-----Original Message-----

From: Hannibal Cassanova <[log in to unmask]>

To: [log in to unmask]

Sent: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:48 pm

Subject: ZIMBABWE:
Propaganda of the West...



Folks,



The crisis of Black media has always been a challenge here
in America. We
have not created an alternative outlet news media which speaks truth to power.
As a result, we continue to mimic, replicate,and parrot western European
thought, as our reality, in negation of, African reality and historical
thought. Please read scholar activist Chinweizu's position paper on the
confusion in Zimbabwe,
created by America,
and a call for our support. PS: This is where critical thinking comes in.
See below...



 



Black Africa’s duty
to help Zimbabwe
defeat sanctions



By Chinweizu.



Talk at African Liberation Day Public Forum at Accra
Polytechnic, 26May2008,



Organized by the PAN-AFRICAN COUNCIL





 Greetings, Pan African comrades!!



I am here to remind us all of our Pan-Africanist duty to
stand in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe
in their present trials and tribulations. 



May I remind you of Pan-Africanism’s Black Solidarity
principle that, in Nyerere’s words, "as long as black people anywhere
continue to be oppressed on the grounds of their color, black people everywhere
must stand together in opposition to that oppression". 



In Zimbabwe
for the last 8 years, the Black population has been under severe attack by the
imperialist white power enemies of Black Africa, namely the UK,
the USA and the
EU. The people of Zimbabwe
need our Pan-African help and solidarity against an economic war inflicted on
them through sanctions allegedly targeted at only their leaders.



Sanctions have crippled the Zimbabwean economy.†Markets for
Zimbabwean exports are closed because Blacks now own the land stolen by
Rhodesian colonizers.†Foreign tourism has also plummeted, costing tens of
millions of dollars a year in lost revenue. Basic imports are unavailable; currently (as of March 2008),
Zimbabwe suffers from widespread food shortages, the world's highest inflation
rate at over 100,000%. A sizeable
part of the population has been forced to seek economic refuge abroad. This is
all happening according to the white power plan. We should recall that former
US Assistant Secretary of State on African Affairs, Chester Crocker said in a
2005 testimony to the US Senate for the Zimbabwe Democracy Act [i.e. sanctions
and regime change legislation] "To separate the Zimbabwean people
from ZANU-PF we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you
senators have the stomach for what you have to do." (Democracy
Now!, April 1st, 2005). And that is precisely what is happening. The economy is
indeed screaming, by enemy design.†The enemy intended to so torture the
Zimbabwean people that they would reject ZANU-PF at the polls.



Of course, enemy propaganda claims that the collapse of the
Zimbabwean economy is simply the result of land reforms and mismanagement by
the ZANU-PF regime. My friends, if you believe that you can believe anything.
You can even believe that all the weapons of mass destruction in the world are
stockpiled in Saddam Hussein’s shoes!



-----



So we come to the question: Why are the white powers
torturing the black people of Zimbabwe?



They call Zimbabwe
an "outpost of tyranny" and claim they want to remove ZANU-PF from
power and bring to the Zimbabweans the pleasures and benefits of democracy. But
that is a bloody big lie. In actual fact, they want to reverse the land reforms
of the last 10 years, and engineer a situation where the whites, at less than
1%of the population can go back to owning more than 70% of the arable land,
including most of the best land. That is why they are, through sanctions, which
is an act of economic warfare, torturing the black people of Zimbabwe.




----



But how did
whites ever come to own land in Zimbabwe, and so much land at that?



The answer lies
in what happened during the so-called Scramble for Africa in the closing
decades of the 19th century. Following the notorious Berlin Conference of
1884-85, the European powers set out on their scramble to conquer and seize the
lands of Black Africans.



In 1889
Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSA) gained a British mandate to
colonize what would become Southern Rhodesia. In 1890 – a pioneer column of
white settlers arrived from South Africa at the site of the future capital
Harare, and started grabbing land. The Black owners of the land opposed the
white land stealers. But by 1893 the Ndebele uprising against BSA rule was
crushed. 



But that
statement does not convey how it was done. For a flavor of the genocidal war
and sustained terrorism the British inflicted on the Blacks who resisted their
land grab, consider the case of the Amandebele (Matabele) of what became
Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). By the trickery of treaties and the terrors
of war, the Amandabele were dispossessed of their land, stripped of their
cattle, reduced to the status of bondsmen, scattered, barred from moving about
from place to place except under a system of permit or pass, and made to do
forced labour on the farms and mines of Whites. The net result, as reported at
the time?



