Even US laws would find MDC-T subversive
By Lloyd Whitefield Butler Jnr
A PRESS statement made by MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai recently did not even mention the word "sanctions".
If Tsvangirai was trustworthy and was respected by the US and Britain, they would have given him the authority to eliminate all manner of sanctions illegally imposed on Zimbabwe.
Or, as an act of support, the West should lift the sanctions on his behalf to demonstrate honorable support and appreciation for his leadership.
The Press statement in question is full of emotive accusations and slander to appeal to mob rule.
No facts are given to substantiate claims. No mention of source material verifying his theory.
The language and vocabulary used is a mirror image of Tsvangirai’s state of mind.
The terms: ‘‘Steal victory from fellow brothers and sisters by using guns, sticks and screwdrivers; cold and callous; are ready for the final round; betrayed and traumatised; unleashed violence on his own children; Are we brave enough? Are we strong enough? Are we angry enough? Illegitimate regime of Zanu-PF to access more weapons for use against its own people.’’
These are words of a man scared and under duress of his overseers.
The statement is a reflection of a hapless and sad man with only one brief: Destroy President Mugabe and Zanu-PF and you will be rich.
The article "Zanu-PF should set conditions for run-off" in The Herald is excellent for political and economic discussions and public interest.
The conditions should be centred on:
l To whom MDC-T owes loyalty and allegiance,
l Making public their source of revenue,
l Providing Zimbabweans with proof that Tsvangirai was indeed fingered for assassination,
l Providing documentation to Zimbabweans on the ‘‘corruption’’ of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.
l Providing documentation on how MDC-T ‘‘won’’ the March 29, 2008 election at, as they claim, with 50,3 percent of the votes.
The foregoing provisions and/or conditions should be made available by MDC-T, which presented them to the world as fact.
Treason, sedition and subversive activities are the federal charges MDC-T and its leadership would surely face if American laws where instituted in Zimbabwe.
The Government would have the legal right to arrest the MDC-T leadership through means of "extraordinary rendition" where "torture by proxy" is authorised.
The political behaviour of MDC-T in calling for and supporting illegal economic and trade sanctions against Zimbabwe in an attempt to cripple its infrastructure and invite foreign military forces and corporations; just for a change of government, are acts of treason without question according to US law.
In the US, a citizen can be charged with "conspiracy" for the mere mentioning of such subversive acts.
Under United States Code — Treason, Sedition and Subversive Activities — Title 18, Part I > Chapter 115 as currently published by the US government which reflects the laws passed by US Congress as of January 2, 2006 if applied to MDC-T would land them in Guantanamo Camp X-Ray prison.
The penalties can be death, life imprisonment, harsh confinement or as is presently done in America prison without trial or hearing.
For example, the following are seven US Codes that the MDC-T leadership should mull over for having already overtly supported foreign intervention in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs: (The author put Zimbabwe in brackets for emphasis)
l Section 2381. Treason: Whoever, owing allegiance to (Zimbabwe) the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within (Zimbabwe) the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than US$10 000; and shall be incapable of holding any office (in Zimbabwe) under the United States.
l Section 2382. Misprision of treason: Whoever, owing allegiance to (Zimbabwe) the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same to the President or to some judge of (Zimbabwe) the United States, or to the governor or to some judge or justice of a particular State, is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both.
l Section 2383. Rebellion or insurrection: Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of (Zimbabwe) the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
l Section 2384. Seditious conspiracy: If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of (Zimbabwe) the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of (Zimbabwe) the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
l Section 2385. Advocating overthrow of Government: Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of (Zimbabwe) the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in (Zimbabwe) the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or . . .
l Section 2389. Recruiting for service against (Zimbabwe) United States: Whoever recruits soldiers or sailors within (Zimbabwe) the United States, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction thereof, to engage in armed hostility against the same; or Whoever opens within (Zimbabwe) the United States, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction thereof, a recruiting station for the enlistment of such soldiers or sailors to serve in any manner in armed hostility against the United States . . .
l Section 2390. Enlistment to serve against (Zimbabwe) United States: Whoever enlists or is engaged within (Zimbabwe) the United States or in any place subject to the jurisdiction thereof, with intent to serve in armed hostility against (Zimbabwe) the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
It is also against the law of (Zimbabwe) the United States Constitution to intervene in foreign governmental affairs, particularly if the nation is not a threat.
In South Africa, if US Codes were applied there the codes would have resulted in imprisonment for the International Transport Workers with charges of Treason, Sedition and Subversive Activities in their refusal to unload government cleared freight (i.e. a shipment from China to Zimbabwe via South Africa).
A visit to their ITF’s website (http://www.itfglobal. org/press-area/index.cfm/pressdetail/1936) reveals their emissary surveillance network; it says: "International Transport Workers’ Federation — Press area
"An Yue Jiang news. Ship makes no attempt to offload arms, trade unions report.
"The ITF understands that the An Yue Jiang left Luanda during the afternoon of 4th of May and headed southbound at around 10 knots. We believe she passed Ponta Da Marca (Angola) earlier today and if speed and weather remain constant should arrive off, or pass, Cape Town on or around 12th May. The vessel’s next stop is not known at this stage.
"An Yue Jiang update. Ship makes no attempt to offload arms, trade unions report
"The ITF and ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation) report the following news received from their fellow trade unionists in Angola: That the An Yue Jiang has left Luanda after unloading a cargo of cement and construction material only. No attempt was made to offload any armaments, and the ship sailed after taking on fuel and food.
"Trade unionists, including from the port workers’ union, maintained a watch on the ship and what came off and went on it throughout its stay in port. The police were also present.
"The ITF will supply an update on the vessel’s location tomorrow."
Is this a union to help fellow workers earn proper wages, health and work benefits?
The late US President Ronald Reagan shocked the US labour movement in 1981 when he fired 12 000 striking air traffic controllers for refusing to end their strike.
If there is one positive message the George Bush Doctrine has made known to the world is that every country should honour its patriotism with a Patriot Act.
Presidential debates in Zimbabwe by centering on Zimbabwe integrity, independence, self-rule, Zimbabwe land for Zimbabweans, and patriotism would easily dispel and expose disloyal sources.
Zanu-PF should set conditions for a run-off, as stated by Caesar Zvayi, by demanding that MDC-T state in writing the clearly defined objectives of foreign sanctions.
By providing proof how seven years of sanctions benefited Zimbabwe would give legitimacy to MDC-T as a patriotic pro-Zimbabwe political party.
Again, MDC-T should also be required to reveal their expenditures, foreign and domestic financial connections in order to determine whether it is a Zimbabwean political party or foreign agent.
Demand an answer for their support of blockading government strategic materials for Zimbabwe.
It is high time to shed the light of day on MDC-T: under oath and sworn Zimbabwean constitutional allegiance.
Publicly determine who does what law MDC-T respects.
The Zimbabwean Press and Parliament should demand written proof and public statements on the so-called atrocities and scandals MDC-T proclaimed as facts to the world.
As a last note, one of MDC-T’s objectives is to Look West (US and UK).
Alas, America’s Fortune 500 have already implemented their "Look East Policy" and has no interest in turning back; including US Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton now based in Dubai and under Justice Department Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.
In America it’s called "outsourcing".
There are also US congressional debates questioning their business first loyalties to foreign governments.
l Lloyd Whitefield Butler Jnr is a freelance journalist and columnist, The Zimbabwe Guardian. He is based in Brooklyn, New York.
O lift high the banner, the flag of Zimbabwe. The symbol of freedom proclaiming victory; We praise our heros' sacrifice, And vow to keep our land from foes; And may the Almighty protect and bless our land. O lovely Zimbabwe, so wondrously adorned; With mountains, and rivers cascading, flowing free; And may the Almighty protect and bless our land. O God, we beseech Thee to bless our native land; The land of our fathers bestowed upon us all.
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
Sunday, 25 May 2008
Tsvangirai’s aid hoax must be totally avoided
Tsvangirai’s aid hoax must be totally avoided
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
ACCORDING to Frantz Fanon, the only way colonial and neo-colonial African elites can lead their peoples to full independence is if they give up bourgeois privileges and join the masses from whom they must also learn how to be truly African.
For Zimbabwe, those elites who led the liberation movement now represented by President Mugabe did give up their privileged positions in colonial society in order to create and lead the people’s movement.
This legacy is being reversed by the post-independence elites who got free education from the new Government of independent Zimbabwe. These are the new petty bourgeois elite who have joined white Rhodesians in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Yet according to Fanon:
"(The) historical vocation of an authentic national middle class in an underdeveloped country is to repudiate its own (neo-colonial) nature insofar as it is (petty) bourgeois, that is to say insofar as it is the tool of capitalism, and to make itself the willing slave of that revolutionary capital which is the people.
"In an underdeveloped country an authentic national middle class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray the calling (which) fate has marked out for it, and to put itself to school with the people: in other words to put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that is has snatched when going through the colonial (and neo-colonial) university.
"But unhappily we . . . see . . . that very often the (derivative) middle class does not follow this heroic, positive, fruitful, and just path; rather, it disappears with its soul . . . into the shocking ways of a (derivative) bourgeoisie which is stupidly, contemptibly, cynically (petty) bourgeois."
(Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth)
Any Zimbabwean who doubts that the government of national unity (GNU) proposal for Zimbabwe coming from certain media is the latest imperialist and neo-colonial trap put in the path of the Third Chimurenga should ask to watch a repeat of ZTV’s Zimbabwe Today programme aired on May 21 2008.
The programme featured the Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Cde Patrick Chinamasa (representing Zanu-PF); Dr Joseph Kurebwa of the University of Zimbabwe; and the MP-elect for Kuwadzana Mr Nelson Chamisa (representing MDC-Tsvangirai).
Apart from demonstrating on national television that the MDC-T routinely tells lies to the whole world (including lies about election results), the most shocking revelation from the panel programme was that a party which openly praises illegal, white racist sanctions against its own people wants to form a government of national unity with a liberation movement seeking to indigenise the very same economy being sanctioned by the white racist countries. And the purpose of the sanctions is to stop real indigenisation in the name of curbing what Chamisa called "misbehaviour" by the Government of Zimbabwe.
MDC-T represents that fraction of the derivative and aspiring African middle class described by Fanon, which sees development as the flaunting and celebration of a white middle-class lifestyle based on consumption patterns created through the sponsored neo-liberal NGO culture of the last 15 years. That is why the most important election message from MDC-T and its NGO cohorts is that the very same countries squeezing the people through sanctions will resume fully sponsored aid and relief programmes as soon as the people agree to be coerced into electing Morgan Tsvangirai.
Euro-American sponsorship and aid constitute the sole purpose for the existence of the MDC-T and the antithesis of indigenisation.
In his Revolutionary Pressures in Africa (1978), the late Claude Ake defined the problem which Zimbabwe faces in the MDC-T and its Western-woven trap called government of national unity:
"The priority for the indigenisation of African economies is the liberation of Africa from the (derivative) African (petty) bourgeoisie, since African societies cannot fight imperialism under the leadership of agents of imperialism . . . The indigenisation of African economies must entail their disengagement from exploitive relations with international (Western) capitalism; this indeed is why indigenisation is important. Therefore, if indigenisation is to be anything more than a token gesture, it will jeopardise the interests of international capitalism. This means that indigenisation must come down to a battle against international capitalism . . . (But) any attempt to disengage African economies from their crippling dependence will create grave economic hardships in the short run as the economies readjust and absorb the sanctions which the Western powers are bound to invoke."
In other words, a government of national unity between those who want African empowerment through indigenisation and those who praise the sanctions meant to stop indigenisation could be entered into only as a temporary, tactical move backwards, in the belief that the indigenising forces would survive and dilute the anti-indigenising sanctions party in the process and move forward later. That would be falling into a trap.
There are clear historical reasons why this trap should be avoided altogether and the vast majority warned against it.
The issues of Euro-American sanctions and Tsvangirai’s instant aid hoax through a GNU has to be put into context. Both the current Euro-American sanctions against Zimbabwe and the US$10 billion or more promised to Tsvangirai by Euro-American forces depend on the use and control of the World Bank and the IMF by the very same forces. The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of the US makes that clear.
So the question which arises is why would the same international financial institutions co-ordinating and enforcing illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe today suddenly give US$10 billion to Zimbabwe when they failed to deliver just US$2 billion promised by the US and UK at Lancaster House in the UK in 1979?
The US$10 billion means loans spread over 10 years from the day of the setting up of the trap called GNU. The loans would be partially granted only if the GNU fulfils the "recovery" requirements of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, that is, only if the GNU becomes a new resettlement scheme for former Rhodesian settler farmers to recover the land which our Third Chimurenga has reclaimed for the indigenous population.
How do we know this? We know this because there is a historical record which explains it.
The US reconstructed Europe after the devastation of the Hitler wars through a programme called the Marshall Plan.
The European countries being reconstructed paid back the US with foreign currency earned by the colonies of those European powers. Zimbabwe was one such colony used by the US and the World Bank to pay for the reconstruction of Britain.
But that was not the only way in which Africans in Zimbabwe paid for the reconstruction of Britain. The US, through the World Bank, helped to pay for the creation and implementation of the white Rhodesian programme of African dispossession called the African Land Husbandry Act in 1951. This involved paying demobilised British war veterans to migrate to Zimbabwe; worsening the unequal and discriminatory land tenure introduced through Land Apportionment Act in 1930 by putting specific limits on how much land each African could have in the so-called Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs); limiting those Africans who owned cattle to a maximum of six head of cattle per household; and creating a large class of totally landless Africans in the TTLs who also could not own any cattle.
Not only were the African majority pushed into dry and barren reserves while the white minority monopolised prime farmland. By the beginning of the Second Chimurenga white farmers averaged 1 200 acres per farmer on the best soils while Africans averaged 14 acres on the poorest soils.
In short, the US through the World Bank and the Marshall Plan financed the African Land Husbandry Act of 1951 because the racist Act helped to resettle and rehabilitate white war veterans of the Hitler wars at the expense of the African majority. The same US with Britain and Europe are promising Tsvangirai US$10 billion because Tsvangirai, like the colonial regime of Rhodesia in 1951, has promised to resettle those white farmers who ran away from the African land reclamation movement of 1992-2000. The illegal sanctions are the blunt instrument with which to force the majority and their government to resettle the former Rhodesians yet again.
But there is more to the story. When it became clear that the white Rhodesian regime and its Zimbabwe-Rhodesia arrangement with Muzorewa were going to be defeated by the liberation movement, to whose aid the Rhodesians appeal? They appealed to the same US which had financed their resettlement here through the African Land Husbandry Act.
On January 12 1979, white Rhodesia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs P. K. van der Byl wrote to US senators Jesse Helms and Roger W. Jepsen who, in turn, wrote to white conservative Christians all over the US, to ask them to rally the white people of the US and their government in support of white Rhodesia. Senator Jesse Helms was the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
As a result of those appeals, Ian Smith, Bishop Abel Muzorewa and Rev Ndabaningi Sithole were invited by the senators to tour the US and promote the Internal Settlement in October 1979.
But what was the message from P. K. van der Byl to senators Jesse Helms and Roger W. Jepsen? P. K. van der Byl wrote:
"Attacks which are presently mounted on Rhodesia, a Christian nation, are by terrorists trained and supported by anti-Christian communists (meaning Zanu and Zapu) . . .
The future of Christianity in Rhodesia will largely be influenced by the actions of the United States government in support of the majority rule government of Rhodesia (meaning Smith and Muzorewa.)
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
ACCORDING to Frantz Fanon, the only way colonial and neo-colonial African elites can lead their peoples to full independence is if they give up bourgeois privileges and join the masses from whom they must also learn how to be truly African.
For Zimbabwe, those elites who led the liberation movement now represented by President Mugabe did give up their privileged positions in colonial society in order to create and lead the people’s movement.
This legacy is being reversed by the post-independence elites who got free education from the new Government of independent Zimbabwe. These are the new petty bourgeois elite who have joined white Rhodesians in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Yet according to Fanon:
"(The) historical vocation of an authentic national middle class in an underdeveloped country is to repudiate its own (neo-colonial) nature insofar as it is (petty) bourgeois, that is to say insofar as it is the tool of capitalism, and to make itself the willing slave of that revolutionary capital which is the people.
"In an underdeveloped country an authentic national middle class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray the calling (which) fate has marked out for it, and to put itself to school with the people: in other words to put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that is has snatched when going through the colonial (and neo-colonial) university.
"But unhappily we . . . see . . . that very often the (derivative) middle class does not follow this heroic, positive, fruitful, and just path; rather, it disappears with its soul . . . into the shocking ways of a (derivative) bourgeoisie which is stupidly, contemptibly, cynically (petty) bourgeois."
(Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth)
Any Zimbabwean who doubts that the government of national unity (GNU) proposal for Zimbabwe coming from certain media is the latest imperialist and neo-colonial trap put in the path of the Third Chimurenga should ask to watch a repeat of ZTV’s Zimbabwe Today programme aired on May 21 2008.
The programme featured the Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Cde Patrick Chinamasa (representing Zanu-PF); Dr Joseph Kurebwa of the University of Zimbabwe; and the MP-elect for Kuwadzana Mr Nelson Chamisa (representing MDC-Tsvangirai).
Apart from demonstrating on national television that the MDC-T routinely tells lies to the whole world (including lies about election results), the most shocking revelation from the panel programme was that a party which openly praises illegal, white racist sanctions against its own people wants to form a government of national unity with a liberation movement seeking to indigenise the very same economy being sanctioned by the white racist countries. And the purpose of the sanctions is to stop real indigenisation in the name of curbing what Chamisa called "misbehaviour" by the Government of Zimbabwe.
MDC-T represents that fraction of the derivative and aspiring African middle class described by Fanon, which sees development as the flaunting and celebration of a white middle-class lifestyle based on consumption patterns created through the sponsored neo-liberal NGO culture of the last 15 years. That is why the most important election message from MDC-T and its NGO cohorts is that the very same countries squeezing the people through sanctions will resume fully sponsored aid and relief programmes as soon as the people agree to be coerced into electing Morgan Tsvangirai.
Euro-American sponsorship and aid constitute the sole purpose for the existence of the MDC-T and the antithesis of indigenisation.
