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Simon Massey Correspondent
MY previous two articles have concentrated on the period of the Bush War or the Second Chimurenga, mainly because this period covers my own time growing up in Rhodesia.

In this article I focus on the period of the First Chimurenga and compare the experiences of Zimbabweans at this time with those of Aboriginals in newly colonised Canada.

At the time that the Pioneer Column was rolling in to establish British hegemony in Zimbabwe, British colonialism in Canada was already well established. The colonisation of Zimbabwe effectively concerned the acquisition of land and the resources that lay on or within it.

The Pioneer Column sought gold, diamonds and other valuable minerals, but proceeded to acquire Zimbabwe’s agricultural land once it concluded that the country would not yield the same kind of minerals boom that South Africa had witnessed.

Likewise, in Canada, the vast forests on the land and the minerals within drove Western colonial interest.

As in Zimbabwe of course, this land was occupied by indigenous peoples who needed to be relocated in the first instance, and permanently disenfranchised in the second.

As in Zimbabwe, these peoples held and still hold huge reverence for the land that sustained them. And, as in Zimbabwe, they would need to be removed from their land if the colonisers were to access its resources.

By the time British colonialism was established in Zimbabwe, the Canadian authorities had been working on what the British termed their “Indian problem” for about 40 years.

In Zimbabwe, Africans removed from their lands, often at gunpoint, were “resettled” in arid areas whilst their productive and fertile land was taken by settlers who “bought” it from the British Crown.

In Canada, indigenous children were removed from their parents and villages by Canadian authorities who shipped them off to Indian residential schools, often hundreds or thousands of miles away.

The results were the same in both cases: massive profit for the Crown and destitution or worse for both indigenous Canadians and Zimbabweans, whose only crime was occupying land that the Crown wanted.

The inherent racism characterising the colonisation of both Canada and Zimbabwe cannot be understated.

Ostensibly, the Indian residential schools sought to “civilise” the Aboriginal Indian child by removing them from the influence of their familial and tribal ideologies.

The public image of the Indian boarding schools sought to show that they intended to educate and integrate Indian children and establish in them a “civilised” way of living and thinking. It claimed to turn “savages into citizens”.

This was a lie. Education and integration was never the true purpose of the Indian residential school. The indigenous peoples of Zimbabwe were never expected to survive in the barren parts of the country; they were expected to perish. The same was true for the children shipped off to Indian residential schools.

As in Zimbabwe, where Africans were being forcibly removed from their land, Canadian Aboriginals had no choice in the matter of sending their children to Indian residential schools.

Law was established to force Indians to send their children away to boarding schools. It was not legal for indigenous peoples to keep children in their own villages or to teach them their native language and customs.

The Royal Constabulary of Mounted Police, also known as the Mounties, rode into villages, rounded up children at gunpoint and rode off with them.

In order to isolate children from their own specific Aboriginal influence, authorities ensured that children were never housed or schooled locally. Shipped hundreds or thousands of miles away from their families, children were often mixed up amongst other tribes and groups, all with differing customs.

This made it very difficult for them to be visited by family, who often had no idea of the horrors their children were enduring. And what horrors.

The claims that Indian residential schools sought to “remove the Indian from the child” through education and integration were deliberate lies. What the Indian residential school really sought to do was to damage or destroy coming generations of Indians. This way their numbers would be so heavily reduced that any future claims they might make to their own land could be “legitimately” disputed and resisted.

The Indian residential school was not a place to be educated. It was a place of indoctrination. It was a place of death. Many, many thousands of Canadian Aboriginal children died or disappeared at the Indian residential schools, described by some as “Christian death camps”. How?

The official narrative claims that children often died of disease. The official narrative neglects to mention that these children were often deliberately infected by being schooled and housed in close proximity with other children suffering TB and smallpox. Claims of this sort have been supported by photographic evidence showing healthy children being schooled alongside diseased children suffering open TB sores.

