Black people can’t be racist.

April 4, 2007 @ 6:02 am | Comment

Ting Bu Dong,

Anyone and everyone has the potential to be rascist. Even if they are black or white or whatever…they still have the potential to be rascist.

April 4, 2007 @ 7:16 am | Comment

“…if those who have the power to isolate Mugabe do nothing then the millions that suffer under his regime will point to them…”

That means you too, China.

April 4, 2007 @ 7:42 am | Comment

What else do you expect after a long period of time when an extremely small Rhodesian minority had owned the fertile half of the land? You had all the chances in the whole world for more than a century. Yet look at it now, HIV, poverty, crime, at least there is not a hot war ongoing.

Stop thinking like you have a fucking solution, or even really want to find a solution. What now, the favor of the era how to fuck up Africa? For all this time, you have been a part of the problems.

The best country to squeeze Zimbabwe, justifiable or not, is South Africa. It’s not doing that, for the very reason they have an Africans-centric worldview.

April 4, 2007 @ 8:46 am | Comment

The issue of land redistribution in Zimbabwe is/was important. Though the fact that a tiny minority controlled 50% of the best land up until recently is almost irrelevant. Mugabe is running Zimbabwe into the ground. Any attempted criticism from outside Africa is met with retorts of racism and imperialism and any critics within will be branded as imperialist lapdogs.

April 4, 2007 @ 5:42 pm | Comment

JXie

First of all, don’t swear in your posts like that, please.

Only feudalistic societies require everyone to own land (as opposed to property, which is different). In the modern era it is more important that people can work to buy food from markets.

Before Mugabe’s land seizures’, Zimbabwe was an exporter of good – there was more than enough for everyone. But redistributing those farms has been terrible for the country. Most of the people that were given land had no idea what to do with it so even they didn’t benefit. The only people that have are Mugabe’s cronies who got the best land.

This isn’t about a “solution” to Africa, it’s about the need for action in the region to get rid of Mugabe and support free & fair elections to resolve the political crisis, rather than pander to “neo-racism”.

April 4, 2007 @ 6:51 pm | Comment

@JXie

You had all the chances in the whole world for more than a century.

No I didn’t.

And what has that to do with the indifference of African nations towards Mugab’s insanity?

April 4, 2007 @ 7:04 pm | Comment

@jxie – it is harsh and unfair to say that the west doesn’t want to help find a solution to africa’s woes, or is unwilling to admit its role in the current problem. if the west was really uninterested why all the aid and the presence of ngos in africa? what about the campaign to get rid of poverty? there is a plurality of voices about africa in the west, let alone in africa.

second, problems such as the spread of hiv, corruption and rent seeking behaviour were not caused by the west.

i agree that the the white minority owning all the land caused a huge problem. nevertheless they were the people who knew how to make it productive. secondly for all the crimes of their ancestors they were born in africa, africa is their home, they are africans in much the same way black people born in britain are as british as i am. i can understand the pain of the injustice, but i don’t see how a violent land grab is the best way of settling the problem. you may retort that that was the way the europeans colonised in the first place. that is true, but how do two wrongs make a right? i fail to see how sinking to the level of imperialists gives them a moral advantage

April 4, 2007 @ 7:18 pm | Comment

Alright I’ll tune down. For me it’s just extraordinarily disingenuous to find China the bogeyman for Africa’s woes. BTW, Raj is a Hindu name, I take it Raj you are an Indian British?

The problem as I can see, is lack of understanding of others’ viewpoints. Like Dr. Covey’s line, “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Or Confucius’, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” You don’t even have to understand why South Africa is reluctant to act, because you have all the solutions in the world already.

Not necessarily that I know any better, here are my two cents.

Mugabe isn’t out of thin air. He is a part of Zimbabwe, a land of which people had been robbed for more than a century — they are lack of infrastructure & education. They are poor and desperate. There is no magic formula to change the nation for the better quickly. It will take a long time to gradually have people educated & have infrastructure built. Overtime things will improve.

