05 July 2012 By Reason Wafawarova The greatest inhibition to imperial dominance is
justice. It is impossible to be an imperialist and a
just person at the same time. Ironically imperialism
is and must be fuelled on the pretext of justice and
freedom, these being the only nobilities in whose name
territorial expansionism can be carried out today. Up
to the 1920s one could openly boast of being a
colonialist or an imperialist, but that cannot be done
any more. In order to preserve the legacy of imperialism and
to sustain its perpetuity, it is absolutely necessary
that history is not only favourably manufactured in a
biased way, but also that it is completely falsified. When Caroline Elkins presented her dissertation
proposal to her University Department at Harvard
University in 1997, she had a burning intention to
write about what she believed to be the successes of
Britain's civilisation mission in the Kikuyu detention
camps of Kenya. This started with what was an innocent and routine
research about the Mau Mau uprising, something Elkins
had become "fascinated" with after reading through
records of the uprising in London. She had read all about the Mau Mau savagery and how
it had destructively interfered with the saintly work
of white settlers in the colony of Kenya, unsettling
the good-intentioned Royal colonial powers back in
Britain. She had read of how the barbarians that constituted
the Mau Mau were so savagely primitive, anti-European,
anti-civilisation and above all anti-Christian. She
had gathered through her readings that the Mau Mau
were primitive monsters whose sole occupation was
"reverting to tactics of primitive terror to interrupt
the British civilisation mission in Kenya." The records that Elkins was reading in London gave
her an understanding of a Mau Mau group that attracted
world attention in the early 1950s all for the most
wrong reasons. She read through pages and pages of
"photographic spreads with chilling pictorial evidence
of Mau Mau's savagery that contrasted dramatically
with images of the local British settlers," of course
portrayed in the records as well-meaning advocates of
philanthropic civilisation. In these records it is dismissively mentioned that
the Mau Mau guerrillas "claimed they were fighting for
ithaka na wiyathi, or land and freedom." But the
records show a history written in such a way that very
few people in the West took seriously the need for
either land or freedom for the colonial subjects in
Kenya. With whites in control the Kenyans were supposed to
be freer and happier, just like they needed no land
with white settlers doing real farming on their
behalf. What was taken quite seriously was the prevalent
assertion that the Mau Mau were "criminal or gangsters
bent on terrorising the local European population, and
certainly not freedom fighters." The records make the atrocious crack down on the
Mau Mau and on the generality of the Kikuyu people by
twenty thousand British military troopers, backed by
the Royal Air Force, appear like a saintly endeavour
worthy the praises and admiration of history readers.
The records give a picture of messianic troopers
taming murderous barbaric monsters on the loose. This was heavy military artillery brought in full
force against people with simple homemade weapons for
a solid two years, followed by a lengthier period of
ruthless persecution of 1.5 million Kikuyus, whose
only crime was the suspicion that they had taken the
Mau Mau oath and vowed to fight to have their land and
freedom back. Essentially the British troopers and their backing
Royal Air Force just turned the whole Kikuyuland into
a massive maximum security prison, fencing all the
people in what were called "detention camps." It is the study of these camps and interaction with
those still living who once were detained in the camps
that made Caroline Elkins change her mind completely
about the history she had read back in London on the
Mau Mau uprising. When she began her research on the detention camps
in 1995, little did Elkins know that she would, ten
years later write an incisive book about the
wide-scale atrocities in colonial Kenya and Britain's
vigorous attempts to cover it all up. The book is called "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold
Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya," and it is from the
preface of this book that all the quotations so far
made in this essay were derived. In presenting lies as manufactured reality it is
absolutely necessary to completely falsify history,
that way overcoming the burdensome and sickening
inhibition of truth, making it look like the West only
attacks or destroys primitive and monstrous aggressors
who, if left unchecked can easily destroy the whole
planet, or egregiously harm the nobility of humanity. It makes sense that the Vietnam War history is
reconstructed and rearranged to bring out the reality
that the United States always does the noble and right
thing. As Noam Chomsky puts it, the bombing of South
Vietnam is portrayed as having been done in defence of
South Vietnam "against somebody, namely, the South
Vietnamese, since nobody else was there." The way the Kennedy administration put it was
exceptionally impressive. They simply told the world
that the United States was launching on behalf of the
South Vietnamese a defence against "internal
aggression," of course by the South Vietnamese
themselves, entirely aggressing against themselves. When one has control over the intellectual
community and the media it becomes super easy to get
any kind of lies passed for reality and truth. This is
exactly why it has become fact that Assad's government
in Syria is ruthlessly massacring a peace-loving rebel
group whose only role in the conflict has become
playing victims to a blood-thirsty regime that
thoroughly enjoys killing civilians for sheer
arrogance's sake. It was the same with Libya where the Al-Qaeda
affiliated Benghazi rebels were nobly called civilians
at the mercy of a ruthless Gaddafi, despite vivid
television images of the same rebels violently
marching while armed to the teeth with Western
supplied weapons. The West vehemently insisted that these heavily
armed "civilians" were not to be attacked, and when
they attacked themselves, were not meant to be
resisted, otherwise Nato would be forced to "stop the
killing of civilians." The blatant lie upon which Iraq was invaded by the
West in 2003 was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction and was about to destroy the whole
planet in 48 hours, according to the British Prime
Minister Tony Blair. After the lie was busted for what
it was, a deliberate concoction of an entire untruth,
there have been tremendous efforts at blaming Saddam
Hussein himself for the blatant lie — with some
Western commentators saying the lie was a direct
result of Saddam Hussein's own vacuous claims. The recorded history on Libya is emphatically
silent on the West's oil interest in that country,
bleating so unimpressively about how the West
"prevented a pending genocide," or unashamedly
claiming that Nato helped to bring democracy to Libya
— a democracy of murderous sectional fighting and
endless militia squabbles, as well as a lawless era of
vindictive justice and primitive racial profiling. It is important that Zimbabwe records the history
of the country well, especially from the year 2000.
