You can save your bloody noble savage comments, as well as your benighted white man’s burden commentary.
The issue is for internally supported polities to emerge, e.g. as has occured in Ghana, Senegal and Mali to date, to a somewhat shakier extent in Uganda, etc.
You wrote “ex-South Africa.” Were you not referring to the country?
I’ll grant you (a) and ©. It appears that (b) is a subset of (a). However, (d)Apartheit is far more important than (a), (b) and ©. If you read the various UN resolutions, boycott resolutions, etc, they all refer to (d), and none mentions (a), (b) and ©.
My first post was with regards to why a certain group of people was so awfully quiet. That group termed ‘liberals’ by December and who generally take the front in shouting nice, politically correct, slogans. Why are they quiet with regards to Africa.
In fact I largely agree with you on the causes and that they should govern themselves. I just don’t think that we should have a (assumed or not) guilt complex towards Africa and stick our heads in the sand. Why shouldn’t we point to Mugabe and condemn what he is doing?
Ex-SA, meaning excluding SA. That is excluding SA, the bloody continent barely gets any attention at all in American press, and almost always in the negative. Such that your odd assertion that Mugabe was getting a pass for his blackness and so-called “Marxism”, if I read it correctly to be in re American press, is just more nattering on.
If it is in re the usual clueless suspects on American campuses, variously called “activists”, then I wouldn’t disagree, but as they’re not terribly responsible for media coverage in gross…
As Apartheid is now a decade in the past, more or less, my comments were present focused. However if you read carefully you will note that (b) includes Apartheid (formerly negative, now positive) by implication. Read carefully december, carefully.
In re Latro, I am in no way arguing that Mugabe should not be criticized.
As for “guilt complex” it all depends on what one means by that. If it means the namby pamby attitude that all African problems are the “fault” of “white oppressors” then I might agree. If it means a simplistic it’s all the nigs own fault argument, then I disagree. Colonial rule clearly set up some highly negative patterns of governance, and as we know from political inquiry on a global scale, historical precedent in re political culture etc. is a bloody hard thing to shake off, witness, e.g. FSU region.
The liberal orthodoxy is that all the problems of Africa are caused by colonialism. We have seen an example of this kind of thinking from Collounsbury. (Too bad about december handing you your ass, old boy - better luck next time.)
As long as we condemn only white, trumped-up tinpot dictators, we will have the support of the Third World every time. Once we start condemning all trumped-up tinpot dictators, half the UN starts getting nervous.
Same as when Viet Nam and Cambodia were a big deal in the US, so long as we were fighting there (and there was a draft). Once we got out, Pol Pot and his ilk could make the streets run with blood and everyone looked the other way. No stick for beating up the colonialist powers, you see.
So Mugabe is robbing and murdering. So did Idi Amin. So did Megistu. So did practically everybody else in sub-Saharan Africa. Who did the world spend most of their energy condemning? South Africa. They’re white.
Otherwise, it doesn’t count.
Regards,
Shodan
Genie, the news on Zimbabwe’s human crisis was there, you just didn’t notice. I put “zimbabwe” into cnn.com’s Search function and got the following. (But you and Barbara Simpson both have a point–the animals aren’t mentioned.)
September 16, 2002 (Yes, I know this is the same story twice, but it was posted in both “Health” and “World” that day.)
Annan calls for war against AIDS, focus on girls’ education in Africa – UNITED NATIONS (AP) – U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for a war on AIDS and the promotion of girls’ education as the United Nations took a break Monday from its regular debate to focus on what one African leader called extricating “Africa out of her long night of misery.”
September 12, 2002
Zimbabwe toughens land policy – HARARE, Zimbabwe (Reuters) – Zimbabwe’s government is to speed up the seizure of white-owned farms, state media has said.
Okay, so in the month of September so far, “Zimbabwe” has been mentioned in 22 cnn.com articles, of which I count 15 that were specifically about Zimbabwe. Other African nations with their own crises, both human and environmental, like Congo and Nigeria and Ivory Coast, were mentioned hardly at all during the same time period. I think the news on Zimbabwe is there, Genie, you just haven’t noticed it–if you’re like the rest of us 
, what you’ve been noticing all during September has been (1) the abductions of little girls, (2) Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, (3) the 9/11 anniversary, (4) American Idol, and (5) Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.
We can only care about so many things at once. Look at the world–there are, literally, hundreds or even thousands of crises going on at this very moment. We all have to pick and choose, and human nature being what it is, we all tend to pick the loudest and brightest things to focus on.
But I know what you mean, and what Barbara Simpson means–you both wanna know, “Where are the excited mainstream journalists doing standups in front of the Harare Presidential Palace? Why isn’t the Zimbabwe environmental crisis being featured on 20/20 and 60 Minutes?” There are two reasons for that, I think.
The first is simply because the media also can only care about so many things at once, and like the rest of us, they pick the things that are the loudest and the brightest. Notice that suddenly now that there are American children’s lives at stake, Ivory Coast is all over cnn.com.
