Letter of the Week
EDITOR -THE recent commissioning and immortalisation of the Pupu Battlefield by President Emerson Mnangagwa signals a colossal victory and a significant progress in our journey towards the complete decolonisation and liberation of the minds of African people, particularly Zimbabweans.
According to various sources, President Mnangagwa, during this historical milestone and event, gave an undiluted and chronological account of the Pupu Battle that took place on December 4 1893.
Most interestingly, this fulfilled our wishes and hopes as born free youths, that our revolutionary leaders should give the present and future generations a correct history of Zimbabwe and Africa before their departure from this earth because they are the repositories and reservoirs of a true African history left.
Now our plea is that the Second Republic should help in the quickening of the rewriting of our correct unbiased African history. Dear leadership, our last wish is to see this inspiring history compiled, written down and introduced into schools to be studied on a compulsory basis.
Undeniably, most of the graduates we have been churning out since independence are people who know much about an exaggerated European history than their own African history. For this, they cannot be blamed because the racist authors of African history made sure to produce an uninspiring and negative history about Africa; hence they distorted our history.
They removed every colour from it; twisted everything about it; excluded most of our victories and successes in the struggle for freedom, making our heroes and liberators villains and cowards in the process.
As a result of this, our education system has been producing graduates who know more about the exaggerated battle of Trafalgar than their own native African history since the current African history textbooks that are in circulation in our schools either exclude much relevant content on Zimbabwean history or reveal the partly written content in a biased manner.
Dear relevant stakeholders, our remaining hope as patriotic youths is to see the Pupu Battle and the Battle of Mapai, among many inspiring historic moments of Zimbabwean history, being compiled, written down and introduced in schools to be taught to our children.
As Africans, we should ask ourselves an honest and genuine question that: How long must we continue to make European history compulsory in our schools at the expense of African history? Until our education system introduces a European history that is written from an African perspective, by Africans, the current European history that we are learning should be treated like any other fictitious novels and books to be studied outside the classroom for entertainment or by independent individuals who feel they want to know the gravity of how European history is manipulated, twisted and exaggerated to promote white supremacy.
The twisting of both African and European history was done intentionally with the effect that the result will be the production of a rebellious, unruly, unpatriotic and a confused African who always feels inferior to white people.
The instilling of a sense of inferiority complex among Africans is systematically made possible and easy through a deliberately misleading education system that compels our innocent black children to study an aggrandised European history that celebrates white people in juxtaposition with a miniaturized great African history that demean, undervalue, mock, criticise, and condescend our African heroes and heroines.
Consequently, we have been breeding a whole generation that wishes their sovereign nations would be better off being ruled by white people and not their own revolutionary African leaders. This mentality is un-African, unprogressive, unsustainable and self-destructive hence the need to act urgently and collectively as a nation so that we can nurture African children who are proudly black, patriotic, mentally free and proud of their history, knowledge and culture.
Abraham Mabvurira.