In his Revolutionary Pressures in Africa (1978), the late Claude Ake defined the problem which Zimbabwe faces in the MDC-T and its Western-woven trap called government of national unity:
"The priority for the indigenisation of African economies is the liberation of Africa from the (derivative) African (petty) bourgeoisie, since African societies cannot fight imperialism under the leadership of agents of imperialism . . . The indigenisation of African economies must entail their disengagement from exploitive relations with international (Western) capitalism; this indeed is why indigenisation is important. Therefore, if indigenisation is to be anything more than a token gesture, it will jeopardise the interests of international capitalism. This means that indigenisation must come down to a battle against international capitalism . . . (But) any attempt to disengage African economies from their crippling dependence will create grave economic hardships in the short run as the economies readjust and absorb the sanctions which the Western powers are bound to invoke."
In other words, a government of national unity between those who want African empowerment through indigenisation and those who praise the sanctions meant to stop indigenisation could be entered into only as a temporary, tactical move backwards, in the belief that the indigenising forces would survive and dilute the anti-indigenising sanctions party in the process and move forward later. That would be falling into a trap.
There are clear historical reasons why this trap should be avoided altogether and the vast majority warned against it.
The issues of Euro-American sanctions and Tsvangirai’s instant aid hoax through a GNU has to be put into context. Both the current Euro-American sanctions against Zimbabwe and the US$10 billion or more promised to Tsvangirai by Euro-American forces depend on the use and control of the World Bank and the IMF by the very same forces. The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of the US makes that clear.
So the question which arises is why would the same international financial institutions co-ordinating and enforcing illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe today suddenly give US$10 billion to Zimbabwe when they failed to deliver just US$2 billion promised by the US and UK at Lancaster House in the UK in 1979?
The US$10 billion means loans spread over 10 years from the day of the setting up of the trap called GNU. The loans would be partially granted only if the GNU fulfils the "recovery" requirements of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, that is, only if the GNU becomes a new resettlement scheme for former Rhodesian settler farmers to recover the land which our Third Chimurenga has reclaimed for the indigenous population.
How do we know this? We know this because there is a historical record which explains it.
The US reconstructed Europe after the devastation of the Hitler wars through a programme called the Marshall Plan.
The European countries being reconstructed paid back the US with foreign currency earned by the colonies of those European powers. Zimbabwe was one such colony used by the US and the World Bank to pay for the reconstruction of Britain.
But that was not the only way in which Africans in Zimbabwe paid for the reconstruction of Britain. The US, through the World Bank, helped to pay for the creation and implementation of the white Rhodesian programme of African dispossession called the African Land Husbandry Act in 1951. This involved paying demobilised British war veterans to migrate to Zimbabwe; worsening the unequal and discriminatory land tenure introduced through Land Apportionment Act in 1930 by putting specific limits on how much land each African could have in the so-called Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs); limiting those Africans who owned cattle to a maximum of six head of cattle per household; and creating a large class of totally landless Africans in the TTLs who also could not own any cattle.
Not only were the African majority pushed into dry and barren reserves while the white minority monopolised prime farmland. By the beginning of the Second Chimurenga white farmers averaged 1 200 acres per farmer on the best soils while Africans averaged 14 acres on the poorest soils.
In short, the US through the World Bank and the Marshall Plan financed the African Land Husbandry Act of 1951 because the racist Act helped to resettle and rehabilitate white war veterans of the Hitler wars at the expense of the African majority. The same US with Britain and Europe are promising Tsvangirai US$10 billion because Tsvangirai, like the colonial regime of Rhodesia in 1951, has promised to resettle those white farmers who ran away from the African land reclamation movement of 1992-2000. The illegal sanctions are the blunt instrument with which to force the majority and their government to resettle the former Rhodesians yet again.
But there is more to the story. When it became clear that the white Rhodesian regime and its Zimbabwe-Rhodesia arrangement with Muzorewa were going to be defeated by the liberation movement, to whose aid the Rhodesians appeal? They appealed to the same US which had financed their resettlement here through the African Land Husbandry Act.
On January 12 1979, white Rhodesia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs P. K. van der Byl wrote to US senators Jesse Helms and Roger W. Jepsen who, in turn, wrote to white conservative Christians all over the US, to ask them to rally the white people of the US and their government in support of white Rhodesia. Senator Jesse Helms was the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
As a result of those appeals, Ian Smith, Bishop Abel Muzorewa and Rev Ndabaningi Sithole were invited by the senators to tour the US and promote the Internal Settlement in October 1979.
But what was the message from P. K. van der Byl to senators Jesse Helms and Roger W. Jepsen? P. K. van der Byl wrote:
"Attacks which are presently mounted on Rhodesia, a Christian nation, are by terrorists trained and supported by anti-Christian communists (meaning Zanu and Zapu) . . .
The future of Christianity in Rhodesia will largely be influenced by the actions of the United States government in support of the majority rule government of Rhodesia (meaning Smith and Muzorewa.)
Saturday, 24 May 2008
Xenophobia: Rejecting the vocabulary of the master
Xenophobia: Rejecting the vocabulary of the master
My last week instalment on McGee, US ambassador to Zimbabwe, drew a torrent of reactions. Allow me to share with you three samples from these reactions. One came from Peter Mavunga, The Herald’s London-based columnist whose commitment to the cause is beyond gainsaying. He picked up the bit to do with Rhodesia’s dreaded underworld hit squads — the Selous Scouts — who unleashed terror on pro-liberation rural communities. They did so disguised as freedom fighters, hoping to de-campaign the struggle.
They also killed priests who were known to be sympathetic to the struggle, hoping this would alienate churches. It was a hideous career, one which the white community, principally Rhodesia’s white farmers, both supported and participated in.
The Selous Scouts were active in many places, most notably in Musana and Masembura areas of Mashonaland Central, itself the hottest province of the struggle. They also worked with guerrilla turncoats, embodied in one Commander Max, who was the prime resource person for modelling this cruel outfit after the persona of real guerrillas. I still recall Commander Max’s fullpage picture in the Rhodesian African Times, underpinned by a sonorous headline which proclaimed "We stand for peace", as if unaware of its own reckless irony.
When the past is the future
I hope Peter realises those two communal areas — Musana and Masembura — which became a critical base for these terror agents, today make up one of the two constituencies which Zanu-PF lost in the March 29 polls. How the future is in the past! The MDC simply used these communities’ chequered legacy and turned the tables against Zanu-PF.
I made the same point in respect of Buhera West, Chikomba and Gutu, indicating a direct geographical correlation between erstwhile military strongholds of Rhodesia and current zones of MDC influence. The MDC’s current zone of political comfort is exactly those communities who sheltered Rhodesia’s hit squads and thus got marooned from the pervasive ethos of the liberation struggle.
To them the return of the white man is not such a forbidding prospect. After all, was the MDC not founded by the Rhodesian farmer, himself the reserve force of the Selous Scouts? Apart from directly funding the MDC, Rhodesians have turned over to the MDC the vast repertoire of psych-op techniques they deployed during our war of national liberation.
I argued last week that elements from this repertoire are being brought to bear on communities by the brutalising MDC, with all getting blamed on the mute and blame-prone Zanu-PF.
The bane of amnesia
I always defer to Peter for the historical perspective, itself of quite marked value in our circumstances of journalism of here-and-now, completely shorn of history. I argue that our bane is not that of a bad colonial history; rather it is our induced forgetfulness of it. And the grotesque human outcome of this dangerous amnesia is called "born-frees": a happy go-luck generation freed from the trammels of history and self-dignity.
Their numbers have been swelling beneath imperial West’s silent census, behind our unsuspecting sweet slumber. To every mujibha and chimbwido of the 1970s, there is now a whole family of born-frees all for MDC’s taking, thanks to the hefty failure in national political parenting.
The result is the current paradox where mature father and mother are for the Revolution; three sons and four daughters are anti-Zanu-PF. How do we forget so quickly, so thoroughly, so unhappy process of colonisation we endured only a 28-year yesterday? Thanks Peter. Yeuchidzo yevanokanganwa rukuvhute nechazuro, iropa nemisodzi. Aluta Continua.
The return of Rhodesian lingo
The second sample reaction did not come from an individual. It came from a surprising quarter, namely the editorial board of a website called Zimbabwe Situation whose compilers are cryptically and mock-modestly given as Karen and Barbara.
In reality, this is one of the well-funded ghost sites linked to Rhodesia’s right-wing farmers ironically called Justice for Agriculture (JAG), and supported by a whole battery of Western sponsors, including corporates and governments.
Expectedly, both the US and UK governments are involved. This anti-Zimbabwe site grants yours truly a rare honour of "reproducing" his instalment for last week. "Reproduce" in quotes for the simple reason that what they published in the name of Manheru is a very unfaithful, adulterated version of his real piece.
You cannot help but feel cuckolded when your pitch-dark seed administered at the midpoint of a night of brooding, double darkness, yields so ashen an offshoot! But a very telling editorial tampering. The editors used my piece to market themselves and a whole battery of sites dedicated to making sure "Rhodesians never die". They used every excuse to direct my readers to Rhodesia World Wide links, including sites of the notorious Selous Scouts and Rhodesia African Rifles (RAR).
Tribesmen of Mayo and Shamva
Still that was a small matter. The real big one came in respect of my reference to the violence meted out against innocent resettled villagers in Mayo and Shamva by the MDC, and whose fate McGee is not interested in.
These helpful editors inserted editorial notes which told the reader that Mayo and Shamva are "tribes loyal to the opposition MDC — which seems to have won the recent elections!" Well, well well! Mayo and Shamva are places, not "tribes". Mayo and Shamva voted Zanu-PF, which is why they were targeted by the MDC for retributive violence. What is worse, the language in the editorial insertions is Rhodesian and white, indeed the lingo of Rhodesian settlers during their heyday.
We were tribes and tribesmen, were we not? Language of thoughts to come? I wonder. They are getting quite cocky and brazen about it, their pursuit instinct fully triggered by MDC’s initial good showing.
The story of one Kwame against one Uncle Tom
I turn to the third reaction which I need to give quite a bit of space. I seek your indulgence, dear reader. It came from the UK and pointed out the invaluable points I missed in my piece.
The writer whose identity I shall protect reminded me of striking parallels between US-Zimbabwe relations at this point in history and those the US developed with Nkrumah’s embattled Ghana in the 1960s. The US government posted one Franklin H. Williams — an African-African American — to finish off Nkrumah whose system and ardour had already been enervated if not exhausted by Williams’s white predecessor, one Ambassador William Mahoney, who had done much of the damage.
The dramatic thing about it all is that Ambassador Franklin Williams had been Nkrumah’s college mate at Lincoln University (the class of 1941)! Williams was barely two months in Accra when the coup against Nkrumah happened on 24th February, 1966.
Nkrumah, who knew Williams’ role, was later to point out this cynical gesture from the empire. Nkrumah wrote: In the US, "the Uncle Tom figure is well known. We have mercifully seen less of him in Africa." Overweighed by a sense of guilt, Williams sought the services of one Dr Martin Wachmann, then the president of Lincoln University, who wrote to Nkrumah — now in exile in Guinea — to convince him Williams knew nothing about the coup!
Although Nkrumah never responded to this human salve of evil Williams’ troubled conscience, he registered his reaction with June Milne, his research assistant for 15 years and later publisher: "It is extremely unlikely that Williams did not know what was going on in the embassy with CIA officers operating from there."
I got more from this reaction. The writer went on to disclose that late Ivorian president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny would, in February 1981, recount his encounter with Ghana’s coup-makers, to the Paris-based Jeune Afrique magazine: "Did you know why Idi Amin made his coup in 1972? It was not he who did it, but the British.
"He did not even know what he wanted himself. It was the same in Ghana when the military overthrew Nkrumah. They [coup-makers] came to see me. I asked them why. They replied: ‘All is not well anymore’. Is that all? [I asked them]. I also asked them what they were going to do; they did not know. People outside knew it for them." PEOPLE OUTSIDE KNEW IT FOR THEM! Gentle reader, chirimumusakasaka chinozvinzwira! An insider needs no testimonies.
The Williams in McGee
Is McGee part of the people outside or inside? He comes after the pugnacious Dell who put in place the demons unleashing uncontrollable forces in the financial underworld. Where does that place him in history? Will he succeed? Unlike the outwardly reluctant Williams, our McGee seems most willing, most enthusiastic.
I notice he has had to make a trip to South Africa to order Tsvangirai back to Zimbabwe so the opposition leader can start his run-off campaign. Excuse me, McGee the US Ambassador? He leaves his whole mission to become Tsvangirai’s what? Chairman? Campaign manager? He has not provided comparable service to Obama and McCain; he provides it to Tsvangirai? God help this country, that is, if its own people can’t! Gees, I am coming to the length of my piece, before I have dealt with this week’s subject. Let me broach it in the remaining time and space.
Xenophobia chii?
I am angry, very angry. What is this big word we are using in the media? ZENOFOBIYA? What is that? What good word ever starts with an X? The same X which imperialism is using to bring so much ruin to Zimbabwe’s revolution? An X which is threatening to become a real axe for our ruin? What is this xenophobia business in the media? Our own African media at that? You tell me the word "Revolution" is too big. So is "Sovereignty", Zanu-PF’s favourite catchword in the current elections.
Both break an African jaw, and thus cannot carry an African meaning. But "xenophobia" is small and expressive. It carries an African experience, the African part which is to the south of all of us. In the last week or so, horrible things have happened in Azania. Really, really horrible things.
Appalling violence has been meted out against human beings, all black apparently, all from many African countries apparently, all until now working in South Africa — sorry Azania — apparently. Many of them obeyed South Africa’s post-apartheid magnetic pull, the same way the rest of Africa did in Zimbabwe in 1980, and later in Namibia at its Independence.
That has been the pattern. Africa tends to gravitate towards the point of its latest renewal, its latest promise of a new beginning. I have never seen this as a threat to the newly independent African country. I have never seen this as anything beyond a rejection of failed starts that litter our continent, and, of course, as an undying hope for a fate which is different and better for the continent.
It was there in the beginning . . .
But it is also a wish to offer a service that can make a difference to Africa’s newest parts, themselves definitionally always short of skills to move Independence forward.
It is a wish to avert the same failure that has stalked much of the continent. That has been the story since 1957 when Ghana blazed a new trail as Africa’s first-ever free country under black rule. This is why our own President left Chalimbana in Zambia for Takoradi, a small town in Independent Ghana under the legendary Kwame Nkrumah.
Independence has always lured Africa and the movement of her peoples to newly redeemed lands is an assertion and reaffirmation of placeless-ness of African citizenry, all based on our common humanity, common ancestry, common predicament. I have never viewed it as horizontal parasitism.
Bound by pan-Africanism
But it is also founded in the history of our struggles. No African country, not even the pioneering Ghana, ever fought its liberation struggles alone.
On the continent, the struggle for Independence has been and will always be a communal African affair. We cannot be surprised by that. So was the fall of our humanity through colonialism. Granted we were eaten singly, piecemeal in many respects, but we all fell by our colour, by our place in contemporary history whose fulcrum emerged in Berlin, the same way it once was along the River Nile in good Egypt, which Jewish mythology seeks to disparage as the land of oppression.
I reject this Zionist historiography. We fell together as Africans. We rose together, picked ourselves together again as Africans. Is this not the pan-Africanism which shaped Nkrumah’s generation, and benefited all those who followed them, including us in Zimbabwe? In the mid-1980s, soon after we had recovered from the euphoria of our own Independence, musical bands here sang — almost single-mindedly — about Namibia, Azania and Mandela. Remember the Zig-Zag band? The legendary Robson Banda? And occasionally about Mozambique which was in the throes of a vicious destabilisation war sponsored by American interests through apartheid? That is how deep the pan-African sentiment ran.
Pan-Africanism in the everyday
I am part of that generation shaped by that Africa-wide political consciousness. I taught many cadres from both ANC and PAC. I taught many cadres from Swapo, lived with some of them even. We shared the burden, shared risks, shared the little, sparse comforts Zimbabwe could afford. We were one.
I never knew that some day Zimbabweans would think of going to South Africa or Namibia for employment opportunities. Never. But I expected Zimbabwe to play its part in the revolution effort, and it did. Did it the same way Mozambique, Tanzania, Angola, Zambia, Botswana did for our own struggle for independence.
The pan-African spirit is one huge account we Africans will never settle. Once I met a Mozambican who berated us for neglecting the spot where Tongogara perished. In his view, the spot should have been turned into a shrine. I agreed. He went farther. When necessary each year, the locals in that area go to clean that spot, in honour of the late departed.
Tongogara is Mozambican, he concluded in that very provocative fashion. But so is Samora. I was part of the University crowd that smashed the Malawian embassy when Samora died.
Part of the crowd that attacked the South African Trade Mission; attacked any white person we met in the streets of Harare. We judged all whites blameworthy, vicariously guilty. Long after Mozambique had forgotten the late Machel (under Chissano), Machel remained alive and remembered here, under ZIMOFA.
Heroes of Africa liberation are placeless. PAC’s Phosa, again cut in an accident in Uganda. A living force here the same way Zimbabweans wept when Hani was killed ahead of South Africa’s Uhuru. Joe Gqabi, slaughtered here when I was in University, the same way Tsitsi Chiliza (nee Marechera) would perish in a bomb blast meant for ANC cadres who lived in a flat next to Allan Wilson School.
Black victims, white Inkosi
With these kind of deep, deep inter-linkages, how do you get me to accept this thing called xenophobia? How? Zimbabwe in the 1980s and 1990s: did it enjoy zero unemployment to have been so charitable to South Africans, Mozambicans and Namibians? Of course not!
Is Zimbabwe currently enjoying zero unemployment to play host to the many West Africans and Congolese? Of course not! What is this xenophobia? Please tell me? Did unemployment in South Africa start with the arrival of Africans in that country? Will it end with their departure? Did violence start with the arrival of other Africans in that country? Will it end with their departure? Who is a foreigner in South Africa, itself a product of an all-African liberation effort?
If boundaries define foreignness, why is a white immigrant not a foreigner worthy of the devouring rheum of South Africa’s unemployed? He is easier to identify and target the same way a Ndebele from Zimbabwe, and Shangaani from Mozambique are not. What spawns this strange servile psychosis where a rampaging South Africa will pause a little from his destructiveness to doff “Inkosi!” to a white shop owner passing by?
