Africans deserve compensation and reparations too!

The advent of colonialism on these shores around 1890 began weakening our communal social systems by fetishising or creating an insane obsession with the individual pursuit of wealth.

This was an inevitable and inexorable outcome, considering that Zimbabwe was colonised by a rapacious and extractive firm, the British South African Company (BSAC), through the Pioneer Corps, most of whose conscripts were promised fabulous mineral claims and rich agricultural land.

So, capital and capitalism became major disruptors in social relations and hierarchies, as individuals and societies naturally became materialistic.

By and large, wealth increasingly began defining social standing.

It created a new class of social aristocrats, whose preponderant influence solely derived from their wealth or possessions.

We see it in our families and communities today, where traditional hierarchical structures, which enjoin family members and communities to be deferential to elders, become irrelevant when a rich family member is around.

At funerals, family elders are now more than prepared to ingratiatingly give up their lofty seats to those cash-flush younger family members who usually roll up in those fuel-guzzling monster cars.

It has now become the norm that the richer you are, the more weight your voice carries, the more influential you are and the more reverence and fealty you attract.

The other added convenience that comes with money is the ability to burnish one’s image, no matter how egregiously dark it is or might have been.

Unmasking Musk

We have seen this with South Africa-born American billionaire Elon Musk.

Here is a man whom we all cheered and followed with awe and admiration as one of us as he gradually climbed the ladder to become the richest person in the world.

They say by December, his wealth had actually swelled to an eye-watering US$400 billion, which is more than half the combined economic output (about US$720 billion) of all the 16 countries, including our teapot-shaped Republic, that make up the Southern African Development Community.

Astounding!

With money has also come power, as Musk has become a plutocrat of considerable political heft; in fact, the current power behind the throne in America.

Did we not cheer him on as he oiled Donald Trump’s political campaign and chaperoned him to the White House last year? Now, he occupies a lofty and influential position in both American and global politics.

But Musk is anything but one of us.

He was never, he is not and will never be one of us.

You do not have to dig any deeper to appreciate how congenitally racist Musk is.

His maternal grandparents, particularly his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian chiropractor and aviator, were fanatical supporters of both Nazism and apartheid.

Halderman’s political extremism saw him supporting Technocracy Incorporated, a movement that was founded in the 1930s and advocated abolishing democracy in favour of government by elite technicians.

It was later banned during World War II for its opposition to fighting Adolf Hitler.

Haldeman himself was charged with publishing documents opposing the war and imprisoned for two months.

He later moved to South Africa in the 1950s because he was enamoured of South Africa’s apartheid policies and the ruling National Party.

In 1951, he wrote a revealing article about South Africa for the Saskatchewan newspaper, the Regina Leader-Post, defending apartheid.

“The natives are very primitive and must not be taken seriously . . . Some are quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority. The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question,” he wrote. Kikikikiki.

To be fair, Haldeman died in a plane accident in 1974, when Elon was only three years old. He could, therefore, not have influenced Musk in any meaningful way.

But this is the man who sired Maye, the woman who bore and raised Elon.

PayPal mafia

The friends Musk used to hang around with were not any better either.

Bishop Lazi will only mention two of his business partners at PayPal — Roelof Botha and Peter Thiel.

Well, that Roelof was the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, tells us all we need to know about him.

On the other hand, Peter, whose father worked at a uranium mine in Rössing in the then-South West Africa (now Namibia), lived in Swakopmund, where he attended a German language school.

They say at the time Swakopmund was notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism, including celebrating Hitler’s birthday.

In a 2021 biography titled “The Contrarian”, Thiel even alleges that as a student at Stanford, he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.

So, these are essentially an ultra-right white supremacist lunatic fringe in fact and deed.

Further, what makes Musk’s rise to fame, fortune and political stardom different from the yearned-for rags-to-riches tales that we are so fond of in this part of the world, are revelations that he grew up in the lap of luxury, where his family owned two homes, a plane, a yacht and numerous luxury cars.

So, do not be surprised the next time you see him behaving like the spoilt brat he is.

Fighting for hegemony

Well, make of Musk what you will but this is the character that currently has Trump’s ear at a time when the United States is desperately seeking to re-establish and defend its hegemony, which was the foundation of the erstwhile unipolar world.

Some of us were not surprised when the US recently turned its guns on neighbouring South Africa for entertaining the idea of expropriating land without compensation.

It is all about protecting the interest of the whites.

Saddled with a debilitating US$13 trillion debt and hamstrung by worrying uncompetitiveness in the wake of a rising China, the US is now behaving like a bull in a China shop as it tries to extricate itself from its unenviable circumstances.

The roaring success of technological innovations and apps such as TikTok, DeepSeek, Shein and Temu shows that China is winning and America is losing.

Trump’s “America First” agenda, which is driven and sustained by the Republican Party’s Project 2025, a wish list of the right wing, should, therefore, be viewed within the context of a country desperate to reinvent itself.

This explains the ongoing zealous efforts led by Musk to cut expenditure by also withholding aid and development assistance, which has brought USAID to its knees.

Some African countries that are heavily reliant on aid have been fretting over the US’ decision to turn off the financial spigots, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of Africa as perennial beggars that perpetually depend on alms from the West.

It is payback time

But, as Bishop Lazarus claimed before, the seemingly unending curse of poverty and privation in Africa is a legacy of centuries of the slave trade, colonialism and post-independence extractive Bretton Woods-inspired policies.

It is now time the West pays for the wealth they looted from Africa.

Psalms 82:1-4 says: “God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the ‘gods’: How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked? Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

Proverbs 29:7 also adds: “The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.”

It is heartening that African leaders, who were gathered in Addis Ababa this weekend, have decided to declare 2025 as the year for “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations”.

In this instance, justice would mean acknowledgement of the crimes that were committed and restoration of dignity to the Africans, as well as compensation for historical and continuing losses.

For instance, while Zimbabwe lost more than 1 000 people to the slave trade (according to Canadian economist Nathan Nunn), it suffered even more prejudice during colonisation and continues to suffer from baneful sanctions that were imposed at the turn of the millennium.

Just for perspective, when the BSAC colonised us, they set up a Loot Committee that expropriated cattle from our forebears at an industrial scale.

Writings by Reverend David Carnegie, a Scottish missionary who worked extensively with the London Missionary Society in Matabeleland, estimated that the Ndebele lost about 280 000 cattle to the settlers.

By 1897, the Ndebele held less than 14 000 head of cattle.

The impact that this had on livelihoods was immense.

Need we also talk about the mineral wealth we lost in the more than eight decades we were under colonialism.

So, as Africans, we literally built the West through our blood, sweat and tears.

Instructively, last year, President ED launched an initiative by the Zimbabwe National Elders Forum, led by Rev Felix Mukonowengwe, to carry out a study on the effects of Britain’s colonialism on indigenous Zimbabweans and institute legal proceedings to force the British government to pay compensation and apologise for the brutality of the colonial government.

Namibia has already taken that route with the Germans.

There still exists a compelling case to push for reparations, as we have seen in the recent past instances of fellow African countries — the real victims of the West — being forced to pay compensation to supposed victims in the West. In 2003, then-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was arm-twisted to pay US$2,7 billion to compensate families of victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

And in 2020, poor Sudan was also forced to pay the United States US$335 million to be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Khartoum stood accused of providing logistical and financial support to al-Qaeda and of helping it bomb US embassies in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya) in 1998, as well as attack the USS Cole off the port of Aden in 2000.

About 2 000 people lost their lives as a result of the attacks.

As Africans, we, too, deserve and demand compensation from the authors of our poverty and misery.

Bishop out!