It is a poorly kept secret, at least to those of us who intimately follow such matters, that capitalism's much celebrated success is a culmination of unfettered access to cheap, if not free, resources and cheap or free labour. When I was in graduate school, fine-honing my scientific ambitions, I befriended a Kenyan who was studying for a Ph.D. degree in history. I used to proofread his manuscripts, the reason he almost came "this close" to convincing me to abandon science in favour of history. At any rate, he brought to my attention the fact that colonialism was a covert, seemingly benign and highly insidious successor to overt and virulent slavery.
As slavery was plodding through its inevitable and agonizing march to its natural death, those that had benefitted from it sought to replace it with a more virulent but stupendously profitable strain. Unlike the peculiar institution of slavery, the maintenance of which the slavers of the USA gave the laudatory epithet of Our Cause, colonialism did not cause moral discomfort, especially to its purveyors who strangely called themselves the carriers of Jesus' cross to the hilltop of Calvary.
Colonialism did not die, much as we have been forced to believe by our liberators, historians and commentators. In like manner as it evolved from slavery, colonialism has retreated, what Chinua Achebe calls a strategic retreat to morph into a different form before coming back to sustain its beneficiaries by continually sucking up our blood. We now have forced mass migrations of our most-skilled people to the same lands to which we lost our enslaved relatives and gold, and silver and ivory. This massive mass translocation is now even more malignant than anything that has ever preceded it in recorded memory --- it has the appearance of voluntary mass migration, but looks are highly deceiving, especially in this case. From history, we know that the biggest way to impoverish disinherited nations while bringing prosperity to the recipient nations is to move a nation's most educated people away from that nation. That is how ancient Egypt was destroyed, let me tell you.
It is the educated people who acquire and disseminate new skills. It is far easier for the educated to acquire experience and knowledge, and subsequently put both to beneficent use. Far more important than this acquisition of knowledge and experience is the generation and exploitation of new knowledge. The robbed nations do not benefit from all this. Of course these nations get dribs and drabs of remittances, but these are pretty much wasted away through deliberately designed consumerism appetites --- hello, money-mopping machine Econet.
Apart from the generation of wealth by the educated, the same are agents of social and political progress. Their brain power is essential in the shaping of opinions. Policies that are actionable are mostly the fruits of this class. The same people will be the most effective of the lot when in comes to the efficient implementation of the policies, as well as the gathering of the essential human and material resources.
It is from this pool that we are likely to get the people who have a firm understanding of what it entails to be leaders, I mean real leaders as opposed to the people who only seek to enjoy the trappings of power that come the positions of leadership. The social innovators, the writers, social scientists and activists, and so on and so forth are all essential to human progress and, to be more precise, families, communities and nations. When a nation loses a sizeable hunk of this demographic group, that nation is bound to sink, choke and drown in a cesspool of filth, figuratively and literally speaking --- go to Mbare Musika to see with your own eyes what I am talking about; even David Parirenyatwa is too scared to venture anywhere near that place of plague.
Here is the point worth noting; colonialism has morphed into a state that has seen the sophisticated depredation of nations that gave capitalism its free labour and raw materials, without which it was going to die a stillbirth. The lands that lost its people to slavery are the same that suffered the celebrated robbery called colonialism. As the colonialist made a strategic retreat, Chinua Achebe tells us that the same colonialist left in the place of power a brainless placeholders to further the interests of the former power. The satrap receives some semblance of power such as the free reign to abuse, with a sustained period of impunity, the former victims of slavery and colonialism, by which I mean the peasantry. A knighthood tossed here, a fancy state visit there, an acquiescence to rigged elections, a fancy mansion within the fortress of the former colonial overlord, and all sorts of ego-boosting trinkets to please the vain puppets have seen us suffer through neocolonialism.
While our writers and social commentators are fully engrossed in denouncing neocolonialism, it is ironic that we often do so domiciled in the lands that have benefitted from slavery and colonialism and neocolonialism. How many of us are cognizant of the fact that we may very well be the victims of the new form of exploitation that is replacing neocolonialism before our own eyes? We are the literati, the educated people who mostly create knowledge, bring forth world-jarring innovations, policymakers, groomers of future leaders in our capacity as university professors, et cetera. The satraps have been swindled into pushing away the people in this demographic group much to the benefit of the recipient nations. In the meantime, the lands of our births are condemned to a slow and protracted death march on paths strewn with sharp pebbles, thistles and thorns. That, right there, is what we get because of colonialism.
This beast, colonialism, we either tame it so that we can benefit from it or, on the other hand, powerlessly watch it as it consumes us one by one. Of course their is the very ugly option of confronting it with sharpened swords or watch it die as it must at some point in the future.
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