The greatest inhibition to imperial dominance is justice. It is impossible to be an imperialist and a just person at the same time. Ironically imperialism is and must be fuelled on the pretext of justice and freedom, these being the only nobilities in whose name territorial expansionism can be carried out today. Up to the 1920s one could openly boast of being a colonialist or an imperialist, but that cannot be done any more.
In order to preserve the legacy of imperialism and to sustain its perpetuity, it is absolutely necessary that history is not only favourably manufactured in a biased way, but also that it is completely falsified.
When Caroline Elkins presented her dissertation proposal to her University Department at Harvard University in 1997, she had a burning intention to write about what she believed to be the successes of Britain’s civilisation mission in the Kikuyu detention camps of Kenya.

This started with what was an innocent and routine research about the Mau Mau uprising, something Elkins had become “fascinated” with after reading through records of the uprising in London.
She had read all about the Mau Mau savagery and how it had destructively interfered with the saintly work of white settlers in the colony of Kenya, unsettling the good-intentioned Royal colonial powers back in Britain.

She had read of how the barbarians that constituted the Mau Mau were so savagely primitive, anti-European, anti-civilisation and above all anti-Christian. She had gathered through her readings that the Mau Mau were primitive monsters whose sole occupation was “reverting to tactics of primitive terror to interrupt the British civilisation mission in Kenya.”

The records that Elkins was reading in London gave her an understanding of a Mau Mau group that attracted world attention in the early 1950s all for the most wrong reasons. She read through pages and pages of “photographic spreads with chilling pictorial evidence of Mau Mau’s savagery that contrasted dramatically with images of the local British settlers,” of course portrayed in the records as well-meaning advocates of philanthropic civilisation.

In these records it is dismissively mentioned that the Mau Mau guerrillas “claimed they were fighting for ithaka na wiyathi, or land and freedom.” But the records show a history written in such a way that very few people in the West took seriously the need for either land or freedom for the colonial subjects in Kenya.
With whites in control the Kenyans were supposed to be freer and happier, just like they needed no land with white settlers doing real farming on their behalf.

What was taken quite seriously was the prevalent assertion that the Mau Mau were “criminal or gangsters bent on terrorising the local European population, and certainly not freedom fighters.”

The records make the atrocious crack down on the Mau Mau and on the generality of the Kikuyu people by twenty thousand British military troopers, backed by the Royal Air Force, appear like a saintly endeavour worth the praises and admiration of history readers. The records give a picture of messianic troopers taming murderous barbaric monsters on the loose.

This was heavy military artillery brought in full force against people with simple homemade weapons for a solid two years, followed by a lengthier period of ruthless persecution of 1.5 million Kikuyus, whose only crime was the suspicion that they had taken the Mau Mau oath and vowed to fight to have their land and freedom back.

Essentially the British troopers and their backing Royal Air Force just turned the whole Kikuyuland into a massive maximum security prison, fencing all the people in what were called “detention camps.”

It is the study of these camps and interaction with those still living who once were detained in the camps that made Caroline Elkins change her mind completely about the history she had read back in London on the Mau Mau uprising.
When she began her research on the detention camps in 1995, little did Elkins know that she would, ten years later write an incisive book about the wide-scale atrocities in colonial Kenya and Britain’s vigorous attempts to cover it all up.

The book is called “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” and it is from the preface of this book that all the quotations so far made in this essay were derived.

In presenting lies as manufactured reality it is absolutely necessary to completely falsify history, that way overcoming the burdensome and sickening inhibition of truth, making it look like the West only attacks or destroys primitive and monstrous aggressors who, if left unchecked can easily destroy the whole planet, or egregiously harm the nobility of humanity.

It makes sense that the Vietnam War history is reconstructed and rearranged to bring out the reality that the United States always does the noble and right thing. As Noam Chomsky puts it, the bombing of South Vietnam is portrayed as having been done in defence of South Vietnam “against somebody, namely, the South Vietnamese, since nobody else was there.”

The way the Kennedy administration put it was exceptionally impressive. They simply told the world that the United States was launching on behalf of the South Vietnamese a defence against “internal aggression,” of course by the South Vietnamese themselves, entirely aggressing against themselves.
When one has control over the intellectual community and the media it becomes super easy to get any kind of lies passed for reality and truth. This is exactly why it has become fact that Assad’s government in Syria is ruthlessly massacring a peace-loving rebel group whose only role in the conflict has become playing victims to a blood-thirsty regime that thoroughly enjoys killing civilians for sheer arrogance’s sake.

