Tiger32
Senior Member
Registered: Sep 2001
Posts: 583
|
|
AFRICA'S LONG MARCH TO TRUE INDEPENDENCE
Zimbabwe. The reactions provoked by the mentioning of this country range from fear to loathing to panic in the hearts and minds of the enemies of Africa. Why the seemingly irrational obsession by Western politicians and media with this one country? Kenya's arap Moi has been in power for 27 years and he rules with an iron hand, yet there is no demand by the West that he step down or is too old too rule. The psychopathic war criminal Jonas Savimbi, his military capability smashed by the Angolan army, has fallen back his true character-that of a terrorist and bandit and is inflicting his atrocities on the civilian population in order to cow them. The most recent atrocity- UNITA's blowing up of a train with hundreds of innocent civilians on board does not get any condemnation from the West. In fact, the reason that Savimbi survives to commit these atrocities is because of the tacit and covert support he still enjoys in the West, and the survival of the apartheid-era destabilization network.
For years the Americans and apartheid South Africa backed and armed this megalomaniac whose only goal has been to seize power at all costs. Yet there has never been any condemnation by the West of Savimbi who deserves to be in the Hague war crimes court more than Milosevic. Rwanda and Uganda, proxies of the United States have let loose their armies and puppets to rape and pillage the Democratic Republic of the Congo as King Leopold did 100 years ago. America supplies these bandits and terrorists with satellite intelligence an African-American military advisers to insure that the third largest nation in Africa remains weak, divided and exploited. Yet the focus and vitriol of the West remains on Zimbabwe, one nation which defiantly stands up to the forces that seek to keep Africa from achieving true independence.
What is Zimbabwe's crime? It seeks justifiably to return the ancestral lands of its people which had been STOLEN by whites, at the point of a gun 100 years ago. When the children of South Africa were in the streets challenging the armed might of the apartheid state with their stones and their bodies there was no chorus of outrage and condemnation in the West such as is being orchestrated now against Mugabe and Zimbabwe by a West that has suddenly discovered 'human rights' for Africans. The fact is that where the African people are concerned there is an appalling double standard.
Consider the facts: armed men break into your house, kill your parents, rape your mother and sisters and drive your out of your house. Years later when you are strong enough to defeat the thief and demand your property back, self-appointed authorities tell you that you must observe the law and pay the thief and murderer before you can reclaim what is yours. Can there be a more absurd concept than this?
Yet this is what the West wants the people of Zimbabwe and Africa to do. To pay the thieves for the return of their own property. What about the principles of natural justice? Or does natural justice, the right of every human being apply[ in the eyes of the West] to Africans? Clearly this seems to be the position of the West regarding Africa's fight for just land reform. To illustrate the consistent white bias against Africa, during the closing stages of Zimbabwe's war of independence when it appeared that ZAPU (Patriotic Front) and ZANU now united under ZANU(PF) were on the verge of inflicting a crushing military defeat on the racist 'Rhodesian' army, the so-called group of seven Western industrial states met and were urged by Henry Kissinger, the warmongering US Secretary of State to raise a fund of 'several billion' dollars to 'compensate' and evacuate the whites in the event ZANU-PF overran the cities.
The Japanese, horrified at the insane logic behind this plan, vetoed the idea. The compromise was to push rapidly for a cease-fire before the military situation became irretrievable. [It was a horrifying concept- black armies convincingly defeating white troops with all the security implications that meant for apartheid South Africa. War would have swept the sub-continent, radicalizing the region and bringing about a united effort to topple white oppression in South Africa] The cease-fire was implemented, the West exerted intolerable pressure on the fighters to lay down their arms and pushed them to attend the 'Lancaster House' conference where the land question was obfuscated behind promises of investment and aid for the new nation.
The British, of course, who have had decades of experience in duplicity, planted listening devices in the Zimbabwe delegation's hotel rooms and were always aware of their plans and strategies and were able to checkmate them. Zimbabwe came out with the short end of the deal after Lancaster House. The Zimbabwe revolution was pre-empted as was the South African revolution ten years later. But the anger of the cheated masses had to go somewhere since the issues that brought the two rebellions to the fore had not been conclusively settled. In both cases land was and continues to be the issue, land that was forcibly wrested from the indigenous African peoples.
Wrested in such a deceitful and violent manner that the African metaphysical and cultural concepts of community land tenure were corrupted and overturned. Entire populations throughout Africa have been marched off their land at the point of a gun and replaced by settlers from Europe who replicated the racist territorial aggression of Europeans against indigenous peoples in the American West, in the South American rainforest and in the territories of Australia. What has saved the African people is the fact that despite the depredations of slavery and genocide by Europeans, the African population was large enough to absorb these atrocities albeit at a horrendous psychic and social price. So we come back to land.
