At last, after many years, a decimated economy, a ravaged commercial farming sector, the mass murders of tens of thousands of Ndebele civilians in Matabeleland, the architect of all these horrors, the Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is finally gone. This monster who took what was known as the ‘Bread basket of Africa’ and turned into a starving, poverty stricken hell hole, is leaving office.
Robert Mugabe was a brutal tyrant who started out preaching democracy and reconciliation at the Lancaster House talks that brought about an independent majority ruled Zimbabwe. Sadly Mugabe soon turned out to be all too alike to so many other post colonial African leaders such as Kenneth Kaunda of Zamiba, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire or Milton Obote of Uganda and drove his country and its economy into the ground. Like other African leaders on whom great hope was placed at independence, Mugabe abandoned democracy and the rule of law and instead ruled with brutal violence, torture and oppression.
Robert Mugabe’s rule is a textbook lesson on how to ruin a country with corruption, economic incompetence, racist rhetoric and tribal hatreds. Under Mugabe Zimbabwe declined to such an extent that the Zimbabwean dollar ended up as genuinely not worth the paper it was printed on.
Over the course of Mugabe’s 37 year reign of terror I’ve met a number of Zimbabwean exiles who have made their homes in the United Kingdom, and they have told me tales of the utmost horror. I shudder at the stories of beatings, murders, torture with with anything from sticks to vinegar that I’ve had told to me. I have no doubt in my mind the Zimbabweans who didn’t manage to get out suffered even greater privations that those who managed to escape.
At last this horrific tyrant is gone and the Zimbabwean people of all tribes and races, should be permitted a brief moment of rejoicing before they embark on the monumental task of rebuilding a country that has been decimated by one man’s greed, corruption, authoritarianism and violence. The Zimbabwean people after independence deserved much better than what they got from Robert Mugabe. I hope and pray that the people of Zimbabwe get the peace and prosperity that they have been so long denied by the violent kleptocrat who ruled this nation for far too long.
It’s good news for all, except the left wing liberal fucktards, but don’t think that an African version of Mother Theresa is taking over. They don’t call him ‘The Crocodile’ because he’s a Bill Haley fan. How many people of a rival tribe has he had killed? The only good news is that perhaps the thousands of benefit obtaining Zimbabweans in this country may return home, now that it is the black paradise they think it will become.
I do think the Zimbabwean people deserve better than they’ve had in the past when it comes to leaders but there is the distinct possibility that one tyrannical hard man could be replaced by another. I sometimes wonder if African decolonisation may have worked better had it been a longer build up to independence? Maybe if countries like Kenya or Zim or Uganda or many others had had a decade of pre independence preparation in order to build up local political,legal and administrative talent then they may not have become such disaster zones? This would have been especially helpful when national boundaries left over from colonial times encompassed one or more sometimes mutually antagonistic tribes. In countries like Zambia for example if Kaunda’s government had been decent administrators and not been wedded to socialism then maybe it would not be in such a bad state as it is today. I also think that if the Cold War had not been going on during the move to independence for the African colonies then the proxy wars between the West and the Soviets that scarred Africa would not have occurred.
As for the Western lefties, they backed monsters like Mugabe and too many of them carried on backing him even when he was revealed to be impoverishing and oppressing his own people.
Farenheit211,
You made an interesting comment when you mentioned pre-independence preparation in Africa. The same thing occurred to me a while ago, but I’ve never seen it expressed elsewhere.
Parliamentary democracy is not a natural state of affairs. The idea that the people get to choose their leader and, if they decide they want a new leader, the old one voluntarily relinquishes power goes completely against human nature. Starting with Magna Carta, it took first the English, then the British, eight hundred years – and some bloodshed – to create their current system of governance and, it could be argued, it is still a work in progress.
Even if the Africans could have learned from our mistakes and telescoped everything ten-to-one, I still believe it would likely have taken them at least fifty years to evolve a Westminster-style democracy. To do what was actually done at the end of colonial rule – tell them their country was a democracy and to get on with it – was pretty much doomed from the outset.
SD welcome to F211. You make some good points there about how democracy and good governance needs to be learned rather than something that individuals in societies which have these characters are born with. There were injustices committed when countries like Britain,France and others colonised Africa but I sometimes wonder whether equal or greater injustices were caused by the scramble by the colonial powers to get out of Africa? Departing so quickly from Africa has certainly ended up with a huge death toll that might not have happened if de colonisation had been handled better.