adminHe told scores of mourners including army officers at the funeral parade for Lieutenant-Colonel Thabani Khumalo at Imbizo Barracks in Bulawayo a fortnight ago, that the army would not respect any leader who does not cherish the gains of the liberation struggle.
This no-nonsense declaration will no doubt have had a shattering effect on imperialist proponents of regime change in Zimbabwe and their local surrogates.
The latter have shamelessly been calling on Zimbabwean soldiers to rend their uniforms and mount the political stage to convert them into turncoats and in the process delete from their minds the history of the armed struggle indelibly and irrevocably written in the blood of colleagues who sacrificed their precious lives so that all Zimbabweans, including the running dogs of imperialism, might be free from racist rule and oppression.
But the Zimbabwean, not Rhodesian, military are made not of silver nor bronze either, but of more sterner stuff, gold, and should never unsay themselves as the people who liberated this country by Zimbabweans who slept through that revolution and refuse to embrace a new vision under which the perception of a true leader is that of a person and ruling party that give a liberated people a brave new world through indigenisation — call it democratisation of both the land and the economy as is now manifest through land reform and indigenisation and economic empowerment.
Some of the Zimbabweans publicly parroting or surreptitiously supporting, calls for a change of government in Zimbabwe are leaders who spent holidays in posh hotels in Western capitals and feasting on cuisine with frogs’ legs as a delicacy and have developed frog- like, Western political tastes as a result. Or they are born-agains for whom the stories of the liberation struggle and its concomitant suffering that the freedom fighters endured are nothing but fairytales and both groups of sellouts remain hell-bent on turning Zimbabwe over to contemporary imperialists who have coalesced to fight a new, economic war as some kind of vengeance against the vanquishment of colonialism in Africa and other developing nations elsewhere.
When foreign rulers occupied our minds, we survived long and sometimes dizzying political onslaughts. The new imperialism against small nations immensely rich in minerals or other natural resources such as oil — abundant in the Arab world and in some African countries, too — targets the belly which is a fortress of resistance and whose fall opens the way for the foreigners to come marching in for orgies of economic exploitation under the guise of fostering “democracy” and “the rule of law”.
The nagging desire of post-modern imperialism is that after a regime change blacks will suffer without bitterness against the re-incarnated erstwhile oppressors.
However, such tabula rasa is unlikely to take place in Zimbabwe for very good reasons of impeachable patriotism and sharp foresight by President Mugabe and his colleagues who put everything in their hearts and minds into the revolution to rescue this motherland from foreign captivity.
At Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 President Mugabe and fellow-leaders in Zanu-PF were already so politically astute they could not be hoodwinked — as the fate that befell leaders in West Africa at the end of colonialism there — into sending Zimbabwe’s bright young man for training as cadets at elite Western military academies so that upon their return they would form a core of top notch officers in Zimbabwe’s new independence army.
Once the young African cadets had enrolled at military schools in the West, they were subjective to heavy doses of indoctrination by instructors who told them that African military culture was primitive and that the western military culture to which they were “lucky” to be exposed, was a civilised military culture.
When the blacks returned home to be promoted into higher military ranks, and the opportune moment came for them, they seized power from civilian governments and the diarrhoea continues to this day in that part of our African continent.
When people call for a security sector reform in Zimbabwe, something not enshrined in the Global Political Agreement, they are no doubt doing so under the urging of and pressure from, those pushing for regime change in the country.
Should that happen, the same enemy will then demand the restructuring of the army so that soldiers become alienated from the politics of their country and instead become betrothed through minority attachment to foreigners who keep their own government under a tight rein.
African rulers who succumb to that subtle recolonisation, and begin a journey of suffering without bitterness, are viewed by the imperialist as “honourable savages”.
President Mugabe’s head and those of his party leaders remain encircled in red by the enemy without and within for regime change for refusing to succumb to the whims of Western imperialism because they are not of the mentality of “honourable native savages” found elsewhere as tools by foreigners. These turn against their own government and fail to realise that once they succeed in handing the country back to imperialists they will themselves be discarded, like old shoes by the same enemy so that they do not interfere in the exploitation of the country’s resources.
What this whole scenario suggests is that the coalitions of imperialists against weaker nations but immensely superior in material riches should serve as a wake-up call for all the black people of this world also to regroup in strategic alliances for their own survival in a world that has become a jungle with the fittest standing a chance of survival.
Support for Zimbabwe’s agrarian reform, as expressed recently in Washington by American civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson, is the kind of strategic linkages that are necessary for the survival of the black race, however widely dispersed we might be on the face of this earth.
Reverend Jackson told a Zimbabwean delegation to the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) discussions in the US capital that no country could successfully fight poverty without addressing the question of land.
The civil rights icon also expressed a desire to visit Zimbabwe soon and re-establish close ties which existed between Africa and the US civil rights movements in the fight against colonialism and apartheid. What Jesse Jackson says above is poignantly captured in the West African concept of Sankofa which says: “It is not taboo to return to the past to fetch what we forgot.”
The solidarity with Zimbabwe that other KPCS members demonstrated against attempts by the US government to ruin this country’s diamond industry is ample proof that, united small, rich nations can blunt any monstrosity by Big Brother.
It is all a question of will-power and a refusal to be downtrodden by self-anointed custodians of “democracy and civilised standards”.
Online Reporter
Bongani Ndlovu