I am the savage you want to groom for the Queen\u2019s kitchen, the eunuch in whose presence madams, Helen Zille and Marie Le Pen, can safely undress.<\/p>\n
I am the collateral damage underfoot grand crusades of civilisation, the scum of the Dark Continent who got away when you shovelled my people into a mass grave for imagining they were full-blooded humans like you.<\/p>\n
I picked up crumbs of your language when I was a serf on Rhodes\u2019s farm, though my Bantu accent rings discordantly against it, and my dark skin is a synonym for everything wrong with the world.<\/p>\n
I may be only an ape in a work suit, but I hear just fine when polite society talks about me. The budding humanity in me cringes and my fur stands on end when I see blades sharpened for me in broad daylight.<\/p>\n
I am not a broiler that innocently pecks around while the madam lists it on the Christmas menu. An eternity in the life of a primate has sharpened my eyes to snares and scarecrows.<\/p>\n
I am writing you this letter because I read last week as you told your Caucasian kinsmen that my problem is that I wasn\u2019t colonised enough. You told them that since you cut me loose, I have relapsed back to the Stone Age.<\/p>\n
\u201cColonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch,\u201d you reminded your people of their copyright to civilisation.<\/p>\n
You think I have spent decades stealing King Leopold\u2019s oranges with my fellow monkeys, and thumbing the fleas in my armpits by rundown mines, while my European masters seize the weighty matters of civilisation.<\/p>\n
Though my ancestors told me that a skunk is not skinned in the marketplace, these days I hear your people speak quite openly about what to do with the unwashed kaffir, the reeking nigger, that I am.<\/p>\n
I know that half of Uncle Sam and Aunt Lizzy\u2019s words slip into the Atlantic by the time they reach me in the forest but my sister works in a big hotel and brings me old newspapers where I see their pictures and their words.<\/p>\n
When Uncle Sam is not in his star-spangled chimney pot hat and oil-soaked, zebra bell bottoms, he fits naturally into his Santa Claus and Captain America outfits.<\/p>\n
My family tree was rooted on Aunt Lizzy\u2019s plantations, where my parents met and raised me on her cast-offs, dry bread and sour milk from her kitchen.<\/p>\n
Does it help my situation that only your people are on the committee for listing fragile states and my own country persuasively runs the race to the bottom?<\/p>\n
Master Gilley, when you talk about drilling etiquette into my monkey skull with the barrel of a gun, my heart spins like the Zesa plant at Livingstone\u2019s lake.<\/p>\n
Times have been strange. I have been watching from afar the redneck meltdown in the election circuit. Last year, I heard Donald Trump regret that Barack Obama and George Bush blew their chance to siphon oil to America when they turned Iraq into a crater. Of course, oil is more welcome than Iraqis against whom your president sealed his borders earlier this year.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t surprise me because I know that profit over people is the John 3:16 of the American Bible. When Dinesh D\u2019Souza implores you to flatten Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq with guns in your hands and God on your side, we marvel at the divine right of emperors.<\/p>\n
When Fox blindfolds us with the Star-Spangled, Blood-Soaked, Banner, we forget that Uncle Sam\u2019s halo is powered by stolen oil and his pot belly is stuffed with the flesh of sea-swept Syrian infants and shipwrecked Libyan youths.<\/p>\n
This year, when I heard Madame Le Pen in France and Madame Zille right across my border extol the virtues of European colonialism, it occurred to me that the Antarctic of political correctness has finally thawed and evil diseases are roaring our way. But I though such nasty women are time-travelling back to the Dark Ages, that\u2019s all.<\/p>\n
Then I saw your Third World Quarterly paper last week fashioning a sequel to Bismarck\u2019s Berlin invite: \u201cFor the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts,\u201d you smirked.<\/p>\n
This worries me because you come in the name of science, reason and history to propose that my people had too little of a good thing when your settlers struck their tents and went back to Europe, ending the experiment of civilisation on the dark continent too soon.<\/p>\n
You say \u201cnow that the nationalist generation that forced sudden decolonisation on hapless populations has passed away, the time may be ripe\u201d for your enlightened peers to slice our land into European fiefdoms again.<\/p>\n
Baas Gilley, I know my place but even a beast is allowed to bellow at the abattoir, is it? Come now, let us reason together, even though it may be too much for a kaffir to barge from the cotton field onto his master\u2019s golf course unannounced and undesired.<\/p>\n
History may not know the names of poor Africans, we the footstools of Nandi and General Assembly rugs of Robert Mugabe, but we aspirations of our own.<\/p>\n
