By Dr Charles Leyman Kachitsa
There are two major worldviews in existence perhaps since creation and these are optimism and pessimism. These have driven humanity to move forward and in some cases to retract. At the core of both is the state of fear. One of these two conditions adopts courage that conquers fear while the other embraces fear as the de facto position of safety.
In optimism there is courage as one sees all thing clearly more positively. Such state enables men to shade off their fear and wade into places unimaginable as a result reaping rewards that are not attained by ordinary mortals. This is true at an individual level and or a group of people level including for nations. Such nations with courage dare to dream of the impossible and that is why we have airplanes scouting the skies as would never have been imagined by those people who first came on to earth from the Creator.
On the other hand the pessimistic have always feared that which never needed to be feared including their own shadows. As a result they have remained on one station not wanting to move forward as that would mean their shadow following them. Individuals fitting this bracket have sat on soil and went hungry, have lived in fruitful forests but lacked food for fear of the colour of the fruits. Nations which harbour such pessimistic tendencies have seen other more courageous countries visiting their shores to take off the riches within their bellies.
The middle between these two extremes seems recommendable and the natural place to be. However, it is a preserve for only the enlightened, those who know the truth, what is the truth! At the core of it, is all in the Promise to humanity. You have to find it.
The quotes for this week are an extraction from a book that contains the background to a people that were one, now divided by human want as its pages explain. It shades light on some of the questions people ask on how these countries have turned to the status they are now. I am sure the few chosen quotations listed below from the book will enlighten you to one or two life lessons. Read and enjoy:
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF CENTRAL AFRICA – ZAMBIA, MALAWI, AND ZIMBABWE by A.J. Wills
“In attracting alien influences from the distant seaboard, gold was to become one of the factors that would undermine and ultimately destroy the progressive character of Iron Age society in Mashonaland. The schisms from within might have been resolved had they not been exploited by Portuguese and Arabs from without. Family feuds, endemic since the end of of the fifteenth century, flared up again in 1565 when Chikanga, mambo of Manyika in the eastern highlands, challenged the title of Mwene Mutapa Mokambo. Bothwere killed in this war, which was still smouldering when a Portuguese force under Barreto first entered Manyika in 1569. ……….. “
“It is not known for certain when the Arabs started trading for slaves along the East African coast. Arab settlements were being founded by A.D. 700 and it is possible that slaves were being exported by 750. There is, at any rate, clear evidence of a slave trade from Kilwa and Mombasa by 915. It was a trade which differed radically from its counterpart in the West. The latter had for its object the supply of the New World, where slavery was also new, limited in extent, and as events were to show, shallow-rooted. ……….”
“Livingstone started his life in Africa as a missionary, and though his experience extended his vision, and enlarged his ambition, his life work from the time that he set foot on the continent was a continuous if developing theme, devoted to bringing Christian civilization to the region for the benefit of the indigenous peoples. The charge that he was abandoning his calling for the appeal of exploration seems to have troubled his mind, for he found it necessary to protest that ‘the end of the geographical feat is the beginning of missionary enterprise’. Again, ‘ I would not be content to be an explorer only, but a missionary first and a geographer by the way’. Towards the end of his life, when the obsession to discover the Nile source had taken hold of his mind, he wrote in the same vein: ‘The discovery of these sources would only serve to open my mouth among men.’ However Livingstone might seek to resolve the contradiction in his character, he has been described with some truth as the greatest geographer that Africa has ever seen.”
“According to the agreement of 1891, the Chartered Company was providing the money for the policing and administration of British Central Africa, except for the salaries of the Commissioner and his deputy who were Imperial appointments, while itself controlling mineral rights of the area. This arrangement did not work very smoothly, and led to bitter recriminations between Johnston and Rhodes. The main purpose of the British Government in Nyasa country was the suppression of the slave trade; Rhodes had commercial development and the extension of the Cape to Cairo communications chiefly in mind. So it came about, as we have seen, that in 1894 Nyasaland, according to its present boundaries, was separated from the rest of British Central Africa and was controlled directly from the Foreign Office. ………”
