A COUPLE of weeks ago I visited the National Archives to follow up on a lead concerning the resuscitation of the Chirwa chieftaincy.
I was impressed by the learning activities taking place at this repository of our sacred texts.
There was a large university group preparing to enter the premises on an educational tour.
A group of junior primary school pupils, note pads and pens in hand, was milling around the Alfred Beit statue as I walked past.
Some were caressing it, while others were sitting in its lap in what was an enjoyable selfie session. I overheard one boy remark: “Alfred Beit was there to help Rhodes build the country.”
Clearly, the kids love Beit.
They love his philanthropy; their school hall is probably named after him.
From Beit they most likely visited the imposing Rhodes and Physical Energy statues.
All this being part of efforts from John Tweed to solidify and perhaps cleanse the imperial legacy.
Save for indoor statues of Nehanda and Kaguvi, there are no striking images of liberation icons here.
There is unlikely to be a Mugabe, Nkomo or Chitepo statue here any time soon.
Tomorrow we will converge at REPS for the 21st February Movement celebrations.
Yes REPS as in Rhodes Estate Preparatory School!
I have previously observed how, on entering the Matopos, families and school parties become very excitable, looking for the directional arrows to ‘World’s View’, Cecil John Rhodes’s burial place.
By the time they climb the rock outcrop-turned colonial cemetery the excitement would have reached a crescendo.
At the summit, and gasping for breath, they marvel at the graves of Rhodes, Jameson, Coghlan and the Allan Wilson Patrol.
We must leave the place worshipping the architects of our colonisation, pioneers of African genocide, crooks and looters. We must feel grateful for the philanthropy of those that stole our all.
Elsewhere such history laundering would be criminal.
In 2016 the movement for the destruction of Braunau am Inn, Hitler’s birth place, gathered momentum.
The house’s sole crime was in having been Hitler’s birth place. Feeble arguments like ‘you cannot wipe out history by destroying it’ found few takers.
To this day the world is still hunting for perpetrators of the Jewish holocaust.
And this is the same world that extols the virtues and philanthropy of 19th Century murderers of our forebears.
This is history laundering…sanitising history’s dirty past.
Our children are made to fall in love with colonial images.
And with the new curriculum emphasising on visits to heritage centres, imbibing of the coloniser’s narrative will increase. Resources will continue to be short for Chimurenga images at museums and archives.
At Rhodes’ grave, no one tells visitors they are in the middle of Malindidzimu.
Or that this is Matonjeni, the abode of Mwari.
There are no directional arrows from here to Mzilikazi’s Entumbane or to the numerous rain-asking shrines here. Perhaps, among the visitors, no one is interested in the over 2 000-year-old ancestral history fossilised here pre-Rhodes.
The colonial regime, very early in its life, recognised the critical role that pioneer heritage would play in shaping the psyche of both the ruling Europeans and ruled Africans.
This heritage was memorialised through establishing Rhodesian archives, museums and statues of their heroes like Rhodes, Beit and Jameson.
What the colonial architects perhaps never imagined was how the images would, nearly four decades after the fall of colonialism, continue to shape the psyche of our children, the indigenous children.
The thief and murderer has become our philanthropic hero.
Alfred Beit was a wealthy German and like Jameson, was a special friend of Rhodes.
He became a director and financier of the BSA Company’s looting activities in this country.
He died in 1906, having willed his fortune to a trust fund that supported scholarships, schools and bridges’ construction grants and a Professorial Chair in Colonial History at Oxford University. A statue was commissioned in his memory and hosted at different sites in the then Salisbury (Harare).
Rhodes was the architect of a British imperial ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ colonial dream.
This country was named Rhodesia in his memory.
In 1928 a statue of him was completed and given a home near today’s corner Samora Machel/Third Street.
The Physical Energy Statue was renamed the ‘Horse and Rider’ statue in the 1960s, for being a visual representation of Rhodes’s racist imperial adventure.
The ‘Horse representing blacks and the Rider whites’ statue was completed in 1903 and donated to Lusaka with casts in London and Cape Town.
The original was later pulled down from Lusaka on attainment of Zambian independence and donated to Salisbury.
The statues of these Rhodesian/British icons of colonial occupation of this country were placed in strategic locations in cities like Harare and Bulawayo.
Here they played a key role in representing, sustaining and celebrating Rhodes’s dream.
At independence, the repugnance of the above to the new state of Zimbabwe was very clear and some of these symbols were removed from streets and dumped at the museum in Bulawayo and at the National Archives in Harare with the Rhodes and Beit statues going the National Archives grounds.
Unfortunately, our speed to remove colonial statues was not matched by similar pace in erecting statues that publicly honour our heroes.
While Zimbabwe acknowledged Rhodes’ place in history, his being a key archive and artifact of our tortuous march to freedom, visually we have failed to do the same to our liberation icons.
We have consequently created an unbalanced visual history that is poisoning our children’s minds.
And in the process we have washed colonial history of its dirty and created heroes out of villains.
Who can describe us?
For pride has been washed away!
An often repeated excuse is that we do not have the resources. The Rhodesians erected these statues within four decades of conquering us.
These were statements of intent; symbols of arrival.
Resources will always be short.
It is all about prioritising celebration and memorialisation of our story.
The time is now!