Mnangagwa says we should never waste a good crisis

Colonialism was thus a God-send, not some racially oppressive system of foreign invasion and occupation. Rhodesia described itself as the last bulwark against “the black and red peril”. The “black peril” was represented by us Africans who threatened to overwhelm white civilisation through our overwhelming numbers, and by our culture described as rank heathenism.

The “red peril” represented communism whose diligent agents were “terrorists”, in this case our freedom fighters. These terrorists, so Rhodesian propaganda claimed, had been trained and “misled” by evil, foreign communist hailing from countries like the then Soviet Union, China and other progressive countries drawn from the Eastern Bloc, which supported our Liberation Struggle.

The communists had used their vile propaganda of communism to mislead an otherwise “happy” African populace grateful to be under British settler colonial rule!

As events would have it, in the 1980 elections, we the so-called communist terrorists had now won a Commonwealth-supervised election, and had won it by a landslide. As a result, we had assumed the reins of Government in an independent Zimbabwe! The Patriotic Front, led by our late President, then as Prime Minister, Cde Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and Dr Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo, had to meet clerics, most of them raised on the staple of vile Rhodesian propaganda, in order to allay their deeply ingrained and held fears of us.

Only a handful of Church leaders, mostly Jesuits, had met with us as the Patriotic Front in Zambia, at the height of the Struggle. Those knew our humanity denied us by Rhodesian propaganda, and understood our cause which Rhodesia mischaracterised as foreign and communist-inspired. But these clerics were in the minority.

You also had a few missionaries who led rural parishes and thus had interacted with, and become exposed to, our freedom fighters operating in liberated and semi-liberated zones. Those, too, knew us and even supported our cause. Otherwise, the rest of the erstwhile Rhodesian Church was led by religious figures who viewed us as ogres; figures whose view of us neatly fitted within the terrible persona created of us by Rhodesian propaganda.

I remember that in one of those early meetings, all clerics – to the person – voiced disquiet over our choice of ideology of Marxist-Leninism, which they characterised as a godless creed. They were disgusted that we, the agents of that terrible creed, had won elections, and taken over Government. We needed complete redemption! Could we not, the clerics opined, drop this godless creed for Christianity, of course under their tutelage as Church leaders?

About the same time, our Ministry of Education, then headed by Dr Dzingai Mutumbuka, was transforming the curriculum to make our education more suited to the needs and values of a free Zimbabwe. Dr Mutumbuka worked with leading educationist-comrades like Dr Fay Chung and Sister Dr Janice Macloughlin. These comrades had developed curricula for our wartime schools. They now sought to adapt it to the needs of a free Zimbabwe, under the Zimfeb Programme. Again, this raised more anxieties for the Church. From early colonial times, the Rhodesian Church had heavily invested in African Education; it ran the majority of schools for Africans in the country, right through to our Independence. Any changes to the curriculum, more so done by people long mischaracterised as proponents of communism – in their view a godless creed – was extremely disquieting to them.

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