MARCUS GARVEY once said: “History is the guidepost for a race, it is the inspiration for succeeding generations to know whether it is time to advance or retreat, to revenge or be avenged.”
As blacks are a people that have come out of suffering and prejudice, we are a race determined to suffer no more.
We have to learn from our experiences.
Any nation which aspires to be great has to first unite and break barriers among its people.
The Chinese were united owing to movements such as that of Mao Tse Tung.
They displayed this unity during the long march which saw millions of Chinese working together.
This cooperation is still evident in the billions that exist today.
The hostile nations of the West are therefore careful not to attack China because they have seen what their patriotic spirit and power of masses achieved in fighting Britain and Japan.
Garvey also taught that the prejudice against us as an African people is not because of our colour but our condition.
If we must have justice, we must be strong.
To be strong we must come together.
To come together, we can only do so through the system of organisation.
It is this organisation that is attacked on a micro and macro level.
Blacks in Africa are mostly divided by foreign religions and colonial borders, yet in all truth, we are the same people.
In the West, if many blacks begin working together to liberate themselves, they are called ‘gangsters’ and are attacked by law enforcement institutions.
An example is the Black Panther movement which had the best of intentions, but was demonised to the point of murdering and imprisoning its members.
Marcus Garvey faced imprisonment and deportation.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were murdered in cold blood.
Yet organisation is the only way that blacks and any other race can get truly emancipated.
Blacks seek differences among temselves yet when non-blacks look at us, they see blacks.
Many actually assume we are one people because we are all black-skinned and wooly-haired, but in reality we are divided among ourselves.
The political or colonial borders that the whites have imposed on our lands have to be removed to bring the interdependence that existed throughout Africa and Asia when the likes of Abraham and his descendants could move to and from Africa and stay for centuries without worrying about a passport.
A passport should be required only when we leave the continent.
A national identity card should suffice as a travel document for blacks travelling in Africa.
This is the case for the Chinese who visit provinces besides their own within China.
Some may argue that China is a country like Zimbabwe.
This is not so.
The city of Shanghai alone has about 30 million people and Zimbabwe only has about 13 million.
China used to have many places it considered nations within itself until they had to come together to fight a common enemy during the British–China Opium wars.
It was divisions that had caused for them to be almost wholly colonised but once they learnt from their mistake, they have never looked back.
If China could eliminate its internal borders regardless of ethnic and linguistic differences, why cant we?
China has many races besides the common Han tribe and even more languages and dialects besides Mandarin, but this did not stop them from uniting.
The Chinese simply picked out one language and dialect from the many that exist and made it the official language for these united states of Far East Asia, excluding only Japan and North Korea.
In southern Africa, we find that the indigenous people are all black and the languages are all Bantu.
We share the doctrine of hunhu or ubuntu (humanness) and these common denominators are evidence of our past united existence.
We can also pick out one out of the many southern African languages that we have so as to understand each other in the region and still retain our own.
In Shanghai, the public announcements are made both in Mandarin and Shanghainese, which are quite different from each other but share the same grammar and root words.
Presently, China is trying to unite itself with neighbouring countries like Myanmar and Kazakhstan by modernising the great silk road of old with a railway line and business projects.
No wonder they are doing so well as a nation.
For Zimbabwe to try to make it on its own is like one Chinese city trying to compete with the whole of China.
Interdependence will make us share resources and markets within the region and what we do not have locally, we can procure from our neighbors and vice versa.
Self-sufficiency in the region will therefore be possible because the word self would be encompassing hundreds of millions of people and numerous resources besides our own.
The sea of Mozambique will become the sea of all southern Africa and any businessman will be able to easily take his goods to the coast for export without being treated like a foreigner.
This is how the Chinese businesses all over China export goods from Guangzhou, for example.
To a Chinese man from Beijing in the north, Guangzhou which is far south, is not a foreign land, but a point to simply access the sea.
While there are thousands of kilometres between the two cities and the dialects and even writing styles are different, there is no passport needed.
International trade by sea is therefore possible for a person whose own city may be landlocked.
Unless registered as a foreigner and holding a passport, Zimbabweans are restricted from the sea which our ancestors used to access freely before colonisation.
This is because the whites who colonised us left the Western side for Britain and the east for the Portuguese.
Why should we continue to adhere to these oppressive laws that were set up by our enemies to divide and conquer us?
And yet we still aspire to be great.
Africa is a giant and its resources and market could exceed that of China if properly channelled to benefit its people.
Imperialism and capitalism are not the way for us.
They give opportunity to foreign empires that sustain their economies through slavery and colonial benefits and this oppresses us.
Humans should exploit land for resources not to have themselves exploited by other humans.
The former Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said: “The time of empire and bullying smaller nations is over.
“Now is a time when the nations with the most culture and values will be dominant.”
This is how and why China, Islamic nations and India are doing so well.
They still treasure their culture and develop their nations with their values as a foundation.
Such is not the case in Africa where development is equated to Westernisation.