Anyway, there are so many appalling human crises taking place simultaneously in Africa–starvation, AIDS, totalitarian dictatorships, civil wars, child labor, small arms trafficking, female genital mutilation, baby rapers, you name it, they got it. Where are you supposed to start? Where is CNN supposed to start? The animals just get short shrift in the face of such enormous human suffering.
The second reason is because, as Daoloth mentioned, Mugabe has some serious issues with journalists.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/africa/08/14/zimbabwe.eviction/index.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/africa/1931679.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/africa/1506216.stm
On the BBC website, there’s a whole sidebar of related articles going back to 2001 on the subject of crackdowns on the media in Zimbabwe.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/africa/07/15/zimbabwe.journalist/index.html
Notice that last statement: " …Zimbabwe’s Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, passed earlier this year which made it illegal for domestic journalists to operate without government accreditation. "
But they didn’t deport him after all.
And he has been cleared of his charges, although others are still waiting to hear.
So, we’re lucky that any news about the situation in Zimbabwe gets out, let alone news about the “killing fields” of elephants.
Ah, one of our knee-jerk Liberal-Conservative divide nabobs.
Handing me my ass? My dear Shodan, your skills in reading appear to need some remedial assistance. Or perhaps you are unable to function outside of a nice simple round peg square peg ideological world and december’s inability to follow my statement looks like ‘handing me my ass.’
Now as to the substance, your straw man fails my dear fellow. My position is clear, and reiterated many times in the past:
Colonial rule had a large number of negative effects and largely created the negative political framework for much of the post-colonial troubles through the present. Borders generally at variance with local conceptions of power distribution, hostile communities thrown into one state without local perception of rational for control or history thereof, history of abusive govermental power exercise. All these things are clear historical facts, and to deny their relevance is either stupidity, ignorance (ideologically conditioned or not) or bigotry, or all three.
At the same time the issue of how to work out the history, and deal with locally derived, nurtured and created political society maladaptation resides with locals and local habits. The sole manner of unwinding the same is to allow a political equilibruim to emerge on a local basis. International interventions, massive aid support to vampire regimes etc. only prolong the process of digesting the modern geopolitical condition.
You can natter on about liberals and whatever, this has nothing to do with my analysis.
As to the remainder, what I see is a collection of assertions from someone whose ideologically driven obsessions raise the issue of selection bias / self selected misinformation every bit as important as what DDG demonstrated above in re Zim coverage.
For example
Assertions. Lovely things, above all for creating little self-contained ideological fantasy worlds but let’s speak to evidence. Of course the prime problem (we can lay aside the form of US presence in the region essentially generating the Khemrs Rouges) to start with is Pol Pot’s regime expelling journalists. As little to nothing was known, well clearly coverage in the West fell off.
Navel gazing, not ideology. Now, to truly discuss this point, we need to get into some analysis of the actual coverage and some means to think about a play off between presence driving Western media coverage versus ideology – else it’s really just a shadow game where self-serving assertion rules.
Save your regards for when they mean something.
Is racism by blacks more acceptable than racism by whites? Mugabe has been seizing white-owned farms, and taking them for himslf and his cronies. Many of these farms are owned by white Zimbabwean citizens…whre are the anti-racist people on this one? Whay hasn’t nelson mandela spoken out against black-sponsored racism?
And, when Zimbabwe is reduced to economic ruin (the country was once a major exporter of food, now an importer), who will Mugabe blame?
ralph, there may not be anything about it where you are, but in the UK there has been highly public outrage. I think any reasoning that Mugabe isn’t being impugned for racism because he’s black is total and utter bilge. Mybe the media wherever you live isn’t covering it because it’s considered insignificant.
No.
I don’t know, I personally find the whole affaire sad and disreputable.
The saddest part of course being that this eye for an eye thing has done nothing good for the average Zimbabwean. Eye for an eye – the reference there is in re how the white land got that way, siezed at gunpoint right through the 1950s – in this instance was largely unnecessary.
Land reform was necessary, and Great Britain was ready to fund a transparent process, which might have had the double benefit of (a) securing the title of the white farmers who would recieve payment and perhaps buy back land (b) transferring productive land in a transparent, non-corrupt manner back to the black population from whom it had been siezed some 50-100 years before.
The Brit/Commonwealth plan could have been a win-win situation.
However
To rephrase this, why hasn’t Nelson Mandela spoken out against Mugabe and cronies? I don’t know that he has not. Our absense of knowledge on the matter does not mean he has not.
As a general matter, South Africans all around seem reluctant to comment on Zim bec. they have direct involvement in how Zim got to be a mess.
The Apartheid gov’t supported Ian Smith and his murderers, Mugabe’s own band gave support and cover to the ANC post Zim independence. Both sides have ties, dirty hands or old friendships and connections, especially the ANC. Rather like a crazy aunt in the attic, my impression they rather wish Mugabe would just kick off.
You might ask why the US took has frequently been silent on our old friend’s abuses. Same reasons and rule, sad truth of political relationships.
