AFRICAN scholarship has ignored to study the history that leaves no illusion as to the type of enemy from whom Africans are expecting reparations.
Dare reChimurenga in our own indigenous language would forewarn kuti tisakanganwe zvanezuro nehope. And it would advise kuti chakachenjedza ndechakatanga.
It would save valuable time, effort and resources to remember that the people from whom Africans want to demand reparations are the generational beneficiaries of a worldview that harvested the lives of fellow human beings (our ancestors) for their own exclusive benefit; a worldview that predisposes them to continue to not see anything wrong with that because we, the victims, are a different colour of skin; a worldview that predisposes them to obdurately now see themselves as the victims.
While the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 was allegedly fought to free the African slave, the outcomes stand at variance with the hyped objective. The slave master was compensated for loss of human capital and the slave was not compensated for abuse, lost time and lost life. The ‘freed’ slave was not given the means with which to pick up and mend the broken life. The condition of ‘freedom’, conversely, re-enslaved the ‘freed slave’ to homelessness, landlessness and joblessness. It turned out to be freedom without the instruments to make it a reality.
It turned out kuti the only freedom that came with abolition was the freedom to choose to be a slave again; the freedom to accept any form of abuse as a condition to stay alive. And it is a ‘pattern’ of experience that has persisted right to date and, in that context, the reader is persuaded to rightly understand the synonyms of ‘pattern’ as ‘template’, ‘motif’ or ‘repetition.’
And, it is also pertinent to understand that repetitions confirm that the original acts of evil were not aberrations but real intentions. Repetitions of genocidal abuses only confirm that the original evils were not aberrations but premeditated race crimes against humanity.
The converse side to this indicts us, the black victims, for not drawing any existential or self-preserving lessons from our experience. It highlights a tragic discrepancy in the victim’s understanding of the meaning of ‘liberation struggle’ because it is surely inconceivable that one can wage armed liberation struggle, win it and yet emerge not with the prize that informed the struggle but burdened with an obligation to compensate the oppressor against whom the struggle was waged.
And one then wonders how it is at all conceivable kuti the celebrated breast-beating heroes of a successful armed liberation struggle can beat the bloodied swords of mortal combat into ploughshares on barren ground because they cannot afford to buy the object or prize of their ultimate sacrifice?
How do the villagers who sustained the struggle nehuku nemari yekusungirira even celebrate such a ‘strange victory’?
How does such a struggle remain legitimate?
How does such a struggle retain its credibility and legitimacy for those whose kith and kin paid the ultimate price of life for it?
The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 came 85 years after the declaration of independence from Britain in 1776. The results of the victory against the colonial power, inasfar as it was white people’s independence from fellow white oppressors, were very consistent with the objectives. White immigrants to America won real independence from their British masters.
What was inconsistent was the application of a critical acknowledgement of the declaration of independence to ‘black immigrants’:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government . . .”
Patterns of history stretching 249 years from 1776 to 2025 explicitly show that it is a declaration that excluded black people and Native Americans. Slave rebellions, black civil rights movements and riots that litter American history right to date confirm this fact. The most current is, of course, the Black Lives Matter Movement.
These are patterns of history that also show that the abolition of slavery was not a Pauline act of contrition by remorseful white men. The outcomes of the purported abolition did not redress the moral shortfall. It conversely exposed and amplified the disaster. It became clear that it was not moral considerations but rather, the machines of the Industrial Revolution that had demobilised the African slave from the role of beast of burden in Western economies. The slave master was compensated for loss of human capital so that he could buy the machines that replaced slave labour. In that sense, it translated to a capitalist maneuver to sustain the status quo.
And, in another sense, the capitalist need to create and maintain an unskilled labour pool for incidental developments was obvious. It appears that, for that reason, there was no affirmative action to equip the redundant slave labourers with requisite skills to work the machines that had replaced them. Thus, in essence, the purported ‘freedom’ merely funnelled the former slaves into Western jails as vagrants and common criminals so that from ‘abolition’ to date, the population of black people in Western prisons is disproportionate to the demography in context. And these are the irrefutable statistics that must be used to quantify the damages for reparation if the Africa Union’s 2025 quest for Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations is to be credible.
