Let's deal with puppets

Back in the village, in Rhodesia, colonialism came in several waves, imposing itself on our people, who had their original political ideas, economic innovations and cultural idiosyncrasies, and sought to establish a new system in which the black person was a subservient animal, used by the whites to promote their hegemony on natural resources.

When the wave came, it rolled over African humanism, its contents contaminating and corroding the existing social, political and economic fabric and indeed establishing white supremacy, which only real black men and women started challenging, at the expense of their limbs and lives. Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, was the terrain upon which the colonial waves had wash, swash and backwash effects.

The liberation struggle forced some of the waves to roll back, leaving behind terraces that are a manifestation of the former colonial system's desire to regain lost pride.

The question of what changed over time, what remained, what was washed away, what was altered and what still holds firm is the central occupation of this villager in this instalment.

Yes, the villager has started, you can say that again! Most affected were the blacks, the Shona and Ndebele and others, the autochthons of the land of Munhumutapa.

To call people autochthons, literary meaning those who came out of the ground, sounds village lingua franca, but implies that they are thought by themselves and others to have a special intimacy with the territory they occupy because they are thought to be the earliest to have lived there.

This villager uses the clumsy word autochthon for want of a clearer term that conveys the partly mythical, partly historical, partly attitudinal references that it contains when handling national matters in Zimbabwe.

The remnants of the colonial legacy left by the last Rhodesian, should be put to rest. That even after the victory of the founding fathers ushered Zimbabwe now 39-years-old, is to bury to finality any such Rhodesian thinking and values.

A reversal of the gains of our Independence is certainly a reversal of the victory against the British and their allies, who have not hidden their displeasure at our own self-rule.

What is victory if the key concepts of victory are altered by it and what is defeat if little that is crucial is lost? Cecil John Rhodes is part of our history, so is David Livingstone, so is Leander Starr Jameson, so is Robert Moffat and Ian Smith and many others who made our lives and those of our forebears miserableToday, the main problem is not Rhodes, Jameson or any of their contemporaries, but the legacy they left and those fighting hard to restore Rhodesian legacy; those acting to defend the principles of reversing the gains of our Independence.

It is this legacy of turning black people against black people, the agenda being to perpetuate white dominance in the name of a movement for democracy that is itself not democratic.

We need to exorcise the spirit they left behind, that has inspired a brigade of puppets and sell-outs, manifesting themselves through self-acclaimed political movements of democratic change, which of course, we know are an epitome of undemocratic puppetry.

As we celebrate our Heroes and Defence Forces holidays, we need as a nation to deal with those of our kind who seek political office to deface on our humanism, to destroy our values and to defecate on the template of our revolutionary history.

We need to deal with latter day political parties that seek to defecate on the graves of those who lost limb and life in the fight to snatch Zimbabwe from the jaws of colonialism, glorifying illegal economic sanctions, and belittling the revolutionary fathers of this nation. Outright sellouts, who seek to spoil the broth with sand, fools who seek to urinate in the communal well, where everyone drinks, including themselves.

We need to look at ourselves and deal with the living puppets. In the culture of Rhodes and others the dead never come back as spirits or through spirit medium, so why waste our time?

We must drill sense into the heads of those formations who have become willing slaves of the West and have no shame, telling the whole nation that our economy collapsed out of mere mismanagement and that there were never sanctions. We must drill, drill and drill harder the essence of humanism that gay gangsters are not something we can support.

It is the values that we must drill into these people, our brothers who have lost their social and moral bearing and think are the most democratic. Once that is done, then we can retain our lost pride, our national unity and our dignity.

Villagers know Zimbabwe did not come easily. It came through the barrel of the gun. Many people still lie unburied, others in shallow graves, others simply disappeared: all for the fight against colonialism. All, for our freedom. All for our independence. All for Zimbabwe.