-----Original Message-----
 
From: Hannibal Cassanova [log in to unmask] (mailto:[log in to unmask]) 
To: [log in to unmask] (mailto:[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 herein America.  
Wehave not created an alternative outlet news media which speaks truth to  
power.As a result, we continue to mimic, replicate,and parrot western  
Europeanthought, as our reality, in negation of, African reality and  historicalthought. 
Please read scholar activist Chinweizu's position paper on  theconfusion 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, 26  
May2008, 
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  bythe 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 Zimbabwean "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 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 15 years 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  
sanctionsfrom 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] 
(mailto:[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] (mailto:[log in to unmask]) 
All rights reserved.© Chinweizu 2008
 



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