The Sunday Mail
So far so good. Long live Zimbabwe. Let Africa unite.
It has been a bad week across the Limpopo. Zimbabweans have been hurt, some killed in the rainbow nation that only respects or fears the whiteman, for whom an African becomes a foreigner by simply going south of the African continent.
Yesterday we reached 35 years of self-rule. It is 35 years we are being forced to rue, to condemn, to regret statistically because the whiteman’s economic welfare indicators have gone. To those of us who grew up under Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front, what we are being called on to admire, to reminisce over, to banker after, does not apply because we were not white.
We lived in different nations with whites, so we did not know much about the beauty of Meikles Hotel or Barbours or Greatermans or other such beauties. We knew nothing about the smoothness of the whiteman’s roads in the CBD. We lived in poor townships or in rural areas. So we leave it to our blessed brothers born into independence to be nostalgic about a past grandeur they never lived but lavish from hearsay. They are a lot so beloved of the whiteman because they cry for his losses more than he needs to.
Long live Zimbabwe, God bless Zimbabwe. It is difficult to appreciate fully why there is so much fury against our independence by fellow blacks. They are full of an unimaginable fury purportedly because the ZANU PF government destroyed a thriving economy, the so-called bread basket of the region, the jewel of Africa and many other endearments that make the whiteman feel like he was a godsend to us for colonizing Africa and enslaving Africans.
These are the same people telling us daily that they are fighting for freedom, for democracy, for human rights and many other neoliberal borrowings, but tell in the same breath, without even a sense of irony, that Smith was better, that life was better under white settlers!
The whiteman’s anger at our independence is easy to understand. He lost a lot. They lived like little gods swimming in wealth created through African sweat and blood on the farms and factory floors. They had a flourishing economy.
The ZANU PF government disturbed all that. The social spending on education, health, new townships and related infrastructure meant the white cake was becoming smaller. It began to shrink slowly and resentment against the government began to grow. That investment in education is what has given the country this generation of angry intellectuals, very worldly mobile who tell us how beautiful Rhodesia was. Failing to find the dream Rhodesia they want, they find it easy, being beneficiaries of free education in Zimbabwe, to escape to England, Australia, America, Canada and New Zealand. There they can enjoy the comforts of Rhodesia without enduring the sacrifices of those who made that comfort possible. They cannot sacrifice for the motherland, but are happy to bring instructions and orders on how we should run our affairs from the former colonisers. They have become their most eloquent spokespersons and defenders, these beneficiaries of a free education in Zimbabwe. Easy come easy go.
Long live free Zimbabwe. Happy Independence Day celebrations. It would have been a travesty of the sacrifices of the sons and daughters of Zimbabwe for our independence to simply mean giving a few politicians cosy jobs in government where before there were whites. That could very easily have been negotiated, if all independence meant was to be accommodated side by side with whites. No doubt they wouldn’t have objected a lot. That is why the first few years of majority rule were such a golden era for them, when they no longer had the onerous duty of administering the country. It was time to withdraw from the business of politics and to force on the business of making money. A few blacks, equipped with free education in a deracialised society, made names for themselves, set up law firms and prospered.
They could start businesses in any part of the country. Many others migrated from their roots in the despised ghettos and, without knowing by what miracle, found themselves neighbours with their white bosses in the leafy and formerly exclusively white suburbs. Speaking from this elevated status, it is these mafikizolos in the whiteman’s suburbs who tell us Rhodesia was better, but without wanting to be reminded of their roots in the ghetto.
Meanwhile some of those who had actively participated in the liberation of Zimbabwe knew that the struggle was not over. There still the manacles of Lancaster House that forbade the forcible distribution of land. Whites were making more money than they could dream in Rhodesia. The war was over, there was no more call up, blacks now swelled the ranks of the national defense forces. What was there to worry about beside planning for the next holiday destination?
But the Blackman could not be left out, could not simply watch, hence in crept the cancer of corruption. The results are known: your Willowgate vehicle scandals, the looting of the war veterans’ compensation fund and numerous other scams. But the cause of the liberation still remained outstanding. We had the flag but we did not have the economy. The land is the economy. Even the meanest whiteman will confirm this. That is why nations go to war to defend their territories. Without land there is no country, and there is no point in claiming a country when its land is held by foreigners.
It is this final land war which has caused so much irrational rancour against majority rule. Daily we are assailed in the media by pictures of the whiteman’s dead economy and his jobs. In our teary eyes we ignore or scorn at the shoots of a new black economy we call the informal sector. We laugh at the struggling black farmer. In the process we fuel the myth that the white commercial farmer ever grew maize to feed lazy natives.
Biko then comes to mind; he reminds us ever and ever again that the biggest weapon the oppressor has against the oppressed is the victim’s mind. When a Blackman condemns his own personal freedom, the freedom of his own country and tells you slavery was better, then you know the oppressor did his job well. You know we have a bitter battle ahead against the mind, against cultural imperialism, a battle to open the eyes of those Botha cynically saying “the African cannot plan beyond a year.”
Let us hope as we labour to give full meaning to our independence such that South Africans shall soon realise their real enemy, that they are still dependent on mean-fisted foreign economy and that fellow Africans are brothers, not enemies or foreigners simply because they have travelled South in search of opportunities.
When the real war begins to liberate South Africa, they shall once again find themselves in desperate need of their fellow Africans. That war is not far away. Stop the distractive, afrophobic attacks and confront the real enemy.
