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Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 9:54 PM
Subject: Europe’s apartheid and Africa’s future 


Europe’s apartheid and Africa’s future 



AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso 
Our mass media these days are full of confused and confusing things. These things require detailed explanation, but because journalism insists on reporting events while ignoring relationships among those events, journalism often serves to compound the confusion. 

Looking at our Zimbabwean media in particular during the last week, we can find at least three puzzling stories, one of which we have been trying to explain. 

The first one was a rare editorial attack on the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions in the Financial Gazette on March 4 2004. The Financial Gazette expressed shock that this huge superstructure called the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions does not have the slightest clue where Zimbabwe’s "working people are" and what has been happening to them in the last 15 years. 

The new leadership of the ZCTU has been too busy with white donors, white human rights lawyers and foreign trips in white America and white Europe to be able to attend to the African working person in Zimbabwe. This is a big story of "change" but it is not pursued in detail in our media. 

The second one was about the plight of young journalists at the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe and how they have been misled to believe that the so-called Media Defence Fund, Media Lawyers Network and the likes of Advocate Adrian de Bourbon and Chris Andersen would rescue them from the need to respect the laws of Zimbabwe. Twenty or more court cases later, the situation at the ANZ resembles the situation in the ZCTU. 

The real workers have been sacrificed and only a few guys with their white sponsors seem to have gotten what they wanted — the propaganda point that President Mugabe hates and suppresses "independent" media; "that is why The Daily News and The Daily News on Sunday are not on the streets". This propaganda is, of course, based on lies. 

The third story is an ongoing one — the complete failure or absence of "voluntary action" as a means of instilling and imposing discipline in the private sector. After 15 years of the most hostile campaign against public regulation and public legislation in favour of "self-regulation" and voluntary action, we have not seen any significant initiative by the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce, the Indigenous Business Development Centre, the Affirmative Action Group, the Indigenous Business Women’s Organisation, the Federation of African Media Women or the Independent Editors Forum to show that self-regulation and voluntary action in this country can provide a real alternative to the police power of the State. 

So the intense hostility against public policy and public institutions to which we have been subjected for the last 15 years by the so-called civil society with its "donor community" must have been just propaganda? But Why? 

During that same 15 years, we have also noticed a strange phenomenon — a donor-funded alliance, though temporary, between white settler grandmothers and grandfathers on the one hand and angry middle-class African youths from the urban areas, on the other hand, the phenomenon of Mike Auret, Trudy Stevenson, David Coltart, Cathey Buckle, Diana Mitchell and Adrian de Bourbon becoming the great aunts and great uncles of a supposed African youths revolution seeking to overturn the legacy of the Second and Third Chimurenga. How does one explain all this? 

The answer appears to lie in the nature and origins of the "new right" or "new Reich" forces which now dominate the world and seek "regime change" in Zimbabwe. Some insights can be gained from Richard Viguerie, The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead; Harry and Bonaro Overstreet, The Strange Tactics of Extremism; and Professor Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. 

From these sources we learn that from the 1950s to the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the forces of the new right felt marginalised and dispossessed. They sought to capture power within Western society and to revive and prolong Anglo-American hegemony globally. 

This sense of dispossession arose from the compromise world that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War. Within that compromise there were features which riled rightwing forces, including the UN Charter; African and Asian liberation movements; the UN General Assembly and its endorsement of decolonisation; the acceptance of socialism. In other words, the world which the children of the white rightwing had been educated to expect could not be achieved in the 1945-1989 period. 

This explains why the Western new right admired and protected white settlers under apartheid and UDI. White South Africa and Rhodesia represented the way the white man and woman was supposed to live and thrive anywhere on earth, in the eyes of the New Right. 

The collapse of UDI and apartheid added the displaced and dispossessed former white settlers to the ranks of the traditional Western rightwing. Their strategy was now to use the opportunity offered by the collapse of the Soviet Union to settle all their grievances against the South and the East before the superpower could emerge to challenge the United States. That was the mission of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Senior and now Tony Blair and George Bush Junior. That was the purpose of the programme for a New American Century. 

But the rightwing also understood that the emergence of a new superpower would also depend on what happens in smaller countries. The experience of Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Algeria and Chile showed that small countries have enormous impact on the so-called balance of power. So the new right sought to continue shaping the expectations of youths, intellectuals and professionals in as many countries of the South and East as possible. This was done through donor- funded and NGO-sponsored education and media. 

The result was that even in countries which had experienced limited revolution during the liberation struggle, at least one third of the "born free" generation would experience a shocking gap between the world they were educated to expect and the real world of SAP and capitalist crisis they would actually experience. In other words, newly independent countries such as Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa would find that at least a third of their highly schooled "born free" kids would be ripe for political narcissism and paranoia similar to that of the Euro-American youths of the late 1940s who were not prepared for Vietnam, Cuba, Korea, Congo, the General Assembly or the Non-Aligned Movement. 

In other words, a proportion of the "born free" generation in Zimbabwe and elsewhere would accuse the liberation movement (now the Government) and the war veterans of robbing them of the kind of world which their Group A schools and NGO-sponsored workshops taught them to expect. In fact, the gap between the expectations of real life and the real economy in Zimbabwe, on the one hand, and what some of our youths who were sponsored expect, on the other hand, can be seen in many paradoxes, such as the "salad" phenomenon and the recently exposed financial sector "bubble". 

This feeling among a third of the "born free" generation that they have been cheated or "dispossessed" and that someone owes them a yuppy existence partly explains this generation’s alliance with white settlers who also feel cheated and dispossessed of the world their parents taught them to expect. 

