admin
Gibson Nyikadzino Correspondent
Africans generally and Zimbabwe in particular have bad memories of colonial experiences, even though some argue without making intellectual inroads that such experiences were compensated as the colonised territories benefited materially.
Historic heinous crimes that were committed against Zimbabwe’s resistance fighters during the late 19th century at the commencement of the colonial subjugation of blacks by the Pioneer Column, a vanguard of colonial cruelty, cannot be atoned by anything.
The inhuman treatment of peasants, nationalists and the middle-class in the mid-twentieth century through a massive armoury of structurally legislated racist laws can never be defended even when people are independent.
So, the institutional discrimination, exploitation and suppression of the black majority raised the anger levels of both the nationalist leaders, middle-class and peasants who then demanded the overthrow of the settler system.
Contextualising resistance
The intensity and transition of black resistance from protests, industrial action and direct military confrontation against the colonial establishment was a legitimate rebellion to a socio-economically and politically constructed and upheld racist superiority belief by the white man.
This urge for resistance was in response to the ambitious capitalist imperial order that was mounted, operated and commanded by people who considered black Zimbabweans, together with their land and minerals, as exploitable natural resources.
More so, the “settler-native” reference was inflammatory to the existence of the black majority to which the outlook of the racist establishment connoted that whites were unequal to blacks.
Racist English economic historian Arnold Toynbee in his book, The Study of History summarised what the majority of the Westerners then and even today think about Africans.
“When we, Europeans, call people natives, we take away anything from them, anything that suggests that they are human being. They are to us like the forest which the Western falls down. Or the big game that he shoots down. They have no tenure of land. Their tenure of land is as precarious as that of animals they find. What shall we the Lords of creation, the white people, do with the natives we find?” wrote Toynbee.
Revolutionary intellectual and philosopher Frantz Fanon was clear in pointing out, critically, that colonialism was a total project whose existence was propelled by the cheap exploitation of resources (including people) in colonised lands as expressions of white domination. These birth pangs influenced the beginning of revolution.
Serious anger, hardened resistance
Wherever the word revolution has been used, it has primarily been about land because without land there is no life, but death. In China, Cuba, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Mexico’s Zapatista movement and Zimbabwe, revolutions in these countries were premised on land.
For Zimbabwe, the Land Apportionment Act (1931) was used by the colonial establishment to compartmentalise people on who ought to get prime land, tired and depleted soils. Access to education was restricted. More education opportunities were directed towards whites to keep blacks in ignorance.
Despite the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), rights of black Zimbabweans were never regarded in their natural or otherwise form. The rights to free movement, association and equality before the law were among the others curtailed for the black majority.
In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, black nationalist leaders that boldly spoke for justice were arrested or detained without trial. The Preventive Detention Act and the Unlawful Organisations Act (both 1959) separated the right of people to make legitimate demands for independence.
As such, the spread of education and urbanisation of Africans led to the growth of ideas about independence and the people began to question and challenge colonial rule.
By these assessments, to the black majority it now meant that the road to independence via constitutional discussions, legal changes and agreements of a peaceful nature was not a desirable source. With the formation of ZANU in 1963, its slogan of “direct confrontation” was the only meaningful alternative response to end the colonial injustices through sharpening of tools for resistance.
Ending imperial exploitation
The mobilisation of peasants and middle-class citizens inspired a new vision for a Zimbabwe that was going to be attained by a struggle that involved life and death. Sacrifices had to be done to end imperialist exploitation and the direct control of the Zimbabwean economy.
What has to be restated is that when the colonialists came to Africa and Zimbabwe, these European immigrants were encouraged to get comfort here as pioneer farmers or exploiters who forced Africans to provide cheap labour. This resulted in severe consequences in black communities who became determined to remove the colonial structure.
The struggle for political and economic independence, which the peasants contributed to, was to end the parasitic nature of the immediate local agents of a network of international capitalist manoeuvres that wanted the continuance of control and exploitation of Zimbabwe’s resources.
This exploitation also included the involvement of big capitalist entities. It is natural that the collaboration of Zimbabweans under colonial rule towards the whites had to make their establishment impossible to feel safe until the war was won.
It was a crucial victory in political terms encapsulated by the abolishment of the capitalist economic order to turn the wheels towards justice and equality.
Forget not…
With liberation from European colonialism being achieved, Zimbabweans in earnest, should start the process of decolonisation. This is an epistemic counter struggle against processes of the West that want to continue to dominate us.
While political and economic independence are guaranteed in Zimbabwe, social independence is also an arena that needs to be linked with the former and all other aspects.
In the quest to endeavour for such, it is no licence for Zimbabweans to forget the cruelty of the former colonisers and be vigilant to anticipate their unkind intentions, especially in countries like Zimbabwe where their capitalist tentacles were eliminated.
Zimbabweans, remember we are one. This is homeland!
Online Reporter