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Opinion Cuthbert Mavheko
Tomorrow, May 25, Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa will commemorate Africa Day. This day has tremendous significance in the continent’s protracted struggle to emancipate itself from the yoke of colonial domination. For it was on May 25, 1963 that African leaders, who included Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta and others met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to found the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), an organisation that was to spearhead the total decolonisation of the continent .

There was unanimity of opinion among African heads of state and government, who attended this august summit, that every people and nation have the right to self-determination and be politically and economically independent.

What is now disconcerting, however, is that while most African countries attained their political independence many years ago, economic independence has remained elusive. Powerful Western nations continue to call the shots in African economies through their control of Africa’s natural resources.  Resultantly, hunger, disease, poverty, illiteracy and civil strife continue to wreak havoc on the continent, leading to debilitating under-development in the midst of an abundance of natural resources.

It presents a painful paradox to note that while Africans are exceedingly affluent in all the resources that create wealth, the majority of them are wallowing in abject poverty. No wonder why one author described Africans as “the richest poor people”.

Indeed, it is dismaying to note that former white colonisers still control the means of production like land for instance, in most African countries while the indigenous citizenry are literally scrounging around to eke out a living on pieces of arid, unfertile land.

It is only Zimbabwe which did the unthinkable when it acquired land from white commercial farmers to resettle the indigenous locals. I personally know of no other country, other than Zimbabwe, which has come up with policies that seek to transfer all the means of production, and indeed all its natural resources, into the hands of locals.

But this has had a cost to it. It would be an act of extreme naivety to expect Western imperialists, whose kith and kin lost vast tracts of land in the resettlement exercise, to stand on the periphery and fold their arms while economic power is being wrenched from their siblings. The change in the control of the economy from former white colonisers to the black indigenous populace had a cost to it.

Zimbabwe courted the ire of Western nations when it decided to indigenise the national economy. Western imperialists are in a state of panic.  They realise that if Zimbabwe’s economic empowerment initiatives are successful, other nations will follow suit and Western economies will suffer as they are heavily sustained by the resources that are plundered in Africa and other developing nations.

This is one of the major reasons why illegal sanctions were imposed on Zimbabwe.  The ruinous, illegal sanctions imposed on the country by the West and its allies in Europe is the price that Zimbabwe had to pay for economically empowering its poverty-stressed people.

As if this is not bad enough, the Western imperialists have embarked on a character-smearing campaign against Zimbabwe’s Head of State and Government President Mugabe branding him a “ruthless dictator” who, they say, is responsible for the country’s slide into an economic quagmire.  This is an overt lie which can only be believed by idle minds that are wont to believe anything.

It is the strong contention of the author of this article that no matter how much the West revile and demonise President Mugabe, he is right in initiating land reforms in the country. One has to read the history of how our ancestors were dispossessed of their land by white settlers in the 19th century to understand why it was necessary to redistribute land in Zimbabwe.  Harrowing stories of blacks being butchered, hanged and forcibly evicted from their own land by white colonial settlers of British descent during the first Chimurenga (1890-1896) and the Second Chimurenga of the 1960s and 1970s are meticulously documented in our history books.

In 1890 the British, through Cecil John Rhodes’ British South Africa Company (BSAC) invaded Zimbabwe and expropriated vast tracts of land and cattle from indigenous blacks after forcibly removing them from their villages.

Those who resisted eviction, like Mbuya Nehanda, Sekuru Kaguvi, Chief Negomo of Murehwa and many others, were ruthlessly hanged and heartlessly crushed by the white settlers. After colonising the country, the settlers passed a plethora of laws that gave a stamp of legitimacy to their vile activities.

One of these laws was the Land Apportionment Act, which was passed in 1930.
This law allowed the settlers to demarcate African land. Blacks were dumped in reserves or tribal trust lands with poor, unproductive land while whites grabbed the most fertile land. The white colonial settlers were cruel and heartless – they never did anything good for black people. They came to this country to steal our land and plunder our natural resources.

The armed struggle was launched to reclaim our heritage (land) and, in the process, make Zimbabweans masters of their own destiny.
The right to determine our destiny did not come on a silver platter, as some are wont to believe.

Tens of thousands of Zimbabwean people lost their precious lives in a bloody and bitter struggle aimed at dislodging the brutal colonial regime in what was then Rhodesia, which had dispossessed blacks of their land, cattle and reduced them to owners of nothing in their own motherland. All that they (blacks)  remained with was their labour, which they were forced to sell for a song to survive .

It is comforting to note that this year’s Africa Day commemorations are being held when, for the first time ever, there is now a collective realisation by African leaders that Africa’s woes stem from the fact that its resources are still controlled by foreigners.

At the 22nd Ordinary Session of the African Union General Assembly held in Ethiopia in February this year, Africa Heads of State and Government expressed unanimity that to eradicate hunger, disease, poverty, illiteracy and underdevelopment, Africans should take control of their economies and should not allow foreigners to dictate the exploitation of their natural resources.

This reawakening of African minds to the need to control their own resources, heralds the dawn of a new era in Africa’s long pilgrimage towards economic independence.

For far too long, Africans have assumed the role of passive observers while their resources are being exploited for a song by their former colonisers, through multi-national companies.

Surely, the time has now come for Africans to speak with one voice and demand what is rightfully theirs.