I AM INDEBTED TO THE KINGS OF ZULU LAND Celebrating the mentors that I never knew that I had -Peter Oshioreamhe Umole C.E.O. Nite Geography Of all the things that inspires my tender heart to love and to cherish and watch my mind progress in to the consummate realm of contemporaneous events from the conscious position of my trade secret to the penchant of my political convictions, and from the common phenomenon of my nationalistic rectitude to the universal appeal of my spiritual edification nothing up-lifts my spirit to the height of exultation like my Africaness, and I have no one else to thank for this inexplicable behavior which remains the only phlegmatic ritual of my contemplations that is not yet expendable than the leaders of the black race who stood the pressure of Caucasian discomfit for more than two hundred years of African history; from the likes of Nationalist leaders like Marcus Garvey, Abolitionist like Frederick Douglas, Civil right activist like Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King Jr., Educators like Booker T. Washington, Historians like W.E.B Du Bois, Political activist like Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka and Freedom fighters like Nelson Mandela and Luthuli Albert Other admirable Africans that have inspired me over the years are great personalities like Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Ogunde, Olufumilayo Ramsome- Kuti, Chistopher Okigbo, Leopold Senghor, Wole Soyinka, Oba Ovonremwem, Jaja of Opobo, king Glele, Oba Osemwede, Samori Toure, Alkanami of Borno, Mai Idris Aloma, Emeror Menelik 2, Haile Selassie 1 and Asantehene Osei Yaw of Ghana. From the courage of these leaders I found the voice to ask for equality from all men and from the convictions of their course I understand the powers of a scope to mean the love for the language of freedom which must be magnified at all times; whatever they have achieved they did for us, the rest of humanity that cannot progress without the freedom of expression. My list of inspiring figures is long and commendable but still only a few of them keep me psychological bound to a people’s sense of history, I do not speak of the anonymous names of history buried in the sand of time where heroes once stood to be labeled unknown, I speak of a nation of fighters whose success and failures brings the history of that era to specific details. The Zulu nation is my first choice of stories of life changing encounters because the completion of their task as a people renders me useless to myself when my mind is not in search of a vision that is larger than the sum total of my unanswered dreams, and the kingdoms that their kings left behind still gives my heart a resting place which to me appeals to be a psychological advantage to finding the deeper meanings of a strategy as the ultimate asset of my prepared mind, so that twenty years after I first read about the Zulu kings nothing takes me by surprise or keeps me in a state of indecision. I own the success of my survival to the memory of the Zulu kings who were not spirits among men but mortals that led men like gods in the realm of immortals. Some say that king Chaka was a dictator and that king Cetshwayo was an opportunist, but these are my favorite kings and I have come to understand them better since I began to study the history of wars and its intended consequences on the balance of power theory. King Chaka fought for principality (jurisdiction) because he wanted the kind of transformation that will bring his people closer to providence since they could not afford to leave their fate in the hands of the unknown, and fifty years after his death his prophesy came true because the final outcome was his people suffering the scourge of apartheid. King Cetshwayo on his own part (was the last independent Zulu king before the defeat of the Zulu kingdom by foreign powers) brought the world attention to the ingenuity of the African military might when he won the stunning Battle of Isandlwana (1879) that ended the British policy of confederation in South Africa and also inspired the Afrikaners to engage the British in a four years battle known today as the Boer war (1899-1902). King Cetshwayo fought for principle because he wanted to bring his people closer to the reality of their admirable but impracticable life of peace without victory which is nothing more than the attempt to live as a master of the irrepressible under the inevitable bondage of time. What the kings of Zulu land have thought me is many but the most interesting ones that stands out for our sense of entrepreneurship sounds pleasurable to all that can be cerebral when we remember that it came not from an educated professor but from the so called savage Zulu king called Chaka (1) Turning around is not a short cut to moving ahead unless it is the opportunity to face what is ahead, this is the main lesson of Chaka’s military tactics as taught to young warriors in his amabutho system (2) The degree at which anything exist is not equivalent to the powers of its impact if it is not applicable to the measurement of distance because progress moves only by the accumulation of time for the effective control of space, since victory means having the ability to identify a comfort zone; this was the idea behind the success story of Chaka’s territorial expansion during the Mfecane. (3) Physical contact is the connection to the comprehension of anything, because the presence of a thing cannot be smaller than the energy that it radiates when victory depends on assessment, this was the ideal behind Chaka’s introduction of the short spear. It is the kings of Zulu land that first made me to understand that for every battle fought there is a business strategy buried in it and that for every peace treaty signed there is a business negotiation skills hidden in it, this is so because the different between business and war is ‘the clothes that we wear’ after all business is war and war is business.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 16:28:42 +0000
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