Oh, Them Poor White Farmers in Zimbabwe

The bogger goes on the record. The stance of Free World – i.e., the World of Two-Party Democracy in which Mrs. Teasdale chooses the candidates of both parties – concerning Zimbabwe is instructive and illuminating. Cheque it out:

What Really Pisses Us Off

1. We’re awful offended that the Remarkably Productive and Utterly Civilized and Beneficent Giant-Farm Farmers of Zimbabwe (né Rhodesia, named for the Great Benefactor of Unwhite People for No Selfish Motive Whatever) are being deprived of their hard-earned sweat, or somebody’s sweat, and investment, or somebody’s investment, and county-sized landed estates, or somebody’s land. So we want to force Zimbabwe’s President to grovel and restore the Status Ante-Independence.

2. Two million people have died in the Congo is the past few years, and God knows how many millions during the 35-year rule of Leader for Just Short of Life Mobutu, hand-picked for the job by Mrs. Teasdale and Leopold II, King of the Belgians. The West’s response to the predicament of this huge nation in the middle of Africa, victim of the worst and most genocidal colonial rule of all (1885 to 1960, after which the method was modified to “neo”-colonial – nothing neo about it at all, actually), whose people are dislocated, dispossessed, and starving when not being gunned down: We do not mince our words: we yawn.

3. Hundreds of thousands dead and millions dispossessed in Sudan, and that’s only in Darfur (i.e., we’re not even thinking of the 20-year war for freedom waged on behalf of the suffering people of southern Sudan under the leadership of the sainted John Garang): By God, we’ve wrung and wrung our hands, and by God we’ll wring them some more.

4. Further really outraged hand-wringing over genocide and plain old mass murder in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Liberia. Damn, that’s ugly, we say. And don’t ask about Biafra: that was a lifetime ago. A whole shitload of lifetimes.

5. Shall we even mention the West’s unflagging support for the colonial masters against freedom-fighters in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia (né Southwest Africa of Boer mandate)?

6. Shall we even mention the West’s unflagging uninterest in mass destruction and genocide in Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Ogaden, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Central African Republic, and so on? Well, out of sight, out of mind.

Now: what do the suffering people in Nos. 2 through 6 have in common that the people of No. 1 on whose behalf we’re so currently outraged do not? Why, is it possibly skin color? Not us, surely not us.

A Few Q’s (Supply Your Own A’s)

1. This bogger keeps reading that, because of the policies of Zimbabwe’s Leader for Life-Plus, Robber G. . Mugabe, Zimbabwe has gone from one of the strongest economies in Africa to one of the weakest, that a country that exported food now must import it, that southern Africa’s breadbasket is now its basket case.

Queue – Do y’all really think that the great white-owned farms of Zimbabwe were producing grain so that Africans at home could have full bellies? I’d like to see statistics proving that white-ownership of 70 per cent of the land (that percentage was reserved for them by colonial law throughout the 20th Century, even after independence) was for the purpose of feeding African Zimbabweans and that the white farmers exported their grain and meat only after every Zimbabwean was nourished.

Queue – Do y’all really think that white farmers were so well to do in Zimbabwe because of the expenditure of their own sweat and “inputs” of their own wherewithal?

2. This bogger also keeps reading that this situation must be fixed, and that other African countries must step in and fix it. Why is it their responsibility? Well, the color of their skin is largely the same. America used to expect that colored community leaders should keep the other colored folks in line.

Queue – Why don’t the Blairs and Browns and Cheneys of the Anglo-American Empire read some history? Why shouldn’t the people who caused the problem be the ones to solve it? – viz., the Latter-Day Gangsters of the Cecil Rhodes Hegemony.

Queue – The African National Congress was formed in 1897 and fought against the Boers and the whole white world’s support for them for a century just to gain minimal political rights in their own country, and they still fight for a fair share in the economy. Now the A.N.C. should ride to the rescue of the poor white farmers of Zimbabwe?

A Piece of the Solution

There are two problems, the economic one and the political one.

1. I propose that all white farmers inside the borders of Zimbabwe be allowed to stay and farm the thousands of acres they have enjoyed calling their own for all or most of the 20th Century, exporting everything for their own profit, so long as they can prove both of the following:

First, that the land was obtained through payment of a fair price directly to Africans and not by payment of a fee, if any, to Cecil Rhodes’s company or to the British colonial government, and

Second, that they developed their tens of thousands of acres per farm through the sweat of laborers who were paid a fair wage and worked under fair and humane conditions, and secondarily were not forced into virtual slave labor by government taxes that could be paid only through low wages from forced employment on white farms.

This also applies to the ones who fled or were forced out: they can come back and take up where they left off if they can pass the tests above.

2. What to do about Robber G. Mugabe? Well, not much. It’s a shame that a century of theft and oppression by white farmers has been replaced by the rule of a corrupt and selfish dictator apparently in his dotage. But Africans around the continent, many of whom think little these days of Mugabe, still note that his economic policies are dispossessing Unafricans of land that they had stolen from Africans and then developed through a modern, advanced system of slave labor.

Mugabe’s become an octogenarian counterpart to America’s venal Real President, older but equally as selfish as that American shame and his (its?) supporters and peers, oil barons and financiers and polluters who toil not, neither do they spin, yet all things are added unto them, in the Freedonians United in Can-do and Know-how Party and the Radical Imperialists Party. But there’s one major difference, among other lesser ones: Mugabe was a brave man, a hero, one who fought for the freedom and advancement of his people, and succeeded against not only the armed cruelty of Ian Smith’s Agrarian Plutocrats and Slavemasters but in fact against the might of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Advice From the Bogger

Don’t comment on Mugabe and his Land Reform until you read the history of white colonization of southern Africa. Know your Boers: that’s what the white Rhodesians were even if mainly Anglo-Saxon. If you want to say Mugabe is a Brave Freedom-Fighter turned Asshole, a Washington become Cheney, I won’t dispute your statement.