EDITORIAL COMMENT: 1980 and the Lessons for Life

19 Apr, 2015 - 00:04 0 Views
EDITORIAL COMMENT: 1980 and the Lessons for Life

The Sunday Mail

Some things you cannot unlearn.

Things like revolution, like sovereignty, like the true meaning of individual and collective dignity.

You can’t unlearn those things. You must not unlearn those things. — Not to say there will not be pressure to unlearn such valuable lessons. No. the pressure is unrelenting and the onslaught is feral in both a sophisticated and an overt manner. But you can’t unlearn.

This is a lesson that countries like Iran learnt back in 1979 when the Shah was overthrown and the Grand Ayatollah showed the people of that great Persian civilisation that living with dignity, with self-pride and a strong sense of identity was the basis of development.

Today, the United States is trying to make Iran unlearn being Iranian. It is a battle they have been losing and will continue to lose.

Long before the Iranians learnt revolution, the Cubans grasped this life-changing lesson too.

Today, Fidel and Raul Castro can look back to 1959 as the year that the children of Cuba made it clear that no one — from the medieval Spanish monarchs to the modern White House warmongers — could decide their own destiny for them.

More than 50 years of sanctions have failed to erase the lesson of revolution from the minds of the Cubans, they remain unbowed; and it is Uncle Sam who is flying to Havana now to “normalise” relations.

Cuba offers a vital lesson in never unlearning revolution: well over 70 percent of that island’s population was born after the US puppet called Batista was overthrown, but that connection to the foundation has never been lost.

Zimbabwe is 35 years old, reaching that milestone just yesterday.

15 of those years — representing nearly half of our sovereign existence — have been spent under American and European sanctions.

Zimbabwe’s demographics, as regards to the number of people born after Independence, are not quite the same as Cuba’s with us having been sovereign for significantly less years, but they are not far off either.

Our population is mostly young, with roughly 50 percent of the population born after 1980.

These are people many refer to as “born-frees”, something that is sometimes said with a somewhat derogatory slur as if being born into an Independent Zimbabwe is an insult of some undefined sort.

Cuba has embraced its “born-frees”, teaching them the revolution that it’s older generations have refused to unlearn.

And the result has been a nation that can withstand more than half-a-century of American sanctions, retain its dignity and look to the future with hope.

These are lessons that must be taught to young Zimbabweans, lessons that cannot be unlearnt and that will provide that spine that is needed to resist subversion and take the economic independence agenda forward in a meaningful and sustainable manner.

We can say so far so good for Zimbabwe insofar as first-time voters — estimated at around one million — were likely pivotal in President Mugabe and Zanu-PF’s landslide victory in the 2013 elections. There is a lesson that these young people learnt which informed them to vote the way they did, which made them vote for empowerment over servitude in an enclave economy that has traditionally catered for the needs and interests of an oppressive minority.

We can also say so far so good for Zimbabwe insofar as young people increasingly identify with “Mudhara” and his politics of self-reliance that brings dignity to the individual and to the nation.

These are vital lessons that must be passed on from one generation to the next, ensuring that the umbilical link to our foundational principles is neither compromised nor severed.

Because it is a war we are fighting; a war for equality and dignity, a war to create the room we need to develop as we must.

We are 35 years old now. Wonderful. But we must never unlearn the lessons of revolution.

The lessons of independence, of sovereignty, of dignity and of identity are lessons worth learning. They are lessons for life.

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