NEED HELP? ITS ALL OUR OWN FAULT

Who will put the coint into the old man's hand now?
I read in today's ZWNEWS that Zimbabwe's Government has swallowed its pride - or whatever unhealthy deadly sin that has made it so dangerously ill these past years - and asked for help.

White Rhodesians invented an apt, not necessarily racist aphorism which I can't resist using at this time. "Even Lobengula's oldest and blindest wife could see that..." Starkly obvious is the fact that the Mugabe regime's ill-considered destruction of the agricultural base of the economy would end in tears. One thing has led to another and now, not only are the people starving but things have finally, but not quite yet fatally, fallen apart in Zimbabwe. Perhaps it really is our own, stupid fault, be we the former colonizers or the colonized.

I want to advance a little thesis as one possible explanation of what it is that ails Zimbabwe's current leaders. Remember that they are, in the main, old men. I am thinking now of the arrogant octogenarian, Robert Mugabe, mortally wounded by 56 years of pre-independence racial discrimination and of his all-powerful, opportunistic sidekick, Didymus Mutasa. They are still afflicted with the mindset of the colonized. Could it be that Rhodesia's eighty eight years of colonial paternalism juxtaposed with a Christian brand of humanitarianism gave these oldest Zimbabwean descendants of dispossessed ancestors a false idea of how the world really works? Weren't they led by missionaries (at Catholic Kutama and Anglican St Faith's)to believe that God would eventually restore their sovereign birthright after all the injustices they endured under the colonial yoke? Wasn't it the Cold War that convinced them that the enemy was the imperial West and that Communism's help against the oppressor would give them back their country? It is true that European (white) colonial overlords were either afflicted with the imperialist's zeal to teach the natives how to live or, more lately, were overburdened with guilt for past political incorrectness. Is Zimbabwe's `liberator' still obsessed with the belief, long ingrained, that the white man has always been his patron?

A white man put the coin in the child's hand as he held open the farm gate; missionaries taught him how to read and write; healed him with modern medicine and preached (cynically as it turned out) the gospel of a great Western, Chistian civilization. The child has grown up and the hero liberator has been let down: no more patronage and not nearly enough money. New, non-Western patrons: Cubans, Russians, North Koreans, Libyans, Malaysians have been sought. Nothing much forthcoming. Only the Chinese are left. Surely somebody should have come to the rescue by now? All that determined effort to wipe out the last vestiges of the colonial grip has come to nought. What has happened to the expected, new patronage? Who will put the coin into the old man's hand now?


Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell