THERE is something that bothers the mind about the so-called Pioneer Column.
This week, on September 12, Rhodies around the world commemorated the ‘Pioneer Column’.
This was a band of brigands, murderers, rapists, thieves, all sorts of miscreants and convicts who came to rob us of our land, and yet we refer to them as ‘pioneers’.
So, if we continue to call them the Pioneer Column, what are we saying? — that they are not the most evil force to spearhead the British armed robbery of our land and wealth?
It means we do not agree that something so evil ever landed on our shores.
When we call armed bandits who came to murder, plunder and loot in our land ‘pioneers’, are we not saying that they were innocent of what Mbuya Nehanda and her compatriots accused them of?
If they were a band of armed robbers who came to unleash terror on our people for purposes of taking our land and imposing their violent evil rule on us, how come the term ‘pioneers’ sits so easily on our tongues?
Why is it so hard to call them what they are, terrorists, paid mercenaries with no values, no compunction about murdering a people, looting and taking over their land and wealth?
What does it say when these terrorists whom we insist on calling pioneers then call our own freedom fighters, the ones who took it upon themselves to sacrifice their lives to end this robbery, terrorists?
Do we not recognise the temerity of the robber in making it seem normal that they can murder, plunder loot and brand those who would stop them from committing these heinous crimes, terrorists.
Is the crassness and callousness so difficult to decipher?
Is it not obvious what the name of the game is, and our role in this game, is it so honourable?
Who is the terrorist, the murdering, plundering and looting rapists, or the one who sacrifices his/her life to end these cruel activities of the marauding robbers?
Mbuya Nehanda is a murdering ‘witch’ according to these marauding robbers, but the activities that earned her this title are those of fighting to end the murder of her people as well as the plundering and looting of her land and its wealth.
She is a freedom fighter who sacrificed her life to end this evil and for this, she is branded a ‘witch’ and they murder her.
She loses her life to end this crime against humanity, against her people.
She is a martyr but the robbers call her an ‘unrepentant witch’ who fights against Christian civilisation.
If Christian civilisation means convicts should invade your land, kill all those who stand in their way, plunder and loot your wealth, is it any wonder Mbuya Nehanda refused to baptised, instead telling the robbers it is they who needed Musikavanhu’s forgiveness for their armed robbery of what is hers.
And then they actually set up a society so dichotomous; on the one hand you have the ‘infidels,’ so ‘uncivilised,’ fit only to be slave labour, to work in the mines, on the farms, in your homes to cook for you, take care of your children, wash your clothes and clean your homes.
So you come as a band of brigands to create a society in which you reduce the owners of the land to labourers, those whom you have robbed of the mines, farms, cattle and the dignity of their sovereignty.
Then you sit down and write ‘laws’ to protect this new order — ‘laws’ which say their cattle are now yours, their land is no longer theirs, their mines are no longer theirs but yours and then you set up a system of kangaroo courts to try the owners of the land whenever they break your laws in their quest to regain what is theirs, and you call it a judicial system.
What a travesty of justice!
It was not a judicial system but a system of kangaroo courts to protect robbery of what belongs to others.
You cannot have a judicial system when the basis is unjust, judiciousness is based on justice.
Thus you set up a bandit system in which the owners of the land are permanently on the ‘wrong side’ of the ‘law’ and the murdering robbers are permanently on the right side of the ‘law’.
And then a bandit army and police are set up to masquerade as security forces, but it was only a back-up to the kangaroo system to protect what they had stolen from its owners.
So you have a system of euphemisms to whitewash the armed robbery of our land by the British; you have brigands whom you call pioneers, farm owners, mine owners who are not owners but robbers; you have a whole loot economy based on murder, looting and plundering of land, cattle and minerals and then you masquerade as a legitimate economy when its very basis is illegal.
Nothing was legal about the band of brigands who entered our land.
They went on to create what they termed a security force.
How can a force of aggression, armed robbery, plundering and looting be a security force?
They are bandits, terrorists and fascists; they cannot be a security force for the two are diametrically opposed.
They killed over 50 000 of our people.
Rhodes was so bloodthirsty he could not count the bodies of Africans they killed in the First Chimurenga.
Feverishly he gloated over these dead bodies, over a genocide.
The so-called ‘Pioneer Column’ — the band of brigands — was the front force for a lot of evil and the likes of Father Hartmann, a Jesuit Priest of the Catholic Church, accompanied them, saying Mass for them as they journeyed to perpetrate such evil in our land.
Why was it, and still is, easy for the Rhodesians and the Rhodesian world, the perpetrators of such terrible crimes against our people, to call the comrades, a noble force committed to end their banditry, ‘terrorists’?
And why is it so difficult for us to call these bandits, ‘terrorists’, the ones who murdered our people, plundered and looted our wealth for 90 years.