Fault-line of poverty
Let me push the senselessness a little further. The harrowing figure captured burning, slowly disappearing before leaping flames his clothing ironically stoked, is that of a South African, South African Venda apparently.
He was being told to go back north, to Limpopo. He got burnt and killed, so we are told, by this thing called xenophobia. But he is a South African from Limpopo. Whose jobs is he stealing? You have Zulus devouring Xhosas, IFP-style. Why does the same violence which served apartheid against the forces of liberation the same violence purportedly defending “new South Africa’s jobs”? What is going on? Then you have shops belonging to so-called African foreigners — Zimbabweans included — attacked.
Manning them are young South Africans who are thrown into unemployment soon after the so-called xenophobic attacks. Defending jobs? What is worse, the fight starts in Johannesburg’s depressed townships. It spreads, spreads until it reaches Durban, always following the fault-line of poverty in new South Africa, always following the colour of poverty in new South Africa, which is as dark under the rainbow as under white apartheid. And you notice the attacks did not begin at Anglo-American Corporation’s workplaces — industry, mines, banks — which is where you find the real jobs stolen and those who stole them.
No, it started in the townships which house the unemployed and the informally employed. It is a bloody fight for a place at the margin, ironically by those collectively marginalised. It is horizontal violence, meted out by one victim against the another. This is how Fanon and Mmemi would have called it. But the agents of this violence have no wish to be at the lucre-rich centre, apparently, where you find the likes of Sanlam, Old Mutual, etc, etc. No, their real target is a tuckshop, an internet café, a phone-shop somewhere in violent-prone Hillbrow! No Old Mutual.
They want jobs, not industry; they want a shack, not a multinational, an acre not South Africa. Xenophobia?
South Africa or Kenya?
What is the difference between what we have seen in South Africa and what we witnessed in Kenya after the elections? If elections spawned violence in Kenya, why is violence of the same genus visiting South Africa which is not in an election season?
If xenophobia spawns violence in South Africa, why did we have the same genus of violence in Kenya, pitting a Kenyan against a Kenyan? And if economic meltdown is the source of the great African trek, why is the same media which covered border jumpers now admitting to a reverse trek back to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and even beyond, themselves poverty bowels as claimed by the Western media? And why is economically successful Europe, itself the source of longest migrant community on the continent, unable to keep its demos? And if economic growth is the panacea, why have these spasms of appalling violence hit South Africa and Kenya, Africa’s foremost economies by any measure? Why is violence more susceptible in countries and economies which read least susceptible in the European media?
Tutu goes a-globe shouting peace, warning against genocide everywhere else except in South Africa. Where is his mouth today? How hot is his lip now that the fart has been emitted from under his saintly robe?
Mugabe’s era is come
I raise so many questions this week hoping we can all begin a real engagement in the weeks that follow. This story will be with us for a long while to come. It is elemental. It is foundational. Africa could be reaching a tipping point, all against a stupendous effort from the West to divert its attention towards fads and false conflicts.
I argue that the social question is slowly and inexorably thrusting itself to the fore. Against age-old denial, it is asserting itself with wrath and fury. When the world thinks Mugabe has hit the nadir, the era which crowns his politics could just be dawning. But in the meantime I have very sobering short points for you, gentle reader.
None of the victims of the violence in South Africa used the word “xenophobia”. Yet they carry the experience the word claims to capture and convey. It was the white media which used it, infecting the rest of the auxiliary African media which must know better who to follow, what to copy.
The images were horrid, all suggesting an unexpected release of Africa’s pent-up urge for self-destructive, gratuitous atavism.
A Dark Continent? The (Ig)Noble Savage? But Conrad’s “dark continent” was pre-colonial.
So was the mythic “noble savage”.
Today the BBC and CNN give us exactly the same colour, social and continental type, only in a post-colonial, post-modern world. And we oblige by adopting the master’s vocabulary, we the noble savages of post-industrial, globalised Africa? Xenophobia?
Where our predecessor noble savages used fangs and tree branches to kill and maim, we use guns and matchetes.
Where they killed in forests, we now do it on hard asphalts of Johannesburg, our dastard actions handsomely reflected by the shining glass facades of multinational skyscrapers, all laid for us by Anglo-American Corporation and its eating peers. Anglo and its peers, the real vectors of African poverty and joblessness on the continent.
The real xenophobes.
Icho!
My last week instalment on McGee, US ambassador to Zimbabwe, drew a torrent of reactions. Allow me to share with you three samples from these reactions. One came from Peter Mavunga, The Herald’s London-based columnist whose commitment to the cause is beyond gainsaying. He picked up the bit to do with Rhodesia’s dreaded underworld hit squads — the Selous Scouts — who unleashed terror on pro-liberation rural communities. They did so disguised as freedom fighters, hoping to de-campaign the struggle.
They also killed priests who were known to be sympathetic to the struggle, hoping this would alienate churches. It was a hideous career, one which the white community, principally Rhodesia’s white farmers, both supported and participated in.
The Selous Scouts were active in many places, most notably in Musana and Masembura areas of Mashonaland Central, itself the hottest province of the struggle. They also worked with guerrilla turncoats, embodied in one Commander Max, who was the prime resource person for modelling this cruel outfit after the persona of real guerrillas. I still recall Commander Max’s fullpage picture in the Rhodesian African Times, underpinned by a sonorous headline which proclaimed "We stand for peace", as if unaware of its own reckless irony.
When the past is the future
I hope Peter realises those two communal areas — Musana and Masembura — which became a critical base for these terror agents, today make up one of the two constituencies which Zanu-PF lost in the March 29 polls. How the future is in the past! The MDC simply used these communities’ chequered legacy and turned the tables against Zanu-PF.
I made the same point in respect of Buhera West, Chikomba and Gutu, indicating a direct geographical correlation between erstwhile military strongholds of Rhodesia and current zones of MDC influence. The MDC’s current zone of political comfort is exactly those communities who sheltered Rhodesia’s hit squads and thus got marooned from the pervasive ethos of the liberation struggle.
To them the return of the white man is not such a forbidding prospect. After all, was the MDC not founded by the Rhodesian farmer, himself the reserve force of the Selous Scouts? Apart from directly funding the MDC, Rhodesians have turned over to the MDC the vast repertoire of psych-op techniques they deployed during our war of national liberation.
I argued last week that elements from this repertoire are being brought to bear on communities by the brutalising MDC, with all getting blamed on the mute and blame-prone Zanu-PF.
The bane of amnesia
I always defer to Peter for the historical perspective, itself of quite marked value in our circumstances of journalism of here-and-now, completely shorn of history. I argue that our bane is not that of a bad colonial history; rather it is our induced forgetfulness of it. And the grotesque human outcome of this dangerous amnesia is called "born-frees": a happy go-luck generation freed from the trammels of history and self-dignity.
Their numbers have been swelling beneath imperial West’s silent census, behind our unsuspecting sweet slumber. To every mujibha and chimbwido of the 1970s, there is now a whole family of born-frees all for MDC’s taking, thanks to the hefty failure in national political parenting.
The result is the current paradox where mature father and mother are for the Revolution; three sons and four daughters are anti-Zanu-PF. How do we forget so quickly, so thoroughly, so unhappy process of colonisation we endured only a 28-year yesterday? Thanks Peter. Yeuchidzo yevanokanganwa rukuvhute nechazuro, iropa nemisodzi. Aluta Continua.
The return of Rhodesian lingo
The second sample reaction did not come from an individual. It came from a surprising quarter, namely the editorial board of a website called Zimbabwe Situation whose compilers are cryptically and mock-modestly given as Karen and Barbara.
In reality, this is one of the well-funded ghost sites linked to Rhodesia’s right-wing farmers ironically called Justice for Agriculture (JAG), and supported by a whole battery of Western sponsors, including corporates and governments.
Expectedly, both the US and UK governments are involved. This anti-Zimbabwe site grants yours truly a rare honour of "reproducing" his instalment for last week. "Reproduce" in quotes for the simple reason that what they published in the name of Manheru is a very unfaithful, adulterated version of his real piece.
You cannot help but feel cuckolded when your pitch-dark seed administered at the midpoint of a night of brooding, double darkness, yields so ashen an offshoot! But a very telling editorial tampering. The editors used my piece to market themselves and a whole battery of sites dedicated to making sure "Rhodesians never die". They used every excuse to direct my readers to Rhodesia World Wide links, including sites of the notorious Selous Scouts and Rhodesia African Rifles (RAR).
Tribesmen of Mayo and Shamva
Still that was a small matter. The real big one came in respect of my reference to the violence meted out against innocent resettled villagers in Mayo and Shamva by the MDC, and whose fate McGee is not interested in.
These helpful editors inserted editorial notes which told the reader that Mayo and Shamva are "tribes loyal to the opposition MDC — which seems to have won the recent elections!" Well, well well! Mayo and Shamva are places, not "tribes". Mayo and Shamva voted Zanu-PF, which is why they were targeted by the MDC for retributive violence. What is worse, the language in the editorial insertions is Rhodesian and white, indeed the lingo of Rhodesian settlers during their heyday.
We were tribes and tribesmen, were we not? Language of thoughts to come? I wonder. They are getting quite cocky and brazen about it, their pursuit instinct fully triggered by MDC’s initial good showing.
The story of one Kwame against one Uncle Tom
I turn to the third reaction which I need to give quite a bit of space. I seek your indulgence, dear reader. It came from the UK and pointed out the invaluable points I missed in my piece.
The writer whose identity I shall protect reminded me of striking parallels between US-Zimbabwe relations at this point in history and those the US developed with Nkrumah’s embattled Ghana in the 1960s. The US government posted one Franklin H. Williams — an African-African American — to finish off Nkrumah whose system and ardour had already been enervated if not exhausted by Williams’s white predecessor, one Ambassador William Mahoney, who had done much of the damage.
The dramatic thing about it all is that Ambassador Franklin Williams had been Nkrumah’s college mate at Lincoln University (the class of 1941)! Williams was barely two months in Accra when the coup against Nkrumah happened on 24th February, 1966.
Nkrumah, who knew Williams’ role, was later to point out this cynical gesture from the empire. Nkrumah wrote: In the US, "the Uncle Tom figure is well known. We have mercifully seen less of him in Africa." Overweighed by a sense of guilt, Williams sought the services of one Dr Martin Wachmann, then the president of Lincoln University, who wrote to Nkrumah — now in exile in Guinea — to convince him Williams knew nothing about the coup!
Although Nkrumah never responded to this human salve of evil Williams’ troubled conscience, he registered his reaction with June Milne, his research assistant for 15 years and later publisher: "It is extremely unlikely that Williams did not know what was going on in the embassy with CIA officers operating from there."
I got more from this reaction. The writer went on to disclose that late Ivorian president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny would, in February 1981, recount his encounter with Ghana’s coup-makers, to the Paris-based Jeune Afrique magazine: "Did you know why Idi Amin made his coup in 1972? It was not he who did it, but the British.
"He did not even know what he wanted himself. It was the same in Ghana when the military overthrew Nkrumah. They [coup-makers] came to see me. I asked them why. They replied: ‘All is not well anymore’. Is that all? [I asked them]. I also asked them what they were going to do; they did not know. People outside knew it for them." PEOPLE OUTSIDE KNEW IT FOR THEM! Gentle reader, chirimumusakasaka chinozvinzwira! An insider needs no testimonies.
The Williams in McGee
Is McGee part of the people outside or inside? He comes after the pugnacious Dell who put in place the demons unleashing uncontrollable forces in the financial underworld. Where does that place him in history? Will he succeed? Unlike the outwardly reluctant Williams, our McGee seems most willing, most enthusiastic.
I notice he has had to make a trip to South Africa to order Tsvangirai back to Zimbabwe so the opposition leader can start his run-off campaign. Excuse me, McGee the US Ambassador? He leaves his whole mission to become Tsvangirai’s what? Chairman? Campaign manager? He has not provided comparable service to Obama and McCain; he provides it to Tsvangirai? God help this country, that is, if its own people can’t! Gees, I am coming to the length of my piece, before I have dealt with this week’s subject. Let me broach it in the remaining time and space.
Xenophobia chii?
I am angry, very angry. What is this big word we are using in the media? ZENOFOBIYA? What is that? What good word ever starts with an X? The same X which imperialism is using to bring so much ruin to Zimbabwe’s revolution? An X which is threatening to become a real axe for our ruin? What is this xenophobia business in the media? Our own African media at that? You tell me the word "Revolution" is too big. So is "Sovereignty", Zanu-PF’s favourite catchword in the current elections.
Both break an African jaw, and thus cannot carry an African meaning. But "xenophobia" is small and expressive. It carries an African experience, the African part which is to the south of all of us. In the last week or so, horrible things have happened in Azania. Really, really horrible things.
Appalling violence has been meted out against human beings, all black apparently, all from many African countries apparently, all until now working in South Africa — sorry Azania — apparently. Many of them obeyed South Africa’s post-apartheid magnetic pull, the same way the rest of Africa did in Zimbabwe in 1980, and later in Namibia at its Independence.
That has been the pattern. Africa tends to gravitate towards the point of its latest renewal, its latest promise of a new beginning. I have never seen this as a threat to the newly independent African country. I have never seen this as anything beyond a rejection of failed starts that litter our continent, and, of course, as an undying hope for a fate which is different and better for the continent.
It was there in the beginning . . .
But it is also a wish to offer a service that can make a difference to Africa’s newest parts, themselves definitionally always short of skills to move Independence forward.
It is a wish to avert the same failure that has stalked much of the continent. That has been the story since 1957 when Ghana blazed a new trail as Africa’s first-ever free country under black rule. This is why our own President left Chalimbana in Zambia for Takoradi, a small town in Independent Ghana under the legendary Kwame Nkrumah.
Independence has always lured Africa and the movement of her peoples to newly redeemed lands is an assertion and reaffirmation of placeless-ness of African citizenry, all based on our common humanity, common ancestry, common predicament. I have never viewed it as horizontal parasitism.
Bound by pan-Africanism
But it is also founded in the history of our struggles. No African country, not even the pioneering Ghana, ever fought its liberation struggles alone.
On the continent, the struggle for Independence has been and will always be a communal African affair. We cannot be surprised by that. So was the fall of our humanity through colonialism. Granted we were eaten singly, piecemeal in many respects, but we all fell by our colour, by our place in contemporary history whose fulcrum emerged in Berlin, the same way it once was along the River Nile in good Egypt, which Jewish mythology seeks to disparage as the land of oppression.
I reject this Zionist historiography. We fell together as Africans. We rose together, picked ourselves together again as Africans. Is this not the pan-Africanism which shaped Nkrumah’s generation, and benefited all those who followed them, including us in Zimbabwe? In the mid-1980s, soon after we had recovered from the euphoria of our own Independence, musical bands here sang — almost single-mindedly — about Namibia, Azania and Mandela. Remember the Zig-Zag band? The legendary Robson Banda? And occasionally about Mozambique which was in the throes of a vicious destabilisation war sponsored by American interests through apartheid? That is how deep the pan-African sentiment ran.
Pan-Africanism in the everyday
I am part of that generation shaped by that Africa-wide political consciousness. I taught many cadres from both ANC and PAC. I taught many cadres from Swapo, lived with some of them even. We shared the burden, shared risks, shared the little, sparse comforts Zimbabwe could afford. We were one.
I never knew that some day Zimbabweans would think of going to South Africa or Namibia for employment opportunities. Never. But I expected Zimbabwe to play its part in the revolution effort, and it did. Did it the same way Mozambique, Tanzania, Angola, Zambia, Botswana did for our own struggle for independence.
The pan-African spirit is one huge account we Africans will never settle. Once I met a Mozambican who berated us for neglecting the spot where Tongogara perished. In his view, the spot should have been turned into a shrine. I agreed. He went farther. When necessary each year, the locals in that area go to clean that spot, in honour of the late departed.
Tongogara is Mozambican, he concluded in that very provocative fashion. But so is Samora. I was part of the University crowd that smashed the Malawian embassy when Samora died.
Part of the crowd that attacked the South African Trade Mission; attacked any white person we met in the streets of Harare. We judged all whites blameworthy, vicariously guilty. Long after Mozambique had forgotten the late Machel (under Chissano), Machel remained alive and remembered here, under ZIMOFA.
Heroes of Africa liberation are placeless. PAC’s Phosa, again cut in an accident in Uganda. A living force here the same way Zimbabweans wept when Hani was killed ahead of South Africa’s Uhuru. Joe Gqabi, slaughtered here when I was in University, the same way Tsitsi Chiliza (nee Marechera) would perish in a bomb blast meant for ANC cadres who lived in a flat next to Allan Wilson School.
Black victims, white Inkosi
With these kind of deep, deep inter-linkages, how do you get me to accept this thing called xenophobia? How? Zimbabwe in the 1980s and 1990s: did it enjoy zero unemployment to have been so charitable to South Africans, Mozambicans and Namibians? Of course not!
Is Zimbabwe currently enjoying zero unemployment to play host to the many West Africans and Congolese? Of course not! What is this xenophobia? Please tell me? Did unemployment in South Africa start with the arrival of Africans in that country? Will it end with their departure? Did violence start with the arrival of other Africans in that country? Will it end with their departure? Who is a foreigner in South Africa, itself a product of an all-African liberation effort?
If boundaries define foreignness, why is a white immigrant not a foreigner worthy of the devouring rheum of South Africa’s unemployed? He is easier to identify and target the same way a Ndebele from Zimbabwe, and Shangaani from Mozambique are not. What spawns this strange servile psychosis where a rampaging South Africa will pause a little from his destructiveness to doff “Inkosi!” to a white shop owner passing by?
Fault-line of poverty
Let me push the senselessness a little further. The harrowing figure captured burning, slowly disappearing before leaping flames his clothing ironically stoked, is that of a South African, South African Venda apparently.
He was being told to go back north, to Limpopo. He got burnt and killed, so we are told, by this thing called xenophobia. But he is a South African from Limpopo. Whose jobs is he stealing? You have Zulus devouring Xhosas, IFP-style. Why does the same violence which served apartheid against the forces of liberation the same violence purportedly defending “new South Africa’s jobs”? What is going on? Then you have shops belonging to so-called African foreigners — Zimbabweans included — attacked.
