Today: “Jimmy Carter: Cholera-, inflation-ridden Zimbabwe ‘a basket case'”
Yesterday: “Zimbabwe is called the breadbasket of Africa…”
Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory... More by Charles Mudede
According to the Yesterday link:
“Zimbabwe was called the breadbasket of Africa until the Land reform in Zimbabwe.” in 1979.
Not to call Charles out (he’s one of my favorites at The Stranger), but “Yesterday” was a long time ago.
Charles,
It is clear that some countries in Africa are spinning deeper and deeper into hell (Zimbabwe, Somalia, Central African Republic & Democratic Republic of Congo). Is it unfair or even morally wrong to pose this question. I believe you’ve heard it in some capacity before “Would Zimbabwe, Somalia, CAR and DRC be better off if they were voluntarily recolonized by Britain, Italy, France and Belgium today now that the cold war has ended?”
700,000 people have fled Mogadishu, the capitol of Somalia. It’s a ghost town. Over 3 million(!) people died during DRC recent civil war. There are still insurgents wreaking havoc (including rape) there. Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a homophobic autocrat who won’t even allow Pres. Carter or Sec. Annan in his country! Seriously, the continent not just Zimbabwe (South Africa too has to reckon with its horrifc AIDS crisis) is in a tailspin. What can be done, if anything? Last time I checked, these are our fellow human beings. I served them and my country (the USA) proudly when I lived there in the Peace Corps twenty years ago. It is devastating to read about the continent’s tragedies.
The real lesson is: “Don’t kick out and/or kill all the white farmers who grew your food for you if you are too lazy or stupid to know how to grow it for yourself.” I’m sure there were lots of naive liberals in Seattle cheering on Mugabe when he started “land redistribution”. Where are they all now? And boy howdy isn’t South Africa just SO MUCH BETTER OFF now too? Nothing says “progress” like degenerating in only about ten short years from a first-world status nation to having the highest rape and murder rate in the entire world and being unable to keep the power stations running. Great job!!!
I think South Africa still manages to feed itself, no? Well, maybe not now that they are feeding millions of Zimbabwean refugees.
“I think South Africa still manages to feed itself, no?”
— Yeah, isn’t it great? One in every three women in SA gets raped, but at least they can still eat. Actually, not for long, probably, as the SA “government” is considering similar Zimbabwe-style “land reform” too. Look for famine coming to SA soon. At least they won’t have to eat any of that horrible racist white-grown food!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/170359…
Baby rapes shock South Africa
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“Every day the newspapers bring awful revelations: a nine-month-old girl gang-raped by six men; an eight-month-old raped and left by the roadside.”
It is the latest in a series of rapes of baby girls – some of them involving children less than one year-old, which has left South Africans reeling with horror.
Every day the newspapers bring awful revelations: a nine-month-old girl gang-raped by six men; an eight-month-old raped and left by the roadside.
…
Rape statistics from South Africa are so shocking as to be almost unbelievable – women’s rights activists say one South African is raped every 26 seconds.
It is the young who are particularly vulnerable, with the police saying that more teenagers are raped than any other age group.
But even in a country numbed to horrific events, these cases are bewildering to South Africans, and making them question where their society is heading.
It is hardly believable – but some think that this is not new, only that a horrible truth is finally being acknowledged
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“Actually it’s not a new phenomenon, it’s been something that you hide, you regard it as an embarrassment within the family. But now people have started to talk, they’ve decided that they’ve had enough,”
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The government is appealing for calm.
It is also trying to dispel a widespread rumour – that having sex with a virgin cures AIDS.
…
Traditional healers, or witchdoctors, are blamed for spreading this idea, and encouraging child rape. “
@2 could we then just post the question, would those countries be better off today if they were not colonized by france, italy, and britain to begin with?
@3 maybe if the white farmers (and their regime) created the environment where the behavior we now see was cultivated?
“@2 could we then just post the question, would those countries be better off today if they were not colonized by france, italy, and britain to begin with?”
Africa should have never been colonized by Europeans. They should have completely avoided it altogether. If Africa had been avoided by Europeans, they probably wouldn’t have all the modern weapons they have to fight their myriad tribal wars, which were going on for centuries before Europeans contacted Africa, so in that sense I guess they would be better off without modern weapons. In fact, the Europeans imposed and temporarily kept a relative peace among tribes that had been continually warring for centuries. Now the Africans are reverting back to their “old ways” since they have been released from European control.
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@3 maybe if the white farmers (and their regime) created the environment where the behavior we now see was cultivated?
