I listened to British Foreign Secretary, the blonde-haired and chubby Boris Johnson, scion of Turkish janissaries, read to the British people President Mugabe's political obituary. Naturally, my first response was anger. I tried to sleep over it, which helped crystallize in my mind what seems to be happening in my Fatherland --- yes, ndiri Murozvi, meaning that my father's people are the ultimate custodians of the nation, a charge that goes back into antiquity. My thoughts ended up being summed up in the form of a simple question: ARE THE BRITISH FOOLING MY MILITARY OFFICERS TO UNWITTINGLY AID OUR FORMER SUBJUGATORS RECOLONIZE MY FATHERLAND IN CONNIVANCE WITH SOME OF MY COMPATRIOTS WHO MAY HAVE NO COMPUNCTION SELLING THEIR MOTHERS FOR A FEW PIECES OF SILVER, EPHEMERAL FAME AND FLEETING FORTUNE?
I thought about the Lord Soames of my youth, the last British Governor of my Fatherland that had been under brutal and merciless occupation for 90 years. In 1980, he presided as the envoy of British capitulation before my self-liberated people. Looking back at what is now going on, that surrender before the eyes of the world and obviously elated Africans from Cape to Cairo must have been a source of the kind of agony that has persisted unto this day. On the battlefields fought allover the villages in my Fatherland, did we not destroy the myth of British invincibility? After the victory, following a bloodletting war, did we not prove to the world that far from being half human and half wild beast, the African was fully human and more than capable to match the racial supremacists on the battlefield and spectacularly prevail? We drove a stake through the head of the monster of British Manifest Destiny, much like the Biblical heroine Jael did to Sisera the tormentor of her people. We thought this monster was dead, gone for good. Alas! We seem to have been wrong.
Then, 37 years after his father capitulated to the previous loathed and derided Africans, Lord Soames the Younger, pops up in my Fatherland --- again! A few hours after his departure, we wake up to hear the constitutionally elected leader of my Fatherland is being removed from power for what, as of now, are very spurious charges. Was Lord Soames the Son back on the same land of his father's capitulation to undo the humiliation of admitting defeat to Africans, the same beasts of Joseph Conrad's Congo Forest? Overnight, I have thought about this. The thought disturbed greatly.
As this was going on in my mind, the triumphalist statement made by the British Government's fat descendant of Turkish wanderers kept ringing in my mind. Was the gloating not meant to announce the resurrection of the monster we thought we had permanently dispatched in 1980? In all likelihood, we may have provided the casus belli for what may very end up as our recolonization. It kept me awake the entire night.
I then thought about British Ambassador Laing. In these thoughts, I recalled the role of my own compatriots who aided and abated in the occupation of my Fatherland. We have always had these in our midst. I thought about Mutapa Gatsi Rusere conniving with the Portuguese. Then I thought about Mutapa Mavhura colluding with the same Portuguese who put him in power after overthrowing Mutapa Kapararidze.
What Mavhura had thought as a favour in ascending the throne turned out to be a very cunning trick by the Portuguese to completely subjugate my people, and brutally subjugate my people they did! We found ourselves under unrelenting terror. Our fathers were whipped like donkeys pulling ploughs. Our people were abducted for shipment as far afield as India, Indonesia and Brazil to have their labour brutally extracted for no compensation beyond plates of weevil-laden beans and unfamiliar gruel to finally die and be buried under alien soil. Go to San Salvador in the Brazilian State of Bahia and see the graves our people there. It took Changamire Dombo and his fellow patriots to undo the damage, which came at great cost in shed blood and lost lives. Cursed be Mutapa Mavhura! I say.
I thought about the British coming to steal our land and minerals and labour to drive their economic engines in 1890. They had enablers, our own people. We became British-occupied people. We fought back. We lost but not before we had witnessed the gallantry of our fathers with names like Soko Mashonganyika, Humba Makombe, Mhara Mashayamombe, Shava Chiwashira, Nyati Makoni, Moyo Mapondera, Soko Makwati and others too numerous to mention here. Our fathers and mothers were dynamited in their homes, in the mountain and hills were they had sought shelter from terrible death. Our food was looted and burnt. We only succumbed due to the use of hunger as a weapon of war. It only marked a temporary setback.
In due course, we fought back, in a resumption of the initial War Against Occupation. I personally witnessed this war. We had traitors amongst us, MaBhasopo. Though our cousins, they championed the Rhodesian agenda of an occupation meant to last 1000 years. We triumphed, an inevitability when our goals are peace and social justice.
When you defeat a determined enemy, perennial vigilance is imperative lest the enemy comes back. As I think about Cecil John Rhodes, Ian Smith, Lord Soames the Father, Ambassador Laing, Lord Soames the Son and the gloating Boris Johnson, I cannot help but think of Robert Gabriel Mugabe taking the same last stand as Humba Makombe did in 1917 or Moyo Kadungure Mapondera who simultaneously faced the British and the Portuguese.
As I pen off, I must ask this question: Is Mugabe our last barrier against the recolonization by the Brexit-beleaguered British or Chinese colonial ambitions? If he is, I stand with him. ZIMBABWE WILL NEVER BE A COLONY AGAIN. Our compatriots who might be colluding with the Chinese or the British, we will remember you by name. Our posterity will know you by name and your acts of treachery. Traitors, remember this.
As I head off to work, may our benevolent God and all our deified ancestors since antiquity bless my beloved Fatherland.
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