- Among most British people, Robert Mugabe inspires much
more anger than Saddam Hussein. Iraq`s leader murders his enemies out of
sight. Whatever horrors he is brewing in his secret laboratories and factories,
they have not been unleashed upon the world at large. Mugabe, by contrast,
terrorises his white subjects under floodlights. Farmers are driven from
land they have tilled for decades.
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- Casual brutality is the nation's staple diet, and heaven
knows there is little else to eat. Zimbabwe is sinking into a slough of
corruption, starvation and bankruptcy to satisfy the megalomania of one
man.
-
- If Tony Blair announced tomorrow that Britain intended
to invade Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe from power, I suspect that the news
would be far more enthusiastically received than a declaration of war on
Saddam Hussein.
-
- Yet, of course, neither Britain nor the United Nations
will depose Mugabe. Many miles and the colonial legacy divide us from his
crumbling country. His tyranny poses no threat to the outside world. His
victims are his own people.
-
- For all the sentiment expended upon Zimbabwe`s white
farmers, most people in Britain recognise that their fate was sealed more
than two decades ago when black majority rule came to the former Rhodesia.
Since 1980 it has merely been a question of how long the dwindling number
of Rhodesians could stick it.
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- After the bitterness of the civil war there never seemed
a realistic prospect that a multi-racial society would survive for long.
For 100 years, the white man lorded it in old Rhodesia. Now a black tyranny
does so.
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- The remaining whites will be driven out of Mugabes`s
Zimbabwe. The wise ones will leave while they still have the skin on their
backs. Just or unjust, that is reality.
-
- I would go further and suggest that the game is up for
the white man throughout Africa. It does not matter whether this is a good
or bad thing - it represents the tide of history.
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- For four centuries, white immigrants and their decendants
have pitched camp in Africa. "We belong here. We are as much Africans
as any of Mugabe`s war veterans" a Zimbabwean farmer will say.
-
- Yet, in the eyes of Africa this is not true. The white
man is always the alien, the outsider, the former ruler whose very competence
is a painful embarrassment even to the most educated black Africans. However
much those Zimbabweans, or their South African counterparts, love the countries
in which they live, few black Africans will today acknowledge that the
white man belongs among them. He is perceived as a leftover from the past,
flotsam drifting on the beach of history.
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- The remaining whites will not be driven out in a single
dramatic purge. Over the next 30 years, they will simply be prodded, frightened
and squeezed until they slip away piecemeal, as the children of a good
many friends of mine has already done.
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- In a succession of lurches and surges, Africa is reverting
to a dark continent. Over the past 40 years, since the colonial powers
began to depart, all the world's efforts to provide advice and aid have
been frustrated by cultural resistance, lack of education, population explosion
and above all, corruption on a vast scale.
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- Many Western nations suffer from political corruption.
But they are rich enough, and the corruption modest enough, for their economies
and political systems to co-exist with it. Across Africa, however, rulers
have systematically stripped national treasuries of their wealth. It was
recently estimated that 95 billion Pounds has been illegally removed from
the continent by national rulers since the colonial powers departed. No
society can prosper amid corruption on this scale.
-
- We take for granted the honesty of our judges, accountants
- yes even after Enron - banks and bureaucrats. Honesty is not only the
best policy, it is indespensable if any economic system is to prosper.
In Africa, the only wholly successful modern industry is the theft of cash
from businesses, aid funds, government coffers, utilities, mines, wildlife
charities etc.
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- In the days when I travelled in Africa a lot, an old
hand in Nairobi explained a few home truths to me. "In this society,
if you don`t use power to enrich yourself and your family you are not merely
behaving foolishly, you are thought to be acting wickedly" he said.
"There is absolutely no understanding here of the ideal of the community,
of people at large. There is only the family, the tribe and yourself."
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- There are a few exceptions such as Nelson Mandela. But
for most of the continent, that cynical piece of wisdom is as true today
as it was 20 years ago.
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- Almost every African state is governed solely in the
interest of its ruling clique. National bankruptcy does nothing to diminish
a bottomless appetite for first-class travel and absurdly pretentious embassies
abroad. Look at the roll call in London alone - some of the most expensive
real estate in the capital is occupied by the diplomatic missions of some
of the poorest countries of the world: Malawi in Grovener Street, Tanzania
in Hartford Street, Zambia in Palace Gate, Zimbabwe in the Strand.
-
- By almost every economic measure Africa has gone backwards,
not forwards, since the 1960`s. Three years ago Bill Clinton toured the
continent and delivered a series of supremely cynical speeches, proclaiming
that the West would henceforward be coming to Africa`s aid. It sounded
like rubbish then and it is rubbish now. The West has no intention of bailing
out Africa, even if Blair has surges of compassion for the place.
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- Donors are tired of giving cash of which only a smidgen
reaches the people for whom it is intended. Food deliveries to starving
people will continue, but these do nothing to salvage collapsing economies.----The
end of the Cold War means that no great power feels a need to buy influence
there. For many years, African leaders bitterly denounced "imperialist
interference" in their countries. Today, they are learning that international
indifference is far more painful.
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- For most of Africa`s people the future looks even grimmer
than the past. Aids is ravaging populations. The statisticians expect its
consequences to grow much worse before they get better. The influential
American academic Phillip Bobbitt, in his recent book Shield of the Achilles,
observed that he sees only misery ahead for Africans in the 21st century,
as disease, famine and corruption relentlessly assail them.
-
- There was a vivid moment a couple of years ago during
the first stage of the British intervention to support the struggling government
of Sierra Leone. Its prime minister asked a visiting British politician,
in the presence of journalists, if it might be possible for his country
to become part of the British Empire again. Most of those present believed
that the Leonese leader was serious. The problems of African societies
are so huge, so deep- rooted, that the few honest and decent politicians
despair. They grasp at any straw to rescue their countries. It is a tragic
spectacle and few experts see a way out.
-
- When the West does intervene in any African society,
it is essential to stay for at least 10 years or more to have any hope
of making lasting progress. The Americans failed miserably in Somalia a
decade ago, because they treated it as a short term problem. The British
Army training team in Sierra Leone has done a good job, but the lasting
need is for civil assistance - to teach people to collect taxes, administer
courts and run infrastructure projects. We are talking, of course, about
something embarrassingly close to neo-colonialism. Many Africans would
be delighted if there was more of it about. But political obstacles remain
overwhelming, the imperial memory too fresh.
-
- Almost every Western attempt to help Africa founders,
sooner or later, amid the morass of political prejudice and cultural division.
Zimbabwe`s remaining whites farm the land incomparably more efficiently
than their black counterparts. But this makes their presence more intolerable,
not less so, to the likes of Mugabe.
-
- The big fib, propagated at the time of African independence,
was that local people wanted the right to vote. Not so. They scarcely cared
a fig for ballots, most of which were soon rigged anyway. They wanted the
land, cars, houses, swimming pools of their erstwhile white rulers. They
still want these things, in Zimbabwe and South Africa generally.
-
- Sooner or later, most African leaders find it expedient
to hand over the white men`s toys to their own people, without all the
bother of explaining that these things should be won through education,
skills, enterprise, and hard labour over generations.
-
- I was never a supporter of Ian Smith`s Rhodesia, which
was founded on a huge injustice to the blacks, and sustained by cruelties
as horrible as those of Mugabe today. White minority rule in South Africa
was a loathsome thing. Thank God it has gone. But it remains a tragedy
to see black-ruled Africa sinking into the swamp of history.
-
- Outsiders can do little to save it from itself as long
as it remains a continent of tyrants, and democracy is making no headway
at all. There is one striking oddity about Africa`s misery today: passions
remain entirely internally directed. Whereas in the Middle East resentment
of the rich West spawns terrorism and active hostility, above all towards
the USA, even Mugabe`s denunciations of Blair lack conviction.
-
- Africa`s rulers are overwhelmingly preoccupied with their
personal cravings for wealth. Their subjects merely struggle to survive.
Some observers believe that this may change as the power of Islam grows
across the continent. The influence of the Moslem religion may generate
a new assertiveness, even aggression, a decade or two onwards.
-
- For now however, African passion focuses exclusively
upon their own societies, and upon futile thrashings to make some brand
of authoritarian Socialism blossom amid the failling crops.
-
- You may have noticed that even as more and more whites
are obliged to quit Africa, growing numbers of black Africans seek to migrate
to Europe and the United States - refugees from the economic catastrophies
their own rulers have created at home. On every plane that bears sorrowing
whites away from the continent of their birth into exile in Europe or Australia,
there are also many seats occupied by departing blacks who are just as
much victims. It is a bitter historic irony.
-
- I believe that the remaining whites will continue to
trickle away from Africa until there are only a handful of communities
left between Cairo and The Cape. Then the white outside world may notice
less, and care less, what happens to the continent because we shall perceive
no kin there. Africa`s story will have become an exclusive black disaster.
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- Well there you have it.
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- It is sad but true, history repeats itself.
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- © 2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
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