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Claude Maredza Correspondent
The same distortion is what has caused the clearly unnecessary debate about whether black Africans built the Egyptian Pyramids or not. Of course, black Africans built the Pyramids in not only Egypt but in Sudan as well and wherever else Pyramids are found in Africa.

The problem with history books, mostly written by white people whose agenda was mainly to demonise and belittle black people, is that the white writers of these books did not bother to really understand black people so that they could unbundle all the important details like we are doing now.

This has resulted in us understanding the Rozvi Empire as some different empire and the so called Rozvi as a new set of people coming into Zimbabwe from somewhere outside Zimbabwe and establishing themselves as new rulers from somewhere else.

Because of this distortion, you hear even amongst ourselves, confused people with no clarity whatsoever imagining the so-called Rozvi as some people from outer space when they were the very same people, the very same Zimbabweans who only got described as such because of the military modus operandi they used to drive the raiding Portuguese out of Zimbabwe.

White people could not stomach the defeat of the Portuguese by the Moyo Chirandu General Dombodzvuku-commanded Zimbabwean army of the time so at best, they skirt around this Portuguese defeat and say very little and or nothing about it when they write their distorted versions about it.

What you will likely meet in writings by white people is further distortion of the Rozvi soldiers by describing them as a very cruel lot who could kill somebody at the drop of a hat.

This is done by white writers so that there is perpetuation of the “black African murderer and cannibal” image in the psyche of anybody who meets the Rozvi for the first time in material written by white people about the Rozvi.

And this is intended for the minds of black African people, particularly black African children, so that they lose self-esteem and any pride in themselves and their own people as proud black Africans who have significantly contributed to the development of this world.

The black African children begin to imbibe and believe in the white lie which tells them that black people are savages and white people are gods of black people.

And these black children actually begin to take this trash as the absolute truth and they begin to want to emulate white heroes whom they have now begun to worship. Thanks to these lies peddled by white writers about black Africans; while on the other hand, they begin to curse God and feel angry with Him for having created them black as there is clearly nothing to admire in blackness as depicted in literature written about blacks by white writers which in a lot of cases usually happens to be the only literature available for these black kids to read and therefore the only “truth” available to them.

There is not even a whiff of mentioning that when the Moyo Chirandu took over the rulership of this country first through General Dombodzvuku, a Moyo Chirandu, or a so-called Rozvi, Zimbabwe experienced a period of peace and prosperity stretching for almost 200 years until Zwangendaba, then Mzilikazi then the British attacked us, all these invasions happening between 1830 and 1890 after almost 200 years of uninterrupted peace and prosperity under the leadership of the Moyo Chirandus.

The same distortion is what white people have done to Emperor Shaka, that doyen of the Zulus that because of what white writers wrote about Emperor Shaka every black person grew up thinking that Emperor Shaka was a very cruel person who could kill people for fun or so that vultures could have meat to eat when, on the contrary, a more objective analysis of Emperor Shaka devoid of any anti- black white writers’ biases shows us that in fact Emperor Shaka was such a genius Africa actually needs another Shaka to regain its lost glory!

This is why all black African history or anything written about black Africans by white people but without the participation and contribution of the black people themselves on matters being written about them by white people must really be discarded and rewritten and corrected because there is so much distortion a lot of it is really hogwash.

White people didn’t really care about black people. All they wanted was to promote the idea that black people had no history and that black people’s lives only started when white people arrived in Africa on a mission to “civilise” black people.

The same distortion is what has caused the clearly unnecessary debate about whether black Africans built the Egyptian Pyramids or not. Of course, black Africans built the Pyramids in not only Egypt but in Sudan as well and wherever else Pyramids are found in Africa.

But because white people were too embarrassed to admit that people they called uncivilised cannibals and savages were actually far much more advanced than them in terms of everything, from civilisation, scientific discoveries and more, they then sought to demonise black people and started to peddle the myth that the Egyptian Pyramids were built by some Sumerians or some such foreigners from somewhere out of Africa and not by black Africans.

And because white people, by conquest, began to control the means of information production and dissemination, it meant that any vitriol they spewed out there as information on blacks was accepted as the gospel truth by the world and ironically even by black people themselves who had been so thoroughly brainwashed by white propaganda by force to the extent where they began to accept that they were indeed cannibals as the white people were propagating!

That’s really callous.

So, all material written and or propagated by white people about black people without the participation and contribution of the black people themselves must be re-examined and rewritten to correct it as it is invariably full of intentional distortions of the black African by the white man. Never ever accept what the white man says about the black African before thoroughly verifying it with independent conscious black African sources.

This clearly instructs that black people urgently need to write about themselves and enforce literature they have written themselves about themselves as the first reference point for anything about black Africans.

That way, black Africans may be able to restore their dignity which has been savaged by white people through lies white people have written about black Africans and these lies are ironically presently being peddled as the true literature available about black Africans which gives a real horrible though untrue picture of who and what black Africans really are.

General Dombodzvuku and all his soldiers and eventually everybody around them then became generally referred to as the Varozvi, a nickname they had been given by the sellout chiefs whom they had punished for accommodating the Portuguese.

With that, the term Varozvi caught on. That is how these particular Moyo Chirandus became known as Varozvi.

So the term Varozvi is a mere description of soldiers led by a Moyo Chirandu General Dombodzvuku in a campaign against the attempted but dismally failed colonisation of Zimbabwe by the Portuguese.

In fact, after putting the rebellion at the new Guruuswa down, General Dombodzvuku went back to the front and finally routed the Portuguese and drove them right out of the whole of the Zimbabwean territory and left them at the Indian Ocean for them to go back where they came from.

From that time, this country experienced no other war till Zwangendaba then Mzilikazi then the British invaded Zimbabwe from about the mid 1800s until the British colonised this country in 1890 until we took it back in 1980.

In other words, the Moyo Chirandus rescued this country from the attempted colonisation by the Portuguese which led to the war against the Portuguese between 1675 and 1695 and the Moyo Chirandus became the rulers of this country from about 1695 to about the time the Zulus came in around 1840.

Claude Maredza is a Crown Prince of the Norumedzo Moyo Chirandu (Duma) Kingdom Royalty of Norumedzo Village (KuHarurwa), Bikita, Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Email: [email protected]