THE PENALTY OF POWERLESSNESS
JOHN MORSE looks at 'Zimbabwe' after fifteen years of 'Independence'
IN 1980 Rhodesia's whites surrendered power to its blacks. Today, in the bankrupt and decaying banana republic of 'Zimbabwe' there remain from an original total of 250,000 only some 80,000 white residents*. Following the much acclaimed 'triumph of statesmanship' of Margaret Thatcher and her Tory Government in cynically manoeuvring Marxist terrorist to power, the rest quit.
The immediate aftermath of so-called 'Zimbabwean independence' witnessed a number of anti-white outrages. There was the inevitable tidal wave of crime, a form of pillaging and humiliating the helpless that always follows white abdication everywhere. There has also been the seizure of white farms under the pretext of 'land redistribution' (although a disproportionate amount of the land thus 'nationalised' has tended to end up in the hands of black politicians of the ruling ZANU-PF party rather than the landless peasants for whose benefit it was supposedly taken). There was also the Stalinist-style show trial on trumped up charges of 'sabotage' of a number of white officers who stayed on to run 'Zimbabwe's' air force in the 1980s.
However, for much of the time Mugabe's regime has relatively speaking pulled its punches against the surviving old Rhodesians. No doubt Mugabe has had the animal cunning to see that too bad an image of black rule on their northern border might have had the effect of spurring resistance among South Africa's whites to the hand-over of their own country and thus compromise this ultimate objective.
But with South Africa now apparently in the bag Mugabe no longer seems to feel this restraint. The whites of 'Zimbabwe' are at his mercy and he need no longer hold back from punishing their weakness in time-honoured African fashion.
In addition, of course, under his and his terrorist 'cohorts' corrupt and incompetent rule the country is in the same shambles as every other 'independent' African state. It suits his books to channel popular resentment against a scapegoat, and who better than the rump of the old 'Rhodesia'.
These are no doubt the reasons why, according to a recent report in the Sunday Times supplement (30th April) by Christopher Hope, the regime seems now to have declared open season once more against the whites.
INTIMIDATION OF WHITES
One of the leaders of the pack is black 'entrepreneur' Philip Chiyangwa, reputedly a relative of Robert Mugabe.
Chiyangwa's latest enterprise is the 'affirmative action group,' an agitprop body whose function is to harass and intimidate whites. He launched this by circularising white businesses with notices threatening that they had better start giving jobs, money and promotion to blacks - "or else." When asked by Hope, "or else what?" Chiyangwa apparently replied, "Rwanda."
In typical African style, when asked whether this did not amount to extortion, Chiyangwa claimed that extortion was taking other people's money. His AAG was only claiming back "what belonged to black Zimbabweans." White people had grown fat on what he called, 'black money.' Overlooked was the fact not only that no businesses at all would exist without the whites, but also that there would be no such thing as money either, a concept that never figured in African culture at all before white people introduced it!
Chiyangwa openly boasts of having launched 'direct action,' including a notorious attack on a white-owned night club in downtown Harare. It seems that the students who took the place apart were acting under his incitement.
Anti-white racial abuse and white-bashing sprees have in fact become the order of the day. The country's tame media violently denounce the alleged 'white stranglehold' on the economy, the alleged white ownership of the best land, and most of all the alleged 'racism' in the attitudes of white 'Zimbabweans.' It does not help the latter in the least to proclaim their 'Zimbabwean' patriotism, no matter how slavishly. According to Hope, they are increasingly "held up to scorn, ridicule and even physical attack in Harare today." (Even the name 'Harare' as applied to the capital symbolises black take over and white humiliation. Harare used to be the name of the native township on the fringe of Salisbury. Today the city is Salisbury no longer, but 'Harare' instead).
BLACK DICTATOR SETS TONE
Setting the tone is Mugabe himself. He accused whites of "insulting blacks every day." It was Mugabe who set in motion the process of 'Indigenisation.' The trouble from the whites' point of view is that although the president proclaimed all 'Zimbabweans' to be indigenous he went on to remark that some were more indigenous than others. In short, official policy, as even a liberal like Hope admits, is really "racism in reverse."
To stoke up the paranoia, the Harare Sunday Mail has spouted lunatic nonsense about former Rhodesian whites planning to return to the country "in their hundreds of thousands." Says Hope; "The paper alerted concerned readers to be ready to man the barricades and repel the racist invaders."
But however ludicrous it may look to the European mind this type of thing is taken up enthusiastically, especially by young black 'Zimbabweans.' The frame of mind and the type of activity that it stimulates among suggestible and violent young Africans is having ever more dire consequences for whites.
HOUNDING OF WHITES
An anaesthetist, Dr. Richard McGown, was charged with manslaughter of his patients by experimental epidural injections of morphine. This set in motion a hysterical campaign of vilification against white doctors in general who, without names being named, were accused by leading 'Zimbabwean' politicians of plotting to infect blacks with AIDS and heart disease. The hapless McGown was pronounced guilty before his trial had even begun by the ZANU-PF Women's League, which demanded his instant hanging. When the judge retired to consider his verdict, students from the university of 'Zimbabwe' led by comrade Obey Mudzingwa (everyone in 'Zimbabwe' is now styled 'comrade') said that they would take drastic action of their own if the sentence was not to their liking. They would attack whites in the streets and in the process, they said, "We will perform epidural morphines(sic) and amputations."
The trial brought out another skeleton from Africa's closet. As anyone who has lived in the dark continent for any length of time knows, the belief in magic and witchcraft is universal, as is their practice, among Africans of all classes and degrees in society. Dr.McGown was not only likened, as might have been expected, to "Doctors in Nazi concentration camps" and called a "messenger of death" by the prosecution. He was also described as a 'demon.' One placard borne by a demonstrator outside the court spelt it out in so many words. "McGown is a witch," it proclaimed.