If Mugabe is forced out of power, due to isolation and outside pressure, for starter the process likely will be very painful for Zimbabweans — wars, deaths, lowering living standard will be highly likely. But what after? What kind of leader will emerge out of that land? Are you sure he will be better?

In my younger days, I had a what-if scenario about Mao. What if the Qing Court didn’t lose all those war indemnities and Mao actually had a chance to be educated overseas. What kind of leader Mao would’ve become. The sad realization of this exercise was that Mao was shaped in his youth by what the early 1900s China was, and I was shaped by what his late disastrous policies brought to China when I was a kid.

It’s a very complicated world out there. You probably don’t have solutions to others’ problems — and you shouldn’t need to. Get that into your head. If you really want to help, how about donate a portion of income to make sure people there can access basic medicines, clean drinking water and kids can have decent education?

April 5, 2007 @ 5:27 am | Comment

Si, I actually agree with most of what you wrote.

April 5, 2007 @ 5:30 am | Comment

“This isn’t about a “solution” to Africa, it’s about the need for action in the region to get rid of Mugabe and support free & fair elections to resolve the political crisis, rather than pander to “neo-racism”.”

People are really unaware as of how difficult it is to “save Zimbabwe”.

Getting rid of Mugabe by any means might help in the short-term, but something that actually helps for any significant amount of time requires the building of infrastructure and a costly occupation by peace-keeping forces.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t detect any amount of sincerity in this widespread “Save Africa” hysteria. If anyone actually cared about Africa they wouldn’t only be donating a pathetic 800-1000~ dollars to charity a year; very little of which is donated to Africa.

They wouldn’t only be sitting on the piles of natural resources stolen from there, infrastructure built by exploited non-whites and said resources, and the tech developed through such an artificially bolstered economy, and just complaining.

All you end up getting is revolutionista rhetoric from people unfamiliar with the “Wests debt to Africa”. They brush meager scraps off their tables, insufficient to lift Africa out of a subsistence level. Another Darfur is right under the surface as disease, warlordism, bad rulers, and famine damages the socio-economic fabric of the continent.

It’s not that simple. Kill Mugabe! Blame China! The Scramble for Africa did much more than just let loose a bunch of ruthless, immoral European opportunists throughout Africa to do surface-level damage; it completely destroyed things that took centuries to build and some hand-wringing isn’t going to pay for it.

So basically what I’m saying, is that certain people’s efforts are not commensurate with the historical debts they owe and definitely not commensurate with their level of whining. They should at least educate themselves beyond the basics and learn up about the current situation of Africa and the PAU.

What does everyone expect them to do? It’s not like they’re so rich they can abandon their own problems at home and start dumping money into Zimbabwe. The whole country is a mess and Mugabe is just the cherry on top.

I’m thinking the best solution would be to support the PAU, diversify and increase aid going into the continent, as well as make microloans to people in Africa trying to prop up the economy. This would eventually give the PAU the ability to effectively counter problems such as Mugabe and Darfur.

April 5, 2007 @ 6:34 am | Comment

The problem is, ferins, that corruption will destroy the good intentions of any and all aid packages sent to Africa under its’ current leadership. There is a problem with Africa – and it’s African leaders. It’s no coincidence that until recently, the two richest nations in Africa were not run by Africans – Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa – and that both, following the introduction of native African leadership – are headed southwards at a breakneck spead (although Zimbabwe certainly has an impressive head-start). The fact is that African leadership will jeapordise any and all attempts, no matter how sincere, to pull Africa out of its’ misery. I’m not necessarily proposing a return to colonialism – however, time and time again it has been shown that as long as African leaders of all political hues have had their fingers on the purse-strings, the end result of Western, Soviet and any and all financial assistance has been atrocious mismanagement, famine, and warfare.

April 5, 2007 @ 7:04 am | Comment

yes, that’s just a symptom though; get rid of Mugabe and another despot will just rise to the top without something like the PAU to (try) and regulate corruption.

April 5, 2007 @ 7:25 am | Comment

@JXie

I think you have some basic facts wrong.

