Cedric Steele YOUR Excellency, President ED Mnangagwa. We are living in a time when the vestiges of white hegemony and entitlement are, at long last, being challenged almost on a daily basis all over the world. This is as it should be. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice”. Black people have been waiting for justice for a long time. Zimbabwe fought a protracted war against a racist system that was put in place by arch-white supremacist Cecil John Rhodes, paid a heavy price for taking on what was a de facto imperialist power. In 1890, Rhodes dispatched his Pioneer Column to “appropriate”any land as it saw fit. There were no agreements of sale, no willing buyer/willing seller, no compensation paid to the occupiers of the land who inhabited it for countless generations. Africans were systematically driven off the land, often brutally and with many atrocities occurring. This land grab by the settlers continued for the next 90 years right up to independence in 1980. Your Excellency, the Pioneer Column which consisted of greedy, land hungry mainly white Europeans, was not interested in sharing the abundant good farmland with the Africans whom they saw as inferior beings. On the contrary, the land was part of the spoils of their conquest. This nightmare for Africans is similar to what has taken place on countless occasions all over this continent. Slavery and colonialism have wreaked havoc and wrecked the lives of so many people for more than 500 years and yet no compensation has been paid to Africans or their descendants for the trauma they suffered, lost livelihoods, lost opportunities, loss of inheritance, loss of intellectual pursuits, not to mention the pursuit of happiness. The invaders that stole the land from the indigenous people did prosper. Many of them managed to grow their farming ventures into huge going concerns generating great wealth for themselves and their offspring, as well as contributing greatly to the Rhodesian fiscus. In turn, these same farmers benefited from government assistance, concessionary banking terms, and very cheap, mainly black labour. The system worked very well if you were a farmer and happened to be white. However, it is universally accepted in any society that is governed by laws, that no one should benefit from the proceeds of a crime and neither should their descendants. Unfortunately, we are waking up to the realisation that due to white privilege and entitlement, the law isn’t applied equally. The reality is, to be a victim one must be white. Your Excellency, even when a crime is perpetrated against a black person by a white person, the victim is the white person. This is nothing new and it is stubbornly persistent. Jamaica is a prime example of this phenomenon. Slavery lasted for nearly 200 years on the island then In 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act freed all the slaves. The British government decided to pay compensation, not to the slaves for the 200 or so years of unpaid labour, pain and suffering, not for the