Patrice Lumumba, in his last letter to his wife before being martyred, teaches us that history that will absolve African heroes like him is not that which will be taught in Brussels, London, Paris, Washington nor the United Nations, but in African countries which have been freed from the claws of imperialism. The fact that Mandela’s legacy is celebrated in London and all other imperialist strongholds as I showed above indicates clearly that he is a puppet of imperialism and is used for imperialist agenda advancement. It cannot be that the system that murdered Lumumba for his ideas before he even implemented them in the Congo; that murdered Thomas Sankara after he had set the pattern for other African states to follow in a mere four years of power (unlike 2 decades of lies we have received here), rejecting the world bank and IMF and drastically transforming Burkina Faso, can equally turn and cherish Mandela as they do if he was indeed a genuine revolutionary. Your kids learn about the French revolution, Nazi Germany, American Revolution, but never do they learn about the Chimurenga or the Battle of Adwa or the knowledge harboured in Timbuktu. The same system teaches them about Louis XVI, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, but fails to mention Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon or Malcolm X. They rather your children read books by Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and George Orwell; but none by Chinua Achebe, Tsitsi Dangarembga or Ngugi wa Thiongo. This very same system holds Mandela in high esteem; he is the archetypal black man according to them. Ask Robert Mugabe, when you are doing what the system requires of you, you are a hero; you become a monkey when you start to address the real needs of the black man, like land dispossession. Before 2000, Robert Mugabe had accolades from institutions all over the world and one by one they were revoked after the land reform programme; simply because he was no longer their puppet, Blair had been told to keep his England and stay away from Zimbabwe and how it addresses its affairs. Whenever they tell you about “a long walk to freedom”, tell them that the only long walk that has taken place and is still taking place is that of thousands of black children in rural areas and white- owned farms, who walk countless kilometres on end to and from school on a daily basis – in blistering cold during the winter and scorching heat and unforgiving rains in summer – only to learn under a tree at the mercy of these weather conditions, and expected to miraculously produce results when not even textbooks are delivered to them. We will always have the most progressive constitution in the world for as long it is anti-black, but Sobukwe taught us long ago that it is impossible to implement something that is unjust in a just fashion; thus the wrath of the people will always at some point get to enough levels to inspire reform. When Africa rewrites the narrative of history that Lumumba speaks about in his final words as he stared death in the eye without a quiver, let it rewrite a narrative that will truthfully present the legacy of Mandela as that which was at the centre of perpetuating a brutal system of relentless exploitation on our beloved continent. In Azania there must be no Mandela Bridge, mall, university, street or even squatter camp; the deception of Madiba magic must be buried with South Africa.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:18:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015