Christian death camps

The deaths and disappearances of native children through the Indian residential school system in fact came about in various ways. The people who ran these schools were often religious zealots who deliberately mistreated the “heathen” children.

Children were inadequately fed and were left in freezing dormitories in the middle of winter. They were punished by electric shock or severe beatings, kicked or thrown downstairs and even out of windows. Many children were experimented upon to see how long they could survive without proper food or clothing.

Whilst many died from disease, many others ran away from school, only to die from the freezing conditions outside, often literally within sight of the building.

Many children were raped and sexually abused by priests. Children who fell pregnant had their babies removed from them and often murdered immediately. In later years children were farmed out to local paedophile rings and never returned.

Others were used in medical experiments and claims that Nazi doctors used Indian children for experiments in the 1930s abound. In fact the phrase “The Final Solution” was not coined by the Nazis in order to deal with their “Jewish problem”, but by the Canadians seeking to resolve their “Indian problem”.

Although the horrors of the Holocaust cannot be understated, the Nazis did not directly target the children of Jews in the way that Canadian Indian residential schools targeted the children of Canadian Indians. Yet the rightful outcry over the genocide of the Jews in Germany thoroughly over-shadows that of the genocide of Indian children in Canada.

It is perhaps that the British Monarchy endures whilst Nazi Germany has fallen, that explains why the German Genocide of Jews receives so much more attention than the Canadian genocide of children.

Numerous attempts to expose these atrocities have been and continue to be made by Canadian defrocked priest, Kevin Annett.

Annett was trained and ordained into the Canadian United Church and after a number of other successful positions, was appointed Minister of Port Alberni United Church in British Columbia.

Annett was concerned that despite the numbers of local indigenous Indians suffering poverty, unemployment and addiction, none attended his church services. After some quiet, friendly enquiries, Annett discovered that local bigwigs in the church, business and town community were accused of child abuse, cruelties and atrocities at the local Indian residential school.

Digging deeper, Annett also discovered that his church was parcelling out land, selling it for logging and mining development and accruing vast sums without telling the local communities, who were under the impression that old treaties gave them rights to veto such developments.

Not long after attempting to expose these varying crimes to his superiors, Annett was defrocked and has been the subject of concerted demonisation ever since.

He has made exposing the crimes of church, state and crown his life’s work.

What is striking when considering the Indian residential schools in Canada and the land theft in Zimbabwe is that all these crimes were being organised and legislated by the same people back in England.

While native children were being stolen from their families and imprisoned in Indian residential schools in Canada, Africans were being removed at gunpoint from their land in Zimbabwe by the same authority and for the same reason: so that the Crown might access their land and resources.

African land that was stolen and then sold off by the BSAC in Zimbabwe, brought profits not to the Africans whose land was sold, but to the British Crown.

Eighty nine percent of Canada effectively belongs to the Crown and is deemed “Crown Land”. This vast proportion of one of the largest countries on earth is purported to be held “in trust” for the Canadian people, but instead is under the control of the British Crown. As indigenous Canadians are far more likely to be suffering in poverty than their white countrymen, it would appear they are not benefiting from the land that is being held “in trust” for them by the Crown.

Canada is a vast country, the second largest on earth by landmass. The resources within and on her land are priceless in value. Why is it that those with the greatest right to that land are benefiting least from it?

The short answer is the Crown. It was the Crown that benefited from land theft in Zimbabwe and it was the Crown that benefited from the Canadian genocide of children.

A failure in truth and reconciliation

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 2008 and reported its findings of cultural genocide in 2015.

Upon completion of its investigation, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission produced dozens of recommendations to move forward and to help bring the vast numbers of indigenous Canadians in dire poverty into affluent mainstream Canadian society.

Primary amongst these was the actual reconciliation in its title: acceptance and apology by those who had organised and legislated the horrors of the Indian residential schools and who ultimately benefited and still benefit from them through the theft of Canadian resources.

The commission recommended that the Pope and the Queen of England should each make public apologies for the genocide of children as well as for the endemic cruelty, starvation, abuse and suffering inherent within the schools programme.

