AS previously colonised nations continue to call for closure and justice for crimes against humanity that were committed by their erstwhile colonisers, this begs the question: Are ‘apologies’ enough? “ Zimbabwe has been subjected to heinous post-colonial trauma by its former coloniser, Britain, which has tried but failed on several occasions to isolate and paralyse Harare through its ever intrusive and destructive foreign policy. Such is the arrogance and sense of entitlement by the British that not only have they railroaded the rest of the West to slap Zimbabwe with illegal economic sanctions over the latter’s heroic and historic land reform, they want to go further and install a puppet government in Harare. The British still stubbornly refuse to surrender the heads of our leaders and spirit mediums, which they arrogantly flaunt as war trophies.

Local opposition parties are complicit in this devilish scheme. Using soft power, the Western-sponsored project exhibits well laid out plans that are premised on subtle attempts to make us forget our past. Our history is supposed to start on April 18, 1980, and should be defined by the aberration called Gukurahundi. Anything else that happened prior to Zimbabwe’s independence is defined as ZANU PF ‘propaganda’.

NGOs funded to pursue the Gukurahundi issue have cashed in on that bizarre attempt to obufuscate our past. And the West is daring in that quest, with former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, funding and proudly launching a provocative book titled ‘Kwawakabva Hakuna Kukosha Pane Kwaurikuenda’ at the US Embassy in 2012. But the tenacity of the people, their determination to protect and defend their gains, have duly kept the country’s wheels rolling. That determination and resolve now manifest in the many success stories that the country has scored in recent years in agriculture, mining and now energy and infrastructural development despite the relentless onslaught by the aggressive West and its illegal economic sanctions.

At the launch of a study by the Zimbabwe National Elders’ Forum (ZNEF) on October 31 in Harare, President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s poignant calls for the British to formally apologise for the horror they condemned Zimbabweans to during the colonial era (100 years) pave the way for locals to hold their former colonisers accountable to their heinous acts. Zimbabwe said the President must also demand reparations for the loss of lives, trauma, and potential revenue it could have generated if it had not been colonised.

The study by ZNEF, titled ‘Land Displacements: The Untold Stories of Crimes, Injustices, Trauma and Losses Experienced by Indigenous Zimbabweans during the Colonial Era’, unravels the devastating impact of colonialism and calls for reparations from the British. It also extensively explores how punitive laws like the 1931 Land Apportionment Act and the Native Land Husbandry Act (1950) systematically marginalised the locals.

“It is pleasing that the Forum intends to comprehensively document the injustices, trauma, and loss of lives experienced by black Zimbabweans due to colonial land appropriation,” said President Mnangagwa. “We wonder when we, the rest of former colonies, will receive similar apologies from the British. They must apologise.” This was in reference to other former colonies, including Kenya’s Mau Mau and Namibia’s Herero-Nama, who were offered apologies by the British and the Germans respectively.

The Mau Mau survivors received 13 million British pounds in 2013 from the UK for crimes against humanity while in 2021, the German government revealed it would pay the Herero-Nama 1,1 billion Euros as compensation Recently, the Belgian government was ordered to pay reparations to five women of mixed race who were forcibly removed from their families during the Belgian-Congo era. The DRC, which was under Belgian colonial rule from 1908 to 1960, suffered from a cruel policy that saw the abduction of children born to a black mother and white father, mainly through rape. These children were placed in poorly managed orphanages, and judges said this was a crime against humanity, describing the kidnappings as an inhumane act of persecution.

Monique Bitu Bingi, Lea Tavares Mujinga, Noelle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula, and Marie-Jose Loshi, now all in their 70s, were abducted under the age of seven. They launched their case for compensation in 2021. Their case had initially been dismissed by the Brussels Court of Appeal, which had said that ‘too much time had passed for them to be eligible for reparations’. Typically, the Catholic Church — which had been complicit in that psychologically damaging scandal — where most white fathers refused to acknowledge paternity or recognise their mixed race children, were housed in Catholic-run orphanages where they endured further abuse.

The Catholic Church apologised in 2017 for its role in the scandal while the Belgian government formally apologised to more than 20 000 victims of forced family separations in the DRC, Burundi and Rwanda. And ours is a past that we can never forget or erase from our enduring history. “A century later, the residual effects of the pain and bitterness are still real. Our people carry the scars of a painful and cruel past,” said President Mnangagwa. The process for Government lawyers to file lawsuits against the British and the Rhodesians begins now.