Paul Mangwana says the decision to `indigenize' the Zimbabwe economy (i.e. give 51% shareholding to locals) under the Indigenization and Empowerment law which passed through Parliament on Wednesday, cannot be reversed. He thinks the revolution will not be complete until the last white-owned business is despatched to the pages of history. Curiously this thinking is premised on the country having been colonized by force. I wonder how many countries in today's world have, at some time been colonized by force. It beggars belief that the rampant racism of the ruling regime has out-done the racisim of the former colonizers - in spite of claims made even by Mugabe himself (read his reconciliation speech of 1980) - that racism would not be tolerated in free Zimbabwe. He doesn't care if Standard Chartered bank, for example, pulls out of the country, regardless of the effect this may have on an already near-destroyed economy.
"Mangwana labelled local managers in the financial institutions "neo-liberals" who take instructions from London. He said they would never be given space to reverse.." what he termed a political decision(my emphasis). The last time I heard those words, "a political decision" they came from the lips of a Rhodesian Front Minister who, in 1966, said that keeping black children's schools out of white areas was a political decision.
Strange things, these political decisions. I am writing right now about how it was that very phrase "a political decision" which galvanized me into fighting, first for the rights of black children to an education equal to that of whites and then for the removal of all forms of racial discrimination in Rhodesia.
Mangwana, so proudly revolutionary has let the cat out of the bag. He and his cronies fought not so much for Zimbabwe's liberation as for the power to introduce reverse racism.
I once believed that they were better than that.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