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Whites turned Zimbabwe into the “breadbasket of Africa” and then Mugabe decided to take over producing farms and give them to blacks who had never farmed and had no intention of even learning how to farm. Whites cannot “create” such an “environment”. If a regime is that dumb it is its own fault. Many whites in Zimbabwe warned the blacks that the present crisis would in fact happen and they were called racist and often killed for it.
You have to remember that these are AFRICANS we are discussing. I know that’s terribly un-PC but it is the truth. Mugabe and other high-ranking members of his regime actually believed a woman who said she had magic powers to make diesel fuel come out a rock. They gave her OVER A MILLION DOLLARS before they realized how stupid they had been.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/wo…
October 27, 2007
‘Miracle’ fuel that made a mockery of Mugabe
Jan Raath in Harare
When Nomatter Tagarira, a spirit medium, claimed that she could conjure refined diesel out of a rock by striking it with her staff, ministers in Robert Mugabe’s Government believed that they might have found the solution to Zimbabwe’s perennial fuel shortage.
After witnessing her apparently miraculous gift they gave her five billion Zimbabwean dollars in cash (worth £1.7 million at the start of the year but now worth one seven-hundredth of that) in return for the fuel. Ms Tagarira was also given a farm, said to have been seized from its white owner during Mr Mugabe’s lawless land grab, as well as food and services that included a round-the-clock armed guard on the rock in the district of Chinhoyi 60 miles (100km) from Harare, the capital.
More than a year later officials realised they had been duped. Ms Tagarira is now in custody, awaiting trial on charges of fraud or, alternatively, of being “a criminal nuisance”. Details from court papers published this week said that over 15 months, until July this year, Ms Tagarira convinced Cabinet ministers, ruling party heavy-weights and top army and police officers that by striking the rock with her staff she could produce enough fuel to supply the country for 100 years.
The legal firm representing her told The Times that she had been refused bail and no trial date had been set yet.
“It’s an outlandish story but the people in government who believed this are the same ones who believe that Mugabe’s official policy of printing money will end inflation,” said an economist, who requested anonymity.
After 27 years of economic misrule, what was once one of Africa’s most prosperous countries is in a nightmare of hyperinflation, famine and infra-structural collapse.
According to the police docket at the court, Ms Tagarira, 35, discovered a large bowser of diesel last year, suspected to have been abandoned in the hills of Chinhoyi during the country’s civil war in the 1970s.
She laid pipes from the bowser to a point at the bottom of the hill. Whenever she assembled an audience, she would strike a rock and an assistant at the top of the hill would open the tap and lo, fuel would pour out. The bowser eventually ran dry but that didn’t stop Ms Tagarira. “They would buy diesel from lorry drivers and keep it in the pipe on the pretext it was coming from a rock,” the docket said.
By June the Government had decided the claims were plausible enough to warrant an official investigation. However, where a single geologist would have sufficed, they dispatched a large “task force” of politicians and members of the security forces, led by the deputy commissioner of police.
The task force duly reported to Mr Mugabe’s politburo, the most powerful body in the country, that the liquid appearing at the rock had been siphoned into lorries and that they had driven off without problem.
However, it was when a second “task force” of ministers was sent by the politburo a month later that Ms Tagarira’s ruse ended. She “failed to prove the existence of the fuel”, it said. She disappeared and was arrested this month. “It is not the woman who ought to be arrested, it is the idiots who authorised this criminal waste of public money,” said a lawyer, asking not to be named.
Come on now, we all know this is white people’s fault. It’s the legacy of colonialism and oppression. Soon, under Mr. Mugabe’s leadership, Zimbabwae will be sending rockets to Mars, exploring space, unraveling the secrets of DNA, and creating cutting edge technology in computers and medicine.
ian, if you’re so smart, why don’t you try running the country?
They kicked me out… they made their bed, and now they have to die in it.
“ian, if you’re so smart, why don’t you try running the country?”
Why would he want to run a DAFN country full of groids who love to rape and kill doing TNB???
“ian, if you’re so smart, why don’t you try running the country?”
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If you are so fucking smart, why don’t you? Jesus what an absolutely fucking stupid thing to write!!!!
look up “ian smith”… it’s not that difficult.
the posts here mirror someone else’s ideas — ideas that failed in reality. i could dispute the failed ideas here in their theoretical form, or simply point out how they failed in reality.
“i could dispute the failed ideas here in their theoretical form, or simply point out how they failed in reality.”
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Yeah you say that you can, but you didn’t, so I don’t think you can until you do it.
Those “failed ideas” you vaguely reference could not have failed any harder than the current way way the blacks are failing in Zimbabwe. Nobody starved in Rhodesia and even Zimbabwe grew enough food to feed several other countries, at least until blacks who didn’t know jack shit about farming decided to kill the whites who grew food for them. Suck it.