The land issue had never been settled conclusively at Lancaster House nor has it been addressed when the deals were cut with the ANC to abort its revolt in return for the superficial trappings of majority rule. In both cases, Zimbabwe and South Africa, the whites maintained the economic leverage which had the potential to hold the state to ransom if white interests were challenged. This is the Trojan Horse that the West hopes will allow them to exercise control over the political direction of the African masses. The miscalculation in the West's equation has been the determination and intransigence of Mugabe in the face of internal and external economic and political sabotage.
The MDC which has been created out of the old CIA destabilization blueprint has proven to be a paper tiger that fell in love with its own propaganda. The rural masses of Africa want land and the MDC has played itself out by aligning itself with the forces that are perceived as opposed to any meaningful land reform. Years of white racism, oppression and arrogance are now yielding their fruit. Whites in Africa have long fooled themselves with the fiction that somehow no matter what atrocities have been heaped on the African, he will forgive and forget, thus when the just anger of the people is expressed the oppressor becomes outraged because after centuries of denying the man his humanity he is faced with the most striking manifestation of humanity- the desire to right the wrongs that have been perpetrated against one.
The West is unwilling to accept that Africans want or deserve justice. Hence the just struggle to regain one's land in Zimbabwe and South Africa has to be placed in the context of the 'rule of law' a rule that seemed to apply only to white Western Europeans and not Africans. In rural South Africa more whites [1,200] have been killed than in all the years of the apartheid struggle previous to 1990. Yet this low-intensity conflict does not receive the exposure and excoriation that befalls Zimbabwe.
No Act of Congress or Rural South Africa Democracy has been passed to chastise the government of South Africa. There is a simple strategic reason for this, a can of worms which the apartheid-era Institute of Security Studies might be afraid to open. In both Zimbabwe and South Africa, land and race are inextricably joined. In South Africa the land theft by Europeans is on a larger and more brutal scale than has occurred in Zimbabwe. Inevitably, when the rural Africans in South Africa [or Azania, as it should be called] cross the red line, there will be bloodshed, since the African people have not experienced the cathartic purge necessary to clean their psyches of centuries of white domination, humiliation and racism. Rural South Africa is as racist and violent as it was in the whitest days of apartheid. The difference is that now African anger is finding expression and this is where the example of Zimbabwe becomes frightening to the planners in the West and that is why Mugabe becomes the devil incarnate to the West.
But once again, the West has misread the situation. It is not Mugabe who moves the land revolt, it is the people themselves, hungry for just land reform. Twenty years on the land fought for is still not in the hands of the people. Is it any wonder then that African rage is growing? Zimbabwe, no matter what the West wishes or conspires to do, is on an unswerving path to meaningful land reform, inertia has been overcome and neither threats or Acts of Congress will turn the clock back. The 'instant' political party the MDC, by siding with the farmers has placed itself against the will of the people. The rage expressed in Chinhoyi is not a reaction to incitement by war veterans or ZANU-PF but an expression of a long-simmering hatred and resentment of white arrogance and privilege twenty years after independence and a hunger for land justice.
The ANC in South Africa will do well to heed this expression of the people's will. The mythology generated by whites that Africans have forgiven and forgotten their worst, while oppressors and any anger expressed is merely the work of anti-white government agitators is the height of self-delusion, serves only to cloud the issues. The truth is that the land in contention today was stolen by whites at the point of a gun. Of this there can be no dispute. The Africans cannot be made to pay for their own land. Of this there can be no dispute. It may very well be the beginning of a long bitter struggle throughout Southern Africa for land justice and despite the attempts to contain similar explosions in South Africa, revolt is inevitable if onlybecause whites there remain racist, arrogant and unrepentant just as their cousins in Zimbabwe.
The people need no agitation from government supporters. Their rage has been buried long and deep and like a volcano has nowhere to go but out. The West by blaming Mugabe and seeking to punish him for the people's anger is like a foolish man standing on the edge of a volcano. Africa began its Long March to true independence a long, long time ago and we still have a long a way to go but nothing- nothing thrown in our path will stop us. There can be no compromises, no stepping back from challenges, no retreat from the goals of total freedom and independence as Africans. That is the reality and all including collaborators like the MDC and other unpatriotic Africans and their Western masters would do well to remember this.
|
|
