By Mashingaidze Gomo 

MORE than anything else, the post 2000 experience showed the critical importance of history to the survival of any nation.

The troubled time showed that for any nation, the writing of history is not critical for its own sake.

It is most critical as the foundation of a sustainable national vision in the sense that under purposeful scrutiny, history yields patterns that reflect the achievements and failures of a nation. The question of who has to write the history of a nation is therefore something that cannot be taken for granted.

The recording of the history of a nation can therefore not be assigned to the aggrieved mind and hands of the vanquished imperialist.

In the case of Zimbabwe, Freeth’s ‘White African’ would obviously never record the black man’s liberation struggle as a legitimate and genuinely human rejection of servitude to the white man. In fact, Eddie Cross, the Rhodesian MDC policy chief abundantly made it clear kuti if they won the 2013 elections, they would de-legitimize the indigenous people’s liberation struggle, despite their having invoked it to stand in the elections.

Land reform would be reversed to restore unsustainable exclusive white minority land tenure. The term ‘indigenous’ would be adulterated to be inclusive of Benjamin Freeth’s unsustainable  ‘white African concept’ in order to entrench the  dispossession of black people.

The liberation struggle heroes at the National Heroe’s Acre would be disinterred and replaced with Rhodesian war criminals and MDC traitors.

And, all the while, the hoped- for-MDC would be silent on the unsustainable status of the homosexual Cecil John Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson among the other malcontents still defiling the sacred Matopos over three decades after the aggrieved black nation won the freedom to throw them out.

Given Eddie Cross’ mindset as MDC policy chief, it is beyond doubt that if the puppet party had won the elections, the history of Zimbabwe would have been re-written by Rhodesian war criminals like David Coltart, Roy Bennet, Eddie Cross, Ian Kay, Mike Campbell and Johnny-come-late colonial missionaries like Benjamin Freeth, masquerading as men of God, human rights activists and authorities on the crisis in Zimbabwe.

The history of Zimbabwe would have been re-written by these ‘White Africans’ to replace the memory of gullible black people.

And all these plans had the endorsement of the black MDC leadership whose own greed and strange code of perverted justice pushed them to put up a spirited fight for white human rights that not only exploit but infringe on the dignity of black people.

In retrospect, it is difficult to fathom how descendents of dispossessed and murdered black people could actually stand up and insist that they must buy back what was thus taken from their forebears.

And, all that notwithstanding kuti that history of dispossession had withdrawn their (descendents) capacity to buy back their land even if they were subverted enough to want to. And, what they (MDC) were actually saying was that black people did not deserve to get their land back. Oftentimes, the lame argument was that they were not opposed to land reform, but the manner in which it was being carried out.

Yet, ironically, that same show of conscience did not make them question the brutality the British had used in dispossessing their own ancestors.

More critically too, the very same MDC people did not exhibit the same conscience in crafting savage illegal sanctions that reduced their own black kith and kin to obscene levels of destitution.

The scenario exposed a fundamental relationship between knowledge and conscience which the ZANU(PF) government must, as a matter of urgency, address through the commissioning of objectively patriotic historians to re-write and teach our history without interference from Rhodesians and the MDC masquarade.

The new history must clarify to our children that it is not conscience but suicidal ignorance that makes Nehanda’s grandchildren feel any wrongdoing in recovering their heritage from the grandchildren of those who dispossessed and murdered Nehanda.

And, it is not conscience but obscene simple-minded racist arrogance that makes Benjamin Freeth ask the question: ‘If they (black people) do not work for us (white people), whom do they work for?’

And, it is simple-minded white supremacy that makes the bloodied foot-soldiers of the Rhodesian genocide imagine that the majority of black people could, under free and fair circumstances, actually elect to return to landlessness  and servitude to white racists.

What all the foregoing observations mean is that if the re-writing of Zimbabwean history were assigned to Rhodesian racists and MDC puppets, then, the servitude of black people to white racists would be re-defined as the dignity of labour and the natural order of things.

Their history books would omit the genocide that transferred African land ownership from legitimate indigenous hands to racist colonial hands.

Their history version would ignore and not explain the moral discrepancy between an apartheid war criminal’s actions and his attempt to pass himself as a human rights activist defending the rights of his victims.

Their version would not explain that the willing-buyer-willing-seller principle failed because the willing-buyers and willing-sellers eventually came from the same white race and excluded the intended black beneficiaries.

For post 2013 election Zimbabwe, all this means that it is imperative for the ZANU(PF) government to recognize that if our history has to be re-written for us by the local agents of British imperialism, it will severely corrupt the national vision in favour of servitude to interests that exclude  the objectives of liberation struggle.

Indeed, it would be naïve for any black people to imagine Benjamin Freeth writing a history book that awakens his semi-literate and severely subverted black farm labourers and all their future generations to the historical injustices that make them work their own land for the exclusive benefit of an apartheid war criminal’s grandchildren.

The only history that Coltart, Cross, Bennet, Kay, Campbell and Freeth can write is a subverted history of Zimbabwe that guarantees them a stake in our future.

Their story of Zimbabwe can only be one which when taught in Zimbabwean schools would incorporate or inculcate a line of weakness in the reasoning of black youths, so that their vision is permanently flawed to the enemy’s  advantage in a manner that makes the youths a conduit through which continued sabotage of African interests is assured.

It must therefore the ZANU(PF) government’s primary task to overhaul the nation’s educational system so that the history that is taught our children is history that is consistent with the irrefutable global historical context of five hundred years of slavery and colonial dispossession and genocide.

The history taught in Zimbabwean schools would be incomplete and totally false if it does not identify Coltart,

Cross, Bennet, Kay and Campbell as the zealous foot-soldiers in the Rhodesian genocide. It would be incomplete and false if it does not cast Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo as the liberation war icons who contested the Rhodesian villains.