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Dr Masimba Mavaza

The President of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans in the Diaspora joined the British in celebrating a sense of their own history.

The coronation of King Charles III was steeped in history, a re-enactment and remembrance of ancient traditions and events.

For many, the ceremonies and pageantry, with their centuries-old carriages, crowns and even stones, will serve to re-establish a link to the past.

However, a central irony will be that we have denied ourselves the beauty of our own history.

The ritual of coronation, perhaps like the monarchy and the king himself, is itself a relic from a vanishing past. Today, the United Kingdom is the only European monarchy to keep such a ceremony.

Emerging in Europe at a time when monarchs claimed their rule was legitimised by divine sanction, the central act of the coronation ceremony is the “unction”, the anointing with holy oil signalling conferment of God’s grace upon a ruler.

It should be remembered that King Charles III is now the head of the Anglican Church worldwide. He is both a spiritual leader and a political leader.

He represents traditional culture and norms. He is the identity of the English in particular and the Commonwealth at large.

Before his anointment, King Charles III, like his predecessors, took the coronation oath. He was looking at the expansion of his empire in any way.

King Charles III solemnly promised “to govern the peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon, and of [her] possessions and the other territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs”.

Zimbabweans in Diaspora reflect with interest if there is any truth in what King Charles III said in his oath.

It is the British government which spearheads the cultural attack by forcing other governments to accept some behaviours which other cultures regard as unnatural.

While the coronation enhances a culture that has outlived its time, it marks the destruction of other cultures and has preserved theirs over ours.

At the time, and in the years that followed, few of her subjects outside the UK were ruled “according to their respective laws and customs”.

On the African continent, as the late Professor Terence Ranger noted, British colonial administrators had “set about inventing African traditions for Africans”.

These subjects were in fact taught that they had no history or achievements, and that the brutal colonial dispossession and occupation was actually for their benefit – that it helped to civilise them.

Africans are still today living with the effects of this loss and reinvention of their history and remaking of their societies.

The “tribal” cleavages that distort politics on the continent are almost entirely a legacy of that occupation.

“Africa, for the European occupant, was quintessentially tribal’,” wrote the late Professor Crawford Young. “Thus the task of the colonial state was to discover, codify, and map an ethnic geography for their newly conquered domains, according to the premise that the continent was inhabited by ‘tribal man’. This ethnic template, as imagined by the colonizer, became the basis for administrative organization.”

Africans live as a divided entity.

The kingdom which King Charles III rules divided and ruled Africa. They did it in a well calculated way.

The black man’s culture was viewed as satanic, diabolic and devilish and was frowned upon. The white man’s culture was married together with Christianity and became the holy one.

Even as we witnessed King Charles III taking the reins dawned in our diamonds and gold turned into a crown, our own Chief Murinye (Ephius), Chief Bushu and Chief Makoni are crowned in a red robe and a helmet.

The irony was piercing hard the country which boasts of gold and diamond sees their own Chief Chitsa crowned in a ugly copper badge poorly engraved “chief”.

When are we going to upgrade our chiefs to be kings? When are we we making their helmets become gold and diamond? When are they going to dawn the robes of silver and pure cotton? When are we, as Africans, going to embrace our own culture and take pride in our own lives?

Just across the border, South Africans take pride in expunging the Black African labelling him a foreigner and embracing a whiteman as a brother.

This is a familiar sight. It has its roots in the crowning we witnessed last week.

Diaspora took pride in President Mnangagwa who is prepared to re-engage, but not to submit to other people’s cultures.

While Zimbabwe seeks to be re-admitted to the Commonwealth, it simply recognises that we are not in isolation.

We can not survive alone. We need others, the world has become a global village and no nation can survive on its own. So we push on to be re-admitted into the Commonwealth.

As we have seen, the British crown showed little interest in African history, and are invariably of one mind as to the need for the colonial state to partially overwrite that which they felt was ‘old’ and ‘traditional”.

Thus generations of Africans, cut off from traditional histories through indoctrination in Western schools, grew up imagining that the fictional picture Europeans painted of a tribalised, brutal pre-colonial Africa, full of petty “tribal” conflicts, and chained by the despotism of age-old and unchanging “customs and traditions,” was essentially true.

The pageantry that accompanied King Charles III’s coronation, which was through sheer spectacle, is also a reminder of the place to which the British had exalted themselves.

In a sense, it was not just the monarch that was ordained as God’s chosen ruler, but the entire nation that had staked for itself a claim as ruler of other nations and peoples.

Today, like its monarchy, the UK is a pale shadow of its imperial self, and such displays may provide some level of nostalgic comfort as it struggles against its increasing marginalisation and loss of prestige.

While there will be attempts to show some sensitivity to modern-day issues – the sacred coronation oil will be animal-cruelty free, the King has invited leaders of non-Christian faiths – there will be very little about the ceremony that will address the historical harms, which remain unacknowledged by the monarch.

And without that, the ceremony will be little more than a fresh layer of royal whitewash, said Patrick Gathara a Kenyan historian.

Curiously, the King of Britain did not invite a single African tribe whose gold and diamond the king was showcasing.

The royal event, though it provided Zimbabwe a chance to re-engage, it failed to recognise African kings. The only king invited was King Mswati III, the only absolute African monarch.

What we have taken home from this coronation is let us revive our chiefdoms. We need to be valued by us, for us.

Why should we not ditch the helmet for a golden crown?  Each chief must make a crown of the important mineral in their area.

By so doing we put value on the crown and the one who puts it on.

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