It was the same with Libya where the Al-Qaeda affiliated Benghazi rebels were nobly called civilians at the mercy of a ruthless Gaddafi, despite vivid television images of the same rebels violently marching while armed to the teeth with Western supplied weapons.
The West vehemently insisted that these heavily armed “civilians” were not to be attacked, and when they attacked themselves, were not meant to be resisted, otherwise Nato would be forced to “stop the killing of civilians.”

The blatant lie upon which Iraq was invaded by the West in 2003 was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was about to destroy the whole planet in 48 hours, according to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. After the lie was busted for what it was, a deliberate concoction of an entire untruth, there have been tremendous efforts at blaming Saddam Hussein himself for the blatant lie — with some Western commentators saying the lie was a direct result of Saddam Hussein’s own vacuous claims.

The recorded history on Libya is emphatically silent on the West’s oil interest in that country, bleating so unimpressively about how the West “prevented a pending genocide,” or unashamedly claiming that Nato helped to bring democracy to Libya — a democracy of murderous sectional fighting and endless militia squabbles, as well as a lawless era of vindictive justice and primitive racial profiling.

It is important that Zimbabwe records the history of the country well, especially from the year 2000. Right now the West has done numerous documentaries, films and literature on Zimbabwe’s land reform program. Just about every one of these records vilifies the person of President Robert Mugabe, the liberation war veterans, Zanu-PF and others often called “Mugabe cronies,” whatever that means.
The land reform program is not often recorded as the just cause it effectively and indisputably is. Rather it is recorded as a lawless endeavour carried out by unthinking land grabbers who blissfully “destroyed the country’s agricultural system,” in the name of land reclamation. The record portrays white colonial settlers as

“skilled farmers who once made the country the bread basket of Africa,” while the resettled indigenous Zimbabweans are portrayed as “unskilled blacks who have in a short ten years turned the country into a basket case.”
The truth is that in a short ten years; the new farmers have surpassed the record tobacco production ever, registering a new record of 122 million kilograms in 2010.

In 2008 Professor Ian Scoones of Sussex University discovered the lies about Zimbabwe’s land reform the same way Caroline Elkins discovered the lies about the Mau Mau uprising in the late nineties.
After a thorough study of land reforms in Masvingo Province, Professor Scoones challenged a number of what he called “myths,” in reality lies about the land reform program in Zimbabwe.

He dismissed as untrue five well publicised “myths;” fabrications if one is charitable with words, or lies if one is honest. The first such myth was the assertion that Zimbabwe’s land reform has been a total failure, the second being that the beneficiaries were largely political “cronies,” the third was the claim that there has been no investment in the new settlements, the fourth being that agriculture is in complete ruins, and the fifth asserted that the rural economy has collapsed.
None of these assertions could be supported by evidence on the ground, with the contrary almost always the result in Ian Scoones’s study; for example the finding that only about 11 percent of the land reform beneficiaries could be described as being politically connected.

It also turned out that agricultural production per household had actually increased for the land reform beneficiaries, just like it turned out that the Government had in fact significantly invested in supporting the new farmers.
Now the record of the indigenisation policy has already suffered a lot of distortions and deliberate fabrications aimed at slandering its movers and pushers, as well as destroying its merit.

What the Western media report is not an indigenisation policy designed to empower the local Zimbabwean towards controlling the country’s resources and wealth. Rather we are told of an unsound policy designed to unfairly and illegally grab shares of wealth from well-meaning foreign investors.
The logic of local ownership of the means of production has been dutifully vilified as an ill-thought policy of “scaring investors,” or “causing capital flight,” if one were to borrow the words of the pro-West Zimbabwean Finance Minister, Tendai Biti.

If indeed Zanu-PF is using the economic indigenisation policy as an electioneering tool, then the party is doing an excellent job of campaigning on real democratic needs of the people.
It is far much better than Tsvangirai promising the electorate US$10 billion in aid money from “our friends in the West,” whoever these are. This he did in run up to the March 2008 election, and four years on, no such money has been received despite Tsvangirai being part of the Government.

Advocating an economic takeover by the locals is a lot more sensible than Joyce Banda’s obsession with Western aid in Malawi — a humiliating dependence syndrome that makes Africans look like the sub-humans they are seen to be in the West.
When the reality before us is a manufactured reality by those who seek to hide the truth from our people we must wake up and stand not only in defence of the truth, but more importantly in defence of our dignity as a people. Sovereignty is not a bigoted idea entertained by extremist nationalism.

It is a sound economic principle upon which economic freedom is premised and founded.
Let us not allow our sovereign initiatives to be recorded as barbaric ideas by those who specialise in manufacturing realities meant to protect their own selfish interests.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!

• Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.