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Stanely Mushava Literature Today
I am the savage you want to groom for the Queen’s kitchen, the eunuch in whose presence madams, Helen Zille and Marie Le Pen, can safely undress.

I am the collateral damage underfoot grand crusades of civilisation, the scum of the Dark Continent who got away when you crunched my people into a mass grave for imagining they were full-blooded humans like you.

I picked crumbs of your language when I was a serf on Rhodes’ farm, though my Bantu accent rings discordantly against it, and my dark skin is a synonym for everything wrong with the world in the Oxford dictionary.

I may be only an ape in a work-suit, light years below you on the evolution pyramid, but I am not a broiler which innocently pecks around while the madam lists it on the Christmas menu.

I hear all right when the polite society talks about me. The partial humanity in me cringes and my fur stands on end when I see blades sharpened for me in broad daylight.

I am writing you this letter because I listened last week as you told your Caucasian kinsmen that my problem is that I wasn’t colonised enough. You told them that since you let me loose, I have relapsed back to the Stone Age.

“Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch,” you told your white peers.

You think I have spent decades stealing King Leopold’s oranges with my fellow monkeys, and thumbing the fleas in my armpits by rundown mines, while my European masters are seized with the weighty matters of civilisation.

Though my ancestors told me that a skunk is not skinned in the marketplace, these days I hear your people speak quite openly about what to do with the unwashed kaffir, the skunky nigger, that I am.

I know that half of Uncle Sam and Aunt Lizzy’s words slip into the Atlantic by the time they reach me in the forest but my sister works in a big hotel and brings me old newspapers where I see their pictures and their words.

When Uncle Sam is not in his star-spangled chimney pot hat and oil-soaked, zebra bell bottoms, he fits naturally into his Santa Claus or Captain America outfits. I like Aunt Lizzy more because my parents met on her plantation. But what do you care about branches of a mellanoid family tree? We would rather go back to your Third World Quarterly article.

Does it help my situation that only your people are in the committee for listing fragile states and my own country is never away from these lists? Master Gilley, when you talk about drilling etiquette into my monkey skull with the barrel of a gun, my heart turbinates like the zeSA Holdings plant at Livingstone’s lake. I am, after all, another disposable pawn on your Berlin chessboard.

Times have been strange. I have been watching from afar the redneck meltdown in high places. Last year, I heard Donald Trump regrets that Barack Obama and George Bush must not have only drawn the blood, but also the oil when they turned Iraq into a washbasin.

God knows what Uncle Sam has not already taken away from the rubble that was Iraq. Does it surprise you that while your president does not mind oil crossing American borders from the rundown colony to pacify your country’s addiction, Iraqis refuges are the vermin against whom you sealed your borders in January this year?

It doesn’t surprise me because I know that profit over people is the John 3:16 of the American Bible. When Dinesh de’ Souza tells us that you flatten Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq to sea level with guns in your hands and God on your side, we marvel at American exceptionalism.

When Fox blindfolds us with the Star-Spangled, Blood-Soaked, Banner, we forget that Uncle Sam’s halo is powered by stolen oil and his pot belly is stuffed with the flesh of sea-swept Syrian infants. Excuse my out-of-place rambling, Baas Gilley. Let us get back to your grand design.

This year, when I heard Madame Le Pen in France and Madame Zille right across my border eulogise the virtues of European colonialism, it occurred to me that the Antarctic of political correctness has finally thawed and evil diseases are roaring our way.

But these are just spoilt babies of privilege whose backgrounds railroaded them past the shrink to public platforms, right? I thought so and flipped on. Even when Madame Le Pen said history is on her side, I thought a nasty woman is time-travelling back to the Dark Ages, that’s all.

Then I saw your Third World Quarterly paper last week convening your people to another Berlin conference: “For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts.

This worries me because you go on to invoke science and history to prove that my people had too little of a good thing when your settlers rolled their tents and went back to Europe, ending the experiment of civilisation on the dark continent too soon.

You say “now that the nationalist generation that forced sudden decolonisation on hapless populations has passed away, the time may be ripe” for your Caucasian peers to come back and civilise us again with the gun.

Baas Gilley, I know my place but even a beast is allowed to bellow at the abattoir, right? Come now, let us reason together, even though it may be too much for a kaffir to barge from the plantation onto his master’s golf course unannounced and undesired

First, I will commend you for the few things you said right. Civilisation, after all, begins with listening. You stress that this discourse must be reclaimed from sentiment to science, and confess your intention to see progress, peace and freedom taking root in Africa.

Even though it’s hard to separate colonial atrocities with human feeling I will grant you this. Cold fact for cold fact. But allow me to be emotional when I want because my ancestors say though the axe may forget, the tree never forgets. Sentiment wells out of science, after all.

