admintime, but if the narrator insists that your parents and grandparents were idiots and he is your well-wisher, who by virtue of this piece of information (that your parents and grandparents were useless) was apprising you about reasons for everything wrong with you, then you may give him a shut up call.
Heroes and history are like your link to the past, they provide continuity of the quest for human progress as well as culture and relationship.
Without heroes and history, a nation is likely to lose its cohesiveness, lustre and sense of belonging and even its nationhood.
In this new era of information explosion and empowerment where the information tools are available to everyone like a toothbrush, it is very easy for nations and their people to get disillusioned and mislead; especially if they fail to maintain their link with their past.
In order to understand importance of history and heroes, just look around in the world, where the artificially created anarchy has lead to wars, divisions in the society and infighting.
I will quote an extract from a wonderful article, Memory of a Nation by a Somali, Mr Muhamoud A Gaildon, in Hiiran Online, who painfully cries of importance of heroes and need for rallying points.
“What about your memories, and the memories of every one of us? What about stories passed on to us through the generations?
“What about still living Somalis who, though a dying breed, bear terrible scars incurred in defence of the nation?
“Surely, not all memories can be tainted, distorted, poisoned, or erased.
“For such is the memory of a nation that it remains passed on from mother to child, enduring the violent twists of the ages?
“It is these memories of the nation that must survive if the Somali race is meant to survive in the face of all odds . . .
“My faith is strong that we shall survive. After all, we Somalis stand as the only nation in the Horn of Africa that over the centuries repulsed the Abyssinians and lived in our lands as free men and free women until the Europeans came and did what they did.
“Nothing, in my opinion, defines the Somali nation as does its centuries-long struggle to remain free of Abyssinian rule:
“A great feat that we could have never achieved as clans.
“True, we may not have had one unifying state, but we still achieved what to other, much larger nations, proved impossible, as a nation united by one language, one religion, and one national heritage.
“If you do not believe these words, just imagine what would have been of your clan if none of the other Somali clans ever existed.
“Just, for a moment, close your eyes and imagine the unthinkable.
“I shudder.
“If you’re nursing deep scars from events of the past few decades, I urge you to aim high and think big.
“The alternative is extinction of the Somali people as a free nation . . .
“Let all know that we are but a small nation in a tough neighbourhood, so far from God and so close to Ethiopia, to paraphrase that Mexican general.
“We cannot afford to fall apart, neither as separate countries nor as federal states.
“The key to our nation’s survival is to go back, all the way back, and rediscover Somali nationalism.
“For without Somali nationalism, there can be no Somali unity and, thus, no Somalia as we know it. It was the rise of Somali nationalism that led to the birth of
Somalia as an independent nation; and it was the fall of Somali nationalism that was a prelude to the collapse of the Somali state; and it is Somali nationalism that once again has to rise, this time higher and stronger than ever before, for Somalia to rise from the ashes.”
The aim of this lengthy quote is not to distract ourselves from the main theme, but to highlight the importance of heroes and history in the lives of nations, only to caution every one that if you don’t preserve your history and heroes, you may have to weep like Somalis in a fractured nation.
This leads us to the problems of the developing world in the field of perception management and the continuous fight to maintain their heroes and history against the so-called armchair intellectuals, who have no other business but to tarnish and erase history and memories of your heroes from the collective mind of the nation.
You can find these armchair intellectuals in every nook and corner of the world, as the globalised world allows them to operate freely and air their views from even their toilets.
You and your nation may be attacked from London, New York, Paris, Durban, Mumbai, Dubai, Doha, Bulawayo, Mutare or even Harare, these armchair intellectuals proliferate like mushrooms on the filth of dollars and have access to your minds without even your knowing of their presence.
They may pose to be your well-wishers and champions of this and that, but unfortunately they are champions of making a quick buck and are there to erase memories of your nationhood, divide you into tiny entities and ultimately derail the system to create anarchy, with role models of Somalia and Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, we find very few people aware of this nuisance and doing their part to keep their youth and next generation abreast with lurking spectre of chaos.
