By Farayi Mungoshi

STEVE BIKO once said: “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.”
Many decades later after his death, I shudder to think and say most of us Africans have still not grasped this truth.
Most of us do not even know what it means neither can we recognise the pattern in our very own lives.
Most people from my generation cringe upon hearing such terms as keeping things African, or observing our African culture, traditions or heritage.
They immediately rush to think we are talking about taking them back to the days of spears, knobkerries and nhembe.
They rush to say there is nothing to celebrate about the old days when there was no electricity or cars and we had to walk miles to fetch water and use firewood to do all our cooking sitting around the fireplace and telling folk-stories.
Needless to say we have been conditioned by the oppressor to think this way instead of looking at ourselves and cranking up that potential and energy within us to invent our own things. They got us staring and marvelling at their inventions (of which some were actually stolen from the blackman) and looking down on ourselves as if we are incapable of inventing anything.
Let me use a personal example.
What started off as a healthy verbal argument with my best friend some 23 years ago about our history ended up turning nasty.
The question was whether or not it was a good thing the whiteman invaded Africa.
We ended up getting into an embarrassing physical fight because he felt that the coming of the whiteman was a good thing.
He said without them, Africa would have remained a ‘dark continent’ with no cars, trains, airplanes and even the infrastructure we now have.
In other words, we owe the whiteman or else we would still be wearing nhembe.
I on the other hand felt the whiteman had done a horrible thing by invading our land.
Then I did not have enough facts, neither could I actually explain myself as to why I felt their (settlers) coming was not good for Africa.
After all, we have that Shona saying: “Chirungu chakauya nengarava.”
How then is it a bad thing if they brought this kind of infrastructure?
Who wants to stay in a hut without electricity?
My friend defended the invasion by the whiteman with such vigour that 23 years on, it is still vivid in my mind.
Each time I opened my mouth to say something during the argument, he would mention another achievement by the Americans that everybody knew about like going to the moon.
It was useless for me to try and mention such things created or built by blacks like the pyramids in Egypt.
The reason being ancient Egypt and its greatness was irrelevant to him and his day-to-day needs.
The pyramids do not light up his house when it’s dark at night.
And just to make some of our friends laugh mockingly at me, he ended by shouting some very infuriating words at me: “Enda unopfeka nhembe dzako uko!”
So, yes my best friend and I fought over the fact that he told me to go wear nhembe.
At that moment I forgot about all the great things black people had done, or the stories I had heard about the Moors (blacks) that ruled Spain for generations till the Europeans decided to overthrow them because they posed a threat to their race.
I threw out my knowledge of Great Zimbabwe, the little I knew and held dear then simply because this guy had told me to go wear nhembe.
You got to understand that being teenagers at that time telling a young man to go and wear nhembe was a great insult.
Why?
Because it meant you were backward, a zinjathropus.
Listening to mbira music was also backward.
The girls wouldn’t look at you twice so we tried to fit in by listening to the in-thing.
While people generally might not see that they are slaves despite living in a free country, it is up to those that can see to push hard and preach the news of decolonising the mind.
How?
By looking back at ourselves and embracing who we are, our past, losses, gains and genealogy and by focusing mostly on our triumphs through the ages, are we able to realise that we have it in us to contest on a larger scale with the rest of the world and build a greater future for our children.
Where do we start?
In the mind, what we eat, what we wear, how we talk, how we preserve what we were taught by our elders, our heritage.
We are not poor, we just need to remember that we started mining gold before the whiteman came.
We started building houses of stone before they came, but somewhere along the line we stopped and started looking at them.
Looking at something in adoration like that over a period of time is not any different from worshipping that thing.
And so it goes in life, the more you look at something the more you become like it.
The more we watch their (whiteman’s) television programmes without promoting our own local content, the more we become like them.
A good example are the Nigerian movies, particularly how — when they flooded the streets of Harare — everybody started talking like them.
Imagine if that was all we saw on our television sets.
Will our children remember how we even talk?
Indeed, the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.
How we think matters and this is the only way we can free ourselves from the over 400 years of mind conditioning we have endured at the hands of those that still want to steal from us and make it look like they are actually doing us a favour.
I now don’t have issues with nhembe anymore because I have grown to understand there is more to who I am, that I did not know, that tells me of a fulfilling future for those that are willing to open up their minds and discover that there is greatness within them.