Right now the West has done numerous documentaries,
films and literature on Zimbabwe's land reform
program. Just about every one of these records
vilifies the person of President Robert Mugabe, the
liberation war veterans, Zanu-PF and others often
called "Mugabe cronies," whatever that means. The land reform program is not often recorded as
the just cause it effectively and indisputably is.
Rather it is recorded as a lawless endeavour carried
out by unthinking land grabbers who blissfully
"destroyed the country's agricultural system," in the
name of land reclamation. The record portrays white
colonial settlers as "skilled farmers who once made the country the
bread basket of Africa," while the resettled
indigenous Zimbabweans are portrayed as "unskilled
blacks who have in a short ten years turned the
country into a basket case." The truth is that in a short ten years; the new
farmers have surpassed the record tobacco production
ever, registering a new record of 122 million
kilograms in 2010. In 2008 Professor Ian Scoones of Sussex University
discovered the lies about Zimbabwe's land reform the
same way Caroline Elkins discovered the lies about the
Mau Mau uprising in the late nineties. After a thorough study of land reforms in Masvingo
Province, Professor Scoones challenged a number of
what he called "myths," in reality lies about the land
reform program in Zimbabwe. He dismissed as untrue five well publicised
"myths;" fabrications if one is charitable with words,
or lies if one is honest. The first such myth was the
assertion that Zimbabwe's land reform has been a total
failure, the second being that the beneficiaries were
largely political "cronies," the third was the claim
that there has been no investment in the new
settlements, the fourth being that agriculture is in
complete ruins, and the fifth asserted that the rural
economy has collapsed. None of these assertions could be supported by
evidence on the ground, with the contrary almost
always the result in Ian Scoones's study; for example
the finding that only about 11 percent of the land
reform beneficiaries could be described as being
politically connected. It also turned out that agricultural production per
household had actually increased for the land reform
beneficiaries, just like it turned out that the
Government had in fact significantly invested in
supporting the new farmers. Now the record of the indigenisation policy has
already suffered a lot of distortions and deliberate
fabrications aimed at slandering its movers and
pushers, as well as destroying its merit. What the Western media report is not an
indigenisation policy designed to empower the local
Zimbabwean towards controlling the country's resources
and wealth. Rather we are told of an unsound policy
designed to unfairly and illegally grab shares of
wealth from well-meaning foreign investors. The logic of local ownership of the means of
production has been dutifully vilified as an
ill-thought policy of "scaring investors," or "causing
capital flight," if one were to borrow the words of
the pro-West Zimbabwean Finance Minister, Tendai Biti. If indeed Zanu-PF is using the economic
indigenisation policy as an electioneering tool, then
the party is doing an excellent job of campaigning on
real democratic needs of the people. It is far much better than Tsvangirai promising the
electorate US$10 billion in aid money from "our
friends in the West," whoever these are. This he did
in run up to the March 2008 election, and four years
on, no such money has been received despite Tsvangirai
being part of the Government. Advocating an economic takeover by the locals is a
lot more sensible than Joyce Banda's obsession with
Western aid in Malawi — a humiliating dependence
syndrome that makes Africans look like the sub-humans
they are seen to be in the West. When the reality before us is a manufactured
reality by those who seek to hide the truth from our
people we must wake up and stand not only in defence
of the truth, but more importantly in defence of our
dignity as a people. Sovereignty is not a bigoted idea
entertained by extremist nationalism. It is a sound economic principle upon which
economic freedom is premised and founded. Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome.
It is homeland or death!! Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in
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