HomeOld_PostsPuncturing imperial discourse: Part One

Puncturing imperial discourse: Part One

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IT is my pleasure to announce this new series on the block, especially now that it is coming right on the heels of a long journey in which The Patriot has faithfully escorted our brothers and sisters all the way from January 2014 to the October-November examinations.
My sincere hope is that those who have been following our literary commentaries on Advanced Level Literature in English set books in preparation for their current on-going examinations are enjoying the benefits of those hints and insights.
I have decided to shelve that intellectual barrage for now to permit our candidates to do justice to their on-going exams.
In place of exam hints and commentaries which we will resume next year for our new L6 initiates, I have decided to fill in the gap with something more general.
The series on ‘Puncturing imperial discourse’ marks the necessary interlude between the just ended literary commentaries of 2014 and those awaiting current L5 who are soon joining the same baptism of fire and brimstone this coming January.
The ideology that informed past reviewers of texts will continue to inform even this interlude, being the only constant that defines our identity as Africans.
The series introduces you to a cryptanalysis of some sort.
It is driven by the desire to unmask the cryptical ideologies of Western imperialism which have kept Africans in political, economic and intellectual bondage for five-and-half centuries through sustained hypnosis cast by their magical education and media propagandas.
Granted, if a people have been hypnotised, tormented and confused for five-and-a half centuries by foreign dogma, it would be naïve to expect them to come out of the spill-binding stupor overnight.
Admittedly, it demands a great deal of persistent drumming to reverse the process of mental customisation through colonisation.
Indeed this series will go a long way towards contributing to this noble feat of kurutsisa.
Puncturing the imperial discourse series is one that will provide a necessary ideological bridge in the interim.
It is predicated on the need to unmask the pillars of global imperialism which continue to stalk and ransack Africa materially, milking us culturally and continuing to peddle the intellectual enslavement of our people, young and old. These myths and lies are masked in sponsored education, sponsored media programmes and sponsored political ideologies such as the myth of democracy.
Such disorienting imperial discourse also manifested through the manipulation of things as innocent-appearance as food, drink and sex.
The over-arching purpose of this series is to puncture the basis of Western epistemological imperialism.
You just have to understand the full meaning and implications of this important term, epistemology which I am happy to announce as an operating system that determines a people’s knowing patterns.
Nothing is more important to identity and self-knowledge than knowing, including knowing how to know and what to know.
Epistemology is about studying knowledge systems.
The next submission will take you to town about this all-important concept.
It will take great caution to painstakingly explain what epistemology is and why you should understand it.
Need I stress that all of us especially the so-called educated are all under the spell of Western epistemological imperialism.
This is the greatest tragedy ever to befall Africa.
You should proceed to analyse how Western epistemology was used as the buttressing philosophy hence the urgent need to puncture its self-acclaimed invincibility by pointing to its naked lies.
When we are clear about this then we can agitate for its immediate displacement by the very African epistemology that Western imperialism so feared most, displaced and sought to inter for ever as evidenced by the symbolic burial of Cecil John Rhodes on Zimbabwe’s most sacred shrine, Mabweadziva which you now know as Matopos.
When you understand the power of epistemological imperialism you will also understand why the statue of David Livingstone should be removed from that other holy site of ours, Shunguya Mutitima (another local name for Mo-sia-Tunya), which you innocently call Victoria Falls.
Then you can understand why colonial names should be removed from our towns, roads and schools.
Everywhere you go you still meet a building ‘revered’ as ‘Beit Hall’ and wonder which ubiquitous African hero was ever called Alfred Beit.
The examples are far too many to mention all under our very noses existing as if natural.
No they are not natural names.
It is our eyes that are drunken with the imperialists narcotic that see order where there is disorder.
Africa it’s high time you wake up.
First to give a tip of the series therapeutic concoction you need to start to puncture the lie that there was no history in Africa before the coming of the white predators and destroyers.
You need to disabuse yourself of such terms as ‘slave trade’.
Never was there such a trade.
It was clearly mass humiliation.
Nothing was paid for millions of people forcibly shipped across the Atlantic.
What trade have you come across that puts no money at the centre.
Disabuse yourself of such immoral euphemism.
Refuse to believe that international means US and America.
It also means Southern African Development Community countries working together.
l To be continued

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