LAST week we looked at epistemological genocide carried out on African knowledge systems by the colonial settlers.
Some call it cultural imperialism.
At the core of this calculated onslaught is the role of colonial language.
Colonial languages include English, Portuguese, French and Spanish.
Of these the most dangerous is English in that it surpasses the rest in appropriating the entire cosmos.
It projects the lie that London is the centre of everything.
I have called this conditioning Londo-centricity, the tendency to view London as the centre of the Universe from which everything cascades.
The fellow colonising languages seem to confirm this by not challenging the self-acclaimed superiority of the English Language.
They are reduced to translating mediums.
In this article we demonstrate the extent to which English Language, and by implication fellow colonising languages, contribute to imperial conditioning.
Let us look at the way the world itself is divided into geographical regions.
The centre is London.
The rest is defined from that centre.
When you hear ‘middle east’ you are made to think of this part of the world in relation to London.
It simply means ‘Middle East’ of London.
If it is further away from London, it is called ‘far east’. And yet these places are populated by people and had names for their places before.
Tragically, they are now known by their relationship to the centre.
This tendency to de-name and re-name is a key strategy of colonial re-appropriation.
It is wrestling ownership from the indigenous people.
The colonisers know well that the best way to destroy a people is to take away their collective identity and there is no better way than denying a people the name of their territory.
When Zimbabwe was successfully occupied it became known as Rhodesia, after the usurper’s name.
In fact at some point Zimbabwe and Zambia became known as Southern and Northern Rhodesia, respectively.
To date South Africa is still known as such as defined by London – as south of Africa.
The whole continent of Africa was a victim of this re-naming scandal.
You want to think of Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique), South West Africa (Namibia), Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nyasaland (Malawi), just to mention a few.
Within the colonised nations critical places such as shrines were also targets of desecration and subsequent re-appropriation.
Great Zimbabwe Monuments is satirically reduced to Great Zimbabwe Ruins as if to celebrate the demise of a ‘useless civilisation’.
Mabweadziva/Matonjeni is first defiled by planting the coloniser’s grave on the holy rock.
Then it is renamed Matopos which is neither Shona nor Ndebele.
Mosi-oa-Tunya/ Shunguya Mutitima is re-named after the Queen in London.
It is now called Victoria Falls, as if she created the falls.
Just like Masvingo, then called Fort Victoria, again as if to replace all the great ancestral empires such as the Mutapa and the Rozvi empires which both hailed from there.
Similarly, Harare is called Salisbury after one of the pioneer administrators. And Chivhumudhara became Enkeldorn.
Hartley replaced Chegutu.
This became the fate of all our towns, cities and geographic sites.
If they were not re-named, their existing names were deliberately corrupted. This was the fate of Mandiseta (Chimanimani) which became Melsetter.
And Mutare which became Umtali.
The naming moved from territory to people in order to remove the last vestige of identity.
Colonial local governments registered Africans with new colonial names.
They were backed by colonial churches in this sinister adventure.
All the Christians had to be renamed.
They had to be given English names taken from King James Version which had succeeded in Anglicising all the Hebrew names in the original Bible.
For instance ‘Yashua’ became ‘Jesus’.
Today Zimbabwe and indeed the rest of Africa and its Diaspora are known as Mary, John, Stephen, Alexander, Timothy, Ruth, Rebecca and James, among others.
Those that retained their African names were not only looked down upon; others were also corrupted.
For instance, my revered mother’s surname Mugariwa has been rebranded Mugarwa by the colonial district administrator’s office.
Many of us continue the burden of such gross distortions or misnames.
Our children’s children will inherit the wrong identity ad infinitum.
It must be remembered that African names carry with them not just identity, but a whole repertoire of history and permanent sense of communal solidarity.
When the colonialists were done with our institutional identities, they moved on to assault our last line of defence – our minds.
They dismissed our knowledge systems and reconfigured our minds with foreign lenses.
As reconstituted automatons we find nothing wrong with the whiteman’s lexicon which has replaced our own.
As I demonstrated before, we now accept without questioning the meaning of ‘international’.
It has come to refer to the involvement of Europe and America.
Their wars are ours too.
That is why European wars are called world wars.
They are the centre and we are ‘third world’ countries or developing countries; implying that we are en route to where the developed countries (Europe and US) are, ‘guided expeditiously by their experienced hand’.
The ‘developed world’ is also the ‘global community’. SADC is not.
It is a sub-regional bloc belonging to a bloc called Sub-Saharan Africa.
Together with Arab North Africa they form a continent called Africa which itself is not global.
The US is global. And so is Europe. To belong to the global community you must subscribe to these two centres.
The point is it is time we question imperial discourse which though geography-specific, but assumes that it is the world standard.
Is it not strange that Africans are content to follow as the whole world and its processes are masterminded by a small minority who give themselves the monopoly of defining world agendas and processes?