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nation or employ the youths in the world of today. In fact this writer has been repeatedly attacked for writing too much about Zimbabwe’s political past – a past seen by some as entirely irrelevant to the many needs of today’s generation.
There are some Zanu-PF politicians who seem to believe that their involvement in the country’s liberation history amounts to some form of entitlement, not only to power but also to many other privileges. When we study history as a nation we cannot be entirely expected to merely celebrate those who struggled on our behalf.
History must instruct us, and we must be able to transform history into concrete reality, into planning and development, into construction of power and the ability to ensure our survival as a people, be it political survival or socio-economic survival.
If we do not adopt this approach, the Heroes Day celebrations become an exercise in the inflation of egos – an exercise that cuts us further from reality. When history fails to instruct its subjects into the future, we begin to see the irony of people who are not even our friends joining in the celebration, the way Westerners celebrate the history of Nelson Mandela, or that of Bishop Desmond Tutu, even the dozen years the puppet MDC-T party has been in existence.
Western propagandists would want all of us to remember this treacherous episode as a history of democratic struggle.
We have been informed that the white community in South Africa is quite keen to celebrate the sanitised and dramatised autobiography of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai – a revisionist glorification of an otherwise unassuming life of a mediocre high school dropout who could only do four of the six-year high school life span, proceeding to work as a teenage general hand at a mine at a time his peers were largely engaged in a fierce liberation war that brought Zimbabwe’s independence; and then learning the art of politics through trade unionism.
The author of Tsvangirai’s memoirs calls this experience “At the Deep End,” regardless of the shallowness of the majority of the feats. A man described by members of his own party as always “doing what the last man said” cannot possibly be “deep end” material unless we are discussing drowning lessons.
Like the history of Nelson Mandela and that of Desmond Tutu, Morgan Tsvangirai’s history must really be appealing to Westerners. This means that they must be seeing in such history some means of protecting their own interests, and see in it something that works for them, and possibly against us all.
If the Westerners can celebrate our history and see in it something positive, then it simply means we are not using such history in a revolutionary sense. They do not see William Bango’s study of Tsvangirai’s history as a threat to their power or their interests and that is why they want Bango’s narrations serialised in the media.
If we are studying our history the way Mandela’s history is told in the West we are studying it incorrectly, and our celebration of such history may only be helping to maintain us in a state of deception.
It is us and us alone who can make sure that we look at and study history in a light that advances our own interests, not inflates our egos and blinds us to reality.
Revolutionary history is often downplayed while mediocre achievements like Tsvangirai’s little political troubles are elevated to pure heroism.
Our revolutionary history is not serialised in white-owned newspapers the way Tsvangirai’s childhood stories are going to be serialised in South Africa.
This writer and others embarked on drafting a syllabus for the National Youth Service’s National Orientation Program in 2001 and that effort was emphatically described by Westerners and their lackeys in Zimbabwe as “brainwashing of youths,” not because any of those that denounced the process had taken any time to read the syllabus, but purely because the history to be taught was a threat to the power and interests of the West in Zimbabwe, especially British interests, and also a threat to the political prospects of the MDC.
The BBC’s Hillary Anderson manufactured a script which she developed into a documentary that was then screened on the Panorama program, and she did her very best to portray the National Youth Service scheme as nothing more than orgies of rape sex carried out by heartless beasts calling themselves instructors.
When we further developed the National Orientation program into National Strategic Studies for technical colleges like Harare Polytechnic in 2003 critics of this development argued that the effort was essentially badly reputed, and was nothing more than a set of dates and past events.
They asked, “Why should students study these dates; why should they study these events; what do these events have to do with today?” It is as if they were saying, “Ok, it may be used to explain how some things came about in today’s Zimbabwe, but we could probably live without it.”
Revolutionary history has been looked upon as irrelevant and unprofitable. Some argue that history is not going to earn anyone money, it is not going to get people jobs, unlike a degree in computer science or a trade course of some sort.
Nothing can be more foolish than these sentiments. When we hear them we recognise that the individual has not seen the connection between history, power and wealth.
