A far cry from community tourism promotion
museum was supposed to be done soon after the BaTonga Museum in Binga but it was at that time that the economy started facing serious financial problems and plans to do it were shelved,” said Chief Nekatambe.
Director of NMMZ Dr Godfrey Mahachi confirmed that work on the Nambya museum was a prerogative of his department and said they were working to ensure the mobilisation of financial resources so that the museum could be completed.
He said an initial figure of $53 000 was proposed for the first phase of the project that entails refurbishment of the museum, research and documentation to produce an exhibition storyline as well exhibition design and mounting.
He said the idea to capacitate community museums so that they serve their communities fully in the preservation of their cultural heritage and identity was mooted under the community museums development programme embraced in the year 2000 by his department which falls under the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The programme however, hit a snag in the years preceding dollarisation as the department was faced with a myriad of challenges that included but were not limited to the exodus of qualified and experienced staff to greener pastures across the country’s borders.
The problems, he said, were further perpetuated by the acute shortage of funds that characterised the economy and saw the country’s museums department being poorly funded and operating with skeletal staff while other museums were forced to close down operations.
“I am well aware of the situation in our museums. Something definitely needs to be done to restore them to their past glory. Some of the structures need to be worked on like the Nambya museum in Hwange that is still not complete. Let it be clear and understood that we have not been neglecting the museum. We are worried by the number of years it has taken us to complete it but we are mobilising resources so that we finish the work and make it fully functional.
Dr Mahachi said fully capacitating of the country’s museums was a major component of the tourism sector as community museums were the best place to visit if one was interested in knowing the community’s culture.
He said although the department had enough capacity in terms of research it was the material and financial resources that were lacking to make their work complete, adding that they were courting the private sector to help them develop and capacitate the community museums and promote community tourism in the long run.
Enough of the comedy, let me get back to serious matters — My epiphany. I want to challenge young people, our young politicians with so much energy to demonstrate, aspire for political office and be acolytes of factionalism, secession, succession and multiple mainstream political gimmicks we are witnessing today in this land of ours. I am troubled so much by the neglect of more pressing issues and attendance to smoke screen politics.
I say smoke screen politics because nation over we are competing in a political culture we did not create, cannot recreate or manage. Our politics is approved by our colonial master; consequently we wait for positive reinforcements from Britain and United States every time we make political decisions. Since the attainment of our independence we have been guided by political barometers mechanised by Lord Soarmes and Carrington.
As a liberation transition model it was essential then, but today it’s confining us to political slavery. In fact we are still slaves because all our systems — educational, political and social are very “white”. We have not departed from Rhodesia; we are still an enemy of ourselves. We have collectively participated in the prolonging and dissemination of that culture from one generation to the other and this has been successfully guaranteed by our education systems.
Hilarious enough is when there is an attempt to create Zimbabwean systems, divorced from our colonisers’ benchmark; havoc wrecks the cities with protests dominating the day because we would have deviated from conformity.
Our “national” level of conformity is despairing; to say the least it is ghastly. We do not believe in anything created by us for us because young people who have been students’ leaders or Political Movements’ Generals have been keen on creating their own space to have a slice of the cake and left everyone else vulnerable to a regeneration of colonisation in its subtle ways.
I should say last year was supposed to be an epiphany when South African students decolonised the space with the #Rhodesmustfall movement which even led to the renaming of Rhodes University to The University Currently Known as Rhodes University (UCKRU).
This was a bold move outside its vandalism strategy, but all the same we can justify such violent stances as statements of destroying a culture, it’s symbolism I should say.
However, it’s a huge difference here at home, decoloniality is still an academic elitist thought or our young people are too greedy to re-think about generations