Manning them are young South Africans who are thrown into unemployment soon after the so-called xenophobic attacks. Defending jobs? What is worse, the fight starts in Johannesburg’s depressed townships. It spreads, spreads until it reaches Durban, always following the fault-line of poverty in new South Africa, always following the colour of poverty in new South Africa, which is as dark under the rainbow as under white apartheid. And you notice the attacks did not begin at Anglo-American Corporation’s workplaces — industry, mines, banks — which is where you find the real jobs stolen and those who stole them.
No, it started in the townships which house the unemployed and the informally employed. It is a bloody fight for a place at the margin, ironically by those collectively marginalised. It is horizontal violence, meted out by one victim against the another. This is how Fanon and Mmemi would have called it. But the agents of this violence have no wish to be at the lucre-rich centre, apparently, where you find the likes of Sanlam, Old Mutual, etc, etc. No, their real target is a tuckshop, an internet café, a phone-shop somewhere in violent-prone Hillbrow! No Old Mutual.
They want jobs, not industry; they want a shack, not a multinational, an acre not South Africa. Xenophobia?
South Africa or Kenya?
What is the difference between what we have seen in South Africa and what we witnessed in Kenya after the elections? If elections spawned violence in Kenya, why is violence of the same genus visiting South Africa which is not in an election season?
If xenophobia spawns violence in South Africa, why did we have the same genus of violence in Kenya, pitting a Kenyan against a Kenyan? And if economic meltdown is the source of the great African trek, why is the same media which covered border jumpers now admitting to a reverse trek back to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and even beyond, themselves poverty bowels as claimed by the Western media? And why is economically successful Europe, itself the source of longest migrant community on the continent, unable to keep its demos? And if economic growth is the panacea, why have these spasms of appalling violence hit South Africa and Kenya, Africa’s foremost economies by any measure? Why is violence more susceptible in countries and economies which read least susceptible in the European media?
Tutu goes a-globe shouting peace, warning against genocide everywhere else except in South Africa. Where is his mouth today? How hot is his lip now that the fart has been emitted from under his saintly robe?
Mugabe’s era is come
I raise so many questions this week hoping we can all begin a real engagement in the weeks that follow. This story will be with us for a long while to come. It is elemental. It is foundational. Africa could be reaching a tipping point, all against a stupendous effort from the West to divert its attention towards fads and false conflicts.
I argue that the social question is slowly and inexorably thrusting itself to the fore. Against age-old denial, it is asserting itself with wrath and fury. When the world thinks Mugabe has hit the nadir, the era which crowns his politics could just be dawning. But in the meantime I have very sobering short points for you, gentle reader.
None of the victims of the violence in South Africa used the word “xenophobia”. Yet they carry the experience the word claims to capture and convey. It was the white media which used it, infecting the rest of the auxiliary African media which must know better who to follow, what to copy.
The images were horrid, all suggesting an unexpected release of Africa’s pent-up urge for self-destructive, gratuitous atavism.
A Dark Continent? The (Ig)Noble Savage? But Conrad’s “dark continent” was pre-colonial.
So was the mythic “noble savage”.
Today the BBC and CNN give us exactly the same colour, social and continental type, only in a post-colonial, post-modern world. And we oblige by adopting the master’s vocabulary, we the noble savages of post-industrial, globalised Africa? Xenophobia?
Where our predecessor noble savages used fangs and tree branches to kill and maim, we use guns and matchetes.
Where they killed in forests, we now do it on hard asphalts of Johannesburg, our dastard actions handsomely reflected by the shining glass facades of multinational skyscrapers, all laid for us by Anglo-American Corporation and its eating peers. Anglo and its peers, the real vectors of African poverty and joblessness on the continent.
The real xenophobes.
Icho!
Sunday, 18 May 2008
Govt summons, warns US ambassador McGee
Govt summons, warns US ambassador McGee
Herald Reporter
GOVERNMENT on Wednesday summoned United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee and warned him over his involvement in the country’s domestic affairs.
Foreign Affairs Minister Cde Simbarashe Mumbengegwi confirmed this at a Press briefing in Harare yesterday.
"The US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGee, was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on May 14, 2008.
"Ambassador McGee was dressed down on the following sequence of events which constituted violations of Diplomatic Protocols and Procedures," he said.
Cde Mumbengegwi said McGee wrote a letter to the Press on May 12, 2008 making unsubstantiated allegations clearly in support of MDC-T.
"This was clear interference in Zimbabwe’s domestic affairs and in violation of the protocols governing diplomatic relations between states."
Cde Mumbengegwi said on May 13, 2008, McGee travelled beyond 40km from Harare without making prior arrangements with his ministry.
McGee’s actions violated Zimbabwe’s rules and regulations which require that diplomats travelling beyond a 40km radius should make prior arrangements with the ministry.
"The ambassador made politically charged and inflammatory remarks when he visited the Avenues Clinic on 9th May 2008. This again constituted interference in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs," added Cde Mumbengegwi.
"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs brought to the attention of Ambassador McGee that he had not only failed to respect the laws and regulations of Zimbabwe, but had also blatantly interfered in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe."
He said McGee’s actions were in total contravention of Article 41 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
The Vienna Convention reads: "Without prejudice to their privileges and immunities, it is the duty of the persons enjoying such privileges and immunities to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving state. They have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of that state."
Cde Mumbengegwi said the summoning constituted the first warning to the US ambassador that Government would not tolerate any interference in the country’s internal affairs.
"The Government of Zimbabwe will not hesitate to invoke the relevant provisions of the conventions and protocols which govern the conduct of diplomatic relations between states," he said.
Asked what course of action Government would take if McGee persists with his actions, Cde Mumbengegwi said it would depend entirely on "what happens next".
He said other ambassadors who have also committed such acts would be duly warned.
"All diplomats and all ambassadors are fully aware of the provisions of these protocols and conventions. They will also be warned."
Herald Reporter
GOVERNMENT on Wednesday summoned United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee and warned him over his involvement in the country’s domestic affairs.
Foreign Affairs Minister Cde Simbarashe Mumbengegwi confirmed this at a Press briefing in Harare yesterday.
"The US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGee, was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on May 14, 2008.
"Ambassador McGee was dressed down on the following sequence of events which constituted violations of Diplomatic Protocols and Procedures," he said.
Cde Mumbengegwi said McGee wrote a letter to the Press on May 12, 2008 making unsubstantiated allegations clearly in support of MDC-T.
"This was clear interference in Zimbabwe’s domestic affairs and in violation of the protocols governing diplomatic relations between states."
Cde Mumbengegwi said on May 13, 2008, McGee travelled beyond 40km from Harare without making prior arrangements with his ministry.
McGee’s actions violated Zimbabwe’s rules and regulations which require that diplomats travelling beyond a 40km radius should make prior arrangements with the ministry.
"The ambassador made politically charged and inflammatory remarks when he visited the Avenues Clinic on 9th May 2008. This again constituted interference in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs," added Cde Mumbengegwi.
"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs brought to the attention of Ambassador McGee that he had not only failed to respect the laws and regulations of Zimbabwe, but had also blatantly interfered in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe."
He said McGee’s actions were in total contravention of Article 41 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
The Vienna Convention reads: "Without prejudice to their privileges and immunities, it is the duty of the persons enjoying such privileges and immunities to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving state. They have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of that state."
Cde Mumbengegwi said the summoning constituted the first warning to the US ambassador that Government would not tolerate any interference in the country’s internal affairs.
"The Government of Zimbabwe will not hesitate to invoke the relevant provisions of the conventions and protocols which govern the conduct of diplomatic relations between states," he said.
Asked what course of action Government would take if McGee persists with his actions, Cde Mumbengegwi said it would depend entirely on "what happens next".
He said other ambassadors who have also committed such acts would be duly warned.
"All diplomats and all ambassadors are fully aware of the provisions of these protocols and conventions. They will also be warned."
Unite for victory: President
Unite for victory: President
Herald Reporters
President Mugabe says Zanu-PF should gear itself for the presidential run-off and work hard for victory to repair the damage it suffered in the March 29 elections while deploring violence that has erupted in some parts of Zimbabwe as unacceptable.
"We have a crucial run-off ahead of us. We must use it to repair the damage and shortcomings which we suffered in the harmonised polls. The bitter rivalry of the party primaries must make way for unity of purpose. No bhora musango this time. All party members, whether defeated or triumphant in the party primaries or national elections, must work for the victory of the President.
"A party that forgives Ian Smith cannot fail to let bygones be bygones within its own house and membership. Whether you won or lost at whichever level of contest, today the hope of your future political career lies in Zanu-PF winning the Presidency. Let us go back to work," he said
The President was addressing the 73rd Ordinary Session of the Zanu-PF Central Committee at the ruling party’s headquarters in Harare yesterday.
The ruling party structures, he said, went to sleep resulting in the dismal performance on March 29 and the leadership should shoulder the blame.
"Let us go back to work fully mindful of the fact that except for one province, most of our provinces failed to mobilise even half of their registered voters to go to vote," he said.
"Most people stayed at home and that sleeping vote is what we must target and arouse. It is our vote. It is loyal to us and, in fact, stands already aroused by the sense of danger, which the party setback has shown. Let us galvanise it for an emphatic victory."
President Mugabe said the party entered the elections with lethargic structures.
"We went to the election completely unprepared, unorganised and this against an election-weary voter. Our structures went to sleep, were deep in slumber in circumstances of an all-out war.
"They (structures) were passive; they were lethargic, ponderous, divided, diverted, disinterested, demobilised or simply non-existent. It was terrible to see the structures of so embattled a ruling party so enervated.
"As leaders, we all share the blame: from the national level to that of the branch chairman. We played truant; we did not lead, we misled; we did not encourage, rather we discouraged; we did not unite, we divided; we did not inspire, we dispirited; we did not mobilise, we demobilised. Hence the dismal result we are landed with," he said.
Zanu-PF lost its House of Assembly majority for the first time since independence in 1980 but retained control of the Senate.
Cde Mugabe said the ruling party did not mobilise adequate resources for the polls.
"What is worse, it was pitted against an opposition backed by a hostile axis of powerful foreign governments with the strongest economies in the world. It was pitted against powerful global corporates who had decided to invest in the opposition in order to install a pliable client state sworn to promoting their commercial interests.
"On the ground, our sparse resources translated into onerous burdens on our candidates who had to finance their own campaigns, they had to find resources for campaign vehicles, campaign materials, campaign staff, food and all," he said.
He, however, paid tribute to the Zanu-PF candidates who are "of very humble means but with a deep love and commitment to their party. They did their utmost against insuperable challenges (but) we let them down".
President Mugabe said Zanu-PF went into the elections a
l To Page 7
United we win: President
From Page 1
"bickering and divided party" and "dangerously operated at cross-purposes".
"What was amazing was that a party facing such formidable external enemies, a party which had upset such powerful interests, a party, therefore, whose very survival was under threat, could afford to bicker and indulge in internecine squabbles. We were either bravely mocking a horrible destiny or simply foolhardy. Either way, we were courting doom.
"It should have been clear, as it must now, that as Zanu-PF, our fate is one and inextricable, our fortunes, the very fortunes of this collectivity we call Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Zanu-PF is no Phoenix: that legendary Arabian bird said to set fire to itself before rising anew from its ashes!
"If we allow ourselves to go, we are gone. We have enough examples all around us to draw useful lessons on the fate and aftermath of strong liberation movements and their anti-imperialist governments once they are ousted."
President Mugabe said although ambition was encouraged, it has to be nurtured so that power-hungry individuals did not get an opportunity to destroy the party.
Cde Mugabe said Zanu-PF should be alive to its responsibilities as a liberation party.
"We rose united on the strength of a Patriotic Front which would push for total freedom and empowerment of our people. Our unity was, and remains, an instrument of consolidating our revolution so it is better able to deliver tangible gains to our expectant people," he said.
Cde Mugabe said the party rose on the strength of the programme of recovering the country’s stolen land and delivering it to the needy people.
"These are core principles, sacred goals which motivate us as a party. Our party is synonymous with the national question, as it has evolved over time, synonymous with the preservation and defence of the national interest.
"And hence the concentrated attack on us by forces seeking to recolonise our nation. They know where the defence of our revolution lies; they know who the consistent cadres of the revolution are," he said.
He said this was evident through post-election events that saw white farmers coming back to stake a claim on the land which had been liberated when they brazenly walked back to confront newly resettled A1 and A2 farmers.
"They felt buoyed by what appeared to be a Zanu-PF defeat which they mistake for an MDC victory. They had worked so hard for such an outcome, and had managed to reconnect with their erstwhile employees on the farms, to mobilise them into supporting the MDC.
"It is clear, as it has always been, that a Zanu-PF defeat is a victory for the Rhodesian settler, never of the MDC which is just a mere instrument for disguising their overriding interest. It is a victory for the British and Americans who arch over their kith and kin here, themselves the beachhead of Western imperialism.
"The fall of Zanu-PF, therefore, is the fall of Zimbabwe as a sovereign nation, indeed the displacement of our people’s interests by those of imperialism. We have to be alive to our responsibilities as leaders of a party of liberation."
President Mugabe said although succession in the party was a fact of life, it should never be taken to be a succession by former colonial powers.
"Succession is a fact of biology, of life. No one individual governs forever. I have to be succeeded. But we should never mistake the succession of individuals with the succession of Zanu-PF by the Rhodesian Front, however disguised. Zanu-PF cannot be succeeded by a Rhodesian opposition. Zimbabwe cannot be succeeded by Rhodesia."
He said Zanu-PF was supreme, lives forever and this means its cause must always triumph and carry the day.
"In an environment of defeat, there can never be succession. Our party must reclaim its glory so its leaders can hand over the revolution to new hands who must assure continuity of the party. Our people come first please."
President Mugabe paid tribute to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission for standing firm and resolute in the face of attempts to overrun it when it was not ready to announce correct results of the elections.
"Our electoral process must remain solely accountable to the Zimbabwean people who rightfully vote and who are fated to live with and submit to the Government that emerges from the exercise of their vote.
"The result is theirs and must satisfy them beyond any doubts and suspicion. And, as it turned out, Zimbabweans preferred an accurate result to one rigged by foreign-inspired haste and false timetables. Once that result came, not even the opposition or their sponsors could challenge it. That is Zimbabwe; that is us," he said.
Cde Mugabe said the elections strengthened the country’s democracy, built enduring institutions for it while there were also a crucial crucible for it.
"I happily announce that it emerged intact, solid and strengthened. We handled the whole poll on our own. We set the ground rules for it ourselves. We financed it ourselves. We managed it ourselves."
He said the process, however, revealed serious weaknesses, vulnerabilities and loopholes that have to be addressed.
"I believe this is happening so that irregularities — real or suspected — will not delay future polls, including the impending run-off. We do not believe that the integrity of our ballot is assured by foreigners. We believe it is assured by satisfied contesting parties and satisfied voters for whose support the parties arise in the first place.
"The West must never expect us to fulfil their stereotype of an inherently corrupt African ballot, only redeemed by foundations and institutions from Europe and America. Not here please; we are Zimbabweans," he said.
President Mugabe expressed concern over reports of violence received from some parts of the country.
"Such violence is needless and must stop forthwith. Our fist is against white imperialism; it is a fist for the people of Zimbabwe, never a fist against them.
"Support comes from persuasion, not from pugilism. Let us build genuine support for the party and such support cannot come through coercion or violence."
He warned the MDC and its white supporters who are perpetrating violence in the rural areas.
"We have disturbing evidence of motorised gangs trained and equipped by the MDC, and of returning white commercial farmers who have been visiting terror on villages and party supporters. They have targeted resettled farmers, in the process triggering anew the land question.
"Expensive equipment bought and distributed by Government through the central bank has been burnt. Granaries have been gutted by fire in naked cases of arson. Such acts of banditry must stop forthwith. The MDC and its supporters are playing a dangerous game.
"They should know they cannot win that kind of war which they have carried to rural constituencies in the hope of destabilising our supporters. We need peace and freedom everywhere in our country. They (the MDC) should take heed."
President Mugabe said Government would continue to import grain to offset the disastrous harvest that visited the country.
"We fend for all our people, regardless of political affiliation. Food must reach all families who need it. That has been our philosophy. We do not discriminate. We should never discriminate. When it comes to food, everyone is a citizen whose needs must be met by Government," he said.
Herald Reporters
President Mugabe says Zanu-PF should gear itself for the presidential run-off and work hard for victory to repair the damage it suffered in the March 29 elections while deploring violence that has erupted in some parts of Zimbabwe as unacceptable.
"We have a crucial run-off ahead of us. We must use it to repair the damage and shortcomings which we suffered in the harmonised polls. The bitter rivalry of the party primaries must make way for unity of purpose. No bhora musango this time. All party members, whether defeated or triumphant in the party primaries or national elections, must work for the victory of the President.
"A party that forgives Ian Smith cannot fail to let bygones be bygones within its own house and membership. Whether you won or lost at whichever level of contest, today the hope of your future political career lies in Zanu-PF winning the Presidency. Let us go back to work," he said
The President was addressing the 73rd Ordinary Session of the Zanu-PF Central Committee at the ruling party’s headquarters in Harare yesterday.
The ruling party structures, he said, went to sleep resulting in the dismal performance on March 29 and the leadership should shoulder the blame.
"Let us go back to work fully mindful of the fact that except for one province, most of our provinces failed to mobilise even half of their registered voters to go to vote," he said.
"Most people stayed at home and that sleeping vote is what we must target and arouse. It is our vote. It is loyal to us and, in fact, stands already aroused by the sense of danger, which the party setback has shown. Let us galvanise it for an emphatic victory."
President Mugabe said the party entered the elections with lethargic structures.
"We went to the election completely unprepared, unorganised and this against an election-weary voter. Our structures went to sleep, were deep in slumber in circumstances of an all-out war.
"They (structures) were passive; they were lethargic, ponderous, divided, diverted, disinterested, demobilised or simply non-existent. It was terrible to see the structures of so embattled a ruling party so enervated.
"As leaders, we all share the blame: from the national level to that of the branch chairman. We played truant; we did not lead, we misled; we did not encourage, rather we discouraged; we did not unite, we divided; we did not inspire, we dispirited; we did not mobilise, we demobilised. Hence the dismal result we are landed with," he said.
