By Mashingaidze Gomo

IN my last installment, I mentioned the ‘prayer warrior’ who read almost nothing else, but the Bible, and who incidentally used the history of Israel to interpret what is happening in Zimbabwe today.
I did mention that there was no awareness (in the prayer warrior) that history always gravitates into patterns that turn prophecy into a science anybody with interest can study and practice, so that any scholar should be able to use the patterns of history to prophesy and redress national problems.
In this installment I want to say that the prayer warrior also did say that we should not live in the past; that we should forget the past and pray for our future, most particularly pray to go to heaven.
He invited me to pray for our nation, particularly to pray for national healing.
However, while we agreed on the principle of prayer, we disagreed on the context that should inform the prayer.
My position was that it is in the interests of anyone taking the decision to become national prayer warrior to know the historical origins of their tragedy.
It is prudent for them to research and know the historical backgrounds of their perceived friends and enemies.
It is important to be guided by such research.
On the other hand, his own position was that (in the preacher’s words) it was all a ‘chasing after the wind’.
Yet, ironically, he went on to quote and praise Daniel’s steadfastness in worshipping the God of Israel even in captivity.
And for me, that identified him as totally oblivious to the fact that Daniel constitutes Israel’s past and that particular past predates our own riotous present by over two and half millennia.
And what that meant to him was that everyone else’s past should matter except his own.
When, he proceeded to zealously quote Job ‘uyo akarwara kusvika pakusemesa achingoteerera,’ I discovered that he knew nothing about our own Nehanda who chose to die rather than succumb to British Satanism.
And while he talked about Abraham, Israel and David, and talked about Moses being raised in Pharaoh’s household, I noticed that he was not interested in knowing that Tongogara was Zimbabwe’s own Mosaic equivalent whose childhood was spent on the Smith farm in Selukwe, but like Moses, rose to bring the Rhodesian Pharaoh (Ian Smith) down to his knees and again like Moses, died on the edges of liberation.
And he talked about David and Goliath without appreciating poorly equipped ZANLA guerrillas who punched holes into the over 50 Rhodesian combat aircraft that mobbed Chimoio in November 1977.
And, while talking about the gospel of prosperity, he confessed ignorance of the colonial constitutional foundations of the black man’s poverty.
Looking back now (and with all due respect for the prayer warrior’s constitutional freedom of worship) it makes me sad to imagine how someone with so much ignorance of his own past should even attempt to make the story of Israel’s past more relevant to him than Zimbabwe’s own past, more so, without himself (prayer warrior) knowing anything about the historical context in which he is existing.
I also wonder how it would be logical to exclusively invoke the history of Israel to heal Zimbabwe?
Above all, would there be logic in Africa sending prayer warriors (to the United Nations and other international conferences) armed with nothing, but the history of Israel, to defend indigenous interests defined by the traumatic history of Africa? And, that traumatic history being the very same history the prayer warriors feel is irrelevant to their well-being!
Perhaps the challenges that must be defined for prayer warriors engaged in politics, international diplomacy and national healing are:
How does one address the trauma of dispossession without thorough knowledge of the history of dispossession?
How does a Zimbabwean address the trauma of dispossession by knowing God’s promise to give Abraham the land of Canaan and not Nehanda’s vow to resurrect in liberation struggle?
How does a descendant of dispossessed ancestors correct the legacy of poverty by embracing the history of other men and ignoring his own?
How do we pray for peace outside the historical context that explains the absence of peace in Africa?
How do we hope to achieve peace by denying the historical context that gives us woe?
How do we pray for peace when we are ignorant of the causes of distress that are embedded in our history?
How do we preach the gospel of prosperity without alerting our fellowship to the acts of law that Rhodesians specifically put in place to disempower black Zimbabweans?
Mike Campbell, the racist apartheid war criminal in Benjamin Freeth’s documentary propaganda, Mugabe and the White African, confirms all these concerns when he says: “I often say to people I wouldn’t want my grandchildren to one day in the future say, ‘You know, my grandfather had a farm in Africa, then a few guys said boo! to him and he packed his bags and ran away.’
“I would rather they had the impression that we fought for the farm, whether we keep it or lose it.”
Campbell’s wish was for white grandchildren empowered by the dispossession of black people to be proud of a history that would relate a racist grandfather’s fight to keep black people landless.
In conclusion, the best food for thought I leave to those Zimbabwean prayer warriors (who know nothing else, but the history of Israel) is another quote from the same apartheid war criminal Mike Campbell.
When he challenged the compulsory acquisition of stolen land (from Rhodesians) for re-distribution to landless black Zimbabweans (in the now defunct SADC Tribunal, his stated objective was: “If we win this case, the whole land reform programme in Zimbabwe becomes illegal.”
The wider as well as graver implications of this heartless objective is that success in our struggle for the total liberation of Zimbabwe is firmly premised in the thorough knowledge of the historical trauma that impoverished us.