History has made the quarrels of kings, the diplomats\u2019 sumptuous lunches, state functions and palace intrigue its exclusive business, but the poor and anonymous have their dignity.<\/p>\n
Yes, we salivate for the crumbs off the AU high table, but what are you suggesting about our humanity when you say the liberty we need is colonial bondage? Maybe we should pay for a doctor\u2019s report at the mission hospital tracing our DNA to Adam?<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t tease a cheated man\u2019s emotion because, as my ancestors said, though the axe can forget, the tree never forgets. Sentiment wells out of science, after all.<\/p>\n
When you cite a fistful of Africans, whatever their names, wishing for the good old days of colonialism, what makes you think the rest of us cannot see beyond the cotton stalks?<\/p>\n
You talk about Livingstone, Lugard and de Brazza enjoying nostalgic popularity as colonial paterfamilias. Do you care to know meanwhile that young Africans are emptying buckets of human waste on your ancestor, Cecil John Rhodes, and sledgehammering his monuments from public space and social memory?<\/p>\n
When you say most Africans voluntarily went to colonial metropolises in search of the life that their precolonial hellholes could never replicate, I am reminded of one of your own writers\u2019 aphorism that the most dangerous worldview is the view of one who had not viewed the world. Though, I have been but a poor, rural Zimbabwean all my life, I can\u2019t figure out why you presume the mantle of lecturing us when you don\u2019t know the first thing about the ills we suffered under colonial violence.<\/p>\n
You say, \u201cMillions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonised to colonized areas, fought for colonial armies and participated in colonial political processes \u2013 all relatively voluntary acts.\u201d<\/p>\n
My relatives, my people didn\u2019t go to your cities because they were starstruck by towering lights, wanted to read your Dickens or run your municipal errands. They went there because you took their farms, stole their cattle, raped their women, drove them to dry reserves and siphoned their wealth to the capital.<\/p>\n
When you cast Patrice Lumumba as an apostle of King Leopold, how much do you want for a funeral jester\u2019s fee from the family and compatriots who lost him and their resource-rich country\u2019s stability and dignity to premeditated homicide by Belgian colonisers and the American CIA, with the complicity of the U.N?<\/p>\n
Good sir, can you even begin to estimate your funeral jester\u2019s from Namibians who lost tens of thousands Herero and Nama people, whole cultures, in Germany\u2019s anticipatory African Holocaust? All the best with revising this into an act of civilisation in your next article.<\/p>\n
Lumumba, whom you generously clothe with a Berlin conference wrote his wife from prison: \u201cThe day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. It will be the history which will be taught in the countries which have won freedom from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.\u201d That\u2019s the history that speaks to young Africans not you and Third World Quarterly editors\u2019 senile fantasies.<\/p>\n
We, poor, backwards Zimbabweans, stand with Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Steve Biko, Eduardo Mondhlane, Chris Hani, Herbert Chitepo, Dedan Kimathi, Edison Sithole and our countless heroes whose blood seems not to have pacified your colonial cravings, seeing as you are still calling for the reconstitution of the Caucasian axis of evil.<\/p>\n
We side with even the most violent of our freedom fighters because, as Frantz Fanon charged us, we must counter colonial violence with violence, since \u201cno diplomacy, no political genius, no skill\u201d can counter colonialism except force.<\/p>\n
Fanon says: \u201cColonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state and will only yield when confronted with greater violence.\u201d<\/p>\n
You flatter our capacity for ethics when you speak of our nostalgia for a monster we shook off our throats and drowned in the blood of its victims.<\/p>\n
I have heard that some of your fellow professors want you to retract your \u201cscientific\u201d paper. They are far too generous. I humbly ask you to hang your doctoral cap and return to square one as you would have us already have done.<\/p>\n
Your darkly obsequious colonial subject,<\/p>\n