Zanu-PF lost its House of Assembly majority for the first time since independence in 1980 but retained control of the Senate.
Cde Mugabe said the ruling party did not mobilise adequate resources for the polls.
"What is worse, it was pitted against an opposition backed by a hostile axis of powerful foreign governments with the strongest economies in the world. It was pitted against powerful global corporates who had decided to invest in the opposition in order to install a pliable client state sworn to promoting their commercial interests.
"On the ground, our sparse resources translated into onerous burdens on our candidates who had to finance their own campaigns, they had to find resources for campaign vehicles, campaign materials, campaign staff, food and all," he said.
He, however, paid tribute to the Zanu-PF candidates who are "of very humble means but with a deep love and commitment to their party. They did their utmost against insuperable challenges (but) we let them down".
President Mugabe said Zanu-PF went into the elections a
l To Page 7
United we win: President
From Page 1
"bickering and divided party" and "dangerously operated at cross-purposes".
"What was amazing was that a party facing such formidable external enemies, a party which had upset such powerful interests, a party, therefore, whose very survival was under threat, could afford to bicker and indulge in internecine squabbles. We were either bravely mocking a horrible destiny or simply foolhardy. Either way, we were courting doom.
"It should have been clear, as it must now, that as Zanu-PF, our fate is one and inextricable, our fortunes, the very fortunes of this collectivity we call Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Zanu-PF is no Phoenix: that legendary Arabian bird said to set fire to itself before rising anew from its ashes!
"If we allow ourselves to go, we are gone. We have enough examples all around us to draw useful lessons on the fate and aftermath of strong liberation movements and their anti-imperialist governments once they are ousted."
President Mugabe said although ambition was encouraged, it has to be nurtured so that power-hungry individuals did not get an opportunity to destroy the party.
Cde Mugabe said Zanu-PF should be alive to its responsibilities as a liberation party.
"We rose united on the strength of a Patriotic Front which would push for total freedom and empowerment of our people. Our unity was, and remains, an instrument of consolidating our revolution so it is better able to deliver tangible gains to our expectant people," he said.
Cde Mugabe said the party rose on the strength of the programme of recovering the country’s stolen land and delivering it to the needy people.
"These are core principles, sacred goals which motivate us as a party. Our party is synonymous with the national question, as it has evolved over time, synonymous with the preservation and defence of the national interest.
"And hence the concentrated attack on us by forces seeking to recolonise our nation. They know where the defence of our revolution lies; they know who the consistent cadres of the revolution are," he said.
He said this was evident through post-election events that saw white farmers coming back to stake a claim on the land which had been liberated when they brazenly walked back to confront newly resettled A1 and A2 farmers.
"They felt buoyed by what appeared to be a Zanu-PF defeat which they mistake for an MDC victory. They had worked so hard for such an outcome, and had managed to reconnect with their erstwhile employees on the farms, to mobilise them into supporting the MDC.
"It is clear, as it has always been, that a Zanu-PF defeat is a victory for the Rhodesian settler, never of the MDC which is just a mere instrument for disguising their overriding interest. It is a victory for the British and Americans who arch over their kith and kin here, themselves the beachhead of Western imperialism.
"The fall of Zanu-PF, therefore, is the fall of Zimbabwe as a sovereign nation, indeed the displacement of our people’s interests by those of imperialism. We have to be alive to our responsibilities as leaders of a party of liberation."
President Mugabe said although succession in the party was a fact of life, it should never be taken to be a succession by former colonial powers.
"Succession is a fact of biology, of life. No one individual governs forever. I have to be succeeded. But we should never mistake the succession of individuals with the succession of Zanu-PF by the Rhodesian Front, however disguised. Zanu-PF cannot be succeeded by a Rhodesian opposition. Zimbabwe cannot be succeeded by Rhodesia."
He said Zanu-PF was supreme, lives forever and this means its cause must always triumph and carry the day.
"In an environment of defeat, there can never be succession. Our party must reclaim its glory so its leaders can hand over the revolution to new hands who must assure continuity of the party. Our people come first please."
President Mugabe paid tribute to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission for standing firm and resolute in the face of attempts to overrun it when it was not ready to announce correct results of the elections.
"Our electoral process must remain solely accountable to the Zimbabwean people who rightfully vote and who are fated to live with and submit to the Government that emerges from the exercise of their vote.
"The result is theirs and must satisfy them beyond any doubts and suspicion. And, as it turned out, Zimbabweans preferred an accurate result to one rigged by foreign-inspired haste and false timetables. Once that result came, not even the opposition or their sponsors could challenge it. That is Zimbabwe; that is us," he said.
Cde Mugabe said the elections strengthened the country’s democracy, built enduring institutions for it while there were also a crucial crucible for it.
"I happily announce that it emerged intact, solid and strengthened. We handled the whole poll on our own. We set the ground rules for it ourselves. We financed it ourselves. We managed it ourselves."
He said the process, however, revealed serious weaknesses, vulnerabilities and loopholes that have to be addressed.
"I believe this is happening so that irregularities — real or suspected — will not delay future polls, including the impending run-off. We do not believe that the integrity of our ballot is assured by foreigners. We believe it is assured by satisfied contesting parties and satisfied voters for whose support the parties arise in the first place.
"The West must never expect us to fulfil their stereotype of an inherently corrupt African ballot, only redeemed by foundations and institutions from Europe and America. Not here please; we are Zimbabweans," he said.
President Mugabe expressed concern over reports of violence received from some parts of the country.
"Such violence is needless and must stop forthwith. Our fist is against white imperialism; it is a fist for the people of Zimbabwe, never a fist against them.
"Support comes from persuasion, not from pugilism. Let us build genuine support for the party and such support cannot come through coercion or violence."
He warned the MDC and its white supporters who are perpetrating violence in the rural areas.
"We have disturbing evidence of motorised gangs trained and equipped by the MDC, and of returning white commercial farmers who have been visiting terror on villages and party supporters. They have targeted resettled farmers, in the process triggering anew the land question.
"Expensive equipment bought and distributed by Government through the central bank has been burnt. Granaries have been gutted by fire in naked cases of arson. Such acts of banditry must stop forthwith. The MDC and its supporters are playing a dangerous game.
"They should know they cannot win that kind of war which they have carried to rural constituencies in the hope of destabilising our supporters. We need peace and freedom everywhere in our country. They (the MDC) should take heed."
President Mugabe said Government would continue to import grain to offset the disastrous harvest that visited the country.
"We fend for all our people, regardless of political affiliation. Food must reach all families who need it. That has been our philosophy. We do not discriminate. We should never discriminate. When it comes to food, everyone is a citizen whose needs must be met by Government," he said.
Saturday, 17 May 2008
James McGee: Oh what a lovely white man!
McGee: Oh what a lovely white man!
When James McGee took up his posting in Zimbabwe, he made it clear Zimbabweans should never confuse his skin tint with the colour of his assignment here.
He had come as an agent and representative of the American Government and American interests.
These he would protect and pursue relentlessly, ruthlessly if need be.
I hope everyone took note. I certainly did, and still do.
But I also hope that by the same logic, Mr McGee granted Zimbabwe the same right, indeed freed it from obligations suggested by skin pigmentation.
When it comes to interests and purpose, he is decidedly white. When it comes to its purpose and interests, Zimbabwe is incurably black. Our paths may never meet. That must be plain and clear.
When black is white
I will favour him with a bit of information. His coming triggered debate on why white America had chosen a black surface for its envoy here, and at this point in the history of US-Zimbabwe relations. It is the same question debated here following the appointment of Powell, Rice and Frazer to high posts in the American Administration.
We knew Mr McGee’s chequered history in one country in our region, and in Madagascar. We knew his role in fighting America’s wars in Vietnam.
I remember someone quipping "White America is now so confident of the whiteness of its blacks that colour is no longer an issue. Colour is no longer a perspective. Look at Obama, he could be white America’s next President, far better at pushing her agenda than George W. Bush!"
I disagreed vehemently with that reading, reminding the owner of the frivolous point that Zimbabwe and Zanu-PF retain staunch support in respectable circles of African-African Americans; that as a matter of fact, many self respecting African-African Americans resent to be identified with these black pastes on America’s stripes and stars.
I also reminded the contributor that Obama was useful in knocking Clinton out of the race, herself the real threat to McCain, but never as a potential President of white America. McGee will deliver Zimbabwe to McCain, the same way Obama will clear the way for McCain’s presidency.
Reading from thongs
The debate went much further. How would we handle McGee in the event that he began to take a hostile line against Zimbabwe, in pursuit of white America’s interests? Again, I reminded the debate McGee would take a hostile line, sooner rather than later.
But I saw no dilemma: we would handle him like a white American, which is what he is, until he limps back home into the anonymity of retirement. But the debate still revealed to me a lingering complex, one deriving from history. Our incorrigible wish to be nice and good to anyone carrying our complexion, which make us so susceptible to needless dilemmas.
It is a disposition of gratuitous kindness, often against the imperatives of lived history. And if the cruel history we have lived and endured has not taught us that not everything black is indeed black, and that anything white cannot be black, I guess nothing ever will.
A people who cannot read from thongs of a cruel history, can hardly be expected to learn from fawned kisses and kindness deployed in peacetime. They have an acute wish to be loved and will smile after a sod splatter on their forehead.
Learning from Jews
The point goes much deeper. A people who cannot read or quantify the hurt of history, the massive injury done them by other nationalities in history, cannot be a people in history. Building a collective identity is based, among other things, on bitterness and bruises suffered and shared in history which become a rallying point for building a national project.
Ask the Jews who go as far as declaring war on whoever seeks to challenge the myth of the Nazi holocaust.
That myth founds them, sustains them, motivates them, unites them. Ask the Palestinians, themselves victims of Jewish victims. They know that each of their dead must go towards building an Arab counter-myth to the holocaust by which Jewish genocidal atrocities against them are beyond error and culpability for all time.
Using America’s colours
We put too much store in the man outside, forgetting the monster inside, we people of little judgement! As if we did not bring to the world the wisdom of the proverbial fig: sumptuous rind to please the eye, but dark, creeping vermin inside. True, the saying is meant to caution the love-smitten in the human drama of courtship.
But who says its semantic range is limited only mortal seductive beauty? No, it extends to warning one against the danger of colour-based solidarity belying an ugly and sinister white beneath. It is as if we forget America is a nation of colour. It has perfected the art of deploying its rich colours to effect. This is why multiculturalism and multicolour-ism are so key to understanding her foreign policy.
Arabised lips, Arab blood
When Iraq was rapped, the spokesperson for the "coalition of the willing" was a bloodshot American spotting the smoked skin and hard, thick lips of an Arab. Aggression and genocidal massacre of Iraqis was made palatable to the world by Arab lips.
That is how consent was manufactured, destruction of Arab life, endorsed and naturalised. The same happened in Afghanistan. The same would happen on the African continent the day America decides we deserve a bit of its hot, molten iron in our bodies, before it takes our prized raw materials.
America’s multiculturalism arises not from its largeness of heart, but from the sheer expansiveness of its global imperial designs. It is a weapon of war, which is why America’s citizens of dark shed eagerly await overseas aggression to find their place and glory, albeit for a short while.
If you are an American of Arab roots, you prayerfully hope Syria or Iran will be next, perchance the American military designates you spokesperson. If you are African-African American, you hope Zimbabwe is next so you become the black spokesperson cleansing such infamy.
The story of a good Rhodes
At some point, a black ambassador had to come to Zimbabwe. In fact he did, much early on, well before the situation in Zimbabwe was ripe for regime change, and before America had built a critical mass of "right-thinking" African-African Americans.
We had ambassador Ambassador Rhodes here, who turned to be a wrong and premature deployment of blackness.
Beyond his title as America’s ambassador here, he turned out to be an African-African American who read Garvey, Malcolm X and Nkrumah.
He never lasted. When the timing was right, a McGee had to come, the same way Andrew Young came in the late 1970s, to win for America the confidence of liberation movements which threatened to overrun white Rhodesia. It is very important to know that not everything black is not white.
McGee’s escapades
The technique remains the same: see one side; hear one side; speak one side. We saw this at work in the run-up to the attack on Iraq. America built evidence with which to justify aggression, using sources which had a vested interest in damning Saddam Hussein and his Ba-athist party.
She built evidence from testimonials from persons opposed to Saddam, persons America herself had taken into exile in America, in preparation for Saddam’s ouster. Why did they expect the rat to plead for the accused groundnut? Now to brother McGee.
The last two weeks, McGee has been very active. He has led missions of diplomats, mostly western, to many places, if only to build a story of a Zanu-PF-led torture campaign in the countryside.
He has been to the Avenues Hospital; he has been to hospitals and clinics in Mvurwi, the so-called international media in tow. He has held interviews with anyone who has cared to ask for them.
He has harpooned African envoys, hoping to dramatise African outrage against Zanu-PF "atrocities".
In one interview, he revealed the whole game plan. It is to pin Zanu-PF and Zimbabwe down for debate in the Security Council, "which will happen very soon." Currently, Britain is in the chair.
Next month, America will be, which is what explains the man’s optimism. And his comments are outrageously unguarded, suggesting more an angry American fighting an unjust war in Vietnam, than a circumspect ambassador with any claim to polish. The violence is 99,9 percent Zanu-PF, he says. If there are any Zanu-PF victims — and he says he is not aware of these — these would have earned it by provoking an MDC retaliation!
The man has made up his mind and will not move or be moved by anyone, by anything. He is defiant, and will push aside the police to access any place. Using an arsenal of illegally imported b-gans, he pipes his choreographed encounters to CNN which obliges a line: "Zimbabwe authorities stop American ambassador twice". It is like you have dared ask God why he is called Almighty, you a mere, puny mortal!
Listening to himself
But McGee has some recommendation. People must see a video produced by some organisation called Solidarity Peace Trust clearly showing that Zanu-PF is culpable! You search who this organisation is and, the horror, the horror! It is an NGO registered in South Africa, co-chaired by Pius Ncube and Bishop Rubin Phillip of KwaZulu-Natal Anglican church.
The same Ncube of church sex-scandals, and who accosts America to invade and topple President Mugabe. The same Bishop Rubin who mounts action against Chinese arms shipment to southern African states, including Zimbabwe.
These are avowed enemies of Zanu-PF and unconditional supporters of the MDC, set up and sponsored by the American Government. Why would they have any other motive other than to damn Mugabe, Zanu-PF and Zimbabwe? Why would the American ambassador pretend discovery of material whose gathering and compilation he commissioned through his intelligence officers which his Government has now deployed in industrial quantities, having smelt Zanu-PF blood? Why feign distance?
Calibrated victims
Secondly, who are these victims? Who are the villains? What is this violence? Fundamental questions which fixation with images of torn buttocks is meant to push away. You have villagers who are clearly traumatised, but who have been rounded up and checked into Harare’s most expensive hospital, the Avenues Clinic.
They have even over-spilled to West End clinic. Until now, they were not known. They are not on any medical aid. Until now they would never have dreamt of such first class facilities. They have no money, clearly village wretches, not through the violence which has visited them, but by historical processes which McGee will not want to discuss. But they are in Avenues. They are predominantly women aged between 30 and 40, badly hurt and bruised. Surprisingly, these are calibrated injuries, mostly on buttocks, under feet and backbones. Relatives who visit them are all middle class coxcombs from the city.
They are very aggressive with hospital staff and immediately go quiet when hospital staff are within earshot. Once away, they are in deep discussions with victims, talking deep MDC politics, victims resting their heads on crispy issues of "The Zimbabwean".
Mr McGee, something is not adding up here. After visiting hours, these "relatives" troop out and congregate to swap animated gossip, all political, before disappearing in the direction of Harvest House or some such MDC-connected NGO offices and safe houses.
Dr. Lovemore, I presume?
Much worse, the rags-to-riches kingly victims have been checked in by one Dr. Lovemore, herself historically associated with ZCTU and Amani Trust.
She runs something called Counselling Services Union, again US/UK funded, and positioned just in time for violence we all did not know would come, but which the West predicted and wished through their media networks. More dramatically, Avenues Clinic has a standing contract with Counselling Services Union, clinched well before the poll and the violence!
Most dramatically, Counselling Services Union generously offers to pay admitting hospitals in currency of choice, with Avenues receiving payment in hard currencies. Goodness me! Including Doctors for Human Rights, which is why habitually scarce doctors will be abundant for this one assignment. And they are even keen to set aside rules governing visits to victims.
They will allow you anytime, grant you as much time as you want to get the outrage pasted on Zanu-PF. Come on!
Return of Selous Scouts
Let us not have short memories. We saw this kind of operation during our liberation struggle, did we not? We had Selous Scouts here, did we not? Cruel men of Rhodesia who melted into farming soon after the war. We had the Special Branch here, did we not? Cruel men who melted into civilian outfits soon after.
We had Rhodesia African Rifles, did we not? African askaris who came under the command of white officers the majority of whom were drawn from territorials. And territorials were white farmers. Rhodesia had a small standing army which got boosted from the farms. Have we forgotten that?
Which stupid Zanu-PFsupporter would create a torture base and leave it intact for Mr. McGee to come and inspect for maximum damage against Zanu-PF? Are we not stretching believability?
Has anyone asked why Gutu, Hurungwe, Buhera and Chikomba have become critical for MDC? What was the significance of these districts during the war?
And why is the violence following the zone of resettlement, targeting new farmers, Zanu-PF supporters or MDC turncoats?
Ambassador, are you puzzled by this like all of us? And why do you not visit victims of Mayo and Shamva?
What place do you give to UN reports which indicated MDC was a villain, not just a victim?
Rhodesia’s new war vets?
Why have you not investigated the role and place of white farmers in all this? Have they now found Rhodesia’s war vets in roving MDC thugs they have equipped with vehicles, cameras and crude weaponry, to effect new land occupations?
Are we not seeing MDC’s land policy unfolding ahead of the run-off? You get an MDC youth arrested on scenes of violence. He is unemployed, unkempt.
But he wields an expensive camera, a b-gan, and expensive cellphone with roving facility. The names in it include whites in the UK, America and South Africa, all linked to MDC activism. Those youths, abundantly unsophisticated, uneducated even, have hotlines to BBC and CNN.
