Somewhere tucked in the maelstrom of BBC's perpetually self-righteous propaganda wars against the Zimbabwean and by extension African people is a video item this week about a "Zimbabwean man [who] forgives men who had beaten him up."
Sad, sad story. Like always. And we savage natives, guilty by association, are supposed to weep for the sins of our cousins and relatives and regret our gargantuan capacity for ingratitude. Ah, that painful word that reminds of all that is wrong with us: ingratitude...
Why not? Just imagine the scenario in which a perfectly innocent man is accosted by a group of strange and strangerly vandals, beaten in a most savage way, and then ejected from a land that he owns by the glorious dictats of an ancien regime of his knowledgeable peer-colonisers. And think of the even more touching dimension: That man can speak, and in his elevated poetry of the soul kind of dialect, he recalls how at the height of all the atrocities perpetrated against him, the only thoughts that came to his mind were drawn from the morally superior words of Jesus who had admonished us to forgive those who ill-use us, etc etc.
What a saint. A holy saint. A perfectly holy saint whose matyrdom, when it is finally confirmed, would provide sanctified material for the most holy of shrines for sad generations yet unborn. Posterity...hmm.
And history is on his side, too. Concerning Zimbabwe, everything was done in the proper manner and in the proper spirit.
After all, had Cecil Rhodes not shown enough good faith by signing an agreement with Lobengula? Had the great white inheritors-of-Zimbabwe-by-the-will-of-god not given enough trinkets and guns and alcohol to the local "rulers" to make the stealing of Zimbabwe by a handful of refugees from Europe the most convenient of transitions in all of modern history?
...and on, and on, and on. But my rebellious spirit could just not soar so holily on Christ's elevated words, or the creative use to which this modern-day buccaneer cum soldier of the cross was putting them. Rather, my mind strayed to that grey zone of unmentionable factoids. There, I picked scattered remnants of a voice from not so long ago:
I was the red man
I was proud , I was strong
You were the white man
And you stole away my home....
You were the white man
And you drove me in the ground...
...I am a wooden Indian
Standing silent in the rain
Swear BY my grandfather's father
We're GONNA rise again...
Na na na....nah, nah, nah, nah, nah...the glorious words of Jesus and how he spoke about forgiving enemies might mean a lot to self-righteous twerps intent on scoring cheap propaganda points on BBC. But, with due apologies to those who have sensitive spirits, etc., those words don't mean shit to men and women whose lands and inheritance were stolen in broad daylight and given to bandits whose only god was/is greed. And no matter how much pretense is set up around it via the smooth-talk of modern noise-multipliers such as the BBC, the attitude of the disinherited would not change until the right thing is done.
Contrary to what many people with short memories would like to believe, Ben Freeth and his father-in-law can do a lot better than join up with some hypocritical concoctors of imperial nostalgia over at BBC. And even if they do, their rantings about kingdoms-gone-so-soon won't, with due apologies again to those with sensitive spirits, mean shit.
Like a famous wise man once said, "there is an old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...that says, fool me once, shame on...shame on you...Fool me...you can't get fooled again."
There is another, similar saying in Zimbabwe. Or Kenya. Or South Africa. Maybe in Namibia...or Libya. It's a swear by a grandfather's father's name that roughly translates as: we simply don't give a fuck about holy charlatans!!