From the sources we have already cited, we find striking similarities between the Western rightwing movement and the alliance of white settlers and African reactionaries here. 

Here are some of the similarities. 

First, both movements feel lost in a changing world. George Bizos thinks Morgan Tsvangirai is Nelson Mandela in 1964, while Adrian de Bourbon thinks Strive Masiyiwa and Samuel Sipepa Nkomo are Martin Luther King. 

Second, both movements feel cheated and dispossessed, although the African youth side of the alliance can claim to be dispossessed only of a lecture room vision of the world rather than real assets which they reject in the form of reclaimed African land. 

Third, both movements are built on hostility against public institutions and public policy. To see proof of this the reader should just go to our courts and look up the hundreds of recent cases against elections, against land reform and resettlement and against the national regulation of mass media. 

Readers should also read the Law Society Magazine Number 15 of 2003. If one reads the stories there, one gets the impression that the only lawyers who should get honours and prizes, indeed the only lawyers who deserve to be called real lawyers, are those who have consistently opposed public policy and public institutions. 

It is clear from reading the magazine that there is an underlying assumption that public institutions and public policy cannot contribute to the defence and promotion of "human rights". Only "civil society" and "civil society organisations" and their lawyers are seen as capable of defending "human rights". The lawyer who defends collective and individual human rights by upholding public policy and defending public institutions is denigrated as a traitor. 

Fourthly, there are clear similarities in the ways both movements define and project "the enemy", whether that enemy is Fidel Castro, Nikita Kruschev, Robert Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki or an African liberation movement. In Professor Hofstadter’s words, "The paranoid interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will . . . the enemy is held to possess some specially effective source of power: he controls the Press; he directs the public mind . . . he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind . . . ; he has a special technique of seduction . . ." 

Since the purpose of the movement is absolute division and polarity, this enemy becomes most threatening if he seems reasonable, if he wants to trade and travel, if he convinces people that he wants peace and the welfare of his own people. According to Hofstadter, "Much of the function of the enemy lies not in what can be imitated (or emulated) but in what can be wholly condemned". If such conduct cannot be found, it has got to be imagined or fabricated. Whole newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations are set up to carry out the fabrication and demonisation. 

Fifth, the purpose of research, investigation and information is not to open up the world, to reveal and communicate reality. In such a movement research, investigation and information serve to shut out and to delete intolerable or unacceptable reality. In other words, under the new Reich or the new apartheid, we have the information equivalents of the Group Areas Act, the Separate Amenities Act, the Bantu Education Act and the notorious pass laws. 

Hofstadter found that the primary purpose of rightwing research was to amass supposed evidence to justify shutting out the threatening world, to prove that the unbelievable and the incredible is the only thing that is real, true and believable. Common sense is, therefore, dangerous and banned. 

It cannot be accepted as common sense that the people of Zimbabwe follow their President Robert Mugabe because he has assisted them to reclaim their land which had been stolen and occupied by invaders for a hundred years. Such a straightforward explanation of history cannot be allowed in the ranks of this rightwing alliance. 

In other words, the purpose of information and communication for the rightwing alliance then and now is to justify closure, to justify isolation and sanctions, but never to communicate, to inform, to reconsider or to negotiate. 

Hofstadter’s description of the rightwing activist and ideologue fits the current behaviour of the European Union, the US and Australia with their illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe: 

"His effort to amass it (information and so-called evidence) has rather the quality of a defensive act which shuts off his receptive apparatus and protects him from having to attend to disturbing considerations that do not fortify his (rigid) ideas. He has all the evidence he needs; he is not a receiver, he is a transmitter." 

Therefore, no African voices should be allowed into the US, the UK and Europe, except those sponsored by European and North American governments, except those sponsored by NGOs, also sponsored by Europe and America. A global pass system has been placed upon information, knowledge and discourse by the very same society which claims to be the open society. This is obvious when one reads the story "Bank of England adopts new EU (ban) list on Zimbabwe", which appeared on Page 5 of the Zimbabwe Independent of March 5 2004. 

The list of banned people under apartheid was very long. Now apartheid has travelled back to Europe and America where it originated, and the new pass system is celebrated in the Zimbabwe Independent as a great achievement of the new white laager. 

What then is the role of rightwing media for this reactionary alliance? Professor Hofstadter concluded that the role of the media in such circumstances is to generate "fright mail", to generate the bad news which justifies a permanent white panic and white hysteria. The coming of the internet, fax and e-mail has turned the white fright into a deluge. Here are recent examples concerning Zimbabwe: 

l "Voters tortured for disloyalty," news.24.com, March 3 2002. 

l "Is Zimbabwe on the brink of genocide?" ZW News, February 28 2004. 

l "Mugabe loses $20 billion in civil suit," The Daily News, October 27 2000. 

l "War veterans plan to attack judges", The Daily News, December 14 2000. 

l "Those with degrees in violence will be declared heroes," The Daily News, December 25 2000. 

l "Land grab: Destroying supermarkets to build tuckshops," The Daily News, December 1 2000. 

l "Risk in Africa — Robert Mugabe threatens more than just Zimbabwe," The Economist, April 22 2000. 

l "The mess that one man makes — Robert Mugabe is wrecking Zimbabwe, — but if voters reject his party at elections, there is hope," The Economist, April 22 2000. 

This is but a tiny sample of the white fright mail from the rightwing. 

Its purpose, like the EU sanctions, is not to enable people to understand Zimbabwe or to debate it. Its purpose is to confirm and justify the permanent panic, pessimism and cynicism of those who feel that the world is the wrong place, filled with the wrong people, living at the wrong time for the wrong purpose. Their excitement about genocide comes from that same feeling. 

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