Evil colonialists. He would be right only insofar as Ian Smith and his disreputable bunch of nasty racists helped create the monster that is Mugabe through a long and unforgiving civil war, instead of having a smooth and just exit from Apartheid. Of course Mugabe is largely responsible for Mugabe, he let the hate that was bred pre-1979 eat him up (as well as I am sure greed), unlike Mandela.
Regretably no one of Mandela’s stature emerged from the Zim indep. movement.
May 2000.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/africa/739258.stm
The same story in the Sunday Times, “South Africa’s Best Selling Newspaper”. They assumed he was referring to Mugabe, too.
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2000/05/07/news/news01.htm
So did the Namibians.
http://www.namibian.com.na/Netstories/2000/May/Africa/007A98DA73.html
Then, in October 2000…
http://www.mdczimbabwe.com/archivemat/other/regional/zimstd001001atxt.htm
I’m not having any luck finding the (what must have been) September 2000 interview itself.
Oh, beat me to it.
DDG, I stand in awe of your mastery - I had a vague memory of the cited statements but was too lazy to look it up.
The Lesson here is:
(a) If you are ignorant of a situation, do not try to characterize it.
(b) North American newsmedia, esp. broadcast media, is a piss-poor means of developing a good view of overseas developments, in general.
I see the same thing constantly in re Q “why hasn’t” [The Muslims/Islam etc] condemned/said something etc. in re terror/11 Sep etc. The questioner usually not having the knowledge to phrase it that way, but rather it should be, “has…”?
This of course is more the fault of navel gazing than anything else.
Horse hockey.
Tribal leaders and their followers were attacking and killing other tribes from time immemorial in sub-Saharan Africa. To pretend that they are only doing so post-1950 or so, and to blame it on colonialism, is to ignore the whole history of that benighted continent.
Magabe was famously advised when the transition to black majority rule was supposed to be beginning, “Hold on to your whites.” (Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith Richburg). He is not taking this advice.
Certainly the economic structures being dismantled by Mugabe and his cronies were imposed on the country by people motivated more by self-interest and racism than by altruism. But the only reason productive farms existed to feed the nation, and to be broken up by Mugabe, was because there was enough political stability during the colonial period to allow food to be grown to feed the nation.
Mugabe is simply returning his nation to its status quo ante of subsistence farming punctuated by massacre. If there had been no colonial period in Africa, the lives of its people would still have been “nasty, poor, brutish, and short”.
There would have been less to fight over, but no less fighting.
Regards,
Shodan
I would hardly classify Mugabe’s actions as tribal. In fact, I’d say that particular analysis is patronising at best.
I will do that one better, I will characterize Shodan’s “analysis” as contemptiblely racist, viz:
Is pure racism.
I will return to engage the facts of the matter, developmental questions and some substantive citations on historical and economic development a bit later on when I have cleared my desk of paying work.
I have no claim to be an expert in the history of sub-Saharan Africa, but even I know that to characterize that history as one of “subsistence farming punctuated by massacre” is, plainly and simply, untrue.
I did a brief web search and turned up this outline of the history of the region. There’s a great deal more out there; certainly enough to demonstrate that “that benighted continent” has a long, rich history, including the development of several advanced cultures. The image Shodan presents is simply not accurate.
As to Zimbabwe (and it would be helpful to consider the origin of that name); although the BBC is currently banned from reporting from within Zimbabwe, its reporters (at no small risk to themselves) are still giving the people of this country a picture of what’s going on. I’d assume that Zimbabwe is considered more newsworthy in the UK than in the US - it is, after all, a former colonial possession, and thus, arguably, our mess. Mugabe is certainly playing the anti-colonialist card as hard and often as he can, but his threadbare rhetoric is increasingly failing to convince. His policy of letting loose the mobs, to target easy hate figures in the form of the remaining white farmers (and, not incidentally, to suppress his political opponents in the rest of the country) looks, to me, like a destructive and desperately short-sighted attempt to retain personal power at whatever cost to his country. In that, he is comparable to any number of dictators, in a whole range of skin colours.
What about the animals? They have to be a secondary concern; if Zimbabwe’s economic infrastructure is sufficiently damaged, the conservation effort will be a luxury the country can no longer afford.
Interesting what happens when you play around with Shodan’s statement:
*Well, Shodan, agree or disagree? Does it fly?
And here we are at Rudyard Kipling again.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.html
Bits and pieces.
http://phrases.shu.ac.uk/meanings/254050.html
Left out “solitary”.
Origin of the name “Zimbabwe”.
http://kalamumagazine.com/african_country_name_origin.htm
About Great Zimbabwe. “Not much is known…” Except that they left huge stone ruins behind.
http://campus.northpark.edu/history/WebChron/Africa/GreatZimbabwe.html
Condensed “bullet point” history of Zimbabwe.
http://www.africanet.com/africanet/country/zimbabwe/history.htm
The BBC’s “key dates in the history of Zimbabwe” which amusingly enough seem to start with 1965. Oh, well…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1998/12/98/zimbabwe/226542.stm