ONE of the most painful results of colonisation was the attempt to alter and in some cases, to completely destroy our culture and systematically replace it with that of the coloniser.
This meant, like through the process of osmosis, indigenes would abandon their traditional knowledge, values and lifestyles and substitute them with those of the colonisers.
The colonisers saw their culture as superior to ours and went on to change our way of life, mainly through education and religion.
The resultant state of anomie made the indigenes turn against their own traditional cultural beliefs thereby losing the identity that had united them as a people.
Through the whiteman’s religion, cultural traditional ceremonies and rituals that had bound families and societies together were dismissed as heathen.
Not only that.
It is now considered taboo by the whiteman’s Christian religion to respect our ancestors with whom we had direct communication through recognised spirit mediums.
It is these ancestors who had the ultimate authority to plead with Mwari, the equivalent of the Christian God.
Come to think of it, there are similarities in the religious belief systems as in both cases God (Mwari) is approached through intermediaries.
But then the colonialists used their skin pigmentation to drive home the point that it was wise to associate with white.
Their God was white, angels were white and Jesus was white.
Black, including our ancestors, spirit mediums and Satan were considered devilish.
So did our cultural beliefs and rituals related to our religion.
Before the white settler-invasion, we were given names related to our forefathers or incidences that reminded parents of what might have happened during pregnancy.
With the introduction of Christianity by the whites, some of these very meaningful vernacular names were dropped and were replaced by names of British kings or queens.
The cultural linkage was this time of no importance, so long as one felt Anglicised.
Apart from religion, schools played a crucial role in destroying our traditional culture.
English was given a special status and one could not proceed to the next grade without passing the queen’s language.
There isn’t a more effective way of destroying a people’s culture than denying them common identity through the use of their language.
Imagine being punished at an all-blacks school for speaking in your vernacular language instead of English.
Our culture had in-built social control mechanisms with specific people responsible for defined tasks.
The introduction of the English language, together with the aura attached to the white Christian colonisers, rendered our own vernacular languages irrelevant.
For example, Shona is very rich with specific relationships like babamunini, babamukuru,mainini, tete, sekuru, sahwira etc.
According to our traditional culture, all these have specific defined roles as demanded by the situation, be it in marriage or in the performance of funeral rites or any other traditional gatherings.
But English, which has been forced upon us by our colonisers, classifies all these as ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’ without the closeness we attach in our vernacular language.
This doesn’t matter with our colonisers because their relationships only recognise the nuclear family.
What we might consider to be incest is legitimate relationship with them.
The extended family concept which has been distorted by colonialism has seen indigenes lose that social cohesion once cemented by inter-dependence guaranteed by this enlarged family unit.
Our cultural heritage based on inter-dependence has been destroyed by being obsessed with colonial ideas drilled in us through church, schools, TV and other subtle colonial tools over many years.