Most recollections of the earliest European interactions
with Africans portray Africans as brutes or Tarzan like characters that needed
taming and civilizing. Notwithstanding
accounts of brutal practices like human impaling that cannot be challenged, it
was inaccurate to ascribe such brutality as specific to African culture excerpt
perhaps that Africans were among the last people to disavow such practices.
So it was up to King cobra to remind us that there are still
some among our contemporaries that are yet to give up dehumanizing fellow human
beings through acts of corporal ill treatment and subservience.
Our quest for Independence from Colonial rule was
intensified by the indignity Zambians suffered at the hands of European masters
who deemed us beneath them and undeserving of the dignity to buy goods from an
open counter.
However, it is now self-evident that while the Zambian
masses sought independence to achieve dignity and self-determination, our
political leaders sought only, to take the place of white man.
Free Zambians hope to construct a social reality that meets
their highest aspirations but our politicians, always set out to construct a
different reality. One that assigns them all the prestige and power the colonizers
enjoyed before independence yet requires Zambians to acquiesce to an only
slightly enhanced status.
King Cobra wants to talk and act like a colonizer, while he tames
the rights of Zambians to speak their minds or express dissent. Meager national resources are spent
indulging cronies and relatives while ordinary Zambians go without drugs, water
and electricity. Each year more and more young Zambians complete the formal
education that marks the rite of civilization yet they find no certain role in
this post independence reality these wannabe bwanas have constructed.
But they need not accept this arrangement that is unfair and
one sided. It is the rider that now, needs taming and civilizing.
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