AFRICAN leaders are meeting European leaders to chart the future of the world, but without Zimbabwe.
The theme of the summit is: ‘Investing in People, Prosperity and Peace’.
It is a noble theme, but the irony of it is that Zimbabwe, which has invested perhaps more than all African nations in its people for sustainable peace and prosperity is absent from the summit.
It is an absence that protests the disrespect that Europeans have for Africans.
The acts of disrespect which the 36 African leaders in attendance have to endure include, a denial of the right to determine the African membership to the summit, thus resulting in the inclusion of suspended Egypt and non-African Union (AU) member Morocco.
Racist disrespect also includes the denial of a Visa to the Zimbabwe First Lady, Mai Grace Mugabe as well as the exclusion of Eritrea, the Sudan and the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic in spite of their full recognition by the AU.
The whole world knows why Europe is uncomfortable with the presence of the President of Zimbabwe.
He took land and resources from white people and gave them to black people.
He invested in black people for sustainable peace and prosperity!
And, in a world where power relations are racially skewed, the terrible fear in the Western world is that the Zimbabwean aberration may become the black man’s norm.
Considered outside a cosmic perspective, those African leaders who have chosen to attend the summit obviously think it is a non-issue.
Yet from another sense, one cannot help notice that the African attendance also speaks of other critical traits in African leadership.
Does Africa have a fair distribution of leaders who are endowed with the rare gift of perceiving issues from a global position, informed by global history?
How is the African attendance interpreting the European arrogance?
Is the slave who feels liked by his master the lucky one or the doomed one?
Is a former slave ever liked by a former slave master for his own advantage?
Is he not liked because he is the one most amenable to the master’s bidding?  
The master expects and knows the loyal ex-slave will continue to work against his own interests even without supervision. 
The loyal ex-slave is even more doomed than the slave who is hated.
A racist once commented that: “Africans do not read and the perfect place to hide anything from Africans is to put it in a book,” and it is turning out to be a very painful truth.
Africans have fervently read the Bible, but missed the most liberating truth in it. The Bible is the story of a people who remained loyal to an exclusive faith even in the face of insurmountable adversity.
When they were enslaved in Babylon, they never questioned the wisdom or strength of their God.
Conversely, they provided a reason for him: that he was testing their faith.
And, when the Jews came out of Egypt, the Passover was supposed to be re-enacted every year right up to eternity, lest they forgot the act of liberation. 
After 400 years of slavery in Egypt, Jews came out of it with greater faith in the capacity of the God who had let them slave for the four centuries.
And, one would like to believe that after an equal four centuries of slavery in Europe and America, the Jewish experience should be fundamental in re-converting African Christian converts back to their own religions.
The Jewish experience should be fundamental in re-converting African leadership back to the gospel of liberation struggle in which the African charts his own destiny.   
Yet, ironically while the most religious people in the world have become Africans practising Islam and Christianity, both of which are not original to Africa, it appears we have missed the whole message altogether and the result is that in Nigeria and the Central African Republic, the traditional conflict of the two religions is the cause of the civil wars there.
And, at a time the African leadership is supposed to be leading African people in reclaiming lost dignity and lost sovereignty and lost resources, the African attendance at the EU-Africa summit actually shows an attempt by that leadership to lead Africans back to slavery.
Coming in short advance of the Christian Easter Holiday, perhaps the EU-African summit must remind Africans that when Jesus fell under the weight of the cross on his way to the weeping place it is a black man, Simon of Cyrene who was gang-pressed to carry it for him.
And one wonders if the lesson to us is not that today, as European economies falter from extravagancies founded on colonial pillage and the abuse of black people, the corrective austerity measures for the racist indulgencies must not be borne by Africans.  
They must be borne by the beneficiaries of the racist indulgencies.
It is time for Africans to interrogate Jesus’ observation: This is why I speak to them in parables: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.” Matthew 13:13.
It is time for Africans to interrogate Acts 28:26 “Go to this people and say, “You will be ever hearing, but never understanding; you will be ever seeing, but never perceiving.”
It is time for Africans to interrogate Romans 11:8: as it is written: “God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that could not see and ears that could not hear, to this very day.”
It is time to re-convert back to Africa to find strength in Nehanda’s refusal to be baptised into an exclusive faith that was preached by robbers, murderers and homosexuals who stood to gain from her rejection of her own past.