COMMENT: A return to the source

28 Feb, 2016 - 00:02 0 Views
COMMENT: A return to the source

The Sunday Mail

Charles Mungoshi has for over three decades been the voice of the nation when it comes to artistic expression of our ethos.

“Waiting for the Rain” remains one of the most brilliant characterisations of the national question in as far as it pertains to identity, unity and progress/regression.

That conversation between the Old Man and Garabha is, all these many years later, still one of the greatest moments in Zimbabwean literature.

The Old Man says to Garabha, “Today we ask: Where are we? Who are we? What wrong did we do? How many stories do we hear of the white man humiliating our people? …

“We hear it, but do we see it? We might be blind. We hear it, but do we listen? We might be deaf.

“And why? Playing the enemy’s drum, that’s why. Making so much noise with the enemy’s drum that we can’t even hear the beating of our own gullible little miserable hearts…

“This is what they don’t know, and because they don’t know it they are going to lose the battle before it’s even started. They fight for what they don’t know. We fought for what we knew…”

Mungoshi’s Old Man was concerned with the manner in which we were allowing foreign things, alien cultures and a love for money to divide us.

Because of that willingness to do anything for money and the belief in the superiority of all things Western, our people no longer know what to fight for.

Mungoshi, through the Old Man, was calling for a return to the source, a return to the roots of our being.

A return to the source is both an ideological and a physical pursuit.

Both were done yesterday as tens of thousands of people from all over the country went to Great Zimbabwe in Masvingo for the 2016 edition of the 21st February Movement celebrations.

We need not regurgitate the importance of Great Zimbabwe to our being, our nationhood.

And so yesterday at Great Zimbabwe it rained like it had not done in a long while. And then the Old Man spoke.

He reminded the nation of the need for unity of purpose. He talked about the importance of valuing ideology, discipline and hard work.

Though he did not use Mungoshi’s words, he evoked the same spirit has he more or less rallied the nation to dance to the beat of its own drum.

The Old Man has been telling us these simple truths for years, for decades. But educated as we are, we have learnt nothing.

We still allow the babble of destructive voices and the sleight of hand of anti-Zimbabwe forces to come between us.

The Old Man spoke against this again yesterday, asking why there are some within the ruling party and indeed Zimbabwe in general who accept money to do the dirty deeds of fanning factionalism and promoting a harmful and retrogressive successionist agenda.

By allowing external elements dictate in any way how our politics play out is dancing to the beat of a foreign drum.

No serious country can afford such subversion and expect to remain as a viable nation-state proposition.

All those whose words and actions spur divisions, all those who by their thoughts and intentions seek to advance narrow and selfish agendas, must heed the Old Man.

They must pause for a while and listen to the sound of the Zimbabwean drum above the noise of the “own gullible little miserable hearts”.

CARTOON

CARTOON

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