Retracing roots of the Chirandu clan: Part 6
FOR the spirit of inclusivity we also need to give spiritual recognition to those that we embraced like the Mwenyi, who have inseparably become part of us. They can guide us as to how they spiritually honour their highest ancestors and God and this becomes included as part and parcel of that highest representation of our original divinity as Zimbabweans.
This then becomes our highest spiritual connectivity to God as a nation which we honour continuously with seriousness and without fail each time every time all of the time, and in our own way, our black African Zimbabwean way which instructs us to honour God through our ancestors.
There are people amongst us who can properly guide us in re-establishing this highest of divine protocols.
We also ensure that in our National Budget, a chunk of that budget is put aside to take care of the needs of our divine protocols as represented by this group of our Zimbabwean spiritual mhondoros/ masvikiro as suggested above.
And this budget must be drawn up by the spirit mediums themselves so that they come up with their exact needs every year, year in year out ad infinitum.
Such a budget cannot be subjected to any desecrating exercises such as audits.
Once the budget is done its passed on to the mhondoros/masvikiros who spend it in their own way without questions being asked.
They know that if they are not responsible, the reprisals to them will be divine which wont be very palatable.
And hind sight testifies that real mhondoros/masvikiro are incorruptible because everything they do is guided by the divine on behalf of the people.
The mhondoro/masvikiro budget is then given to the Minister of Finance as part of the National Budget.
The Minister of Finance then ensures that this budget is properly funded to ensure that our mhondoros are properly looked after to reflect the respect and dignity they deserve as our representatives to the divine.
The present chiefs then get attached to this division of the mhondoros/masvikiro as the correct division from where they are directly guided as to how to rule the communal lands.
The same applies to the politicians. They are also given the same direction by the mhondoros/masvikiro on how to rule the country in the manner it is desired by God.
From then on we can expect generational wealth and generational happiness.
If we leave things as they are, we will continue to suffer. We will just manage to keep our noses out of water as we are doing now, but with the rest of our bodies immersed in messy, troubled waters full of sharks out to devour us.
We don’t need that. We want to thrive, not just to survive.
The solution is there. We all know what to do so we have ourselves to blame when things are wrong like the way they are right now.
And they will continue to go wrong if we don’t correct our spirituality. It’s as simple as that.
The Shoko Mbire established themselves at Great Zimbabwe in Masvingo and established Great Zimbabwe City as their headquarters and it became the centre of all political power, trade and commerce in most of Central and Southern Africa.
The Great Zimbabwe Empire then extended to the Indian ocean incoopting present day Mocambique.
It also extended southwards almost as far as present day Tshwane (Pretoria/Johannesburg area) in South Africa and westwards into Botswana and also northwards into present-day Zambia and parts of present day the Democratic Republic of Congo.
There was very keen trade between Great Zimbabwe and the Arab world as well as India and China.
The Arabs would get gold from Great Zimbabwe in exchange for cloths and other luxury items.
Then the Portuguese landed at Sofala in what is now Mozambique. The Portuguese also wanted this gold abundantly found at Great Zimbabwe.
However, the Portuguese’s terms of trade were very impoverishing, so the trade in gold between the Arabs and the Zimbabweans became clandestine.
The Zimbabweans deftly avoided selling their gold to the Portuguese whose terms of trade were not favourable preferring the Arabs whose terms were better.
As a result, the Portuguese decided to move into inland Zimbabwe to find the actual gold mines and mine the gold themselves as they couldn’t get hold of the gold which was being traded because they were being avoided by the owners of the gold, i.e. the Zimbabweans due to the Portuguese’s impoverishing terms of trade.
The inland movement of the Portuguese resulted in the erosion of sovereignty in some parts of Zimbabwe, particularly the northeastern parts like the present-day Dande/Zambezi Valley, the Mazowe (originally Manzou) area and other parts of northeast Zimbabwe.
In fact, a fortuitous event which had happened before gave the Portuguese an even more perfect excuse to nearly colonise this part of Zimbabwe.
A Catholic priest called Father Gonzalo da Silveira had previously converted the regional Mutapa or regional paramount ruler of this part of Zimbabwe then into Father Silveira’s Christian faith which was Roman Catholicism.
This angered the people so much that Father Silveira was killed for this dastardly act of stealing a whole paramount ruler’s faith. It was considered the most horrible act of disrespect for this Portuguese priest to convert a whole Mutapa into some unknown religion called Christianity when the Mutapa and his people had their own ways of divinity and relating to God.
So this Portuguese priest had to go.
The Muslim Arab traders also used this incident to expedite the killing of Father Silveira because fearing that they were losing their own influence over the Africans to the Portuguese, they made the Mutapa even angrier by rubbing this whole conversion incident in and claiming that the Portuguese had given the Mutapa poison in the form of giving the Mutapa that cylindrical white wafer which the Catholics call the holy communion bread which represents the body of Jesus Christ.
This really made the Mutapa’s anger worse resulting in the killing of Father Silveira, an incident which years later gave the Portuguese the perfect excuse to invade Zimbabwe.
The killing of Father Silveira, although it had happened years before, gave the Portuguese the perfect excuse to move in and terrorise the Zimbabweans ostensibly as a way of avenging Father Silveira’s killing but in reality that was their perfect way of getting to the Mutapa gold mines.
They nearly succeeded because for some time they established their own estates in northeastern Zimbabwe called prazos (from where we get the term purazi meaning large farm or estate).
The owners of the prazos were called prazeros.
They established markets which they called freiras and really made a lot of wealth from this opportunity.
In fact, some of these Portuguese estate owners or prazeros had become so powerful that they could afford to have their own private armies called the Machikunda. ◆ Claude Maredza is a member of the Moyo Chirandu (Duma) dynasty, specifically of Norumedzo Village (KuHarurwa), Bikita, Masvingo, Zimbabwe and is in fact a Crown Prince of the Norumedzo Moyo Chirandu (Duma) Kingdom Royalty. He is a qualified accountant (University of Zimbabwe and Deloitte & Touche) and has doctoral level formal education and everything else below that besides other professional qualifications. He is also a well known published author and film writer/producer/director/actor. FEedback: email; maredzac@ yahoo.com; phone: 00 263 (0) 772 382 099.