By Tawanda Chenana

WE, in the village, were very much delighted to hear that Hwange Thermal Power Station’s Unit Seven has come online.
This means our foundation as a nation is stronger, for power is key to development. Many thought Unit Seven was a pipe dream and was never going to be commissioned, but it has. Yet, we continue to be told that the Chinese are not good friends.
Growing up in the village, vasharukwa vedu (our elders) told us interesting tales and gave us firsthand accounts of how China developed to be where it is today.
Interestingly, the story they were told is the same story we are being told by the West.
Mudhara Chigubhu told us how, in the 1970s, when they were kids, they were bombarded with stories of China’s backwardness, of a country suffering under the grip of communism and led by a dictator called Mao Zedong.
It was a story of the misfortunes which befell China as soon as Mao and his Red Army defeated Chiangn Kai-Shek and took over control of China in 1949.
He narrated how, like Zimbabwe, China was, for more than 20 years, isolated by the West and had to be contained so that it would not influence its Asian neighbours.
Sadly, many of us continue to accept this Western rhetoric against China and Russia.
Today, like China then, we are regarded by the West as a lost nation, one that is backward and primitive.
So good is the propaganda that some of us wholeheartedly accept Western denigration of our country as a lost cause.
However, the very same China, demonised and dismissed as backward, is hosting the second largest economy in the world; an economy reputed to have rescued 720 million Chinese people from poverty into a middle class life whose consumption potential is of some obvious significance to the global economy.
For Zimbabwe, there are some very important lessons to glean from the Chinese story, especially as we continue our walk towards achieving Vision 2030.
The most important lesson is self-belief and confidence.
Billions were spent by the West to isolate and demonise China. Countries that did not follow the Chinese model, especially those surrounding it, were ‘handsomely’ rewarded with aid and donations.
Still, the Chinese did not lose their self-belief and confidence or lose their self-respect; they did not develop an inferiority complex in which the outsider is always regarded as better than the self and what the outsider brings as always superior to the home-grown.
Some among us, in Zimbabwe and Africa, suffer unnecessarily from this kind of inferiority complex and the sooner we acknowledge this and address it, the better for all of us.
If we are to achieve sustainable development, our culture and beliefs must guide us. The Chinese studiously believe in their culture and values and in their chosen path of development.
No amount of Western demonisation of China could ever make them believe that it was better to be Western than Chinese!
By not discarding their own culture in favour of Western culture the Chinese have more or less avoided the kind of alienation associated with imitation and mimicry which plagues Africa today.
We cannot be a country, a people eager to parrot the West, errant boys and girls eager to protect and promote Western interests on the continent at the expense of our people.
The Chinese have developed economically without having to discard their own culture.
While the Chinese and other Asian tigers have appropriated much that is useful from the outside world, they have continued to rely on their own cultural values and practices as a basis for their development.
What is clear is that no nation has succeeded in developing its economy and people outside its culture and values.
By sticking to its cultural world view, China has developed upon an authentic baseline and can afford not only to sustain, but also transform that development to new levels — it has become a superpower.
Countries that have relied on wholesale importation of alien Western models, concepts, practices and approaches remain developing countries.
The Chinese and other fast growing economies, such as Brazil, India and Russia, have imported all these and creatively adapted and aligned them to their own cultural worldview.
No nation whose moral, spiritual and intellectual compass is permanently located outside itself has ever developed beyond being a caricature of other nations.
That centre has to be located and entrenched within the nation itself and this is what the Chinese insisted upon by remaining themselves and not becoming copycats.
So please, let us not listen to anyone telling us not to be friends with China or Russia.
China has undertaken development projects all over Africa and done much more in about 30 years than what Western colonialists ever did during the 100 years or so they ruled African colonies, and these are 30 years post-independence of many African States that received aid from China.
The Chinese have helped us without masquerading as missionaries bent on converting all and sundry to their way of life as Westerners have been doing since the slave trade and colonisation.
The Chinese in Africa are dealing with us on agreed terms that do not involve the arm twisting.