Our glorious past will guide us to a prosperous future!

The majestic Great Zimbabwe monument, which sprawls over 7,22 square kilometres and rises as if to buttress the sky, has always excited wonderment and curiosity in equal measure to those who have had the privilege of laying their eyes on it.

It is a work of both extraordinary craft and inventiveness.

The fact that the enduring stone structure — thought to have been built between the 12th century and the 15th century (1100AD and 1450AD) — was and still is held by nothing but sheer architectural precision and gravity still boggles the mind.

Confronted with such an unimaginable work of genius and craftsmanship, the racist whites who saw it — nay, they actually claim to have discovered it, just in the same way David Livingstone purportedly discovered the Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria) Falls circa 1855. Kikikiki — could not bring themselves to accept that it was the brainchild of black Africans, whom they believed were innately hopelessly hopeless and lacked agency.

Karl Mauch, a German geographer, who was guided to the monument in 1871 by Adam Render, a German-American hunter, actually declared that he had found the biblical land of Ophir and also claimed the stone city was a replica of a palace of the Queen of Sheba.

In his lack of wisdom, Mauch surmised that builders of Great Zimbabwe must have been a lost race from the Middle East. Kikikiki.

There are plenty of other conspiracy theories bandied around by those who desperately elect to give credence to their confirmation biases steeped in the stereotypical racist belief that blacks are not capable of anything.

Considering the body of evidence that exists, archaeologists can only agree it was our ingenious forebears who built the imposing structure during the Iron Age Kingdom of Zimbabwe.

Ironically, it is this belief and desperation to discredit our ancestors that valorises their majestic work and civilisation, which had sway over much of modern-day Zimbabwe and parts of Mozambique.

We know all too well that this is a symbol of the Mutapa Empire, which was at the centre of a trade route, including the Indian Ocean trade network, that even extended as far as China and Persia.

It is, therefore, not surprising that blue and white Chinese porcelain was also found at Great Zimbabwe.

Allow Bishop Lazi to digress a bit.

You see, porcelain was once considered the king of all ceramics.

Europeans have always coveted it, ever since the time they imported it from the Ming Dynasty (from around 1368 to 1644), to the extent that at one point it became more valuable than gold.

For centuries, the Europeans tried to make their own but failed.

They, however, made a “breakthrough” in 1712, when French Jesuit priest Father Francois Xavier d’Entrecolles, learned the secrets behind its manufacture with the help of some Chinese people he had converted.

His findings were published in a letter that circulated in Europe.

It amounted to an embarrassing and egregious case of industrial espionage, and, as a man of the cloth, the Bishop is not particularly proud of this.

The Chinese are reputed for various other inventions, such as gunpowder, the compass and early printing and paper money, as well.

So, we, the builders of the Mutapa Empire, belong to a great civilisation.

We also have been a people with lofty aspirations and ideals.

Not long back, Bishop Lazarus recounted to you the folktale of how subjects of the Rozvi empire decided to fetch the moon and use it as a defining ornament for their king. To accomplish their task, they began constructing a tower to reach out for the moon.

However, after a promising start, the structure spectacularly collapsed.

The story was more about ambition than it was about naivete.

But, because of the legacy of centuries of abuse and the pervasive lopsided narrative peddled by the West, as a people, we have been conditioned to believe that it is only the white man who inherently has the ability to invent and has dominion over all creatures on earth.

By all means, we need to unlearn that, which is our great next revolution — Chimurenga Chepfungwa (Revolution of the Mind).

The mind is a power asset.

Romans 12 verse 2 says: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

Philippians 4 verse 8 adds: “Whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”

Munhumutapa Day

And commemorating Munhumutapa Day, as we will do today, is, however, a good starting point.

Reuniting with our rich history will make us alive to the fact that we are a people of consequence — a people capable of incredible feats; a people who ferociously fought to fend off colonial forces, as exemplified by the defeat of Allan Wilson and his forces by the General Khumalo-led regiment during the First Chimurenga; a people who forged iron and fashioned both implements and musical instruments out of it; and also a people who are grounded in rich cultural norms and values.

We are also a people who fought a bitter 14-year war that culminated in the defeat of colonialism in 1980 and the birth of the Republic of Zimbabwe, which incidentally derives its name from the Great Zimbabwe monument.

But now, in the post-2017 period, with the advent of the Second Republic, led by President ED, we are beginning to witness the renaissance of our value system and great nation.

At every forum, ED takes the opportunity to remind the rest of us of the truism that “we are the people that we have been waiting for” and, as it was during the liberation struggle, “none but ourselves” will rebuild and modernise our motherland.

We have to take as long as it takes to inculcate this value system and reality into our people. Of late, the Bishop has been writing on the Chinese experiences, particularly after the ascension of Deng Xiaoping to power in 1978, as instructive to us in our quest to modernise and industrialise Zimbabwe.

Although academics and scholars often obsess about the success that the Chinese people have recorded in the past 46 years, little focus is given to the changing mindsets and value systems, including challenges, that helped leapfrog China’s development.

Perhaps one of Deng’s major successes was freeing the Chinese people, most of whom heavily leaned on Marxist-Leninism and Maoist Thought, from the grip of “leftist thinking”, “obscurantism”, “blind idealism” and “cultural authoritarianism”.

Inventing “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” meant Deng had to be pragmatic enough to harness the forces of capitalism needed to drive development whilst ensuring that the Chinese people retained the value system that defined them as a people.

As one Chinese journalist and scholar later commented, “Any major change in history must be preceded by a change in people’s conceptual framework.”

The result is the magnificent China that we see today.

This is precisely the reason Bishop Lazarus indicated recently that our history will pretty much judge ED, whose birthday we celebrate today, in the same way that it has judged Deng.

The Great Zimbabwe motifs, which have become signature designs on the new infrastructure projects, such as the Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport, the VVIP Pavilion, the new Parliament building and the Beitbridge roundabout, among others, point to the renaissance of our once-great State.

And most of these projects are being spearheaded by locals, who are gaining incredible capacity and wherewithal that will likely see them getting business in the region and beyond.

You can put these words down: Zimbabwe, in the not-so-distant future, will have influential multinational companies that will trace their genesis to the current epoch.

What ED has done in the past five years is to refocus the national debate and conversations to make economic development and prosperity the zeitgeist of our time.

This has naturally shifted focus and attention on politics to economics, as it should be, especially at a time that we are fighting neocolonialism.

But it all begins by rediscovering who we are as a people. Our glorious past can guide us to a prosperous future.

A happy birthday to ED and happy Munhumutapa Day.

Bishop out!