How so Mr McGee, Mr Pocock?
So many questions, no one interested in answering them.
Zanu-PF has to be indicted, guilty or not guilty. Sooner than later the link between the violence, a former white now in self-exile and white commercial farmers who drifted back, will be made and Mr McGee shall have a major rethink.
Assuming his mission, conscience and decency are compatible. In the meantime, McGee defies his blackness, his history as a descendant of white atrocities, to become so wonderful, so lovely a white man. Icho!
l Feedback: nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
When James McGee took up his posting in Zimbabwe, he made it clear Zimbabweans should never confuse his skin tint with the colour of his assignment here.
He had come as an agent and representative of the American Government and American interests.
These he would protect and pursue relentlessly, ruthlessly if need be.
I hope everyone took note. I certainly did, and still do.
But I also hope that by the same logic, Mr McGee granted Zimbabwe the same right, indeed freed it from obligations suggested by skin pigmentation.
When it comes to interests and purpose, he is decidedly white. When it comes to its purpose and interests, Zimbabwe is incurably black. Our paths may never meet. That must be plain and clear.
When black is white
I will favour him with a bit of information. His coming triggered debate on why white America had chosen a black surface for its envoy here, and at this point in the history of US-Zimbabwe relations. It is the same question debated here following the appointment of Powell, Rice and Frazer to high posts in the American Administration.
We knew Mr McGee’s chequered history in one country in our region, and in Madagascar. We knew his role in fighting America’s wars in Vietnam.
I remember someone quipping "White America is now so confident of the whiteness of its blacks that colour is no longer an issue. Colour is no longer a perspective. Look at Obama, he could be white America’s next President, far better at pushing her agenda than George W. Bush!"
I disagreed vehemently with that reading, reminding the owner of the frivolous point that Zimbabwe and Zanu-PF retain staunch support in respectable circles of African-African Americans; that as a matter of fact, many self respecting African-African Americans resent to be identified with these black pastes on America’s stripes and stars.
I also reminded the contributor that Obama was useful in knocking Clinton out of the race, herself the real threat to McCain, but never as a potential President of white America. McGee will deliver Zimbabwe to McCain, the same way Obama will clear the way for McCain’s presidency.
Reading from thongs
The debate went much further. How would we handle McGee in the event that he began to take a hostile line against Zimbabwe, in pursuit of white America’s interests? Again, I reminded the debate McGee would take a hostile line, sooner rather than later.
But I saw no dilemma: we would handle him like a white American, which is what he is, until he limps back home into the anonymity of retirement. But the debate still revealed to me a lingering complex, one deriving from history. Our incorrigible wish to be nice and good to anyone carrying our complexion, which make us so susceptible to needless dilemmas.
It is a disposition of gratuitous kindness, often against the imperatives of lived history. And if the cruel history we have lived and endured has not taught us that not everything black is indeed black, and that anything white cannot be black, I guess nothing ever will.
A people who cannot read from thongs of a cruel history, can hardly be expected to learn from fawned kisses and kindness deployed in peacetime. They have an acute wish to be loved and will smile after a sod splatter on their forehead.
Learning from Jews
The point goes much deeper. A people who cannot read or quantify the hurt of history, the massive injury done them by other nationalities in history, cannot be a people in history. Building a collective identity is based, among other things, on bitterness and bruises suffered and shared in history which become a rallying point for building a national project.
Ask the Jews who go as far as declaring war on whoever seeks to challenge the myth of the Nazi holocaust.
That myth founds them, sustains them, motivates them, unites them. Ask the Palestinians, themselves victims of Jewish victims. They know that each of their dead must go towards building an Arab counter-myth to the holocaust by which Jewish genocidal atrocities against them are beyond error and culpability for all time.
Using America’s colours
We put too much store in the man outside, forgetting the monster inside, we people of little judgement! As if we did not bring to the world the wisdom of the proverbial fig: sumptuous rind to please the eye, but dark, creeping vermin inside. True, the saying is meant to caution the love-smitten in the human drama of courtship.
But who says its semantic range is limited only mortal seductive beauty? No, it extends to warning one against the danger of colour-based solidarity belying an ugly and sinister white beneath. It is as if we forget America is a nation of colour. It has perfected the art of deploying its rich colours to effect. This is why multiculturalism and multicolour-ism are so key to understanding her foreign policy.
Arabised lips, Arab blood
When Iraq was rapped, the spokesperson for the "coalition of the willing" was a bloodshot American spotting the smoked skin and hard, thick lips of an Arab. Aggression and genocidal massacre of Iraqis was made palatable to the world by Arab lips.
That is how consent was manufactured, destruction of Arab life, endorsed and naturalised. The same happened in Afghanistan. The same would happen on the African continent the day America decides we deserve a bit of its hot, molten iron in our bodies, before it takes our prized raw materials.
America’s multiculturalism arises not from its largeness of heart, but from the sheer expansiveness of its global imperial designs. It is a weapon of war, which is why America’s citizens of dark shed eagerly await overseas aggression to find their place and glory, albeit for a short while.
If you are an American of Arab roots, you prayerfully hope Syria or Iran will be next, perchance the American military designates you spokesperson. If you are African-African American, you hope Zimbabwe is next so you become the black spokesperson cleansing such infamy.
The story of a good Rhodes
At some point, a black ambassador had to come to Zimbabwe. In fact he did, much early on, well before the situation in Zimbabwe was ripe for regime change, and before America had built a critical mass of "right-thinking" African-African Americans.
We had ambassador Ambassador Rhodes here, who turned to be a wrong and premature deployment of blackness.
Beyond his title as America’s ambassador here, he turned out to be an African-African American who read Garvey, Malcolm X and Nkrumah.
He never lasted. When the timing was right, a McGee had to come, the same way Andrew Young came in the late 1970s, to win for America the confidence of liberation movements which threatened to overrun white Rhodesia. It is very important to know that not everything black is not white.
McGee’s escapades
The technique remains the same: see one side; hear one side; speak one side. We saw this at work in the run-up to the attack on Iraq. America built evidence with which to justify aggression, using sources which had a vested interest in damning Saddam Hussein and his Ba-athist party.
She built evidence from testimonials from persons opposed to Saddam, persons America herself had taken into exile in America, in preparation for Saddam’s ouster. Why did they expect the rat to plead for the accused groundnut? Now to brother McGee.
The last two weeks, McGee has been very active. He has led missions of diplomats, mostly western, to many places, if only to build a story of a Zanu-PF-led torture campaign in the countryside.
He has been to the Avenues Hospital; he has been to hospitals and clinics in Mvurwi, the so-called international media in tow. He has held interviews with anyone who has cared to ask for them.
He has harpooned African envoys, hoping to dramatise African outrage against Zanu-PF "atrocities".
In one interview, he revealed the whole game plan. It is to pin Zanu-PF and Zimbabwe down for debate in the Security Council, "which will happen very soon." Currently, Britain is in the chair.
Next month, America will be, which is what explains the man’s optimism. And his comments are outrageously unguarded, suggesting more an angry American fighting an unjust war in Vietnam, than a circumspect ambassador with any claim to polish. The violence is 99,9 percent Zanu-PF, he says. If there are any Zanu-PF victims — and he says he is not aware of these — these would have earned it by provoking an MDC retaliation!
The man has made up his mind and will not move or be moved by anyone, by anything. He is defiant, and will push aside the police to access any place. Using an arsenal of illegally imported b-gans, he pipes his choreographed encounters to CNN which obliges a line: "Zimbabwe authorities stop American ambassador twice". It is like you have dared ask God why he is called Almighty, you a mere, puny mortal!
Listening to himself
But McGee has some recommendation. People must see a video produced by some organisation called Solidarity Peace Trust clearly showing that Zanu-PF is culpable! You search who this organisation is and, the horror, the horror! It is an NGO registered in South Africa, co-chaired by Pius Ncube and Bishop Rubin Phillip of KwaZulu-Natal Anglican church.
The same Ncube of church sex-scandals, and who accosts America to invade and topple President Mugabe. The same Bishop Rubin who mounts action against Chinese arms shipment to southern African states, including Zimbabwe.
These are avowed enemies of Zanu-PF and unconditional supporters of the MDC, set up and sponsored by the American Government. Why would they have any other motive other than to damn Mugabe, Zanu-PF and Zimbabwe? Why would the American ambassador pretend discovery of material whose gathering and compilation he commissioned through his intelligence officers which his Government has now deployed in industrial quantities, having smelt Zanu-PF blood? Why feign distance?
Calibrated victims
Secondly, who are these victims? Who are the villains? What is this violence? Fundamental questions which fixation with images of torn buttocks is meant to push away. You have villagers who are clearly traumatised, but who have been rounded up and checked into Harare’s most expensive hospital, the Avenues Clinic.
They have even over-spilled to West End clinic. Until now, they were not known. They are not on any medical aid. Until now they would never have dreamt of such first class facilities. They have no money, clearly village wretches, not through the violence which has visited them, but by historical processes which McGee will not want to discuss. But they are in Avenues. They are predominantly women aged between 30 and 40, badly hurt and bruised. Surprisingly, these are calibrated injuries, mostly on buttocks, under feet and backbones. Relatives who visit them are all middle class coxcombs from the city.
They are very aggressive with hospital staff and immediately go quiet when hospital staff are within earshot. Once away, they are in deep discussions with victims, talking deep MDC politics, victims resting their heads on crispy issues of "The Zimbabwean".
Mr McGee, something is not adding up here. After visiting hours, these "relatives" troop out and congregate to swap animated gossip, all political, before disappearing in the direction of Harvest House or some such MDC-connected NGO offices and safe houses.
Dr. Lovemore, I presume?
Much worse, the rags-to-riches kingly victims have been checked in by one Dr. Lovemore, herself historically associated with ZCTU and Amani Trust.
She runs something called Counselling Services Union, again US/UK funded, and positioned just in time for violence we all did not know would come, but which the West predicted and wished through their media networks. More dramatically, Avenues Clinic has a standing contract with Counselling Services Union, clinched well before the poll and the violence!
Most dramatically, Counselling Services Union generously offers to pay admitting hospitals in currency of choice, with Avenues receiving payment in hard currencies. Goodness me! Including Doctors for Human Rights, which is why habitually scarce doctors will be abundant for this one assignment. And they are even keen to set aside rules governing visits to victims.
They will allow you anytime, grant you as much time as you want to get the outrage pasted on Zanu-PF. Come on!
Return of Selous Scouts
Let us not have short memories. We saw this kind of operation during our liberation struggle, did we not? We had Selous Scouts here, did we not? Cruel men of Rhodesia who melted into farming soon after the war. We had the Special Branch here, did we not? Cruel men who melted into civilian outfits soon after.
We had Rhodesia African Rifles, did we not? African askaris who came under the command of white officers the majority of whom were drawn from territorials. And territorials were white farmers. Rhodesia had a small standing army which got boosted from the farms. Have we forgotten that?
Which stupid Zanu-PFsupporter would create a torture base and leave it intact for Mr. McGee to come and inspect for maximum damage against Zanu-PF? Are we not stretching believability?
Has anyone asked why Gutu, Hurungwe, Buhera and Chikomba have become critical for MDC? What was the significance of these districts during the war?
And why is the violence following the zone of resettlement, targeting new farmers, Zanu-PF supporters or MDC turncoats?
Ambassador, are you puzzled by this like all of us? And why do you not visit victims of Mayo and Shamva?
What place do you give to UN reports which indicated MDC was a villain, not just a victim?
Rhodesia’s new war vets?
Why have you not investigated the role and place of white farmers in all this? Have they now found Rhodesia’s war vets in roving MDC thugs they have equipped with vehicles, cameras and crude weaponry, to effect new land occupations?
Are we not seeing MDC’s land policy unfolding ahead of the run-off? You get an MDC youth arrested on scenes of violence. He is unemployed, unkempt.
But he wields an expensive camera, a b-gan, and expensive cellphone with roving facility. The names in it include whites in the UK, America and South Africa, all linked to MDC activism. Those youths, abundantly unsophisticated, uneducated even, have hotlines to BBC and CNN.
How so Mr McGee, Mr Pocock?
So many questions, no one interested in answering them.
Zanu-PF has to be indicted, guilty or not guilty. Sooner than later the link between the violence, a former white now in self-exile and white commercial farmers who drifted back, will be made and Mr McGee shall have a major rethink.
Assuming his mission, conscience and decency are compatible. In the meantime, McGee defies his blackness, his history as a descendant of white atrocities, to become so wonderful, so lovely a white man. Icho!
l Feedback: nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
When Great Minds go for Betrayal
When Great Minds go for Betrayal
By Reason Wafawarova May 16, 2008
There is a question that many of the people who, either have hopelessly surrendered themselves to the might of neo-liberal imperialism as an invincible force or have been hopelessly romanticised by the glitter of imperial wealth keep asking the likes of this writer time and again.
This writer got his e-mail inbox inundated with the same question after an article titled “Work for and defend Zimbabwe” published by The Herald on the 31st of July 2007. The question is phrased in different ways but always to the effect that it is hypocritical to criticise imperialism or any of the western policies while one is either studying or living in a western country. Its either, “Why are you enjoying imperialism if you do not like it?” or “Don’t you think its hypocritical to be criticising imperialism from the comfort of western cities?”
There are no doubts; many if not all of the people who ask this question actually do believe that it is a sensible and legitimate question. The sense and legitimacy is derived from an expectation to see a Western trained intellectual who thinks west, acts west and who does no more than wallow in terminology fetishized by the West just as they wallow in Western whiskey and champagne in obscene and treacherous looking lounges.
They expect an intellectual who comes back to Africa with nothing more than degrees and a shiny package of adjectives and superlatives reflecting the glitter and glory of the Western universities that produced them. In short they are contented with an African intellectual, who after years of study and research in the West does no more than imitate Western life even to the extent of taking pride in the idiotic fact that their children cannot speak their vernacular language as they would be trying to make them English, French or whichever imperial empire they subscribe to.
This writer certainly thinks such thinking is worse than vain and would like to make it clear that the experiential and academic knowledge he has acquired in the West so far and that be to be acquired later will be used to benefit the African context in general and the Zimbabwean context in particular. That context is the context of struggle, a struggle that stretches back to the days of slavery, up to colonial days and all the way to the current struggle against neo-liberal imperialism. That context is no context to wallow in velvety plastic luxury while availing oneself as a tool for the furtherance of the subjugation of one’s own people; an attitude that says Africa is a place good enough only for aid.
It must be stated categorically that there is no salvation for our suffering people in developing countries unless we, people from the less developed countries turn our backs to the models that charlatans of all types bred by the legacy of the imperial empire have tried to sell us since the collapse of colonial empires, a long fifty eight years for Africa. There is no salvation outside this rejection just like what President Robert Mugabe told a Ghanaian audience in July 2007. There has not been any development from all the models so far imposed on the African continent; the most failing being the Structural Adjustment Programmes, often referred to as SAPs.
The only meaningful development for Africa in general and for Zimbabwe as a particular state cannot be separated from a rupture of the kind we saw in Zimbabwe in 2000, the people driven land redistribution programme. It was not the first rupture of its kind.
The Iranians first nationalised their oil in 1945, then there was Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaha project, Kenneth Kaunda’s humanism, Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal and Gaddaffi’s OPEC dream where the Oil and Petroleum Exporting Countries sought to have full control of their product.
What is interesting is that every time there has been such a rupture there is always a wave of Western intellectual giants who just emerge as if from deep slumber. They awaken to the threatening and dizzying rise of billions of people in rags and they always stand aghast at the threat of this hunger-driven multitude weighing on their privileges- they relentlessly work on counter strategies; all designed to perpetuate the world order that nurtures racial supremacy while it preaches against it.
Rather than looking at the plight of the multitude in rags, they anxiously search for their usual supernatural silencing tricks, which habitually come in form of development packages meant to divert attention as well as to pacify the threatening masses. A reading of reports and minutes by the so-called “pro-democracy groups” in western countries as well as the publications of innumerable forums and seminars on the so-called “Zimbabwe crisis” is ample illustration of how the West will go to any length to tame anything they perceive as a threat to their imperial hegemony.
Surely we cannot ridicule or ignore the patient efforts of honest intellectuals, hailing from both the industrialised and the less industrialised countries; who, because they have ears to hear and eyes to see, are discovering the terrible consequences of the devastation imposed on developing countries by the so called specialists in the development of the “Third World”.
This writer wants to be part of this team of honest intellectuals and is making every effort to do so day by day. The dream is to have a growing mass of such honest intellectuals founding a revolution for the silent majority of this planet. The fear is that the neo-liberal team of the not so honest intellectuals continues to use the massive resources from imperial coffers to showcase the wave of their magic wand- a bait meant to spring us back to a world of slavery dressed up in today’s capitalist fashion.
That fear is becoming more than a threat if one looks at the fact that the educated petty bourgeoisie of Africa – more so that of Zimbabwe, is not prepared to give up its privileges. This is either because of the sweetness of the western way of life, the employee mentality created by the western way of training in former colonies or plain intellectual laziness.
The lot in this petty bourgeoisie club tend to forget that all genuine political struggle requires rigorous, theoretical debate, and they refuse to rise to the intellectual effort of conceiving new concepts equal to the murderous struggle that lies ahead of every African country.
They are contented with being passive and pathetic consumers of western intellectual input; that to the extent of labelling some of us, the intrepid few that chose not to live on borrowed reasoning- ungrateful hypocrites who fail to appreciate the greatness of the western way of life.
Surely there is nothing hypocritical about pointing out that the ways of your host are not in the best interest of the entirety of humanity, even if that host was a Western country. Rather there is everything treacherous about a Joseph who goes into Egypt and totally forgets that he has a whole Israelite tribe to rescue from biting poverty just because he happens to be promoted by the Pharaoh to be a high ranking official in the Egyptian way of governance.
That is precisely what some of our intellectuals are doing; fighting to be at the helm of the international system by pretending to be as white as wool because that way they make it ahead of fellow blacks and access the bonuses that come with such posturing. These are bonuses of indignity, shame and treachery.
Now we keep asking. What has happened since the days of Dr Martin Luther King? What has happened since the days of negritude and African Personality? What has happened to the vision of Marcus Garvey, Kwameh Nkurumah, Julius Nyerere, the pre-independence Nelson Mandela, Samora Machel and that of Patrice Lumumba?
