African children are wood, and water collectors for the whites: nothing has changed!

I wish I lived in another planet and certainly not planet Earth because this one has painful contradictions. Africa, especially, a continent that was ravaged by slavery for centuries. The white populations came to harvest slaves to send them to South and North America or to the Middle East, to work as slaves. If it wasn't human resources that were exploited in Africa, the mineral resources are in abundance. How easy was it to colonize the entire Africa? (Except those few nations) A walkover, because of short-term transactional demands the colonizers were able to square: Sometimes, transactions were cloths and bottles of scotch whiskeys.

I appreciate Maponga's messages about how the bible was used to colonize the gullible Africans. The stick and the carrot colonized Africa. To this day the African is worshipping the foreign god that is not his/hers: its Christ the King. Some critical thinking is needed: why did Jesus not visit the southern Africa, spreads the gospel truth among the San populations? There are Christians at every corner of African streets, even in wildernesses in Zimbabwe or Ghana, wearing white garments because inherently they were told that the colour black is evil. There is nothing as wrong and evil in Africa as the Christian religion!

The beginning of the twentieth century was the rise of African nationalism. Apparently, they were taken aback when they realized they did not have the land anymore, but the invisible system has turned them into slaves in their own ancestral lands. While religion stuck in the mind of an African, the rhythm and grammar was liberating Africa, a struggle that was painful and successful. However, despite the political freedom in Africa, a freedom with serious contradictions, nothing changed in African settings, socially, economically, politically, and otherwise. I remember, I was at a meeting in Germany when one German woman said to the attendees, globalization started five centuries ago. It is the name that got into the lexicon a few years back. How right! Globalists can be black and white interchangeably. What we see today, what is happening in our independent countries is not different from what happened five centuries ago. Despite our so-called independence and freedom: it is not the purview of us all citizens but a few black elites in the shoes of former white colonialists. The cruelty and rudeness of our African regimes could be worse than that of the white bosses.  

I do not know how the irony escaped us: to say African Ubuntu is a holistic philosophy that bonds African societies together: this is not only untrue but disingenuous and perfidious. So many factors play together to make Africa unlivable. Real African liberators who would have made Africa livable, never survived the liberation wars. They were murdered: (Case study Zimbabwe: J.Z. Moyo, Nikita Mangena, Herbert Chitepo, Edgar Madekurozva were brutally murdered by their own. Dr. Edga Madekurozva was forced to dig his grave, after which he was told to get inside the grave, they finished him with the pick he dug his grave with. Yes, we remember them. We are ruled by people who never went to the bush to fight the Smith's regime. We are ruled by people who were at the sidelines of the war, but somehow rose up to be the leaders when time clocked 18th of April 1980.

Whatever infrastructure the colonialists left behind, have all collapsed: rural schools and clinics are in a bad shape: it is dangerous to be inside those classrooms; it's safe to attend classes under a tree, what has never happened under Smith regime but the first & second republic of Zimbabwe, yes. The political class nerve themselves to get medical assistance abroad because they do not trust their own institutions. They send their children to posh schools abroad. Curiously, it is Africans leaders who use foreign services because they fear their dilapidated educational and medical institutions. Ubuntu is a tall order in African societies because our people love this demarcation of haves and haves-nots: they want to have someone to look down upon: it has become a culture to look down at someone next.  This behaviour starts from the top politicians going down: who is better than me? Not long ago, President Mnangagwa, passed by a cluster of street kids, asked his driver to stop, opened his window and swung a five dollar note to one street kid and not two not three. He was happy the whole day because he at least managed one good turn that day. He was washing his guilt conscience; he has bales of US$ dollars stashed in his home. He does not trust a bank to keep his money. If Africans start discussing Ubuntu: The African philosophy, I go away so as not to internalize what is not existing.

Zimbabwe is a country where each one is for himself/herself and God for us all. A situation like Zimbabwe, you talk of a government that is serving itself and their immediate families. It is painfully difficult to talk anyone about patriotism. "Zimbabwe needs its educated people to uplift the nation". These are noble predicates, but it is extremely challenging to walk-and-talk them. If the government does not see it, to keep its educated key-skilled niche in the country by giving them basic living wages, how do you still linger around, and think you will survive on air alone? Who betrayed Zimbabwe, or Africa? Africa has always been betrayed by the rulers of the time. The brain-drain in Africa, it was to be explained numerically; we talk about billions of dollar revenues that would have benefited the continent and catapult to a first world continent.

Africa, or our Zimbabwe is endowered with abundant human and natural resources. How these resources are plundered by foreigners given permission by our governments; I do not know how this irony escaped us. Maponga said there is no foreign direct investment that can develop a nation. The nation should create wealth using human and natural resources at its disposal. This brings me back to my argument that a rich African see another African trying to eke a decent life a threat. They would rather see foreign national getting richer, using our natural wealth. We work for these foreign settlers as cheap labour. Our sons and daughters are collectors of wood and carriers of water; just like was the case in colonial times. They are not even ashamed that the life of an African is so dire. Ian Douglas Smith said, do not give Africans independence; their children will start playing on sewage water drainages and will not realize the smell. Was Smith not right about African independence? Go to Mbare today or Makhokhoba. It does not disturb the black rulers; nor do they lose sleep, that the life of an African has not changed since independence hence they want to leave for greener pastures, to South Africa, to UK, to USA to Canada. We do relocate to foreign countries, however, an African has no respect everywhere we go. The African youth aspires to go to Europe to work in the Spanish fruit and vegetable fields, harvesting tomatoes and apples: conditions of living are squalor: prior to that, they would have made  hazardous journeys: firstly, on foot through the Sahara Desert, to the north African coast cities; find jobs to work in North African cities, to get money to pay for a trip by a boat to European shores; is what an African youth has to go through. If you told the African rulers about the challenges that the African youth face when they reach the shores of Europe, they will laugh loud at you instead. Let's celebrate the African Ubuntu!


Has the Zimbabwean government thought about removing street kids from Zimbabwean towns and cities? Or should German benevolent-minded organizations do that for them? The life expectancy of a street kind in Zimbabwe is very low. There is nothing to scavenge in Zimbabwean streets bins! They die in the streets; God knows what happens to their dead bodies. If this philosophy of Ubuntu was present in African societies, there would never be street kids at all. A good government would have contingency plans for such social services for vulnerable children: children are a wealth and future of a nation.  African Ubuntu is so hollow, so empty, Ubuntu is in faraway countries & continents and not Africa. For the next century, our African children will remain woodcutters and water collectors for white people: slaves of the twenty-first century.