Your criticism against African leaders who lord it over their people, faring sumptuously like Arab oil barons while we fight over crumbs at AU summits, really holds. I publicly share some of this criticisms as a young, broke and politically unaffiliated pitbull of the Fourth Estate.

Just that, I wonder how the failings of African leaders invalidate the evils of colonialism. No, you don’t play us that easily, Master Gilley. History may not know us names, we the ordinary, anonymous Africans, but we have better things to aspire than being assigned the devil who negotiates Photoshop better. Do you know the name of the black servant on whom Queen Nzinga sat when your people refused her a chair? Neither do, but who ever it was, that’s whom I think of when I speak of Africa. History has made the quarrel of kings it’s exclusive business but the poor and anonymous have their dignity. Ask them their ambitions before you deign to speak for mankind.

To come back to your paper, what makes you think that the best way to bring freedom and dignity back to Africa is colonial bondage? If you are going to canonise colonialism as science-driven, what assumptions are you making about our humanity, dignity and intellectual capacity as Africans, Arabs and Latinos?

When you cite a fistful of Africans , whatever their names, wishing for the good old days of colonialism,what makes you think the rest of us cannot see beyond the plantation? You talk about Livingstone, Lugard and de Brazza enjoying popular resurgence as colonial patriarchs. Do you want to know that young Africans are emptying buckets of human waste on your ancestor, Cecil John Rhodes, and sledge-hammering his monuments from the radius of social memory?

You cite Acemoglu and Robinson checklisting hard times on the continent, but what do you make of their argument that inclusive, democratic spaces encourage prosperity while extractive, oppressive spaces beget woe? To which of these two do you equate colonialism.

When you say most Africans voluntarily went to colonial metropolies in search of the new life that their pre-colonial hell-holes could not offer, I readily agree with one of your own writers’ aphorism that the most dangerous worldview is the view of one who had not viewed the world. I have been in rural Zimbabwe most of my life so I maintain respectful silence about your people but why do you presume the mantle of lecturing us when you don’t know the first thing about the ills we suffered under colonial violence.

My people did not to the city because they were starstruck by tower lights. They went there because you took their farms, robbed their cattle, raped their women, drove them to dry reserves and siphoned their wealth to the city.

When you then publicly say: “Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonised to colonised areas, fought for colonial armies and participated in colonial political processes — all relatively voluntary acts,” you clearly move from history and science to racial excitement and conspiracy theories.

When you quote Patrice Lumumba as a defender of Belgian colonialism, how much violence do estimate visiting in the minds of his family and compatriots who lost him and their resource-rich country’s stability and dignity to premeditated homicide by Belgian colonisers and the American CIA, with the complicity of the UN?

Good sir, can you even begin to estimate the violence your article is visiting upon Namibians who lost between 24 000 and 100 000 Herero people and 10 000 Nama people in German’s African Holocaust? Good luck with Photoshopping this into an act of civilisation in your next article.

Have you heard of the letter Lumumba wrote his wife from prison when he was about to morph into the first martyr of post-colonial colonisation, the very evil you want to visit us for ,God knows what for, after failed experiments in DRC, Libya, Iraq and other empire-demolished trouble spots?

Thus wrote Lumumba: “The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. It will be the history which will be taught in the countries which have won freedom from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.” That’s the history that speaks to young Africans not you and Third World Quarterly editors’ senile hallucinations.

When you say British violence was a toddler’s play compared to Mau Mau violence, what do you make of the fact that the Britons have been compelled to compensate Mau Mau rather than the other way round. Clarify this to me next time.

We are with Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Steve Biko, Eduardo Mondhlane, Chris Hani, Herbert Chitepo, Dedan Kimathi, Edison Sithole and countless of our heroes whose blood seems not to have pacified your colonial crave seeing as you are still calling for the reconstitution of the Caucasian axis of evil. That, as if we don’t already see it at work in Misurata and Aleppo.

We are with even the most violent of our freedom fighters because, as Frantz Fanon told us, we counter colonial violence with greater violence, since “no diplomacy, no political genius, no skill” can cope with colonialism except force.

Thus wrote Fanon: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state and will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Good sir, do you even realise how anachrostic your article is? In 2003, a Spectator article identically headed, “The Case for Colonialism” equally salivated for the blood of Iraqis under the doctrine of Caucasian moral superiority. As for how that story ended, don’t get me started.

I have heard that some of your fellow professors want you to retract your “scientific” paper. They are far too generous. I humbly ask you to hang your doctoral cap so that you can learn the first about civilisation at the kindergarten.

Your dark and servile colonial subject,

Stanely Mushava

The writer is a teaching assistant at the National University of Science and Technology. He can be contacted at [email protected]