Flag continues to follow cross

Vukani Madoda The Sharp Shooter
The Constitutional Court last week ruled that children in mission or private schools are compelled to attend chapel services and observe religious policies at those institutions. If they are uncomfortable, they are free to transfer to other schools. What choice, really? What choice? Isn’t there a choice of freedom of worship and religion in this country? Well here is my modest opinion on the Constitutional Court’s ruling.

When the colonialists invaded this country at the end of the 20th century they had a well-orchestrated plot and that was to send their evangelical missionaries first so that they could take away the social and cultural fabric of the natives and replace those with their own supposedly Christian beliefs.

They stripped black people of their identity, their rituals and rites, their traditions and their sacraments and ceremonies. The result was that black people became so submissive and so stoic in their way of life that they abandoned that which bound them together. The blacks even got to the extent of fighting each other if one remained traditionalist while the other had been converted to so-called Christianity.

The strategy worked very well for the imperialists because when they eventually invaded our land with the Pioneer Column, the colonialists met very little resistance from the indigenous black people because the likes of missionaries such as Reverend John Smith Moffat and Charles Dunell Rudd had managed to make us believe that fight for our sovereignty or our cultural pedigree was against the will of God.

In essence the missionaries played a very critical role as agents of colonialism, not just in Zimbabwe but in Africa as a whole.

For instance, for the sake of spreading their religious beliefs they appealed to their home countries for protection against the “savage and pagan” religious beliefs of the Africans. So their home countries sent troops to “protect” the missionaries, thereby advancing colonialism.

Next they played a critical role in treaty signing and a case in point is the well-known Moffat Treaty which was disguised as a treaty of friendship with Britain.

Then of course the missionaries played another vital role of providing vital information to colonialists as to which band of Africans were peaceful, collaborative, hostile or bloodthirsty; including information about navigable rivers, lakes, climate and disease.

In all this, missionaries put the Bible ahead of them and continued to encourage submissive behaviour from Africans. This was meant to soften the hearts of Africans as the missionaries preached “don’t kill”, “love your neighbour as yourself” and so on and so forth.

There was resultant religious divisionism as African resistance against colonialism was weakened through disunity caused by religious factions. Africans fought each other while siding with the colonialists because they carried the cross.

To entrench their beliefs before the Africans could wake-up from the opium of the colonialists religion, the imperialists built schools and introduced a missionary education system calculated to make good servants.

Missionaries went all out and ingrained a colonial education system that would ensure that history would be written according to the viewpoint of the colonialists.

This is when stereotyping of the African culture as barbaric was massively publicised and taught in all colonial schools to the extent that Africans started condemning their own African names at baptism and replaced them with “Christian” ones.

The identity of the African was destroyed. Resisting missionary education was considered backward and unprogressive. The missionary strategies greatly weakened the African spirit of resistance and made it easier for the colonisation of Zimbabwe and Africa to take root.

Now, more than a century after the colonialists invaded this country, our Constitutional Court, through Justice Bharat Patel, has dismissed a constitutional challenge by parents of four girls of Anglican-oriented Arundel School in the leafy suburbs of Harare.

Amos Makani, Mbiri Shiripinda, Plaxedes Chipangura and Daniel Sakupwanya had approached the court to ask to allow children at Arundel not to be compelled to attend Anglican Church services.

They were turned down. Never mind freedom of worship. I know the argument that parents should just change schools if they don’t want their children marched into church services. Yes, I have heard that argument, and I think it is a weak and flimsy argument.

Let us go back to basics. What is the purpose of a school? What is the objective of a school? Is it not to teach and impart education for academic and not necessarily religious purposes? It is, therefore, my humble submission that Justice Patel erred and that a miscarriage of justice of grave and monumental proportions took place last week at the Constitutional Court.

Surely, who can give me half-a-reason to not think that the flag continues to follow the cross?

Dubulaizitha!