There is always a direct link between history and economics. If there were no direct relationship between history and money, a direct relationship between history and power, history and rulership, history and domination, the Europeans would not have bothered altering and destroying the history of those they colonised.
There is a good reason why the European wants to take away our history from us, a good reason why it is important for imperialists to rewrite and distort our history.
The rewriting, the distortion, and the stealing of our history must serve vital economic, political and social functions for the Westerner, or else the West’s ruling elites would not bother and try so hard to keep African history away from us, and to deliberately distort it in our minds.
We must always understand that it is in the nature of this racist culture of imperialism to hide its true political agenda. Imperialism presents so-called facts and information as if they have no political implications or connections.
If one attaches a political meaning to the “Skinner rat” in a cage then the experiment seizes to be about motivational or reinforcement theory.
The fact that the rat is put in a box and can only eat if it performs a particular behaviour (pushing a lever), means that the experimenter determines when this rat is going to eat, when it is going to drink, determining the living conditions under which this rat must survive.
The rat becomes conditioned and changes as a result of the fact that the man has control of vital things in its life. In reality the rat is forced to survive according to the diktats of a set of power relations, meaning that the conditioned rat is a social creation.
What it learns is the result of a power differential between itself and the experimenter, because the experimenter has power over the rat and uses that power to transform and create something new in the rat.
The caged rat is of course different from other unconditioned rats. What it shows are the effects of its conditioning.
The imperialist, like the experimenter with the rat will always try to condition the African by manipulating the conditions under which we live.
The illegal economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe are meant to condition our politicians to behave like the caged rat, and that is why Morgan Tsvangirai says the embargo can only be lifted after Zanu-PF politicians push the lever in the cage – the lever here being allowing the MDC-T to interpret the GPA and to prescribe fully how it should be fulfilled.
In fact Zanu-PF politicians must allow the MDC-T to transit unopposed into the next government and that would be regarded as the coming of democracy to Zimbabwe.
We do not need Westerners to change our situation and Zanu-PF politicians must get this straight. If we wish to change our situation as Zimbabweans then we must change the power relationships.
That is why it is very important to take the economic empowerment program a lot more seriously than the crowd-pleasing rhetoric we sometimes hear. Controlling of investment power is about changing power relations more than it is about gathering a bunch of enthusiastic indigenous activists so they can try their untested enthusiasm in business.
If we are to prevent ourselves from being created by another people and are to engage in the act of self-creation, then we must change the power relations existing in our economy.
Without addressing economic power relations we will continue to produce bunches and bunches of educated people who wonder perpetually why we cannot get out of the condition that we are in as a poor developing country.
We will continue to produce crowds of educated people who, the more degrees they get in business administration, the fewer the businesses they have to administer; who, as they graduate more with Masters in Business Administration, find Harare being inundated with Asians and West Africans coming to establish all manner of businesses ahead of our own highly educated business administrators.
Apparently their degrees are not designed for them to control their own economic situations and circumstances, but to service the economic circumstances of those who can start businesses.
Our education system must recognise that the whole of human life is a political system, and therefore all matters must be looked at politically. It is only through political, economic and military action that we have to change our circumstances.
Failure to make these adjustments will mean that our education system will continue to churn out highly educated servants. It is the intention of every imperialist that Africans never escape their condition of dependency and servitude.
Without us wrecking this intention to smithereens our education system can only produce highly educated servants.
If history was not the present and the future, if it was just an irrelevant past; then dear reader you would not have read this piece. Your present capacity to read and write is a product of history, of past acquired skills. The ability to walk and talk is an expression of history – of skills that were learnt way back in history.
It is our history that is our present and that will be our future. This is why no one should be too proud of what the Westerners are doing in Libya. They are simply making history telling us they are a dominant people that will get what they want by dominating and manipulating others. We are being recorded as hapless people at the mercy of ruthless dictators and that history is our present and will be our future if we do not radically change the power relations.
We must simply tell aggressive Westerners like Sarkozy and Cameron to get lost or face the wrath pf us Africans. Without that assertiveness we will continue to be to be dominated and to have puppet politicians imposed upon us.
Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

l Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.