No less a personage than the head of 'Zimbabwe's' intellectual community at this point stepped forward to set his seal of approval on this line of attack. The principal of the university of 'Zimbabwe' demanded that the longstanding Suppression of Witchcraft Act, originally introduced by the British colonial authorities, should be repealed. He suggested that the ancient tribal practice of "smelling out witches" should be revived!
Another victim of the prevailing atmosphere of anti-white paranoia was Michael Blackhall, manager of the Sheraton hotel in Harare. A member of Parliament accused Blackhall of 'racism.' The Sheraton's white manager was said to keep six fierce hounds locked in his room, with which he was planning to injure his African staff. At the end of 1994 he was deported. It was of no help to him that an official enquiry subsequently found that the allegations of 'racism' were a pack of lies.
Only one newspaper in the whole country, which folded soon after, reported the facts. Blackhall was in reality driven out because he refused to perform various favours for the ruling ZANU-PF party, which saw the hotel as a source of jobs for its boys and girls and other free goodies for its members. Blackhall wanted to run it as a business.
WHITE LIBERALS GET COME UPPANCE
Most interestingly and symptomatically, liberal whites are being singled out for insult. To their surprise and chagrin they are being lumped together with the old 'Rhodies' (Most of whom supported Ian Smith) of whom many still remain. These self-hating, racially masochistic elements, many of whom have made nice incomes for themselves under the new regime, were the original apostles of white powerlessness. They always derided the Rhodies as their intellectual and moral inferiors.
Now they find themselves in the same firing line as all other whites. Much as they have tried to integrate themselves into the new order, they remain highly visible not only on account of their skin colour, but also because of their privileged living standards.
Even Judith Todd, the daughter of former multi-racialist Southern Rhodesian Premier, Garfield Todd, one of the sickest of old Rhodesian liberals in her desire to see blacks boosted over whites, has been made to understand that in African eyes her former efforts to have her own race dispossessed -- which landed her in prison under Ian Smith's Government -- count for little. The Sunday Mail accused her, just like other whites, of wanting to cling to what it called 'white privilege' and "fix things" to suit herself.
STREET MOBS
Meanwhile, gangs of young blacks have taken to roaming the streets looking for whites to bash. It did the liberal owner of an Italian restaurant in Harare little good that he had always thrown his establishment open to a multi-racial clientele. The students of the university of 'Zimbabwe' still regarded Mr. Bernadini's restaurant, Sandro's, as ‚elitist and 'racist.' When he tried to appease them by throwing it open to them and inviting them in they smashed it up.
Meanwhile, President Mugabe lords it over 'Zimbabwe' in the usual manner of African tin-pot dictators everywhere. His residence in 'Harare' is guarded by a goon squad armed with submachine guns and rocket launchers. He cruises the country in an official cavalcade flanked by police and motorcycle outriders. Woe betide the motorist, especially if white, who does not respectfully pull over to the side of the road and stop as the presidential travelling circus passes by.
PEOPLE WORSE OFF
The regime presided over by this "megalomaniac surrounded by psychopaths" (to quote ex-premier Ian Smith) has inflicted nothing but poverty upon its black subjects. To quote Hope:-
"As the black economist Wilbert Mukori recently observed, after 15 years of independence directed by a single party without serious opposition, when Government and parasitical industries and civil service departments, as well as major banks and pension funds, are staffed and run by black appointees, most people in Zimbabwe are worse off than ever."
The Indigenous Business Development Council (IBDC) is the body charged with Africanising the economy. More often than not, it seems, its initials are taken as standing for "I'm Busy Destroying my Country."
German Catholic missionary priest, father Oskar Wermter SJ, ascribed much of the scapegoating of whites to African self-contempt. "A beggar," he wrote, "hates his benefactor as much as he hates himself for being a beggar." Despite twenty-four years of missionary work on behalf of the natives of the country, he was denounced for this by the People's Voice, a paper which championed the mutilation of whites on the streets of 'Harare,' as an example to the "unrepentant white race." He was, said the Voice "sunk in the sewers of racism."
'Zimbabwean independence,' the first 'triumph' of Margaret Thatcher's foreign policy, was supposed to usher in an age of racial harmony. But according to Christopher Hope the facts are otherwise. The whites have given up their power; they have handed their country over and a large number of them have stayed on to carry on contributing to the economy -- many of them have tried to ingratiate themselves with the country's new black overlords. It has all failed to win them a single brownie point. On the contrary, according to Hope, "It is a fact that white Zimbabweans have never been so detested by their black countrymen." Indeed, the more sycophantic they have been the worse they seem to have fared.
MADHOUSE
Zimbabwe' today is a madhouse with the lunatics in charge. But this is entirely par for the course in 'Independent' Africa. There is not a single detail in Hope's picture of 'Zimbabwe' which was not predicted by the now despised white 'Diehards' who opposed black 'majority rule' in the past because they knew where it would lead. They had seen it all before wherever majority rule had come about. There was no reason at all to think that 'Zimbabwe' would be different.
It is not to the credit of the mass of whites, whether in Rhodesia or beyond, that despite all the lessons of experience they were, and seemingly remain, incapable of learning the elementary lessons.
Webmaster's note: This article was originally published in 'Spearhead' magazine No.316 June 1995.
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* Since this article was written, nearly 5 years ago, the situation has worsened, today the number of whites still resident in the country is believed to be around the 70,000 mark.
