Harare — By far the worst sanctions story, which is not widely seen as a sanctions story at all, is the hushed news about the 2007, 2008 and 2009 Grade Seven national examination results for rural schools.

This is the first part of a two-part series By Tafataona Mahoso

Readers may have seen Mr David Mutambara on ZTV News at Eight on 19 January 2010 and they may have read the Sunday Mail story on 17 January 2010 on page 3 which was entitled Rural schools record zero percent pass rate.

The same readers remember the millennium vision and desired legacy of the liberation movement in government (Zanu-PF) for Zimbabwe as "Education for all by the year 2000" and "Health for all by the year 2000."

Because the MDC formations saw their foreign-driven mission as to stop the programmes and wipe out the achievements of liberation movement in government, they came with their own objective and vision which they did not declare openly: Sanctions for all by the year 2000.

We are now receiving the tragic and long-lasting results at the base, at the foundation, of our once excellent national education system.

This is most tragic, as I pointed out in the African Focus instalment for 17 January 2010, because the people who invited the evil and racist sanctions were themselves given free education up to university level by the very same liberation movement in government whose legacy in education they have now turned upside-down, from "Education for all by the year 2000" and "Health for all by the year 2000" to "Sanctions for all by the year 2000."

On 24 April 2005, my African Focus instalment in The Sunday Mail was entitled "Opposition vent its anger on rural folk" to punish them for continuing to vote for the liberation movement in government.

At that time some of my readers may have thought I was being extreme and unfair. The results are there to see: the worst and most long-lasting effects of the illegal and racist sanctions will be felt at rural growth points, in rural schools and in communal farming areas.

My 24 April 2005 African Focus instalment was provoked by the reactions of the then MDC party in Harare to its defeat in the 2002 Presidential elections and the 2005 parliamentary elections.

The MDC then tried to say that, because it won Parliamentary and Urban Councils seats in Harare and other cities, it would punish "Zanu-PF" farmers by banning them from urban produce markets.

Farmers from Mutoko and Murehwa were therefore ordered not to deliver their fresh farm produce to Mbare Musika.

Unfortunately for the MDC formations, it soon dawned on them that Harare was fed and kept alive by rural farmers, especially those from Mutoko, Murehwa and Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe.

So the ban could not last.

What I wrote in the 24 April 2005 African Focus article included the following:

"After the resounding defeat of the Movement for Democratic Change in the last parliamentary elections, some opposition leaders, foreigners supporting the MDC and opposition media have chosen to attack rural communities rather than accept the MDC's defeat.

"Tony Namate . . . revisited Morgan Tsvangirai's insult to rural people by declaring 'The mushrooms have spoken!' He borrowed Tsvangirai's outburst against the African land reclamation movement where Tsvangirai said:, 'Munongomera pese pese kunge hwohwa.' (Why do you sprout everywhere like mushrooms?)

"Namate elaborated the metaphor, explaining that Tsvangirai's picture of the rural population was good because mushrooms did not think; they were kept in the dark [by ZESA and because of sanctions]; and they fed on rubbish and excrement.

"Trevor Ncube's Mail and Guardian went further and suggested that, since most of the 78 seats which Zanu-PF won in 2005 were in rural areas, His Excellency President Robert Mugabe was therefore the President of rural poverty!"

"Then Tsvangirai added yet another astounding insult, saying that the indigenous land reclamation and revolution in land tenure had turned the entire rural population into "stone age scavengers!"

Yet the real meaning of all this was that the purpose of illegal sanctions was to make resettled African farmers look like stone-age scavengers when compared with the well-supported white settler farmers they had replaced!

What makes the April 24, 2005 article important now is my observation that the MDC formations and their foreign sponsors were in expressing not a fact of rural ignorance, but rather a wish to plunge the rural population into darkness and ignorance in the future as a punishment for that population's historic and heroic role as the backbone of the national the liberation movement and liberation war.

In those MDC outbursts in the sponsored opposition press and at opposition rallies, we were being subjected to the worst anti-African, anti-democratic and anti-popular sentiments of the derivative African bourgeois class. I continued in the April 24 article:

"Most schools where leaders of the African liberation movement studied were based in the rural areas: Chikore, Mt Selinda, Tengwani, Rusitu, Biriiri, Kutama, Mutambara, Hartzel, St Augustine's, Gokomere and so on.

If Zimbabwe had a way of giving awards to entire rural communities the way it did to former leaders of the Frontline States, our rural communities would also have been brought to the Harare Sheraton (Rainbow Towers).

They would have received awards at the same time and the same platform as Zambia's first President Dr Kenneth David Kaunda, President Josè Eduardo dos Santos of Angola and the surviving relatives and spouses of Samora Machel, Julius Nyerere and other leaders of the former Frontline States."

I was comforted, however, by the realisation that the heroic rural population had benefited with everyone else from the practical implementation of "Education for all" and "Health for all by the year 2000."

But now that achievement has been damaged severely.

I did not realise then in 2005 that by documenting the heroic and historic role of rural communities in the liberation and redemption of the African, I was also unintentionally alerting the MDC formations and their hordes of empire-sponsored NGOs to tighten the sanctions screws on the same people in order to try to force them to abandon that historic role.

Two months after my African Focus instalment, former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell went to the site of one of those rural schools, Hartzel, and announced a shocker which we have to revisit in order to put the Grade Seven disaster in context.

Dovetailing into global and regional crises affecting the future of Zimbabwe is the mass shock inflicted on the entire Zimbabwean population through illegal and racist sanctions at the instigation of the United Kingdom.

