Obi Egbuna Jnr Correspondent
Zimbabwe Decolonization and By Whenever the governments of the US-EU fraternity, Western- based human rights groups and NGOs decide to attack President Mugabe and ZANU-PF as Africa’s most notorious violators of democracy and human rights, the rhetoric resembles musical orchestras in absolute harmony. To their detriment is not only the fact that the US-EU imperialist propaganda apparatus is losing its credibility by the second, but the so-called African Americans embrace the adage “if your living in a glass house don’t throw no stones”.
We are well aware some of our comrades in Zimbabwe and throughout Africa might take us to task because this doesn’t represent proper colonial English, our only rebuttal is please don’t overlook the logic and merit.
Because Zimbabwe has the highest literacy rate on our mother continent which at the moment is 97 percent, the Africans living inside US borders can only dream like Dr Martin Luther King Jnr, for the moment in history when we collectively achieve numerical results remotely close to this amazing and staggering number.
In 1980 the year Zimbabwe won its official independence the national high school dropout rate in the US was 14,1 percent, for Africans it was 19,1 percent, today the national high school drop out rate in the US is 8,1, for Africans it is 9,1 percent.
According to the educational website statisticbrain.org whose primary sources of information are Education Week and the Children’s trend database 40 percent of the children expelled from school on an annual basis are Africans, 70 percent of students involved in what is called in-school arrests are Africans.
Our children are also 3,5 times more likely to be suspended from school than their European counterparts. At the moment in the United States 8 000 students drop out on a daily basis which is around three million students (which is 10 percent of Zimbabwe’s total population) a year, 68 percent of all males in prison did not graduate from high school, 75 percent of the crimes in the US are committed by high school dropouts.
These rather disturbing trends played a role in organisations representing a variety of outlooks on the political ideological spectrum, coining a phrase the school to prison pipeline. It makes us wonder if President Mugabe and ZANU-PF’s most hostile detractors in the US are even aware that in Zimbabwe a nation of 13 million people, there are only 20 000 prisoners.
There is a popular joke amongst everyday South Africans that President Mugabe should be appointed their head of state temporarily, in order to establish a Land Reclamation Programme identical to the one in Zimbabwe, perhaps President Barack Obama should take the First Lady and his daughters on vacation while President Mugabe ensures his kith and kin in the US receive quality education.
This is why the Children’s Defence Fund was irate when the Bush administration politically hijacked their slogan “Leave No Child Behind”, when there was no genuine commitment to finding a lasting solution to this national pandemic.
For Africans the struggle against mental enslavement and decolonisation is directly attributed to our fight for quality education, long before the international community decided to pursue the MDGs, our historical and political reality made this an utmost priority on and off the continent of Africa.
Whether we are reflecting on stories on plantations about our ancestors being murdered on site for trying to learn their colonial and slave masters languages, the general sentiment amongst Africans in the US is US imperialism cannot pass moral judgment on any nation who has made education the cornerstone of its culture and society.
We remember the story of the first African woman to be published – Phyllis Wheatley – who was kidnapped from Africa at the tender age of seven, whose slave owners came to the conclusion she should be educated with their children, therefore she would not be subjected to slave labour. While we still marvel at Sister Wheatley’s genius what made her more entitled than the millions of African children who picked cotton and tobacco from sun up to sun down?
The Father of African History, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, who is responsible for the establishment of the African History Month in February in the US and founding the first African publishing company, did not receive his high school diploma until the age of 20, but became the second African to graduate from Harvard University after Dr WEB DuBois.
Because of the historical disconnect Africans in the US are vulnerable to attempts by the imperialists to present bandage solutions to their needs in the area of education. Over 20 years ago an initiative called Teach for America was established, if our topic was construction Teach for America is a wrecking ball, that has a seek and destroy approach to education.
The usual targets are schools that are predominantly African and Hispanic, the majority of teachers who go through the program are predominantly Caucasian, with no sense of sociology or history and they are used to phase out African teachers invested in those children and communities.
One of the prized graduates of the Teach for America programme is the former Chancellor of Education in Washington, DC, Michelle Rhee, who gained international recognition for a documentary entitled “Waiting For Superman” about education in the US. The approach is to intellectually bulldoze the curricular of schools, make standardised testing the litmus for a child’s intellect, and shut down schools with the lowest test scores.
Ms. Rhee was sent running out of Baltimore and Washington, DC, but this programme of educational genocide was already in place. On a global scale, the Africa Society of the National Summit of Africa has a programme called Teach Africa, which is described as an educational initiative for administrators, teachers and youth that addresses the response of lack of African education in US classrooms.
While Zimbabwe celebrates its neighbours in Southern Africa, US imperialism claims to speak for all America an entire geographical hemisphere, will Ms Rhee and Teach For America’s graduates expose the laundry list of war crimes the US Government has committed all over the Americas? Will they discuss the School of the Americas in Ft Bening?
Will they discuss the 635 assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro since 1959?
Since the Obama administration was supposed to usher in the era of post-racial politics, it is now supposed to be politically uncivilised to express nationalist and pan-African sentiment. However, we must speak the truth to power individually and collectively. Our Native American sisters and brothers don’t show their children cowboy movies, the Palestinians won’t let the Zionists develop any historical initiatives about their experience, why must Africans in the US allow disrespect to be the norm?
Any curriculum established in the US that doesn’t deal with the coups and assassinations spearheaded by Democrats and Republicans of the numerous icons of the anti-colonial movement, the trail of US blood money to the most treacherous dictators Africa has known will never make the grade. Will the National Security Advisor Susan Rice come and read her papers on Africom she wrote while working at the Brookings Institute?
Until the US comes to grips with the contradictions inside its borders that are rooted in an educational system on the verge of crashing to the ground, they should resist the temptation to attack President Mugabe and ZANU-PF, instead ask for advice and pointers in the field of education.
Obi Egbuna Jnr is the US Correspondent to the Herald and a US based member of the Zimbabwe-Cuba Friendship Association. His email is obiegbuna15@gmail.com