The Robert Mugabe, Maurice Bishop connection
Obi Egbuna Jnr Simunye While we lost Comrade Bishop to US Imperialism and Reagan’s itchy trigger finger let us rejoice President Mugabe wakes up every day in his rightful role as the head of state and government of mighty Zimbabwe.
AS the struggle for revolutionary pan-Africanism at home and abroad intensifies it becomes extremely necessary to evoke the spirit of our bravest warriors that the current generation of African youth have been denied the opportunity to learn about either in school or at home.
This crippling dynamic, of course, is a by-product that stems from African history being distorted, watered down and commercialised.
Those who only choose to deal with this problem on the surface have arrived at the bogus conclusion that our history is hidden yet our former colonisers and enslavers dangle the truth in libraries and bookstores daring us to seek it.
Through this process, US-EU imperialism gauges the tightness of their cultural, historical and political stranglehold over African people in the new millennium in comparison to the monstrous grip they enjoyed at the height of chattel slavery, modern-day segregation and settler colonialism.
On May 29, Africans paid homage to the former prime minister of Grenada, Maurice Bishop, who was assassinated on October 19, 1983.
Our comrades in Southern Africa without fail always acknowledge the life and work of Mozambique’s first president, Comrade Samora Machel, whose plane mysteriously crashed between Mozambique and South Africa on October 19, 1986, three years to the day Cde Bishop was sent to an early grave by US-EU imperialism.
Moving into the future, Africans should honour Cdes Machel and Bishop everywhere we lay our heads on October 19 like clockwork.
Cde Bishop’s life was claimed at the tender age of 39 just like Dr King and Brother Malcolm, a few more African giants we lost in their thirties, Steve Biko (31), Frantz Fanon (36), Thomas Sankara (37) and Alexander Pushkin (37).
Both Cde Bishop and President Mugabe are intellectual products of Roman Catholic and Jesuit formal education.
When President Mugabe’s family was expelled from the mission near their home by Father Jean-Baptiste Loubiere, special provisions were made for him to remain in the mission primary school.
President Mugabe lived in Kutama during term time and returned to the home of his parents during the weekend.
When Loubiere passed on, his successor, Father Jerome O’Hea, who President Mugabe praised for possessing a warm and exceptional heart, introduced him to the plight of the Irish and their struggle for independence from British occupation and colonialism.
Before President Mugabe went on to Fort Hare University in South Africa he took a teacher training course at Kutama College.
Comrade Bishop received a scholarship to Roman Catholic Presentation Brothers College in 1957, he then won the Principal’s Gold Medal for outstanding academic and overall ability.
Cde Bishop earned a law degree from the London School of Economics in 1966 after reading at the Holborn College of Law and the Gray’s Inn one of the four Inns of Court that admitted students that wished to become barristers.
During his prison term President Mugabe also earned a Masters in Economics an additional Bachelors of Arts and two law degrees.
Cde Bishop was a voracious reader who studied the works of Marx, Engels, Stalin, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung and C.L.R. James.
We are sure President Mugabe was pleased to learn that Cde Bishop considered Mwalimu Julius Nyerere one of his primary influences and studied the Arusha Declaration and the Ujamaa Essays on Socialism.
From the early days of their training neither President Mugabe nor Cde Bishop allowed themselves to be casualties of the brain drain.
Cde Bishop was heavily involved in a Legal Aid Clinic in Notting Hill while President Mugabe taught at St Mary’s College at Takoradi, Ghana, and had the opportunity to breathe the air of Africa’s first nation to dismantle settler colonialism while his place of birth was still illegally occupied by British/Rhodesian colonialism.
Before coming to power Cde Bishop had a lengthy track record of frontline service that included co-founding the Grenada Assembly of Youth after Truth, the National Action Front, Forum, West Indian Students’ Society, Standing Conference of West Indian Organisation, Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, Grenada-Cuba Friendship Association and the Trinidadian National Joint Action Committee.
Cde Bishop’s organisation was, ofcourse, the New Jewel Movement.
President Mugabe joined the ANC while at Fort Hare and when returning to Zimbabwe he joined the National Democratic Party, then ZAPU, where he became publicity secretary and secretary-general before finally cementing his place in ZANU-PF.
It is important to note that both the Zimbabwean and Grenadian revolutions have a unique place in African and Caribbean history.
What Cde Bishop and the New Jewel Movement did in Grenada was the most groundbreaking effort since Haiti in 1804 and Cuba in 1959. President Mugabe and ZANU-PF were the only Southern African liberation movement without Soviet backing to come to power.
What also connects Cde Bishop and President Mugabe is not only British colonialism, or the fact their ascensions to political power are only one year apart, but also their close ties to Cuba and that the Reagan administration was obsessed with claiming both governments as Cold War casualties.
While the recent historical bid of Zimbabwe’s Minister of Tourism and Hospitality Walter Mzembi for the post of secretary-general of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation fell short, Minister Mzembi reintroduced the vision of Cde Bishop whose efforts to redefine tourism cost him his life.
In his epic speech titled “New Tourism”, Cde Bishop highlighted the following areas Old Tourism, Imposition of Cultural Values, Tourist Plant as Enclave, Racism and Black Self-Image ,to name a few.
Cde Bishop considered old tourism as a problem largely because of its colonialist and imperialist connotation.
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