TODAY we are bearing witness to the Chinese renaissance which accelerated from about 40 years ago and is based on studying foreign knowledge and merging it with their own.
This way, they have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
In Africa, we have the problem of forgoing our own and partaking that of others.
This only empowers the foreign entity we are copying from and will not benefit us as a people unless we base it on our own values and ethics.
This is comparable to building a house with no foundation or a tree with no roots.
Though ethnic variations among humans from different locations determine what fields are to be improved on so as to bring about a renaissance, there are certain aspects such as writing, sea navigation, medicine, construction and religion that empower nations that understand them.
If these same fields are misunderstood, a nation cannot excel to greatness.
Never follow something you do not understand.
This is like letting a first timer drive on the highway.
He will only succeed by chance.
Even a computer needs to get a programme installed before it can read files.
Unfortunately in Africa, owing to neo-colonialism and its subsequent destructive education system which most African nations have inherited from their former colonisers, we are not groomed to understand crucial fields like the earlier stated, but to simply follow standards from our former colonisers.
These education systems were set up by missionaries like Robert Moffat in Botswana and his son John Moffat in Zimbabwe.
This education was imposed on the Africans as a way to brainwash them under the guise of civilisation.
Along with the colonial education system was the imposition of foreign laws and religions and the subsequent demonisation and outlawing of indigenous ones.
Hair was outlawed because it was in the form of dreadlocks that the whites did not understand.
The cutting of the Africans hair to the lowest possible level before boldness was mandatory and called ‘English cut’.
The name and hairstyle remains to this day yet one will find that most English people, including those in Africa, always keep their hair long.
Without our wooly hair as a protector and absorber of the sun’s rays, Africans are now more prone to cancer caused by ultra violet rays than ever before.
Once one hates a trait of his race, he will eventually hate the rest.
Now, Africans wear wigs, weaves and bleach their skin and this is because they have over time been taught to hate themselves.
Even African names were demonised and one had to get an English or so-called Christian name.
The religion of our forefathers was replaced by a foreign one imposed on us.
Our own people became sell-outs and would be involved in capturing devout followers of indigenous beliefs who would be imprisoned and often killed by the settler-regime.
As the saying goes: “The whites came into Africa with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other.”
Even medicine which Africans found in the food they ate, including the roots, bark, herbs and so on, was demonised.
White people’s medicine, which was and continues to be, from chemicals was prescribed or rather imposed on our people.
Since the time of creation, we lived, growing old and physically prominent, without chemical medicine but using only what was God-given.
Once we abandoned this treasure of natural medicine for the foreign chemicals we do not understand, blacks began having a short life expectancy, low quality of health and previously unheard of diseases. Chemicals have no place in our bodies because we are not made out of chemicals, thus they have a poisonous effect.
Sea navigation has always been the key to trade of goods and culture.
Air travel is proving to be faster but is not comparable to sea travel in terms of safety.
Sea travel is natural and air travel is unnatural.
The latter defies gravity with the aid of costly equipment and fuel that pollutes the atmosphere.
It is relatively new and has no history of longevity unlike the ancient way of floating a vessel on water.
Before the coming of the Europeans into the region, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Zambians, Malawians, Tanzanians, Kenyans, Rwandese, Burundians, the Congolese, Ugandans and others were one people.
This can be seen in the Bantu languages that are used throughout this east and central part of Africa.
They all share the same names for Lord (Mulungu), human (munhu), moon (mwedzi), dog (imbwa), cow (mombe) and so on.
This shows us that there were no politico-cultural borders in the ancient world.
Today, Zimbabwe is called landlocked because the British colonised us while the Portuguese claimed Mozambique which borders the ocean.
The indigenous name of our eastern region was ‘Mazambuko’ because there we would cross over to other lands by way of sea travel.
‘Yambuka’ is the key word which is Shona in all respects for ‘crossing over’.
Even the boats that were used to crossover to places like Madagascar (Matagadzikwa), southern Arabia (Sheba) and India were called mazambuko or samboks.
As far as construction is concerned, southern Africa has the Great Zimbabwe and Machema in Mapungubwe.
The bricklaying system we have today was practiced by our ancestors 500 years before the Europeans adopted it from the Moors.
The conical tower testifies to a thorough understanding of geometry and the absence of mortar as a joining agent suggests a greater understanding of construction than that of the modern day.
On the walls of the Machema site is a writing done by laying bricks of a different colour to the rest of the wall.
This writing resembles the ancient Minao-Sabaic script.
Unfortunately, the rest of the wall which probably contained more inscriptions was destroyed along with a conical tower whose remains suggest the knowledge of geometry, a branch of mathematics.
So our ancestors, at a certain point, could read and write, build with bricks, navigate the seas, medicate themselves and practised their own culture and beliefs.
A return to such intellectual prowess is the key to truly excelling in development.
Navigating the seas is what gave world dominance to Portugal and Spain before the Dutch and the British.
The US relies on its navy to secure trade routes and monitor world activities.
Yet our coastal region of Mazambuko, which is of great proximity to us, has been taken over by foreigners under the hoax of ‘globalisation’ which is in fact imperialism.
Tanganyika and Kenya have also lost their coasts to foreign companies and have no capacity to monitor their seas for poachers and so on.
Somalia tried to take back its coast by violent means and in turn they were labelled pirates and terrorists by the foreign companies that exploit the Horn of Africa that links this continent to India and Arabia.
South Africa has lost its coast to the settler-whites who govern it and have time and again reminded us of this sad reality by refusing to accept Zimbabwean goods such as weapons from China in 2009.
This was a form of informal sanctioning in conjunction with hostile nations like the US, further proving that whoever governs the coasts of South Africa does not have African interests at heart.
What needs to be done for the African to empower himself to the point of being great again?
It is a modern era and the ancient ways may seem inapplicable.
But do not let machines fool you.
They are simply replacing human labour, but the processes are essentially the same.
Our ancestors smelted gold and copper with extreme heat and the process remains the same today, only improved by the aid of machinery.