There have been ruthless and apathetic physical and intellectual campaigns of destroying history of nations in the past with devastating results for the targeted nations and communities.
One unfortunate example is what happened with the aborigines of Australia and the Natives of Americas.
A brief description of the Stolen Generation of Australia is relevant here as we move to the new paradigm of social engineering underway nowadays, especially in the developing world.
An article by Alia Hoyt with the title, “What was Australia’s Stolen Generation?” is an eye opener describing the exploitation of the Aborigines of Australia.
It states, “An extract from History is rife with examples of flagrant human rights violations, and even picturesque Australia is not immune to the occurrence of these injustices: Between 1910 and 1970, roughly 100 000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes (source: European Network for Indigenous
Australian Rights).
“Known to many as the Stolen Generation, these children, most under the age of five, were taken from their birth families because the Australian government decided that their race lacked a solid future . . . The government believed that the children would fare better if raised by white families . . .
“But it wasn’t just a few overzealous rulers who forced this removal policy upon the nation; rather, numerous state and federal laws were drafted and passed with the express intention of “breeding out” the colour of Australia’s indigenous race and helping the young members fit into mainstream society.
“The hope was to phase out Aboriginal culture . . . A variety of deceptive means were used to whisk Aboriginal babies and children from their families.
“Some children were simply removed from their homes by government officials.
“Too young to remember their family histories, the children were told that they were orphans.
“One mother was given a consent form for what was supposedly a routine vaccination, when in fact she authorised her baby, Leonie Pope, to be sent to foster care.
“She was then told that Leonie had died; Leonie was alive and well and residing with a white family (source: The Independent).
“Other children were taken for treatment to hospitals, never to be seen again by their families, who were also led to believe that their children had died.
“The majority of them were placed in more affluent foster homes with white families, or they were taken to orphanages or church missions.”
It may be pertinent to note that those social engineering experiments in the past and the one being applied at present may differ in terms of methods, but are common in terms of intent, to erase the culture, history and heroes from the minds of the younger generation.
Today we are told that heroes of Africa and Zimbabwe lost their lives for nothing, that the struggle for freedom was a useless exercise and that the living legends like Mandela and Mugabe are a burden on their nations.
What ungratefulness!
Do you want your children to become another stolen generation where they will be taught a new alien culture and given a new set of heroes to eulogise, think of it
as parents and comrades and people of Africa and Zimbabwe.
Nation’s memory is normally short, they tend to see their country from the lens of the present and generally blame their elders for their economic hardships and day to day problems.
Look around, what is happening in Europe and rest of the world? Even the mighty US is not immune to economic meltdown, there is gloom in the West on spectre of coming autumn of despair . . . but have they denounced their history and culture and heroes?
Cecil Rhodes and his pioneers are still their heroes.
There are dozens of books written and hundreds of websites launched on the net on the glorious accounts of their enslaving of Africa and empire building on the name of the crown.
We are told that Conquistadors of South and Central America and ruthless occupiers of Australia who stole a whole generation of Aborigines did some noble deeds and that history came to a standstill for 700 years between the fall of glorious period of Greek to Roman empires and the European Renaissance.
We are told that one million Africans stolen from Africa and transported like animals into cramped spaces of ships across the Atlantic to work on the lands of Americas was a feat in human struggle to open up the Africa to the new world.
But we cannot blame anyone but ourselves for not being able to write our own narrative, preserve our heroes and guard our history.
As others write our history and we accept it as gospel truth, others have also assumed that they can convert our heroes into villains, as Goebbels remarked:
“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle.
“They are mere words, and words can be moulded until they clothe ideas in disguise.”
So those who have some burning desire of being called true nationalists, true Africans and true Zimbabweans have a daunting challenge to counter, preserving your history and culture and defending your heroes.
How do you do it, I leave it for you to decide, but the battle field is too big encompassing your academia, the cyberspace, print and electronic media and the minds of your next generation.
Online Reporter