DO COLONIAL HISTORIES MATTER TODAY? For the less politically literate - usually richly clustered in opposition honeycombs - short answer is: THEY DON’T!!! Those don’t concern or bother me; they are paid to push such a demobilizing narrative by the very forces behind COLONIZATION.

What concerns me is a whole generation of BORN-FREES who didn’t experience COLONIZATION directly, and thus might not recognize and interpret its daily manifestations in what appears like routine post-colonial, in-independence drudgery. It is that generation we must continue to

...engage and equip with strong tools of analysis so they do not mistake colonial continuities into the phase of Independence for failures or even natural outcomes of Independence. As Marx correctly noted, dominant, hegemonic ideas work effectively when they NATURALIZE their

...contrivances against victims, or BLAME victims for those artificial contrivances. Marx was alerting us to THAT’S-THE-WAY-IT-IS hegemonic mantra of naturalizing creations of unequal dominance. Or claims that effects of such DOMINANCE and EXPLOITATION are continental to a people

...or a race!! As American racist race historiography amply show, white hegemonic mantra is to repeatedly claim: BLACKS-ARE-LAZY; BLACKS-ARE-CRIMINALS, both to excuse racial inequities and also violent, even fatal policing methods we continue to highlight to US’s Black Ambassador

...here in Zimbabwe. Racial capitalism, including in its colonial form,has perfected the art of hiding its ills DISCURSIVELY, which is to say, through deployment of language and a set of vocabulary which NATURALIZES its CONTRIVANCES, while NATURALIZING blame of VICTIMS of those

CONTRIVANCES for the same!! There is no debate on whether or not COLONIAL HISTORIES matter in INDEPENDENCE. Clearly they do; will continue to matter. We survive in CONTINUITIES of COLONIALISM we think long dead; we survive and are fated to survive under the blight of GLOBAL

CAPITALISM which all peoples of COLOUR also experience as RACISM. About that, there can’t be any useful debate. What we need to debate is our capacity through requisite conceptual tools and tools of struggle to RECOGNIZE these continuities and mobilize against them effectively.

This thread tackles the CHALLENGE of RECOGNIZING COLONIAL CONTINUITIES into INDEPENDENCE, itself a key step in the DECOLONIZATION PROCESS. I recall a seminar I addressed at UZ at the instance of @rangamataire, now Deputy Editor of The Herald. Then, he was a student at the College

To the surprise of my audience, I challenged the NOTION of POST-COLONY, harshly warning that it lulls us victims of RACIST COLONIALISM by creating an ILLUSION of TRANSCENDING and having gone past COLONIALISM. In fact, I added, discourse & scholarship on so-called POST-COLONIALITY