We cannot find an answer as to why the search for ideas that are genuinely of an African origin, produced by the brains of the “great” African intellectuals is all but in vain. All we can see is borrowed reasoning-our vocabulary and ideas are all imports from elsewhere and somehow we find it reasonable to ask why we continue to be a continent of beggars.
This writer believes that there is no such thing as neutral writing and it is now both necessary and urgent that out trained personnel and those who work with the pen realise this glaring reality. By imagining or pretending to be neutral in such times as the stormy times we are living in these days, all we do is give our adversaries a monopoly over thought, imagination and creativity.
This writer also wishes to put a message across to Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), as well as to the country’s petty bourgeoisie, its media fraternity and the community of its intellectuals. This message is to say, before it is too late- and indeed it is already late- we all need to come home to ourselves, not necessarily by flying home if one is in the Diaspora; but to our society and to the misery we have inherited, a misery which has only gotten worse in the last eight years but was never as glorious as the Western Press would want all of us to believe.
They say Zimbabwe was the Jewel of Africa and a land of milk and honey but are we as naïve as to buy that kind of distortion of history? Are we as naïve as to help tell the world that farm workers on white owned commercial farms were a shining jewel of Africa-that they made people of Zimbabwe live in luxury?
We must understand that the battle for an ideology that serves the needs of the disinherited and suffering masses is not and cannot be in vain.
That is it may, we must also understand that such an ideology can only gain credibility on an international level by us being genuinely creative, honest and dedicated, otherwise it rots in the dustbin of rhetoric.
We all need to portray an honest and faithful image of our people and our country, an image conducive to carrying out fundamental change in political and social conditions and to wrenching our beloved country from foreign domination and exploitation. Failure to adhere to this basic rule of patriotism is nothing but betrayal, never mind the justification behind it.
We cannot continue widening the chasm between the affluent people of our society and those whose only aspiration is to eat their full and quench their thirst, just to survive and preserve the dignity of passing through the face of this earth. How long are we going to enrich ourselves by profiteering from the sweat of the poor? The rich man’s cattle cannot continue to fatten on the crops of the poor man in a country we all inherited from our ancestry.
Lastly, this writer will talk about the concept of aid, something those in the opposition keep claiming to be the only ones with the key to. Indeed the MDC has the keys to the house that stores international aid laced with dirty strings and that key is their servile posturing as willing poodles for the imperialist cause.
Like many developing countries across the globe Zimbabwe can be inundated with foreign aid, theoretically meant to work in favour of development but at the end the result has always been the same in many places, especially in Africa-but one can always search in vain for anything that can be called development, that is, development particularly linked to the aid.
Those in power, either because of misleading advice from the so-called specialists on Third World development, naïveté, class selfishness or pressure from political benchmarks imposed by the donor countries; often cannot and will not take control of the influx from abroad and place demands on it that are in keeping with the interests of the people.
At each evaluation phase this aid is of token significance, if at all it is of significance to such indicators as infant mortality rate, illiteracy rate, life expectancy, doctor-patient ratio, school-attendance rate and the Gross Domestic Product.
It is often of significance in its creation of a petty bourgeoisie middle class ready to pacify and descend on the poor masses should any of them threaten their newly acquired privileges. That is exactly what the aid is calculated to achieve in the first place and we can only be fooling ourselves if we believe this theory of all blame squarely lying with corrupt African governments. In any case, aren’t the proceeds of the alleged corruption invested in the donor countries themselves, making it all a very convenient cycle in terms of flow of currency?
The only aid we should be encouraging is aid that helps us to overcome the need for aid and often that aid does not come in dollars. It comes from good willed and fair partnerships in trade and governance processes.
The science of today’s multinationals does not condone or cherish such partnerships. They thrive on a monopoly of knowledge and would rather perpetuate the crisis of childhood diseases and water born diseases than share the knowledge that combats such challenges. They prefer to expand their knowledge into the cosmetics industry by setting up plastic surgeries meant to satisfy the whims of some overfed people whose charm and life are threatened by the excess of calories in their meals. Their communities need technology and science to deal with diseases emanating from excess food while our children are born in malnutrition-related sickness, and all we can do is look and admire.
This writer thinks its time our great minds and our people stand in unison and declare our resolve for a better world. After all they say a slave who does not organise his own rebellion deserves no pity for his lot.
He alone is responsible for his misfortune, especially if he harbours illusions in the dubious assurance of a master’s promise for freedom. This is the kind of promise we seem to be getting from those talking about something called a new Zimbabwe. Freedom can only be won through struggle and the conflict between the opposition MDC and the Zimbabwean government, if not the people cannot pass for a struggle. It is merely a counterrevolutionary conflict benefiting the real enemy against whom the real struggle is to be fought.
In this context the solution for the crisis we Zimbabweans have created for ourselves since the MDC allowed themselves to be imperialist tools in 2000 can only be solved by us Zimbabweans and no one else. We need to re-orient our political, intellectual and technical focus towards the struggle that empowers the generality of the Zimbabwean population.
Such re-orientation is the only way that can free us from the mentality that says one has to be servile to imperialism for them to reside or study in a Western country.
We do need to appreciate and tolerate the western way of life in terms of co-existence and sharing values but that has nothing to do with condoning the stealing of our countries’ resources.
Case rested.
Homeland or death. Together we shall overcome.
Reason Wafawarova is Metro’s Political Columnist he is based in Sydney, Australia and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk.
By Reason Wafawarova May 16, 2008
There is a question that many of the people who, either have hopelessly surrendered themselves to the might of neo-liberal imperialism as an invincible force or have been hopelessly romanticised by the glitter of imperial wealth keep asking the likes of this writer time and again.
This writer got his e-mail inbox inundated with the same question after an article titled “Work for and defend Zimbabwe” published by The Herald on the 31st of July 2007. The question is phrased in different ways but always to the effect that it is hypocritical to criticise imperialism or any of the western policies while one is either studying or living in a western country. Its either, “Why are you enjoying imperialism if you do not like it?” or “Don’t you think its hypocritical to be criticising imperialism from the comfort of western cities?”
There are no doubts; many if not all of the people who ask this question actually do believe that it is a sensible and legitimate question. The sense and legitimacy is derived from an expectation to see a Western trained intellectual who thinks west, acts west and who does no more than wallow in terminology fetishized by the West just as they wallow in Western whiskey and champagne in obscene and treacherous looking lounges.
They expect an intellectual who comes back to Africa with nothing more than degrees and a shiny package of adjectives and superlatives reflecting the glitter and glory of the Western universities that produced them. In short they are contented with an African intellectual, who after years of study and research in the West does no more than imitate Western life even to the extent of taking pride in the idiotic fact that their children cannot speak their vernacular language as they would be trying to make them English, French or whichever imperial empire they subscribe to.
This writer certainly thinks such thinking is worse than vain and would like to make it clear that the experiential and academic knowledge he has acquired in the West so far and that be to be acquired later will be used to benefit the African context in general and the Zimbabwean context in particular. That context is the context of struggle, a struggle that stretches back to the days of slavery, up to colonial days and all the way to the current struggle against neo-liberal imperialism. That context is no context to wallow in velvety plastic luxury while availing oneself as a tool for the furtherance of the subjugation of one’s own people; an attitude that says Africa is a place good enough only for aid.
It must be stated categorically that there is no salvation for our suffering people in developing countries unless we, people from the less developed countries turn our backs to the models that charlatans of all types bred by the legacy of the imperial empire have tried to sell us since the collapse of colonial empires, a long fifty eight years for Africa. There is no salvation outside this rejection just like what President Robert Mugabe told a Ghanaian audience in July 2007. There has not been any development from all the models so far imposed on the African continent; the most failing being the Structural Adjustment Programmes, often referred to as SAPs.
The only meaningful development for Africa in general and for Zimbabwe as a particular state cannot be separated from a rupture of the kind we saw in Zimbabwe in 2000, the people driven land redistribution programme. It was not the first rupture of its kind.
The Iranians first nationalised their oil in 1945, then there was Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaha project, Kenneth Kaunda’s humanism, Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal and Gaddaffi’s OPEC dream where the Oil and Petroleum Exporting Countries sought to have full control of their product.
What is interesting is that every time there has been such a rupture there is always a wave of Western intellectual giants who just emerge as if from deep slumber. They awaken to the threatening and dizzying rise of billions of people in rags and they always stand aghast at the threat of this hunger-driven multitude weighing on their privileges- they relentlessly work on counter strategies; all designed to perpetuate the world order that nurtures racial supremacy while it preaches against it.
Rather than looking at the plight of the multitude in rags, they anxiously search for their usual supernatural silencing tricks, which habitually come in form of development packages meant to divert attention as well as to pacify the threatening masses. A reading of reports and minutes by the so-called “pro-democracy groups” in western countries as well as the publications of innumerable forums and seminars on the so-called “Zimbabwe crisis” is ample illustration of how the West will go to any length to tame anything they perceive as a threat to their imperial hegemony.
Surely we cannot ridicule or ignore the patient efforts of honest intellectuals, hailing from both the industrialised and the less industrialised countries; who, because they have ears to hear and eyes to see, are discovering the terrible consequences of the devastation imposed on developing countries by the so called specialists in the development of the “Third World”.
This writer wants to be part of this team of honest intellectuals and is making every effort to do so day by day. The dream is to have a growing mass of such honest intellectuals founding a revolution for the silent majority of this planet. The fear is that the neo-liberal team of the not so honest intellectuals continues to use the massive resources from imperial coffers to showcase the wave of their magic wand- a bait meant to spring us back to a world of slavery dressed up in today’s capitalist fashion.
That fear is becoming more than a threat if one looks at the fact that the educated petty bourgeoisie of Africa – more so that of Zimbabwe, is not prepared to give up its privileges. This is either because of the sweetness of the western way of life, the employee mentality created by the western way of training in former colonies or plain intellectual laziness.
The lot in this petty bourgeoisie club tend to forget that all genuine political struggle requires rigorous, theoretical debate, and they refuse to rise to the intellectual effort of conceiving new concepts equal to the murderous struggle that lies ahead of every African country.
They are contented with being passive and pathetic consumers of western intellectual input; that to the extent of labelling some of us, the intrepid few that chose not to live on borrowed reasoning- ungrateful hypocrites who fail to appreciate the greatness of the western way of life.
Surely there is nothing hypocritical about pointing out that the ways of your host are not in the best interest of the entirety of humanity, even if that host was a Western country. Rather there is everything treacherous about a Joseph who goes into Egypt and totally forgets that he has a whole Israelite tribe to rescue from biting poverty just because he happens to be promoted by the Pharaoh to be a high ranking official in the Egyptian way of governance.
That is precisely what some of our intellectuals are doing; fighting to be at the helm of the international system by pretending to be as white as wool because that way they make it ahead of fellow blacks and access the bonuses that come with such posturing. These are bonuses of indignity, shame and treachery.
Now we keep asking. What has happened since the days of Dr Martin Luther King? What has happened since the days of negritude and African Personality? What has happened to the vision of Marcus Garvey, Kwameh Nkurumah, Julius Nyerere, the pre-independence Nelson Mandela, Samora Machel and that of Patrice Lumumba?
We cannot find an answer as to why the search for ideas that are genuinely of an African origin, produced by the brains of the “great” African intellectuals is all but in vain. All we can see is borrowed reasoning-our vocabulary and ideas are all imports from elsewhere and somehow we find it reasonable to ask why we continue to be a continent of beggars.
This writer believes that there is no such thing as neutral writing and it is now both necessary and urgent that out trained personnel and those who work with the pen realise this glaring reality. By imagining or pretending to be neutral in such times as the stormy times we are living in these days, all we do is give our adversaries a monopoly over thought, imagination and creativity.
This writer also wishes to put a message across to Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), as well as to the country’s petty bourgeoisie, its media fraternity and the community of its intellectuals. This message is to say, before it is too late- and indeed it is already late- we all need to come home to ourselves, not necessarily by flying home if one is in the Diaspora; but to our society and to the misery we have inherited, a misery which has only gotten worse in the last eight years but was never as glorious as the Western Press would want all of us to believe.
They say Zimbabwe was the Jewel of Africa and a land of milk and honey but are we as naïve as to buy that kind of distortion of history? Are we as naïve as to help tell the world that farm workers on white owned commercial farms were a shining jewel of Africa-that they made people of Zimbabwe live in luxury?
We must understand that the battle for an ideology that serves the needs of the disinherited and suffering masses is not and cannot be in vain.
That is it may, we must also understand that such an ideology can only gain credibility on an international level by us being genuinely creative, honest and dedicated, otherwise it rots in the dustbin of rhetoric.
We all need to portray an honest and faithful image of our people and our country, an image conducive to carrying out fundamental change in political and social conditions and to wrenching our beloved country from foreign domination and exploitation. Failure to adhere to this basic rule of patriotism is nothing but betrayal, never mind the justification behind it.
We cannot continue widening the chasm between the affluent people of our society and those whose only aspiration is to eat their full and quench their thirst, just to survive and preserve the dignity of passing through the face of this earth. How long are we going to enrich ourselves by profiteering from the sweat of the poor? The rich man’s cattle cannot continue to fatten on the crops of the poor man in a country we all inherited from our ancestry.
Lastly, this writer will talk about the concept of aid, something those in the opposition keep claiming to be the only ones with the key to. Indeed the MDC has the keys to the house that stores international aid laced with dirty strings and that key is their servile posturing as willing poodles for the imperialist cause.
Like many developing countries across the globe Zimbabwe can be inundated with foreign aid, theoretically meant to work in favour of development but at the end the result has always been the same in many places, especially in Africa-but one can always search in vain for anything that can be called development, that is, development particularly linked to the aid.
Those in power, either because of misleading advice from the so-called specialists on Third World development, naïveté, class selfishness or pressure from political benchmarks imposed by the donor countries; often cannot and will not take control of the influx from abroad and place demands on it that are in keeping with the interests of the people.
At each evaluation phase this aid is of token significance, if at all it is of significance to such indicators as infant mortality rate, illiteracy rate, life expectancy, doctor-patient ratio, school-attendance rate and the Gross Domestic Product.
It is often of significance in its creation of a petty bourgeoisie middle class ready to pacify and descend on the poor masses should any of them threaten their newly acquired privileges. That is exactly what the aid is calculated to achieve in the first place and we can only be fooling ourselves if we believe this theory of all blame squarely lying with corrupt African governments. In any case, aren’t the proceeds of the alleged corruption invested in the donor countries themselves, making it all a very convenient cycle in terms of flow of currency?
The only aid we should be encouraging is aid that helps us to overcome the need for aid and often that aid does not come in dollars. It comes from good willed and fair partnerships in trade and governance processes.
The science of today’s multinationals does not condone or cherish such partnerships. They thrive on a monopoly of knowledge and would rather perpetuate the crisis of childhood diseases and water born diseases than share the knowledge that combats such challenges. They prefer to expand their knowledge into the cosmetics industry by setting up plastic surgeries meant to satisfy the whims of some overfed people whose charm and life are threatened by the excess of calories in their meals. Their communities need technology and science to deal with diseases emanating from excess food while our children are born in malnutrition-related sickness, and all we can do is look and admire.
This writer thinks its time our great minds and our people stand in unison and declare our resolve for a better world. After all they say a slave who does not organise his own rebellion deserves no pity for his lot.
He alone is responsible for his misfortune, especially if he harbours illusions in the dubious assurance of a master’s promise for freedom. This is the kind of promise we seem to be getting from those talking about something called a new Zimbabwe. Freedom can only be won through struggle and the conflict between the opposition MDC and the Zimbabwean government, if not the people cannot pass for a struggle. It is merely a counterrevolutionary conflict benefiting the real enemy against whom the real struggle is to be fought.
In this context the solution for the crisis we Zimbabweans have created for ourselves since the MDC allowed themselves to be imperialist tools in 2000 can only be solved by us Zimbabweans and no one else. We need to re-orient our political, intellectual and technical focus towards the struggle that empowers the generality of the Zimbabwean population.
Such re-orientation is the only way that can free us from the mentality that says one has to be servile to imperialism for them to reside or study in a Western country.
We do need to appreciate and tolerate the western way of life in terms of co-existence and sharing values but that has nothing to do with condoning the stealing of our countries’ resources.
Case rested.
Homeland or death. Together we shall overcome.
Reason Wafawarova is Metro’s Political Columnist he is based in Sydney, Australia and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk.
Friday, 16 May 2008
McGee, we wear sanctions as badge of honour
McGee, we wear sanctions as badge of honour
By Caesar Zvayi
THE news in South Africa over the past week was that the US State Department had decided to remove ANC leaders, among them Nelson Mandela on whom the Westerners dote so much, from a Terrorist Watch blacklist.
ANC members, past and present, who wish to travel to the US have to get waivers from the State Department and to this day, even President Mbeki — is allowed to travel only to the United Nations headquarters in New York but not to Washington DC or any other parts of the so-called Free World.
Matters came to a head when former South African Ambassador to the US, Barbara Masekela, was terror-flagged when she attempted to visit a dying cousin in the US, by the time she was cleared, her cousin had already died.
On May 8, the US House of Representatives adopted a bill aimed at taking Mandela and other ANC leaders off the terror blacklist.
The House agreed to give the State Department and Homeland Security Department powers to overlook the ANC’s anti-apartheid activities when determining whether to allow members and former members into the US.
Please note, ‘‘anti-apartheid activities.’’
A similar bill is moving through the US Senate with supporters hoping to get it passed before Mandela’s 90th birthday on July 18.
ANC leaders were naturally elated with many of them lauding the US for a ‘‘progressive decision.’’ It, however, appears not many saw the irony in Uncle Sam’s actions.
Here is a country and leadership claiming to be paragons of liberty and democracy but which had no qualms placing the leaders and members of a liberation organisation that was fighting the evil system of apartheid in occupied South Africa on travel and other forms of sanctions. Instead of recognising that the likes of Oliver Tambo, Mandela and Walter Sisulu were fighting a just war against settler oppression, they were instead labelled terrorists as the US government maintained open relations with the racist regime in Pretoria.
