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Claude Maredza Correspondent

“Whoever does not inform his children of his grandparents, has destroyed his child, marred his descendants, and injures his offspring the day he dies.

“Whoever does not make use of his ancestry has muddled his reason. Whoever is unconcerned with his lineage has lost his mind. Whoever neglects his origin, his stupidity has become critical. Whoever is unaware of his ancestry his incompetence has become immense. Whoever is ignorant of his roots, his intellect has vanished. Whoever does not know his place of origin, his honour has collapsed” (African Philosophy from Antiquity).

This is yet another urgent matter, which we must address and correct urgently, as it touches right at the core of our spirituality. It, therefore, cannot be allowed to carry on in its present form, which is totally white, Western, colonial, racist, unrepresentative of our ways, and alien to our ways. Because it has nothing to do with us, it is illegitimate.

Yet ironically we have among us our own erudite advisors of the highest order and calibre capable and able to advise on how to correctly inaugurate any of our office-bearers from the lowest to the highest in an acceptable manner as practiced in our way not in the racist colonisers’ ways.

We hope that these people are consulted during inaugurations of our national office-bearers. This can only give blessings to Zimbabwe, resulting in national generational wealth and happiness.

So even if Murenga moved to Njelele as observed, Great Zimbabwe, i.e., Masvingo still remained the capital city of the Mutapa Kingdom, which people could still return to despite the internal disturbances of 1450.

So Murenga’s relocation to Njelele, the new Guruuswa was clearly temporary. The wars which we fought against the Portuguese to drive them out of Zimbabwe between 1675 and 1695 were more than successfully accomplished by routing them out of our territory.

The departure of the Portuguese was followed by the entry of Zwangendaba, then Mzilikazi, then the invasion of our land by the British, which disturbed the project of re-establishing our capital city, Masvingo at Great Zimbabwe.

Those events are now over and done with. We have now won back our sovereignty. There is no reason why we cannot re-establish our capital city, Masvingo. That’s the only correct thing to do.

It is, therefore, clearly Lord Salisbury, who disturbed our spiritual equilibrium and equanimity when he caused the diabolic movement of our capital from Masvingo to Harare, because of his fear of the Karanga numbers.

This is, therefore, a colonial mistake, which needed to be corrected yesterday. To the colonials it wasn’t a mistake. It was strategic.

But there is no reason why we should carry on with their mistake when it disturbs our spiritual equilibrium. We well know that it is this spiritual equilibrium, which gives stability and generational success to everything else that makes us.

Hindsight shows us that the colonisers applied this strategy wherever else they colonised for the same reason.

In Nigeria, they put the capital at Lagos, and this has now been corrected by our Nigerian brothers, who have relocated the capital to Abuja, the correct indigenous capital city of the country.

They did it in Malawi and many other African spaces. The only place they left the capital city where they found it as established by the indigenes was in Botswana for the main reason that the ruling Bamangwato was a tiny tribe in terms of numbers, so the colonisers knew that they could contain them without breaking a sweat.

Otherwise everywhere else they colonised in Africa they applied the same strategy of establishing the capital of the new colony far away from the majority indigenous people of the new colony for fear of their inability to contain the hordes of people in the event of a revolt.

Because of Lord Salisbury’s strategy, which has resulted in Harare becoming the capital city of Zimbabwe, all commerce and industry, and most areas of human activity had to be found mostly in this place. Harare is where they began to be developed and expanded by the new people, the British as they settled on our land.

This then brings the unfortunate entry of Professor George Fortune into our linguistic space, because he also happened to be in the Harare/Salisbury area, leading to his futile and arrogant attempt to study and lecture us on our own indigenous languages.

And my God, did he make a mess of it!

Professor George Fortune, a white man credited with putting into writing most of the Shona grammar, took most of the Shona he used for academic purposes from the region of Zimbabwe where the Zezuru dialect of the language is spoken.

This happened to be the area of Zimbabwe he resided in.

It appears he never bothered to research further and look deeper into the make-up of the Shona language, particularly pertaining to dialects.

Given the fact that the Zimbabwean Shona speakers of the time could hardly voice their own opinions due to racism as their language was being destroyed by a white person, who himself was writing on a language that was foreign to him, and was, therefore, bound to make mistakes, we are now stuck with this so called standard Shona, which is mainly Zezuru, a clearly incorrect position.

And the joke and irony is that, because this was a white man writing about an indigenous language he didn’t have the foggiest knowledge about, we now have a situation in Zimbabwe where those studying their own indigenous language, Shona, do so in English.

Now; tell me a better linguistic joke.

This is evidently part of the hazardous nature of racism and colonialism. Here is a white man, who hardly understands an indigenous language, but he lords over the indigenes with their language in their DNA and simply says, “This is the grammar of your language, take it or leave it”.

He most certainly got paid very well for doing this, and it’s not preposterous to hazard that his estate still receives a lot of royalties from this palpable destruction of a whole people through this horrendous destruction of their language.

Claude Maredza is from Norumedzo Village, Bikita District, Masvingo Province. His contact details are; email:[email protected]; phone: 00 263 (0) 77 2 382 099.