ZANU-PF Calls for Slavery Reparations

16 OCT, 2020 - 09:10 

Zanu PF acting Secretary for Information and Publicity Cde Patrick Chinamasa

Joseph Madzimure Senior Reporter

Zimbabwe Herald

Zanu PF has joined the rest of the continent in calling for reparations from Western countries that enslaved and looted resources from Africa years ago.

The clarion call comes as the Namibian Government is presently negotiating for the reparations for the estimated 100 000 Herero and Nama African tribesmen who were massacred by Germans forces in a colonial era genocide.

Shockingly, the German Government is offering €10 million an amount that translates to about €100 per victim.

So far on the continent, Zimbabwe is the only African state that has managed to repossess its land from the former colonisers, however the bully western world reacted by unilaterally imposing sanctions on the country.

Just like Namibia, other African states are now negotiating for compensation from former colonisers like Britain that reneged on its promise to pay compensation for the land it expropriated in Zimbabwe.

Speaking at a weekly press briefing in Harare yesterday, Zanu PF acting Secretary for Information and Publicity Cde Patrick Chinamasa said the revolutionary party is lending its weight to the clarion call.

Cde Chinamasa said that the party bemoans the fact that Africa’s development history since the 15th century is one of slavery in three distinct physical forms namely Captive, Colonial and Neo Colonial slavery.

Untold atrocities committed during the era of the Atlantic African Slave Trade, he said are part of a long chain of human suffering that Zanu PF would not want to be forgotten or just washed away.

Millions of Africans, Cde Chinamasa said, were killed in the slave raids, millions died on the long march to the slave ports and millions perished in the voyage from Africa to the respective destinations.

“These deeply embedded issues from history refuse to and will not go away from modern consciousness,”.

He added that the brutalities that occurred before the creation of modern African Independent states and which accompanied the process of conquest, pacification and the establishment of effective administrations of colonial occupation were experienced by citizens of African modern states.

The subjugation experienced by citizens of these states, he said carry and reproduce collective memories of the painful past.

“As everybody knows the attainment of independence and total sovereignty by each such new state, state formation and constitution was invariably a forced rather than a negotiated matter. In the case of Zimbabwe Independence and restoration of basic human rights were attained after a 16 year of protracted armed struggle. In other words, there were massive violations of human and people’s rights committed during the ear of conquest and the establishment of colonial rule which turned out not to be a civilising mission at all but another form of slavery,” said Cde Chinamasa.

In the case of Kenya, he said brutalities were committed by the British Colonial Administration against Kenyan population during the Mau Mau insurrection.

“No apology or reparations were paid to the Kenyans,” he said.

In Zimbabwe, Cde Chinamasa said, the modern parallel to the slave raids is the orchestrated social media onslaught against the country.

“Zanu PF, is lending its revolutionary support to recent efforts at dialogue. The Namibians and Germans are talking about acts of genocide committed on the Herero and Nama people of Namibia and which arose in the first decade of the 20th century.

“The Democratic Republic of Congo together with the Burundians are talking to the Belgians about issues of human barbarity that occurred in King Leopold, so called Congo Free State and the colonisation of Burundi and Rwanda and their balkanization along ethnic lines”.

Cde Chinamasa added that as a consequence of seeking to redress the brutalities that occurred in colonisation of Zimbabwe accompanied by dispossession of land and brutal confiscation of livestock by colonialists the country has suffered 20 years of naked bullying, economic isolation and a severe sanctions regime by the former colonial powers now acting in concert as economic and political powers in support of what they allege are the rights of 4 500 former white farmers.