The conclusive bottom-line to the whole discourse should simply be that you do not steal a man from his motherland, harvest his life, ‘free’ him without means to survive, deny him access to what you harvested from his life and then jail him for ‘stealing’ what you harvested from him in order to survive. And all that, notwithstanding kuti you are the thief who stole his whole life and his whole future. The scale of damage actually feels almost incredible if the ground did not confirm it. You stole him. You stole his whole life.
Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia would come as the second and last instance of white settler-declarations of independence from British rule. His own declaration would be fashioned after the American thing but less covert in its omission of the self-evident fact that all men (black and white) were born equal. Jack Howe, the Minister tasked to craft the declaration, was emphatic that he did not believe blacks were born equal to white people. That was November 11 1965.
In America, white immigrants had already murdered Malcom X on February 21 the same year (1965) for demanding freedom exactly 100 years after the freedom had been allegedly won in the American Civil War. Precisely too, Malcom X was killed for demanding equality 189 years after the equality of all men had been declared as self-evident in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776.
It should also be of critical interest to note that February 21 1965, the day Malcom X was killed for demanding equality and freedom, was also, the then ZANU publicity secretary, Robert Mugabe’s 41st birthday anniversary and the birthday boy was in a Rhodesian prison having been jailed by Ian Smith for demanding the same. He would remain locked up for a further nine years until December 24 1974.
Malcom X was militant. Critical liberation struggle declarations ascribed to him include the following three:
- You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
- Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you are a man, you take it.
- If you are not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.
In the struggle for Zimbabwe, the same message would be carried in ZANU Chairman, Herbert Pfumaindini Chitepo’s mass education to get the masses to appreciate that the vision of a new Zimbabwe would take struggles that involved life and death.
Malcom X and Chitepo died 10 years apart and both met violent ends at the hands of related enemies.
A simplistic view would ascribe both deaths to the militant approach of the victims to freedom but that should be only until one considered that Martin Luther King, the black American civil rights activist, would, on April 4 1968, meet his own violent end for dreaming peace:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
James Earl Ray, the murderer, would be caught on his way to Rhodesia where a genocide was underway following Ian Smith’s replication of the US July 4 1776 precedent with his UDI on November 11 1965. In the Rhodesian case, there had been no attempt by Britain to stop the racist militarily, like they had done in the US precedent. This was because the victims of Ian Smith’s UDI were black and not white.
There is a version to the Martin Luther King’s case that says that the murderer, James Earl Ray, had written Ian Smith praising him for his genocidal solution to African nationalism and volunteering to come and assist. Patterns of history make this plausible. One instance is that Chitepo was himself assassinated by Chuck Hind, an ex-British SAS man serving as a mercenary in the Rhodesian security forces waging the genocide. There were many more American and British citizens serving as mercenaries propping up Rhodesia. And they included British aristocracy of which a prominent example was Lord Richard Cecil, a graduate of the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, who was killed by ZANLA heroes (April 20 1978) in an encounter in which he wanted to film their ‘supposed’ ineptitude in battle for the BBC programme: Frontline Rhodesia.
Both Britain and the US were allowing Rhodesia to recruit mercenaries from among their citizens, notwithstanding that the rogue State was under UN sanctions.
A critical point worth mentioning in the case of the militant Malcom X and the dreamer of peace, Martin Luther King, is that both were killed by arms of war in the hands of white men invoking the 1791 Second Amendment to the US Constitution arising from the 1776 declaration of independence from Britain:
“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The informing logic was that the amendment supported the natural rights of self-defence in the home as well as resistance to oppression and the civic duty to act in concert in defence of the State.
Indelible patterns of history show that, for 234 years, this right which, in everything but wording, is an exclusive white immigrants’ right, has inadvertently armed the white supremacist psychopaths who have extrajudicially murdered innocent black people in shootings that disproportionately victimise the minority black population who have an institutional restriction to the same arms.
And, this is the history that African scholarship has ignored to study before demanding and expecting reparations.
To be continued …