Ironically, Washington put the ANC leadership under sanctions while it refused to impose sanctions against the racist regime that was oppressing the black majority in South Africa, preferring what they called ‘‘constructive engagement.’’
This approach, constructive engagement, was the brainchild of the then US assistant secretary of state for African Affairs in the Reagan administration, Chester Crocker who argued that instead of imposing economic sanctions on, and divestment from Pretoria, the West had to ‘‘use incentives to encourage South Africa to gradually move away from apartheid.’’
‘‘Constructive engagement" latter became Washington’s official policy towards apartheid Pretoria.
It is important to note that this duplicity was born of the same Crocker who, in a foreign policy testimony to the US Senate in 2001, proposed imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe for, according to him, "to separate the Zimbabwean people from Zanu-PF we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you senators have the stomach for what you have to do."
These words, which were borrowed from utterances made by the then secretary of state Henry Kissinger who said the US had to make the Chilean economy scream to topple the leftwing government of Salvador Allende in 1973, culminated in the drafting of the US sanctions law, the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act that was signed into law by George W. Bush on December 21 that year.
The ZDERA not only provides for the cutting of Zimbabwe’s lines of credit from all multilateral lending institutions but also funding for the MDC and other quasi-opposition groupings in Zimbabwe in pursuit of the regime change agenda.
But what is the point here.
The point here is that Washington, which wants to pass itself as a progressive democracy that supports ‘‘democratrisation’’ throughout the world was opposed to democratisation in South Africa, and instead covertly supported the apartheid State to delay black majority rule.
The same way it supported the racist Smith regime in the then Rhodesia by by-passing UN sanctions to continue trading with Smith and helping him, again, through apartheid South Africa.
A bit of history may help the historically naïve, particularly one James D. McGee who is proving to be every bit the House Negro I predicted many moons ago, to appreciate the destructive role Washington played during Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and how those actions served to delay the dawn of independence at a cost of over 50 000 innocent lives, the same way Washington’s illegal sanctions today seek to torpedo Zimbabwe’s quest for economic independence.
When Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Douglas Smith made, his Unilateral Declaration of Independence on November 11 1965, the progressive world was naturally outraged and the UN Security Council promptly responded by slapping the Smith regime with a raft of sanctions beginning that year till the brief restoration of British rule in December 1979.
Though the terms of the sanctions forbade trade or financial dealings with Rhodesia, the US supported the beleaguered settler regime regardless and covertly channelled assistance through apartheid South Africa.
US allies among them Portugal — then under Marcello Caetano, Israel, and Iran then under the US proxy — Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi — also assisted and traded with Rhodesia.
In an attempt to bypass the UN sanctions, the US passed the so-called Byrd Amendment in 1971 and continued to buy chrome from Rhodesia in violation of the UN sanctions arguing that the mineral was a strategic raw material yet it went on to adorn the chrome-plated bumpers of America’s monstrous vehicles.
As if that was not enough, Washington also contributed to the establishment of an armaments industry in Rhodesia that enabled the Rhodesian Front to decimate over 50 000 black Zimbabweans whose only "crime" was daring to demand black majority rule.
The US also provided the technical knowledge and support, again through apartheid South Africa, toward establishing the 700-kilometre Border Minefield Obstacle along Zimbabwe’s borders with Zambia and Mozambique in an attempt to stop aspiring cadres from crossing to training camps and to blow-up trained combatants who were crossing back into Zimbabwe.
Furthermore, other American mercenaries and US servicemen joined the Rhodesian Security Forces ranks, with many of them bringing back to Rhodesia military ideas and concepts from Vietnam where the US had just been routed in 1975.
But again what is the point here.
The point is that the US has always been opposed to progressive liberation movements for the simple reason that they advance the interests of the black majority over those of white capital. Thus the illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe today, just like those that were imposed on the ANC at the height of the struggle against the apartheid regime, should be seen in that context.
What is more, the US has never, never supported any progressive liberation movement throughout the history of decolonisation.
I challenge McGee to name just one progressive movement that had the baking of the US in the history of mankind.
Washington has, instead, always been found on the side of stooges like Mobutu Sese Seko over Patrice Lumumba in the DRC; Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA over the MPLA in Angola, Aphonso Dhlakama’s MNR over Frelimo in Mozambique, the same way it continues to support MDC-T’s Tsvangirai over President Mugabe’s Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe.
If anything, the US has been implicated in the assasinations and deposition of progressive leaders in Africa beginning with Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana to Laurent Kabila in the DRC.
As such McGee, our black brother getting angry on behalf of white America must know that his ranting and theatrics do not fool us at all.
Contrary to his delusions, McGee is not fighting for the democratisation of Zimbabwe but is just a big player in the Uncle Tom role long conceived by America, their America. A script that seeks to preserve Western hegemony over all other parts of the world.
The sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe only serve to notify the progressive world that Zimbabwe is waging a noble fight. McGee’s obsession with Tsvangirai and the MDC-T only serve to tell us that, Morgan is the latest in a long line of White America’s adopted children among them the Tshombes, Savimbis and Dhlakamas.
We wear the sanctions like a badge of honour. History is on our side, we will be vindicated just as the ANC has been vindicated.
By Caesar Zvayi
THE news in South Africa over the past week was that the US State Department had decided to remove ANC leaders, among them Nelson Mandela on whom the Westerners dote so much, from a Terrorist Watch blacklist.
ANC members, past and present, who wish to travel to the US have to get waivers from the State Department and to this day, even President Mbeki — is allowed to travel only to the United Nations headquarters in New York but not to Washington DC or any other parts of the so-called Free World.
Matters came to a head when former South African Ambassador to the US, Barbara Masekela, was terror-flagged when she attempted to visit a dying cousin in the US, by the time she was cleared, her cousin had already died.
On May 8, the US House of Representatives adopted a bill aimed at taking Mandela and other ANC leaders off the terror blacklist.
The House agreed to give the State Department and Homeland Security Department powers to overlook the ANC’s anti-apartheid activities when determining whether to allow members and former members into the US.
Please note, ‘‘anti-apartheid activities.’’
A similar bill is moving through the US Senate with supporters hoping to get it passed before Mandela’s 90th birthday on July 18.
ANC leaders were naturally elated with many of them lauding the US for a ‘‘progressive decision.’’ It, however, appears not many saw the irony in Uncle Sam’s actions.
Here is a country and leadership claiming to be paragons of liberty and democracy but which had no qualms placing the leaders and members of a liberation organisation that was fighting the evil system of apartheid in occupied South Africa on travel and other forms of sanctions. Instead of recognising that the likes of Oliver Tambo, Mandela and Walter Sisulu were fighting a just war against settler oppression, they were instead labelled terrorists as the US government maintained open relations with the racist regime in Pretoria.
Ironically, Washington put the ANC leadership under sanctions while it refused to impose sanctions against the racist regime that was oppressing the black majority in South Africa, preferring what they called ‘‘constructive engagement.’’
This approach, constructive engagement, was the brainchild of the then US assistant secretary of state for African Affairs in the Reagan administration, Chester Crocker who argued that instead of imposing economic sanctions on, and divestment from Pretoria, the West had to ‘‘use incentives to encourage South Africa to gradually move away from apartheid.’’
‘‘Constructive engagement" latter became Washington’s official policy towards apartheid Pretoria.
It is important to note that this duplicity was born of the same Crocker who, in a foreign policy testimony to the US Senate in 2001, proposed imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe for, according to him, "to separate the Zimbabwean people from Zanu-PF we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you senators have the stomach for what you have to do."
These words, which were borrowed from utterances made by the then secretary of state Henry Kissinger who said the US had to make the Chilean economy scream to topple the leftwing government of Salvador Allende in 1973, culminated in the drafting of the US sanctions law, the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act that was signed into law by George W. Bush on December 21 that year.
The ZDERA not only provides for the cutting of Zimbabwe’s lines of credit from all multilateral lending institutions but also funding for the MDC and other quasi-opposition groupings in Zimbabwe in pursuit of the regime change agenda.
But what is the point here.
The point here is that Washington, which wants to pass itself as a progressive democracy that supports ‘‘democratrisation’’ throughout the world was opposed to democratisation in South Africa, and instead covertly supported the apartheid State to delay black majority rule.
The same way it supported the racist Smith regime in the then Rhodesia by by-passing UN sanctions to continue trading with Smith and helping him, again, through apartheid South Africa.
A bit of history may help the historically naïve, particularly one James D. McGee who is proving to be every bit the House Negro I predicted many moons ago, to appreciate the destructive role Washington played during Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and how those actions served to delay the dawn of independence at a cost of over 50 000 innocent lives, the same way Washington’s illegal sanctions today seek to torpedo Zimbabwe’s quest for economic independence.
When Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Douglas Smith made, his Unilateral Declaration of Independence on November 11 1965, the progressive world was naturally outraged and the UN Security Council promptly responded by slapping the Smith regime with a raft of sanctions beginning that year till the brief restoration of British rule in December 1979.
Though the terms of the sanctions forbade trade or financial dealings with Rhodesia, the US supported the beleaguered settler regime regardless and covertly channelled assistance through apartheid South Africa.
US allies among them Portugal — then under Marcello Caetano, Israel, and Iran then under the US proxy — Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi — also assisted and traded with Rhodesia.
In an attempt to bypass the UN sanctions, the US passed the so-called Byrd Amendment in 1971 and continued to buy chrome from Rhodesia in violation of the UN sanctions arguing that the mineral was a strategic raw material yet it went on to adorn the chrome-plated bumpers of America’s monstrous vehicles.
As if that was not enough, Washington also contributed to the establishment of an armaments industry in Rhodesia that enabled the Rhodesian Front to decimate over 50 000 black Zimbabweans whose only "crime" was daring to demand black majority rule.
The US also provided the technical knowledge and support, again through apartheid South Africa, toward establishing the 700-kilometre Border Minefield Obstacle along Zimbabwe’s borders with Zambia and Mozambique in an attempt to stop aspiring cadres from crossing to training camps and to blow-up trained combatants who were crossing back into Zimbabwe.
Furthermore, other American mercenaries and US servicemen joined the Rhodesian Security Forces ranks, with many of them bringing back to Rhodesia military ideas and concepts from Vietnam where the US had just been routed in 1975.
But again what is the point here.
The point is that the US has always been opposed to progressive liberation movements for the simple reason that they advance the interests of the black majority over those of white capital. Thus the illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe today, just like those that were imposed on the ANC at the height of the struggle against the apartheid regime, should be seen in that context.
What is more, the US has never, never supported any progressive liberation movement throughout the history of decolonisation.
I challenge McGee to name just one progressive movement that had the baking of the US in the history of mankind.
Washington has, instead, always been found on the side of stooges like Mobutu Sese Seko over Patrice Lumumba in the DRC; Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA over the MPLA in Angola, Aphonso Dhlakama’s MNR over Frelimo in Mozambique, the same way it continues to support MDC-T’s Tsvangirai over President Mugabe’s Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe.
If anything, the US has been implicated in the assasinations and deposition of progressive leaders in Africa beginning with Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana to Laurent Kabila in the DRC.
As such McGee, our black brother getting angry on behalf of white America must know that his ranting and theatrics do not fool us at all.
Contrary to his delusions, McGee is not fighting for the democratisation of Zimbabwe but is just a big player in the Uncle Tom role long conceived by America, their America. A script that seeks to preserve Western hegemony over all other parts of the world.
The sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe only serve to notify the progressive world that Zimbabwe is waging a noble fight. McGee’s obsession with Tsvangirai and the MDC-T only serve to tell us that, Morgan is the latest in a long line of White America’s adopted children among them the Tshombes, Savimbis and Dhlakamas.
We wear the sanctions like a badge of honour. History is on our side, we will be vindicated just as the ANC has been vindicated.
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
McGee is no diplomat
McGee is no diplomat
EDITOR — James D. McGee, the man George W. Bush sent to do Washington’s dirty work in Zimbabwe, should be seen by the whole world for what he really is, a political activist for a wrong cause.
He should not be taken seriously, whoever does will do so at his own peril.
This Uncle Tom is a caged man.
The US was struck by a disaster, Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans with heart-rending scenes of dead bodies of people of all ages, who were left to float around simply because they were mostly black.
Bush was not moved, he did not give a hoot, neither did he bother to visit the injured, black people, after such a horrendous occurrence, until five days had lapsed and probably only because of pressure from an enraged African-American community that questioned his attitude and feelings towards black people, given a disaster of such scale in his own homeland and to his own people.
McGee is now telling us that his government, Bush’s government has great love and care for the black people of Epworth and Dzivaresekwa, some of whom carry wounds sustained in beerhall brawls.
Charity begins at home Jimmy. It is the resources of Zimbabwe and not the people of Zimbabwe, that your bosses in Washington love.
Surprisingly, most of the pictures of alleged political violence that find their way onto Internet sites get to US and UK without passing through the nearest Police Post wherever they will be alleged to have occurred.
The world should be aware of the machinations of this hawkish US regime.
Recently we had one Jendayi Frazer the US assistant secretary of State for African affairs, flying thousands of kilometres from Washington, unnecessarily polluting our environment for no genuine nor just cause, running about the most peaceful and politically stable region in Africa (Southern Africa), like a papparazi, assuming the role of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and trying to impose a Western puppet Morgan Tsvangirai on the people of Zimbabwe.
Now McGee and his embassy want to assume the duties of our national police force, purporting to be investigating alleged crimes and intending to prosecute the alleged perpetrators.
We did not know that there is now a police post and court at 172 Herbert Chitepo Avenue. In case McGee does not realise it, his actions constitute gross provocation and abuse of our hospitality.
Zimbabwe has one of the best and professional police forces in the world and a very competent and functioning justice delivery system.
ZRP should demand evidence of the crimes McGee claims to have knowledge of and institute investigations.
Should he fail to provide it, that will amount to obstructing or interfering with police investigation.
He will be guilty of complicity to any of the crimes he will be withholding the evidence.
He deserves to be stripped of his diplomatic immunity, for there is nothing diplomatic about him and the way he conducts his political activism.
The hawkish US regime, politicised the Global HIV and Aids Fund to prejudice Zimbabwe.
They are now politicising HIV and Aids-related deaths claiming them to be victims of post-election violence in their bid to equate Zimbabwe to post-election Kenya.
The duplicitous Western alliance is made up of spoilers bent on undermining our success, unity and revolution.
They should rein in their vagrants wandering on our farmlands, anticipating a victory by Tsvangirai in the run-off.
The same Tsvangirai whom my own grade seven son ridiculed for failing to work out percentages.
McGee came here to pursue US foreign policy that wants a reversal of the land reform programme and to abort our revolution.
They hope to achieve this through indoctrinating people with political doctrines that strip them of their moral, cultural and emotional independence.
They want to programme the people to meet their specifications and render them mere robots, where every action and re-action has to be called by them and guided by them.
We do not need this, we should remain masters of our destiny, independent in our thinking, our deeds and views.
In the impending run-off, whoever
is doing Brown’s bidding should face the same fate as Brown’s resounding defeat.
Cde Cad Mash.
Harare.
EDITOR — James D. McGee, the man George W. Bush sent to do Washington’s dirty work in Zimbabwe, should be seen by the whole world for what he really is, a political activist for a wrong cause.
He should not be taken seriously, whoever does will do so at his own peril.
This Uncle Tom is a caged man.
The US was struck by a disaster, Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans with heart-rending scenes of dead bodies of people of all ages, who were left to float around simply because they were mostly black.
Bush was not moved, he did not give a hoot, neither did he bother to visit the injured, black people, after such a horrendous occurrence, until five days had lapsed and probably only because of pressure from an enraged African-American community that questioned his attitude and feelings towards black people, given a disaster of such scale in his own homeland and to his own people.
McGee is now telling us that his government, Bush’s government has great love and care for the black people of Epworth and Dzivaresekwa, some of whom carry wounds sustained in beerhall brawls.
Charity begins at home Jimmy. It is the resources of Zimbabwe and not the people of Zimbabwe, that your bosses in Washington love.
Surprisingly, most of the pictures of alleged political violence that find their way onto Internet sites get to US and UK without passing through the nearest Police Post wherever they will be alleged to have occurred.
The world should be aware of the machinations of this hawkish US regime.
Recently we had one Jendayi Frazer the US assistant secretary of State for African affairs, flying thousands of kilometres from Washington, unnecessarily polluting our environment for no genuine nor just cause, running about the most peaceful and politically stable region in Africa (Southern Africa), like a papparazi, assuming the role of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and trying to impose a Western puppet Morgan Tsvangirai on the people of Zimbabwe.
Now McGee and his embassy want to assume the duties of our national police force, purporting to be investigating alleged crimes and intending to prosecute the alleged perpetrators.
We did not know that there is now a police post and court at 172 Herbert Chitepo Avenue. In case McGee does not realise it, his actions constitute gross provocation and abuse of our hospitality.
Zimbabwe has one of the best and professional police forces in the world and a very competent and functioning justice delivery system.
ZRP should demand evidence of the crimes McGee claims to have knowledge of and institute investigations.
Should he fail to provide it, that will amount to obstructing or interfering with police investigation.
He will be guilty of complicity to any of the crimes he will be withholding the evidence.
He deserves to be stripped of his diplomatic immunity, for there is nothing diplomatic about him and the way he conducts his political activism.
The hawkish US regime, politicised the Global HIV and Aids Fund to prejudice Zimbabwe.
They are now politicising HIV and Aids-related deaths claiming them to be victims of post-election violence in their bid to equate Zimbabwe to post-election Kenya.
The duplicitous Western alliance is made up of spoilers bent on undermining our success, unity and revolution.
They should rein in their vagrants wandering on our farmlands, anticipating a victory by Tsvangirai in the run-off.
The same Tsvangirai whom my own grade seven son ridiculed for failing to work out percentages.
McGee came here to pursue US foreign policy that wants a reversal of the land reform programme and to abort our revolution.
They hope to achieve this through indoctrinating people with political doctrines that strip them of their moral, cultural and emotional independence.
They want to programme the people to meet their specifications and render them mere robots, where every action and re-action has to be called by them and guided by them.
We do not need this, we should remain masters of our destiny, independent in our thinking, our deeds and views.
In the impending run-off, whoever
is doing Brown’s bidding should face the same fate as Brown’s resounding defeat.
Cde Cad Mash.
Harare.
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