Zanu PF has called for reparations from Western countries that enslaved and looted resources from Africa years ago.
The party make the call at a time when goverment is also under pressure from Gukurahundi Victims and survivors for a similar reparation from it.
Speaking at a weekly press briefing in Harare yesterday, Zanu PF acting Secretary for Information and Publicity Patrick Chinamasa said the party is lending its weight to the clarion call.
Chinamasa said that the party bemoans the fact that Africa’s development history since the 15th century is one of slavery in three distinct physical forms namely Captive, Colonial and Neo Colonial slavery.
Untold atrocities committed during the era of the Atlantic African Slave Trade, he said are part of a long chain of human suffering that Zanu PF would not want to be forgotten or just washed away.
Millions of Africans, Chinamasa said, were killed in the slave raids, millions died on the long march to the slave ports and millions perished in the voyage from Africa to the respective destinations
“These deeply embedded issues from history refuse to and will not go away from modern consciousness,”.
He added that the brutalities that occurred before the creation of modern African Independent states and which accompanied the process of conquest, pacification and the establishment of effective administrations of colonial occupation were experienced by citizens of African modern states
The subjugation experienced by citizens of these states, he said carry and reproduce collective memories of the painful past.
“As everybody knows the attainment of independence and total sovereignty by each such new state, state formation and constitution was invariably a forced rather than a negotiated matter. In the case of Zimbabwe Independence and restoration of basic human rights were attained after a 16 year of protracted armed struggle. In other words, there were massive violations of human and people’s rights committed during the ear of conquest and the establishment of colonial rule which turned out not to be a civilising mission at all but another form of slavery,” said Chinamasa.
In the case of Kenya, he said brutalities were committed by the British Colonial Administration against Kenyan population during the Mau Mau insurrection.
“No apology or reparations were paid to the Kenyans,” he said.
In Zimbabwe, Chinamasa said, the modern parallel to the slave raids is the orchestrated social media onslaught against the country.
“Zanu PF, is lending its revolutionary support to recent efforts at dialogue. The Namibians and Germans are talking about acts of genocide committed on the Herero and Nama people of Namibia and which arose in the first decade of the 20th century.
“The Democratic Republic of Congo together with the Burundians are talking to the Belgians about issues of human barbarity that occurred in King Leopold, so called Congo Free State and the colonisation of Burundi and Rwanda and their balkanization along ethnic lines”.
Chinamasa added that as a consequence of seeking to redress the brutalities that occurred in colonisation of Zimbabwe accompanied by dispossession of land and brutal confiscation of livestock by colonialists the country has suffered 20 years of naked bullying, economic isolation and a severe sanctions regime by the former colonial powers now acting in concert as economic and political powers in support of what they allege are the rights of 4 500 former white farmers.