Doing it better than Helen Zille
for therein lies the African’s redemption, whatever the scary scenarios are being created around Zimbabwe’s land reform, including enlisting the services of black people to repeat Helen Zille’s colonialism benefits mantra.
I am happy for Zimbabwe. To me the worst is in the past. We will have to learn how best to manage and benefit from our resources in a very hostile white world which requires of us to piously cling onto their Bible while they reap riches from our Earth. So the war is being taken to President Jacob Zuma’s courtyard. who control South Africa’s means of production and want to cling to privileges of colonial occupation and their colour, use the media they control to push for palliatives which will not upset the applecart. They use the language of “reform”, respect for the law and property rights. Their biggest shield is an “admirable constitution” and a “vibrant civil society”, states The Washington Post. The precepts of that constitution are what Zuma swore to protect and is being judged against. argument fits the class. He acknowledges that Africans lost their land through violence and that there was no compensation. Then this; “But times have changed drastically since then, when only military strength determined a people’s fate. The armed robberies that yielded land for the foreign occupiers cannot justify today’s armed robberies. There were no rules of engagement then.”
Then he goes for the killer punch; “Societies have since moved on, to civilisation and decency. It is too late to administer the same medicine to punish the crimes of armed robbery that occurred 400 years ago. It’s time for new rules, based on justice and fairness … Such a correction of the mistakes of the past can only be forward-looking, to harmonious and prosperous co-existence, rather than vengeful and equally criminal ‘empowerment’ measures.”
The last bit is a backhanded reference to Zimbabwe where “the importance of livestock has again been elevated to the level last seen before the arrival of Cecil John Rhodes”.
The askari is not even aware that Rhodes and his gang of robbers in fact knew the value of livestock more than Africans, hence The Loot Committee set up to loot livestock for the white occupiers from across the country. But that’s an aside.
What we invariably find obscene about these apologists of white colonial robbery is that it is again always the African victim who is required to compromise and relent in his quest for economic and social justice. It is never the alien aggressor. It is always the colonial rapist who is protected by the law, the constitution, not the African from whom everything was stolen and he was reduced to slavery on the motherland.
Let’s take on Mantshantsha Zille at his word. He tells us; “Societies have since moved on, to civilisation and decency.” That’s another view.
Question: How far on have blacks moved in South Africa since the cursed day Jan van Riebeeck stepped his foot on the Cape of Good Hope? How do we justify a civilisation and decency which tolerate such egregious socio-economic inequalities based on racial conquest in one nation?
Whose civilisation? Whose decency? Shouldn’t civilised and decent whites themselves feel ashamed of the African poverty surrounding their opulence and be calling for a radical economic transformation of South Africa for a harmonious and prosperous future, a more inclusive and therefore a safer nation for all?
We have been there here, we know it. That is where Mugabe’s reconciliation policy with whites fell apart. They would not share land with blacks. Twenty years down the same road one would expect decent, civilised whites in South Africa to know better the risks of a stiff neck, instead of which they deploy willing intellectuals as stalking horses to camouflage the racist architecture of the economy, pretending to be the voice of reason and moderation.
The neo-colonial struggle has entered a dangerous stretch. Indeed, “It’s time for new rules, based on justice and fairness.” Not under white justice.
Zimbabwe has the just departed Justice Godfrey Chadyausiku to thank for helping fashion laws that would yield justice and reunite the African with his land. May his soul rest in peace.