ARE we being just and fair to the children who learn at Cecil John Rhodes Primary School in Gweru or any other institutions christened after colonialists?

We have Jameson High in Kadoma named after Leander Starr Jameson, or Hartmann House in Harare in recognition of Fr Hartmann!

Do we want our children to identify with and honour Rhodes, who seized over 

400 km² from the people of Nyanga, claiming it as his private property.

Do we want our children to identify with the lust and greed of the whiteman? 

Rhodes, with four others, seized the whole of Matabeleland South, with our sacred Matobo Hills becoming exclusively his, while banishing the Ndebele who lived there to oblivion.

Is this the man we can present to our children as a hero? 

Do we want our children to believe the people of Matobo have no rights over their ancestral lands, that it really does not matter that Matobo is the seat of Mwari?

This man who so sought the genocide of our people that his biographers were compelled to describe as “…the blood lust that seized him as he moved in with the column from Salisbury, how he would return to the scene of action to count the African corpses, how he told a police officer to spare no-one even if he threw down his arms and implored for mercy,” (Muchemwa:2015), we would teach our children to venerate?

Our children are not confused about what is morally, ethically and aesthetically correct until the adult world corrupts them. 

They want to associate with what is good, kind, loving, beautiful and special but do we let them?

We are forcing them to identify with the worst murderer in our history, a homosexual who, by force of arms, robbed us of our country, plunging us into wars which cost us thousands of lives as we fought back to reclaim our heritage, Zimbabwe.

How can our children defend their heritage when we have crowned Rhodes a hero despite him being the worst ever villain to set foot on our land.

Nehanda is loving, special and the greatest patriot who defended her country with her life. Why does it not occur to us to name a Government school, Nehanda Primary School, instead of the so-called Cecil John Rhodes Primary School? 

Can the Queen of England ever countenance naming a British state school, Nehanda Primary School? 

When we waged our most heroic armed struggle against the British, they called us terrorist insurgents, until we defeated them in battle, leaving them no choice but to sit down with us and negotiate their terms of surrender.  

And yet today, we, the heirs of that most noble heroic struggle, have no scruples protecting the legacy of this most heinous crime against our people.

Do our children, the young Zimbabweans at Jameson High in Kadoma, know who Jameson is? Do they know he was Rhodes’ homosexual partner? In this country homosexuality is anathema. Our God will never be at peace with that; the way He was never at peace with the armed robbery of our land by the whiteman. So when our children wear badges with Jameson’s name, whose story are they telling, for what benefit?

Have we told them that Jameson was Rhodes’ right hand man in the armed robbery of Matebeleland. 

Coveting the wealth of the Ndebele, their large herd, the largest south of the Zambezi, their goldfields and land perfectly suited for ranching, he put together about 1 000 terrorists to go and murder the Ndebele and loot their wealth. 

How does this qualify him to be venerated by the heirs of this sacred land?

The Catholic establishment still feels morally correct to call a school to which Zimbabwe’s children learn, Hartmann House. 

Hartmann House was established in 1957 as a signature of the Catholics’ approval of the armed robbery of our land. 

To this day, the Catholic establishment has not apologised to Musikavanhu, our Mwari, that they were part and parcel of the armed robbery of this sacred land.

Even after thousands of our people perished in a war to end the criminal robbery of our land by the British, in which the Catholics willingly participated, Catholics still revere Hartmann (Fr) as a hero and would dare tell our children so year-in-year-out.

Hartmann (Fr) was celebrating mass, all the way from South Africa, for a band of convicts on a mission to rob us of our country by force of arms. 

In the Catholic tradition, Holy Mass is a celebration of Jesus’s Last Supper at which he committed his life to die for mankind. 

It is an act of the greatest love, to die for others. Therefore, for a Catholic priest to accompany a gang of criminals on a murder and robbery mission of another people’s land is the greatest antithesis to the Lord’s Supper. 

But the children do not belong to the Catholic establishment; they belong to us, Zimbabweans. Why are we not disturbed that our children should be subjected to something so inimical to them, which denigrates who they are?

The Catholics can name their schools after Satan if they so wish, but we do not have to send our children to such schools.

Our children are not Rhodes’s heirs; his grave would explode if he learned that he now has African beneficiaries. 

He hated ‘them kaffirs’. Rhodesia’s demise did not come about because of the remorseful stroke of the whiteman’s pen, it cost us at least 50 000 thousand lives in the First Chimurenga and another 30 000 in the Second Chimurenga. 

It cost us so much to end Rhodes’ hegemony; why do we now have to resurrect it?