“Mugabe isn’t out of thin air. He is a part of Zimbabwe, a land of which people had been robbed for more than a century — they are lack of infrastructure & education. They are poor and desperate.”

Zimbabwe actually had a thriving economy until Mugabe started breaking up white farmers and started handing the land out to his political supporters. Before, Zimbabwe had a strong agricultural economy but that was destroyed by the redistribution of land.

On the other hand, I don’t think there is anything wrong with China using foreign aid in Africa. They’re trying to ensure access to resources and using the tools they have to secure that access. Chinese foreign policy is amoral, despite what they say, and is simply aimed at improving its economy and trying to cement the one China policy. I don’t think there’s anything particularly horrible about that. It’s not moral either but it just power politics.

April 5, 2007 @ 9:01 am | Comment

Kenzhu, the Zimbabwean economy has been get worse after the harsh land redistribution in the last decade or so. But bear in mind, Zimbabwe has always been a poor country at a per capita base. Most blacks were dirt poor then and even worse now.

April 5, 2007 @ 6:16 pm | Comment

JXie, Zimbabweans might not have all been wealthy but they were not starving either. As I said, the concept that people need land to live off is a throw-back to the Feudal era – land redistribution is not a fast-track to a better standard of living. It is a hard slog requiring prudent economic policies and patience – Mugabe has given Zimbabwe neither.

April 5, 2007 @ 7:21 pm | Comment

@ferins

“Yes, that’s just a symtom though.”

So what is the malady?

April 6, 2007 @ 5:03 am | Comment

Chris Cocks “Fireforce” gives a good view of Rhodesia during the war, and has an interesting vignette concerning a hard-scrabble Afrikaaner family on one not very wealthy farm. It reminded me that much of Rhodesia’s farmland had been converted from bush rather than seized from the local indigenous population, as is the general supposition. The Africans were ancillary to the national economy that developed because they were pastoralists and subsistance farmers. As their numbers grew, thanks in part to governmental health programs, and they became more educated, they naturally questioned why it was that the whites had such (relative) wealth compared to themselves. For some, marxism offered the better explanation, and Lenin and Mao offered a road to power. Unfortunately, this road to power included the strategy of targeting the government infrastructure, to include (indigenous) community leaders, schoolteachers, technicians, etc.. Thus, the manner in which the war itself was waged unnecessarily set their country back by decades. In this regard, Zimbabwe shares some parallels with China and Vietnam. When Mugabe first arrived in power, he appeared to realize that keeping the Whites was in Zimbabwe’s best interest. Unfortunately, that approach fell by the wayside as he maneuvered to keep himself in power. The Economist ran a recent article on Mugabe that paints a somewhat sympathetic, but not supportive, picture of the man. Despite his appearance, he is apparently not some Black Hitler goon, but a highly intelligent and hard-working man who is fixated upon remaining in power, no matter what the cost. Somewhat reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia-Marques’ dictator in “The Autumn of the Patriarch”. And that is certainly a universal personality, rather than some peculiarly African institution. Tellingly, they note that while he is unrestrained in dealing with opponents, he never allowed Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, to be threatened. Smith remained in the country until two years ago, when he moved to South Africa.

April 6, 2007 @ 10:37 am | Comment

bad tangible and sociopolitical infrastructure, that was messed up by colonialism for a bit; and then worsened as leadership changed

April 6, 2007 @ 11:14 am | Comment

The anti-West (whatever that means, guess we’re dealing with abstractions here) strain to African identity politics is hardly anything new. See the Non-aligned Movement of the 70’s.

It is harsh and unfair to say that the west doesn’t want to help find a solution to africa’s woes, or is unwilling to admit its role in the current problem. if the west was really uninterested why all the aid and the presence of ngos in africa? what about the campaign to get rid of poverty? there is a plurality of voices about africa in the west, let alone in africa.

True, but the overall failure of the IMF’s structural adjustment programs for Africa have disillusioned many and fueled no small amount of resentment against the Western model of development (I know, I know – more abstractions), I think. That adds to the already potent mix of black nationalism and post-colonialization hang-ups.

April 13, 2007 @ 6:22 pm | Comment