Without going all the way to admit that the mass shock experienced by Zimbabweans from 2000 to 2005 was a result of illegal sanctions, former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell had this to say to Africa University students and faculty on 2 November 2005:

"The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 is the cornerstone of US policy toward Zimbabwe. Under the Act, the United States conditions aid and financing for Zimbabwe . . . Ladies and gentlemen, no issue today is more important to the future of Zimbabwe nor has the potential to harm the [SADC] region than the growing collapse of the Zimbabwe economy . . . It was more than dismaying to read a paper published in July by the Centre for Global Development in Washington on the Costs and Causes of Zimbabwe's Crisis.

"It is estimated that Zimbabwe's economic crisis has set the country back more than half a century. The paper calculated that the purchasing power of the average Zimbabwean in 2005 had fallen back to the same level as in 1953... That's an astonishing reversal of 52 years [at 2005] of progress in only half a dozen years."

The theory behind the diabolic use of economic terrorism is well established in the ne-oliberal capitalist doctrine which Naomi Klein called "the shock doctrine."

The sanctions-induced economic and social crisis in Zimbabwe had the effect of taking the country and the people back to 1953 in a short period of six years, according to former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell's speech on 2 November 2005.

Such a disastrous situation has the effect of recycling the country back to a "frontier" state, a colonial state. It is unfortunate that journalists did not ask Dell what the significance of 1953 was for the forces of illegal regime change. But the education statistics coming out now show what the US Ambassador was celebrating in his 2005 speech.

In 1953, colonial Rhodesia was an open frontier of fresh opportunities for white racists from all over Europe and North America; it was an open "frontier" economically speaking, territorially speaking, ideologically speaking, culturally and morally speaking. African nationalism was still in its infancy.

In 1953, colonial Rhodesia was an open frontier society where Britain resettled its white veterans of the Hitler wars with the assistance of the US Marshall Plan, the World Bank and the Rhodesian piece of racist legislation called the Native Land Husbandry Act which helped to clear African prime farm land of natives.

Indeed a new "frontier" colony is always characterised by a creeping, universalised corruption, whatever name the coloniser may give it. Sanctions brought back mass corruption and the school system was not spared. We heard of teachers who needed to be "juiced" in order to teach.

The year 1953 was the frontier year of the start of the white Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Coming to Zimbabwe in 1990-2000, the combination of structural adjustment, illegal sanctions and financial warfare was supposed to reverse the African land reclamation revolution and bring back the former Rhodesian settlers to a new post-regime change frontier where the natives would be cleared off the reclaimed prime farmland again in the form of the "rampant mushrooms" and "stone age scavengers" once described by MDC-T leaders.

In the words of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein: "Corruption has been as much a fixture on these contemporary [neoliberal] frontiers as it was during the colonial gold rushes.

Since the most significant privatisation deals are always signed amid the crisis, clear laws and effective regulators are never in place [and if they are they must be removed] -- the atmosphere is chaotic, the prices are flexible and so are the [compromising and compromised] politicians.

"What we have been living ... is a frontier capitalism with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up."

Our education system was brought, through sanctions, back to the Rhodesian frontier, with teachers abandoning their classes to go and prospect for diamonds; teachers abandoning pupils to go and work on farms in South Africa and elsewhere.

Those who stayed behind often demanded illegal cash payments from pupils in order to replace salaries destroyed by hyperinflation.

At the moment in Zimbabwe the location of the frontier mentality has moved to the make-shift structure called inclusive government and the swarming army of more than 2 500 NGOs besieging the IG.

The country has therefore undergone mass shock and there are things, which those who have suffered mass shock should and should not do.

First, they must know that they have been exposed to pure and raw global events moving at lightning speed. In other words, they have been opened up, through someone else's strategy of illegal sanctions and through the free flow of Zimbabwe's wealth and professionals to the outside world.

If our readers wonder what that means they should contemplate the lightning events which finally led to the temporary abandonment of the Zimbabwean Dollar. These events have not been explained in the media except from the point of view of those who imposed the illegal sanctions on the people.

According to Naomi Klein: "A state of shock, by definition, is a moment when there is a gap between fast-moving events and the information that exists to explain them."

The events which destroyed the Zimbabwe Dollar and led to the adoption of multiple foreign currencies, are categorized in disaster theory as "excess reality, pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative or anything that could bridge the gap between reality and understanding.

Without [a full story of our own leading to a home grown strategy], we are . . . intensely vulnerable to people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends.

As soon as we have a new narrative that offers a perspective from within on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make (our) sense again . . . [For] in moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure -- whether the crisis is a financial meltdown or ... a terrorist attack."

So the real purpose of terror is not just the bodily pain which victims feel from injury, hunger or deprivation.

The biggest harm is the shock and "terror by forgetting" which produces "the gap between fast-moving events and the information that exists to explain them," in the words of Naomi Klein.

"Terror by forgetting" means that people begin to experience their lives in isolation and as isolated events, which are disjointed. "Terror by forgetting" first and foremost destroys relationships among people and relationships, which connect events affecting people.

In this sense, the ancient Greeks were like Africans. They understood "terror by forgetting" when their author Sophocles wrote the tragedies of Oedipus at Colonus and Oedipus Tyrannus.

The source of the script is the legend of Oedipus who was saved and raised by foreigners. When he was fully-grown up, he began to travel and in his travels he came to the land of his ancestors without recognising it.

There he fought and killed his own father Laius during a quarrel.

His father's people saw him as hero, the same way some Africans may see US President Barack Obama or his Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Mr Charles Ray or even former US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

So Oedipus was offered his own father's crown as king, which meant that he also took over the queen, his real biological mother Jocasta, as wife!

After his own mother had borne him four children, the truth was revealed to him.

In anguish, Oedipus put out his own eyes and became a wanderer in foreign lands. Anglo-Saxon powers have brought a curse (chikwambo) upon our children, the way Sophocles' Oedipus was cursed.

Illegal sanctions have produced a pervasive and paralysing effect on the whole society.