Stanely Mushava<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am the savage you want to groom for the Queen\u2019s kitchen, the eunuch in whose presence madams, Helen Zille and Marie Le Pen, can safely undress. I am the collateral damage underfoot grand crusades of civilisation, the scum of the Dark Continent who got away when you shovelled my people into a mass grave for imagining they were full-blooded humans like you. I picked up crumbs of your language when I was a serf on Rhodes\u2019s farm, though my Bantu accent rings discordantly against it, and my dark skin is a synonym for everything wrong with the world. I may be only an ape in a work suit, but I hear just fine when polite society talks about me. The budding humanity in me cringes and my fur stands on end when I see blades sharpened for me in broad daylight. I am not a broiler that innocently pecks around while the madam lists it on the Christmas menu. An eternity in the life of a primate has sharpened my eyes to snares and scarecrows. I am writing you this letter because I read last week as you told your Caucasian kinsmen that my problem is that I wasn\u2019t colonised enough. You told them that since you cut me loose, I have relapsed back to the Stone Age. \u201cColonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch,\u201d you reminded your people of their copyright to civilisation. You think I have spent decades stealing King Leopold\u2019s oranges with my fellow monkeys, and thumbing the fleas in my armpits by rundown mines, while my European masters seize the weighty matters of civilisation. Though my ancestors told me that a skunk is not skinned in the marketplace, these days I hear your people speak quite openly about what to do with the unwashed kaffir, the reeking nigger, that I am. I know that half of Uncle Sam and Aunt Lizzy\u2019s words slip into the Atlantic by the time they reach me in the forest but my sister works in a big hotel and brings me old newspapers where I see their pictures and their words. When Uncle Sam is not in his star-spangled chimney pot hat and oil-soaked, zebra bell bottoms, he fits naturally into his Santa Claus and Captain America outfits. My family tree was rooted on Aunt Lizzy\u2019s plantations, where my parents met and raised me on her cast-offs, dry bread and sour milk from her kitchen. Does it help my situation that only your people are on the committee for listing fragile states and my own country persuasively runs the race to the bottom? Master Gilley, when you talk about drilling etiquette into my monkey skull with the barrel of a gun, my heart spins like the Zesa plant at Livingstone\u2019s lake. Times have been strange. I have been watching from afar the redneck meltdown in the election circuit. Last year, I heard Donald Trump regret that Barack Obama and George Bush blew their chance to siphon oil to America when they turned Iraq into a crater. Of course, oil is more welcome than Iraqis against whom your president sealed his borders earlier this year. It doesn\u2019t surprise me because I know that profit over people is the John 3:16 of the American Bible. When Dinesh D\u2019Souza implores you to flatten Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq with guns in your hands and God on your side, we marvel at the divine right of emperors. When Fox blindfolds us with the Star-Spangled, Blood-Soaked, Banner, we forget that Uncle Sam\u2019s halo is powered by stolen oil and his pot belly is stuffed with the flesh of sea-swept Syrian infants and shipwrecked Libyan youths. This year, when I heard Madame Le Pen in France and Madame Zille right across my border extol the virtues of European colonialism, it occurred to me that the Antarctic of political correctness has finally thawed and evil diseases are roaring our way. But I though such nasty women are time-travelling back to the Dark Ages, that\u2019s all. Then I saw your Third World Quarterly paper last week fashioning a sequel to Bismarck\u2019s Berlin invite: \u201cFor the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts,\u201d you smirked. This worries me because you come in the name of science, reason and history to propose that my people had too little of a good thing when your settlers struck their tents and went back to Europe, ending the experiment of civilisation on the dark continent too soon. You say \u201cnow that the nationalist generation that forced sudden decolonisation on hapless populations has passed away, the time may be ripe\u201d for your enlightened peers to slice our land into European fiefdoms again. Baas Gilley, I know my place but even a beast is allowed to bellow at the abattoir, is it? Come now, let us reason together, even though it may be too much for a kaffir to barge from the cotton field onto his master\u2019s golf course unannounced and undesired. History may not know the names of poor Africans, we the footstools of Nandi and General Assembly rugs of Robert Mugabe, but we aspirations of our own. History has made the quarrels of kings, the diplomats\u2019 sumptuous lunches, state functions and palace intrigue its exclusive business, but the poor and anonymous have their dignity. Yes, we salivate for the crumbs off the AU high table, but what are you suggesting about our humanity when you say the liberty we need is colonial bondage? Maybe we should pay for a doctor\u2019s report at the mission hospital tracing our DNA to Adam? Don\u2019t tease a cheated man\u2019s emotion because, as my<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":158,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","tag-side-effects"],"yoast_head":"\n