MY friend misses the village and its past offerings; jenaguru, the full moon in the village during the post- harvest period when the young were let loose to enjoy themselves. The village reverberated to ngoma jiti/mbende sounds. She also fondly remembers her good misfortune at being repeatedly chosen by the Matigimus of the village in the Sarurawako kadeyadeya ane ndoro chena courtship game. When prodded about the poverty and colonial injustices she shows no bitterness; the hardship apprenticed her into the successful and hardworking being she is today. She is not bitter that she wore her first pair of shoes in grade five; only saw her father during Easter, Rhodes and Founders and Christmas or the indignity of having been a third class citizen. My watering hole discussion occasionally slips to the days when the Rhodesian dollar was at par with the American dollar. Some fondly remember the amount of beer they could buy from one Rhodesian dollar. Few recall the poverty that accompanied the Rhodesian value; earning $20/month, four families sharing a room in Makokoba, the education bottle necks that saw many bright minds being denied opportunities, the long journeys to the nearest primary health care facilities, lack of political and economic choices, brutal treatment at the workplace and many more injustices. For blacks property meant furniture, while for the colonisers, property meant real estate, land. The tragedy about Africa is this tendency to remember its colonial past with adulation and post-colonial past with self-hate. Africa is made to recall the pre-colonial era not as the slavery period, but as the pre-civilisation period when Africans fought meaningless wars, went about semi-naked. The colonial period is remembered as the civilisation period that brought Christianity, education and Western materialism. In this line of remembering, the post-colonial period is remembered as the era of dictatorships, coups, civil wars and poverty. Racism and its manifestation through slavery and colonialism is one of the worst crimes against humanity of the modern era. The exploitative economic system that underpinned colonialism remains alive and well today. I recently met a colleague who has been in the Diaspora for the last decade in South Africa and Mozambique. In South Africa he lamented not just the white control of the economy. He was very upset with the lack of recognition by the white establishment of black intellectual capital or the realities of independence. For this he felt Zimbabwe’s land revolution has positively impacted race relations. An Africa without control of its land and resources is a colonial Africa. We have seen the anger that has been directed against Zimbabwe’s land reform. Sadly you find fellow patriots joining the bandwagon criticising land reform beneficiaries for not being productive. I know of a colleague with a 100 hectare plot. To put the plot under maize, he needs US$100 000 inputs and if he were to venture into potatoes he needs US$700 000. Can we really blame him for not utilising his land? Now we must dignify him by encouraging him to rent out the farm to the former settler? Africa must liberate itself from Western exploitation and enrich its own people. It is not an easy walk to this liberation. Nkurumah, Lumumba, Sankara, Gaddafi paid the ultimate price for such thinking and acting. We have seen how President Mugabe has been demonised for seeking African ownership of land and mineral resources through land reform, indigenisation and the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-ASSET). In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated, Gaddafi had managed to turn Libya into Africa’s wealthiest nation. Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands. Under Gaddafi’s rule, Libyans enjoyed not only free healthcare and free education, but also free electricity and interest-free loans. Gaddafi was assassinated by the West at a time when he was embarking on a continental mineral refinement programme that would have dramatically shifted the economic balance between Africa and the West. Unfortunately with the assassination, all this Libyan past will be forgotten. Lasting images shall be of civil strife mirroring the Western stereotype of post-colonial Africa.