IN 2016, there was a curriculum review. 

One scholar, Dr Augustine Tirivangana, is on record saying: “When the curriculum was reviewed in 2016, we made it very clear that there was no room for European history in our schools, not the classical history of Mussolini, Hitler and others. 

We made it abundantly clear that there is no need to stuff and cripple our children’s capacities by forcing them to learn about European empires, and European capitalist wars of attrition.”

Indeed, we underlined this was inimical to our children because what we need is for them to understand the correct relationship between us Africans and Europe, in particular, Western Europe. 

That our children, that us Africans are victims of European imperial capitalist greed which has left Africa limping badly and still bleeding. Western Europe still costs Africa, insisting on beating it to the ground until they can once again plunder and loot the material resources of an utterly defenceless people. 

They want to emasculate people so that no-one can say no to their rabid lust and greed for what belongs to Africans. For that, we cannot afford to have a curriculum which purports such to be offloaded on to us, on our children.

The way our curriculum insists on teaching this European imperialist history does not foster the correct consciousness that European imperialists are predators on the African soul. 

Our children, heirs to this great continent, do not need to be made to admire Europe and the excesses of its imperialist greed. 

In fact, what is essential for us to teach our children is a critical history of Europe which reveals Europe in its true colours of looters and plunderers who will murder and maim without compunction to satiate their imperial greed. This is what our children should learn because this is the truth which will liberate them from the bondage of hero-worshipping murderers who have devastated Africa from the days of slavery to date. 

Our children must be taught that the West has always been looters and plunderers, from time immemorial, that they have never been a positive force on the African continent.

We, of Zimbabwe, have not been spared imperialist ravages. 

Between 1890 and 1980, our land was robbed by looters and plunderers led by Cecil John Rhodes on behalf of the British Crown. 

The British armed robbers, led by Rhodes, murdered our people in cold blood in order to permanently carve out for themselves the land of the plateau between the Zambezi and the Limpopo. 

Their lust and greed for this great, rich beautiful land, its soils which lend themselves to varied agricultural produce, its untold mineral wealth, had a high toll. Between 1896 and 1897 alone, over 8 000 of our people were murdered in cold blood. 

Dr Felix Muchemwa (2016) estimates that at least 8 000 people were blasted to death with dynamite as they hid in caves, kopjes encampments and hill escarpments. 

Hundreds others were killed by starvation induced by conditions resulting from purposeful, intentional use of starvation as a weapon of war to force people to surrender. 

Whites looted tonnes of grain, hundreds of livestock, including goats, sheep and chickens, and they slashed and burnt crops which were in the fields. 

They destroyed and burnt whole villages, reducing people to roving bands of starving destitutes. 

After failing to defeat the Mashona, they resorted to genocide, openly orchestrated by Rhodes and the Catholic and Anglican Church.

It, therefore, is grave aggression against our people to teach our children European history without revealing the manacles of Europe and how this has been detrimental to our people then and today. Therefore, they, as heirs of this great, gracious land, should be vigilant against Western-Europe as an imperialist force. 

What is the purpose of curriculum review if the recommendations are not taken on board?

We did recommend that we do not want European history in our curriculum; the European history crafted by Rhodesians and handed over to us by the colonial curriculum of Ian Smith. 

We are not Europeans, neither are we its colonies nor surrogates. 

Our consensus was that, this European history was to be phased out in the last seven years but our children are still being costed to study this colonial European history. 

The force of the land, the ethos of the nation stood firm that our children should not be reduced to surrogates of Western Europe but seven years later, this persists.

Zimbabwe is ours and nothing must stop us from defining ourselves as who we are.