The net position is this: The native population of
Southern Rhodesia possesses today no rights in land or water. It is
allowed to continue to live upon the land on sufferance and under certain
conditions . . . There appears to be no attempt on anyone’s part to deny the
bedrock fact that these 700,000 natives have been turned from owners of land
into precarious tenants. 



And among
the methods employed in the race war and terror campaign that achieved this? In
the words of the Matabele Times,



We have been doing it up to now, burning kraals
because they were native kraals, and firing upon fleeing natives simply because
they were black.



And for a
glimpse of the spirit in which the British troops waged that race war, consider
these words by an adventurer friend of Cecil Rhodes, a certain W. A. Jarvis:



The best thing to do is to wipe them all out as
far as one can--everything black. 



And in
letters to his mother, Jarvis wrote:



I hope the natives will be pretty well
exterminated. . . . There are 5500 niggers in this district (Gwelo) and our
plan of campaign will probably be to proceed against this lot and wipe them out
then move on towards Bulawayo wiping out every nigger and every kraal we find.
. . . And after these cold blooded murders, you may be sure there will be no
quarter and everything black will have to die, for our men’s blood is fairly
up. 



At the end
of it all, the Amandabele view of what the British had done to them was this: 



Our country is gone, our cattle have gone, our
people are scattered, we have nothing to live for, our women are deserting us;
the white man does as he likes with them; we are the slaves of the white man,
we are nobody and have no rights or laws of any kind.



This armed
and genocidal seizure of the land of the blacks would be compounded and given a
fig leaf of legality when, in 1930 the colonial government passed the Land
Apportionment Act, which divided the colony into separate areas for whites and
blacks. The act allocated to white settlers, who numbered only about 50,000
(less than 5 percent of the colony’s population), approximately 50 percent of
the land. Leaving the other 50% to the 95% of the population that was black.



---------------



Now, as we
all know, it was not until 1980, after a 15years guerilla war against the white
settler government of Ian Smith, that the stage was set for the blacks to
recover their land after almost a century of white usurpation. The setting for
that was the Lancaster House agreement of December 1979.



The
three-month long conference almost failed to reach conclusion, due to
disagreements on Land reform. Mugabe was pressured to sign and land was the key
stumbling block. Both British and American governments of the day offered to
buy land from willing white settlers who could not accept reconciliation (the
"Willing buyer, Willing seller" principle--which could not be changed
for ten years) and a fund was established, to operate for ten years from 1980
to 1990.



The British
assisted in setting up the Zimbabwe conference on reconstruction and
development in 1981. At that conference, more than £630 million of aid was
pledged. The first phase of land reform in the 1980s, which was partially
funded by the United Kingdom, successfully resettled only 71,000 families out
of a target of 162,000.



What, after
that, became of the Lancaster House provisions on land and the pledges?



Having
secured the non-expulsion of the defeated white settlers, Britain proceeded to
renege on its commitment to fund the repurchase of the land it had stolen a
century earlier. By its own admission in 2004, "Since independence we
have provided 44 million pounds for land reform in Zimbabwe" That’s
£44m out of the £630m pledged in 1981.



The
Zimbabwean Ministry of Foreign Affairs has noted that it was estimated that
about $2 billion would be needed to properly support land reforms in the
country. The government said it received only £40m between 1980 and 1996, and
that, though a mission--sent by John Major to evaluate the position after the
£40m provided under Mrs. Margaret Thatcher had been exhausted--recommended that
further funding be given to Zimbabwe to complete the land reform programme,
when John Major lost the 1997 general election to Tony Blair, the new regime
immediately repudiated all the undertakings made by the British under the
Lancaster House Agreement to assist Zimbabwe with land reforms. It quotes a
letter written to the Zimbabwean Government on November 5, 1997 by Ms Clare
Short, the then newly appointed Secretary of State for International
Development, which reads in part: †



†



"I
should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special
responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe.† We are a new
government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests.
My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonized not
colonizers."



†



Given this
clearly worded reneging by the British Government on its Lancaster House
commitments, the Zimbabwean government felt it was left with no option but to
legally designate for acquisition in 1997 "nearly 1,500 white-owned farms
for resettlement to landless peasants." 



