsters into a classroom and you bring the so-called experts and the police to tell them: ‘If uncle, auntie, anybody touches you like this, it is a problem’?
Who are you fooling?
The children are not touched by such cruelty and hypocrisy.
How can you run these programmes just to please some NGOs?
These programmes are not run because of love for Zimbabwe’s children, but to please someone, some other people, and these people are not Zimbabwe’s children.
The children would ask the police if they could: ‘If it is so evil why don’t you start by clearing the streets then I can know it’s evil’?
The children would ask: ‘So I must watch all this as I walk home from school, I must watch it on TV, I must see and hear it everywhere, but I must put it into practice only when I grow up’.
Is that it?
Children are not born evil, they love what is good, but when we make things that are so evil normal to them, something happens inside them, they get hurt, disheartened and disenchanted.
What child can look forward to a life that is so corrupt, a life in which adults are so hypocritical there is nothing to look up to?
Some years back, a little boy was playing with its friends in the bush and they stumbled on two adults committing adultery.
In shock, the children ran away.
This little boy committed suicide a few days later.
Unknown to its friends, it had recognised the woman as its mother.
We must therefore be a people who learn from history.
Western capitalist decadent morality was instituted as part of colonialism, and we have subsequently bought into it, against the better judgment of our own moral, ethical and aesthetic values.
Today this decadent morality is wreaking havoc among us, and guess who is telling us how to solve the problem?
Those who brought the disease.
They have no intention to heal the disease, but to ensure that we never get out of the maze.
That is why they will pay legal fees for prostitutes when they are caught soliciting.
Can they heal the disease among our people when it is flourishing among their own people?
Can we not see that the mathematics is wrong?
Until we acknowledge that ‘none, but ourselves can set us free’, we will be permanent victims of those who profit by our demise.
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.