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GO WARRIORS GO . . . The Warriors have finally come of age at the ongoing African Nations Championship in South Africa, where they have defied odds to reach the last four

Tichaona Zindoga My Turn
Writing this, I have been pretty excited about last weekend.
The guess is right: it is because of the senior national soccer team, the Warriors, who have done what we all feared to be the Houdini by qualifying for the semi-finals of the ongoing CHAN tournament in South Africa.
I am one of the millions of Zimbabweans that support football and in particular the national team.
The Warriors have not been able to reward the Zimbabweans adequately.

They have at times – most times in fact – been a disappointment and outright disgrace and a scandal. They have been the Worry Us.
Some of us grew up amidst a reality of Zimbabwe being the nearly boys of African soccer.
They would go so near but fail to go any farther.

Years of barrenness have followed.
Until this.
It does not matter that CHAN is the second tier continental tournament reserved for players that play in comparatively impoverished leagues and economies and that it has had problems getting recognition from FIFA and clubs.

Yet Zimbabweans are excited all the same.
It is our Nations Cup and World Cup.
Zimbabweans can believe again.

Today they look set to cruise past Libya and book a berth in the final.
The Warriors have the capacity to deliver.
They should deliver the silverware.
Yes, Zimbabwe can achieve great things; especially on its own.

Which brings in the second aspect of this piece, namely the bizarre show by, or events around, one Bryan Adams this same past week.
Bryan Adams is a musician from Canada.
He used to be big.

He no longer has currency, being generally played in slots dedicated to old music by white musicians.
There were issues around Bryan Adams who performed at the Harare International Conference Centre on Friday night.
First, tickets for the show were mysteriously sold out in a few hours and ended up almost exclusively in white people’s hands.
Three thousand five hundred people, of whom 99,9 percent were whites according to one statistic, attended the show.

One of the few blacks that attended told me he could only see one other black soul about.
One commentator believes that if a bomb had detonated at the HICC we would have lost about all of our white species in Zimbabwe.
That would have been such a pity, wouldn’t it?

Here is how one newspaper editorialised the saga: “It was the secrecy surrounding the concert that has left many ordinary Zimbabweans shell- shocked as there was no pre-publicity or details on where people could purchase tickets.

“The million-dollar question is how the 3 475 people, almost all of them whites, managed to know about the concert and buy tickets. Even the media was surprised at the announcement that Adams’s tickets had already sold out.”

The paper tells us the tickets “were sold underground, most of them to the white community”.
It compares the charade with the Harare International Festival of the Arts where all races are brought together in song and dance.
The paper ponders all this: “And you tend to wonder — which year we are in?”

That is a loaded parting shot.
It can only be answered one way.
Here is what a weekend paper reported Adams to have said: “He said the audience at his Friday night show certainly made him wonder whether he was really in Africa or Europe.”

It is clear that the show was never an African thing in an African country called Zimbabwe.
It was a Caucasian thing organised, sponsored and ultimately held by and to serve the white interests.
In fact, this brings the valid observation that whites in Zimbabwe are generally not part of Zimbabwean life, culture and processes.
They have their own places where they live, which they flee to when they see a growth in the number of black faces.

They have their own shopping malls, bars and clubs where they do what they want including homosexuality.
They flee the black man like he has leprosy.

Some of them left the country at Independence, which we all thought was the best thing to happen after nearly a century of colonialism and near slavery.

Most of them had killed black people in the land of black ancestors because the white man envied our land and gold.
Those that stayed put hid themselves in their suburbs and farms and exclusive clubs.

The land reform programme in 2000 knocked some of the last vestiges of white exclusion.
Some of them decided to fight back.

They for the first time in years started to participate in national life, namely via elections, which they had never done.
They hoped to wrestle the land back from three million blacks that they, the under 4 000, had had almost an exclusive claim to.
The local whites have been helped by their kith and kin in Europe, America, Australia and Bryan Adams’ Canada.

In fact, some elements in Canada did not like Bryan coming here, as they reasoned that this would “legitimise” the current Government led by President Mugabe.

What they did not expressly say is that they feared that such a supposedly big concert would show the world that Zimbabwe is not a place where whites are killed and eaten by a “monster” called Robert Mugabe.

The horror stories have been a careful plan to justify Western intervention in Zimbabwe to topple the heroic Mugabe and replace him with a puppet called Morgan Tsvangirai, failure of which scheme today has brought grief to Tsvangirai who is set to be shunted aside like a used something.

The whites, most of them of the genus we call Rhodies, as well as their exiled kith and kin, are supposed to reap the fruits of the suffering and emasculation of the black Zimbabwean.

They wait. They pray.
The decolonisation remains incomplete.
The whites of this country should be reminded that, if they do please, they can keep their Brian Adams and we keep our Warriors.