Siphakeme .Mnindwa
Dr Obert Moses Mpofu
THE wars that will be fought in the future will be purely ideological ones. He who controls the minds of the people will have a power unmatched.
The new battlegrounds in the new world order will feature conflict of ideas, beliefs as well as intellectual competition. We need to take all steps and make all the necessary preparations to guarantee our victory.
Our oppressors are several hundreds of years ahead of us. They inflicted slavery and colonialism on us and that has placed us at a great disadvantage. We didn’t start from the same platform.
The African was deliberately handicapped to ensure that they conform to the will of the former colonisers. The African in this current world order stands no chance, unless they ideologically recondition themselves to be able to resist and launch an offensive on the ongoing war of the minds. Zanu-PF has been working tirelessly to ensure that this becomes a reality.
Our past, where we were brutalised and denied our own land and resources should be enough inspiration for us to turn the tide against those responsible for our plight.
The life of the average African has been a wretched one, full of torment, displacement, colonialism and loss of identity. This is our crooked past that we must correct, at whatever cost. There is nothing shameful about being African and being born from the motherland.
Those who do not want to see us prosper stripped us of our identity, spirituality and belonging and forever attacked our self-esteem, with the goal of ensuring that we shun all that is associated with Africa and being African. When we dared to reverse all these colonial injustices, they unleashed a barrage of sanctions upon us, with the view of making us helpless. Such talk has not been entertained much by the younger generations, who have suffered the most casualties from this war of the minds.
They have had their culture and identity stripped from them and this has been replaced by far more inferior ways.
Indeed, for long we have had our minds colonised by the oppressors. They devised so many layers of oppression. There are clear attempts to ensure that their culture, identity and spirituality are erased from their minds and have foreign beliefs placed in their stead.
This war has been so cunning that none of us saw it coming until now. This is why concerted efforts are being made to free the mind of the African from the warped colonial thinking and place Pan-Africanist ideologies at the core of the mind of the average African.
The African must possess an unquestionable sense of loyalty to their country cultivated from the deep connection they have to the land. Some say the umbilical code of the African is buried in the ground to signify the eternal connection that we have with the land. We can never be separated from this land.
That is why most of our dear comrades made the ultimate sacrifice to die for the freedom of their people which would culminate in them having total control of their land. This is the simple but complex story of the African.
Through the revolution, the African was awakened and made wiser and stronger. The African managed to acquire political freedom, something never thought possible, and in Zimbabwe’s case, we took it a step further and acquired our land. This awakening did not sit well with the former colonisers and they have sought to extinguish it since, using all manner of methods and attacks on the mind of the African.
Nothing happens by accident. There are no accidents in politics. The game of politics is similar to chess. One has to have a futuristic eye and be able to predict the opponent’s next move. Failure to read between the lines often results in political doom and total failure. One requirement for survival in this tricky minefield is a fine eye and the ability to see and seek what lies yonder. Politics is far different from rocket science. It is often the simplest of things that can make the difference. The game of politics is complex in its simplicity. What may be applicable in one jurisdiction at one particular point in time may totally be irrelevant in another, and vice versa is true.
The curriculums we inherited and placed as the foundation of our children’s education were deliberately engineered to keep us under the thumb of our oppressors. They made all efforts to try and make colonisation last an eternity. Had it not been our wit, grit and sheer determination to fully emancipate ourselves, any gains attained at independence would have long been eroded by now.
The African is not as daft as the oppressor thought. They gave us no chance and it is that classification as underdogs that stimulated our passion for freedom and ignited every action we have taken so far to liberate ourselves.
One of the cunning ways of reversing the gains of the hard-fought liberation struggle would be to expedite the process of decolonising the mind of the African.
This we have already begun, and as long as Zanu-PF still exists, we will continue the fight and we will win. We have never in our history lost any fight we have set our minds to. At the end of it all, the mind of the African will be eternally free, and all will prosper through utilising their land, which is their birth right. We will win the war of the minds.
n Dr Obert Moses Mpofu is an academic and the Secretary General of Zanu-PF. He writes in his own capacity.