As Canada’s head of state and head of the Anglican Church, the Queen of England Elizabeth II is thoroughly culpable for the crimes committed at the Indian residential schools, which are now acknowledged as genocide following the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission findings of 2015.

Neither the Pope nor the Queen of England have apologised.

On May 17, 2017 it was reported by CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had called again for the Pope to apologise.

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has suffered numerous complaints that it was set up by those who seek to mitigate the embarrassment of its findings in advance. Nonetheless it has still produced a shocking litany of crimes against children, many of which had been flagged by Kevin Annett as early as 1995.

Accusations levelled towards Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — that it demonstrated an eagerness to whitewash the truth — have also been levelled at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa.

The Mandela Dialogues, an organisation set up to discuss the results of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in various countries, was established in 2013. It draws its participants from Germany and other countries grappling with a difficult history. Its inaugural conference was held in South Africa and it has since visited Cambodia and Sri Lanka.

In 2017, the Mandela Dialogues were held in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The conference was dedicated to discussing the limitations and failures of Canada’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the findings of which appeared in 2015 after a seven-year investigation.

Although official results of the commission claim that only 6 000 children died in residential schools, the true figures are feared to be greater even than 50 000. It is apparent there remain active efforts to maintain a cover-up.

Neither the true horrors of the schools system in Canada nor the brutalised land theft in Zimbabwe are discussed in British media. It would be nigh on impossible to have this article published in Britain.

There is a continued and active cover-up of colonial crimes, but the fact that the British Crown is culpable of these crimes is beyond doubt.

Although the Indian residential schools began operating long before the Queen was born, they continued operating throughout her reign and under her stewardship as head of both the Canadian State and the United Church in Canada, up until 1996, when the last school finally closed.

The Queen of England Elizabeth II personally oversaw a period through which thousands of children died or disappeared from the Indian residential schools in Canada, and at the same time she was taking priceless gifts from Rhodesia’s white school children.

In 1947, the white, predominately British school children of Southern Rhodesia — all 42 000 of them — clubbed together to buy the Queen of England a diamond brooch. Known as “The Sunday Brooch, The Flame Lilly”, this platinum brooch contains 301 diamonds and was utterly priceless even before it became a possession of the Queen.

Surely, it is clear that the acquisition of wealth is the sole ambition of the Crown. Surely it is clear that to acquire and secure future access to wealth, the Crown is prepared to commit genocide.

There are many who doubt the kind of historic atrocities accused of the British by present day Zimbabweans. Some doubt that the land the Crown machine-gunned and beheaded its way across in the 1890s was even occupied.

Many people also openly vilify Kevin Annett on the Internet for his own claims about the Canadian church, state and the British Crown, even when he demonstrates evidence in books such as his recent “Murder by Decree”.

The historic documentary evidence presented within “Murder by Decree” shows that the Canadian State, which was established by the British Crown, sought to benefit from the acquisition of Canada by whatever means necessary. In an earlier book “Unrelenting”, Kevin Annett tells the story of William Coombes. A quite extraordinary story it is too. But a story for which there does not appear to be any direct evidence, however.

William Coombes was resident at Kamloops Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, in 1964, when his school was visited by the Queen and Prince Philip. Coombes claims that after taking the children on a “picnic” down to a popular local spot known as Dead Man’s Creek, ten of his classmates were separated from the group and taken away by the Queen and Prince Philip. None of these children were seen again.

Documentary footage of Coombes describing this visit by the Queen and Prince Philip to Kamloops Indian residential school can be found online.

So if the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, even hobbled well in advance by various restrictions placed upon it by the Canadian government, could not help but find that “cultural genocide” had been perpetrated against the indigenous Canadians, what can be said for those who suffered under the York of British colonial land theft regimes in Africa, and in Zimbabwe in particular? Did Africa suffer her own colonial genocides besides the horrors of slavery?

This article seeks to expose the truth of the brutality of colonialism.