That was how
the Zimbabwean crisis was launched. Because Zimbabwe, when faced with Britain’s
perfidious reneging on the Lancaster House Agreement, dared to try to repossess
the stolen lands by any means necessary, Britain, supported by the white
powers, launched a campaign of regime change, using sanctions and all the other
familiar devices in the imperialist bag of tricks.† They have demonized the
Zimbabwean leadership, crippled the economy with sanctions, organized and paid
for an opposition called the MDC.†It is a script we have seen before in other
parts of the world including Chile, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The result
is the ongoing torture of the Zimbabwean people. 



And where do
the allegations of human right violations, and lack of democracy come in? Or
the claim that Mugabe has ruled for too long and is too old? That is all part
of the regime change scenario. Given their decision to drive ZANU-PF from power
for daring to take back the land stolen by whites, these are all ways of giving
a dog a bad name in order to hang it. It’s all part of the faked story to
justify regime change. It’s like the famous weapons of Mass Destruction that
the world was assured that Saddam had stockpiled!! But we must not be fooled.
We must not forget that Mugabe has stayed long in office by being elected and
re-elected each time. Now, is it for the imperialists, or for the Zimbabwean
electorate to decide when Mugabe should stop ruling? And all this noise about
elections not being free and fair? When was the last time any elections were
held in Saudi Arabia, let alone free and fair elections? Yet nobody is
organizing regime change there!!



even what
the imperialist have not dreamt of asking to be given. The point of it all is
that, if a regime defends the interests of its people, it will earn the enmity
of the imperialists, and become a target for these accusations and sanctions.
But if it serves imperialism, it can be as undemocratic as Saudi Arabia, as
suppressive of human rights as the Obasanjo regime was in Nigeria, or
Pinochet’s in Chile, and the imperialists will give it their seal of approval.



What is the
role of Tsvangirai and the MDC in all this? Tsvangirai and the MDC are simply
regime change tools of the imperialists. He belongs with black traitors like
Dhlakama of RENAMO and Savimbi of UNITA. Not only have they been lavishly
funded by the imperialists, but Rhodesian whites have openly supported MDC and
come to†Zimbabwe saying they will be taking "their" farms from
indigenous Zimbabweans when Tsvangirai becomes president.



Make no
mistake about it. What ZANU-PF has been doing since 1997 is to collect
reparations by any means necessary, after having patiently given the
imperialists every opportunity to abide by their own pledges to fund their own
"willing seller, willing buyer" formula for land redistribution. For
carrying the liberation struggle to its second stage, ZANU-PF deserves the
support of all anti-imperialist Black Africans, of all Pan Africanists.



We mustn’t
forget that when white-ruled Rhodesia was under sanctions in the 1960s and
1970s, it was helped to bust sanctions and survive by white-ruled South Africa
and white ruled Mozambique. Now that Black Zimbabwe is under punitive sanctions
from the vengeful white world powers, why are Black-ruled South Africa and its
other SADC neighbors not doing enough to help Zimbabwe defeat these sanctions?
What is Black Africa doing to help? We must all do much more! We will not have
done enough until these sanctions are defeated with our visible help. So I must
ask each and every one of you: what are you, in Pan-Africanist solidarity,
prepared to do to help the Zimbabwean people today?



Having said
all that, it is our comradely duty to also ask ZANU-PF to thoroughly review its
methods of fighting sanctions and its methods of telling its story to its
people and to the world. For it seems not to have done an adequate job of that
so far.



-----------------------



Chinweizu
is a Black Power Pan-Africanist; the author of The West and the Rest of Us,
Decolonising the African Mind, and other books. He is the co-founder of the
Committee Against Arab Colonialism in Black Africa [CAACBA].



-----------------------



Feel free notice



Please feel free to fwd this
document to any Pan-African persons, or to publish and reproduce it, unedited
and in its entirety, to the Pan-African community, provided you credit the
author, do not change, cut or add any word or otherwise mutilate the piece,
i.e. publish as is or don’t at all. 



If posted at a website,
please email a copy of the web page to [log in to unmask]



For print media use, please
obtain prior written permission, and then send two (2) copies of the
publication wherein used, to Chinweizu, P. O. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos,
Nigeria. 



For further information
please contact Chinweizu <[log in to unmask]>



All rights reserved.



© Chinweizu 2008





¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