Little hearts can also dance

Stephen Mpofu, Perspective
TODAY, yes TODAY you (yes, you) unmitigated patriotic men and women of Zimbabwe are wont to melt with joy — with our youth frolicking around like calves drunk on cow’s milk — at rallying calls from the rest of Africa — along with quiet and loud support by the progressive world elsewhere in the global village — from an immediate lifting of the illegal, repugnant and satanic economic sanctions imposed by the West on our motherland via the incumbent Zanu-PF Government.

Slapped on us two decades ago, the economic embargo was, and still is, intended to dismantle the Zanu-PF Government as punishment for introducing land reform under which some farms usurped from blacks by white settler farmers supported by Government in their native countries, with no dissent tolerated from indigenous owners most of whom ended up scratching their backyards like chicken, for economic sustenance as a result of the land usurpation by the foreigners.

The calls for the removal of the embargo, which have increasingly grown louder in recent weeks, must remind all humanity, particularly those once subjected to colonial bondages by foreigners, of the altruism

“united we stand, divided we fall”.

Interestingly, enough some members of political parties opposed to Zanu-PF and known to have all along rallied their support for sanctions in hopes that once the Zanu-PF Government fell, the imperialists would install the puppets in power, have uncharacteristically jumped off the fence on which they were perched in all those past economic embargo years by also saying the sanctions yoke should be lifted for Zimbabweans to shape their own way immediately without let or hindrance so that the indigenous population may chart their way into the future.

This communicologist — and no doubt other Zimbabwean patriots aware of previous political manoeuvres by some power-hungry souls — will not be duped by any sweet sounding but dubious rhetoric into believing that those prepared to be neo-colonial rulers of this country have undergone political rebirth.

On the contrary, with harmonised elections due next year knocking, as it were, on every Zimbabwean’s heart, those sell-outs who thought they would ride on the illegal sanctions into power must no doubt have realised that they will be duped into self-political doom if they continue to support the economic embargo surreptitiously or otherwise against their motherland.

Various anti-sanctions events due in the next few days in our country should make all Zimbabweans speak with one GENUINE voice against foreign measures meant to stagnate our political, social and economic march into a brave new future as one Zimbabwe, one nation — a legacy for our children and children’s children.

For those among Zimbabweans who may not be aware of the impact of the illegal sanctions beyond our borders, a book by this writer to be published soon locally — Little Hearts Can Also Dance — will shed light on both the repercussions of the embargo out there as well as on the double standards of imperialist machinations here at home.

Some countries in our region and elsewhere on the African continent, which could have danced the land dance, like Zimbabwe, remain scared of introducing land reforms as they dread the possibility of illegal sanctions being imposed on them by imperialists as punishment for destabilising white settler farmers ensconced on vast tracts of fertile land, some of which remains fallow or is used to grow exotic grass for export as cattle feed, while blacks subsist on infertile strips of land available to them.

In our country today a few people are aware of the double standards that imperialists applied when dealing with indigenous people on the land issue.

Hired trucks moved the affected families — including this writer’s own parents, himself and siblings among many other children deprived of education with schools forcibly shut.

During the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland — that is Southern Rhodesia, our country now, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (modern Malawi) — whites usurped vast tracts of land occupied by blacks in the southern parts of the Midlands province, west of Zvishavane, for instance, with thousands of helpless peasants forcibly translocated from their homes and sent hundreds of kilometres away with some ending in the Mazetse area towards the Limpopo river in Masvingo province while many others went to settle in Gokwe which was then teeming with wild animals including lions and others migrating to Mumbwa district in present day Zambia’s central province where they found locals growing food crops around anthills for their fertile soils and taught them better farming methods so that now the people in that district, where Shona and Ndebele are still widely spoken, flood markets in the capital Lusaka with vegetables and other produce as a result of farming knowledge gained from Southern Rhodesian migrants.

But no word of condemnation, let alone sanctions were imposed by the white colonial regime on its kith and kin who usurped the land turning much of it into cattle ranches.

The Zimbabwean government did not send any whites packing when repossessing some farms for redistribution to blacks who needed it the most for food production.

Whites who left the country did so on their own volition to mount attacks on the new black government from abroad as a way of mobilising punishment against our black government, hence the imposition of illegal sanctions by the United States of America and its Western allies, dealing a severe blow to peasants who had turned Zimbabwe soon after independence into the breadbasket of Southern Africa with some of the food grown here going as far North, through Zambia to Cairo, Egypt.

If sanctions are removed today, barring global warming and climate change, Zimbabwe will probably become the breadbasket of much of Africa on the back of the Intwasa/Pfumvudza method of farming which the country has adopted against recurrent droughts.