Walter Rodney, a Guyanese-born African historian, wrote extensively on revolutionary thought and political practice. He was based in Tanzania for many years before returning to Guyana where he was assassinated in June 1980.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
Courtesy of the Zimbabwe Sunday Mail
In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney documented the history of the construction of Western capitalism on African slave labour and African raw materials and minerals.
Now, Professor Bernard Magubane has documented the depth and extent of the criminal and racist defamation and dehumanisation of Africa and Africans which the Anglo-Saxons carried out in order to justify to themselves and to the world the African holocaust in slavery, colonialism and apartheid which made capitalism possible.
In Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other, Magubane gives Africa and the African people a lesson which Zimbabwe needs in 2009.
In the short term Zimbabweans need to unite and defeat the illegal and racist sanctions imposed by the same Anglo-Saxon countries at the invitation of the MDC formations.
But more daunting is the long-term task of cleansing the name of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans, the name of Africa and Africans, which the Anglo-Saxon powers criminally and falsely defamed with the help of journalists and the MDC formations.
As Magubane demonstrates in his book, Africans still struggle to overcome the demeaning and besmirching fabrications and stereotypes of 400 and 500 years ago.
The main vehicles then were a racist anthropology and a bastardised and racist Christian heresy about the origins and fate of humankind.
Today’s visual and digitalised anthropologist is the imbedded and sponsored journalist.
The false videos, films, web sites and e-mails which this new anthropologist and missionary of imperialism produces are not tucked away in museums and libraries like the tracts from old anthropology; they are beamed raw and direct into hundreds of millions of homes around the world.
Africa is still the butt of a globalised defamation industry which began in slavery.
This means that the MDC formations did not know what they were getting into when they agreed to lie about their own country and their own people in order to justify illegal sanctions and in order to earn sponsorship.
The Herald of December 21 2009 carried a story in which Finance Minister Tendai Biti seems to be surprised that the Anglo-Saxon countries whom the MDC formations begged to impose illegal and racist sanctions on Zimbabwe in 2000 are now using all sorts of excuses to justify keeping the sanctions in place.
The minister would now want the sanctions lifted immediately so that “the economic giant” which is Zimbabwe can emerge and play its rightful role among other nations.
The same Herald story reported that the Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, Mr Gorden Moyo, has also realised now that 40 Zimbabwean companies have actually been “blacklisted”, which really means “whitelisted”, by the same Anglo-Saxon powers as a way of deepening and maintaining sanctions on Zimbabwe.
Then on December 23 the same paper reported that Nestlé Zimbabwe has just closed its Zimbabwe factories because of pressure from the illegal sanctions lobby of which the MDC formations have been a part for the last 10 years.
It is reported that the illegal sanctions lobby has a list of Zimbabwean farms which have been acquired by the State for resettlement as part of the African land reclamation movement.
It is those farms which the sanctions lobby believes should not be allowed to benefit from Western companies doing business here, such as Nestlé.
The intimate information about who was resettled on which acquired farms, just-like the intimate knowledge of who is supposed to be banned from travelling to the West, has been supplied by the MDC formations over the years.
Even MDC-T’s demand to install Roy Bennet as Deputy Minister of Agriculture is meant to facilitate access to intimate information which can be better deployed against Zimbabwe’s land revolution.
This duplicity explains why the MDC formations have not yet joined the majority of Zimbabweans to condemn and defeat the sanctions.
While Minister Biti pretends to condemn sanctions in some of his speeches, his own treatment of the agricultural sector and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in his 2010 budget has actually served to deepen the effects of sanctions from inside Government itself.
Therefore the two ministerial admissions that sanctions are part of a real economic embargo against the country show that we may have made a little bit of progress from the days when MDC-T leaders used to deny that Zimbabwe was under sanctions.
But The Herald stories reveal a much bigger problem with MDC-T than whether or not its leaders now realise that the illegal sanctions are a real economic war on the people.
This is the bigger problem:
Either the leaders of the MDC formations really believed that the Anglo-Saxon powers were their true and permanent “friends” who loved them and whose interest in Zimbabwe’s affairs was driven by that love, which love would cause them to put leaders of that party in power; or leaders of the MDC formations really believed that the Anglo-Saxon racists really wanted “democracy” in Zimbabwe which would arrive as soon as MDC leaders were sworn into office; or these leaders were so power-hungry that they would do anything to get into office, including inviting sanctions to be imposed on the people.
And now that they are in office, they want the sanctions removed so that they can enjoy the full fruits of office.
But Magubane’s book raises a bigger question: Even if the sanctions are defeated by the people, what are the MDC formations going to do to cleanse the name of Zimbabwe?
It appears the MDC leaders did not understand that they were getting entangled in something far much bigger and several centuries older than the MDC formations and the current myth of democratic change and human rights.
The myth of democratic change, human rights and freedom used by the Anglo-Saxon powers as the reason for the creation and existence of the MDC formations is just one more construction in a long series going back 500 years.
Anyone who understands the damage done through lies against Africa would not want to allow even one more fabrication to be spun against Africa again.
We happen to have entered a period in history when the slave-built Anglo-Saxon economic hegemony of the last 500 years is collapsing.
Zimbabwe happens to symbolise the reality of that collapse because of its direct defiance of Anglo-American intrusion and interference.
Therefore the extraordinary and global attention paid to Zimbabwe in the last 10 years is a particular consequence of global struggles and global history going back 500 years.
That history and its struggles are far much larger than Zimbabwe, far much bigger than President Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF, far much broader than Zimbabwe’s war veterans and the African land reclamation movement.
That is why the whole world recently gathered at Copenhagen; that is why for the first time in a long time few people are confused as to who the real rogue states are and what havoc they have inflicted on the human race for 500 years.
I have said that the MDC formations do not understand that the democratic change, human rights and global freedom on which they were set up is just but the latest in a series of similar myths constructed in the last 500 years in order to enable Anglo-Saxons to cope with crises.
Let me describe the latest crisis first. It covers the period 1973 to date. In that period:
--Those states whose oil fuelled the Anglo-Saxon empire rebelled by setting up the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec);
--The United States suffered defeat in, and had to pull out of, South-East Asia militarily (1975);
--Although the Arab states were defeated in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 against the apartheid state of Israel, they did demonstrate that Israel could be defeated and Palestinians could be freed if the Arab states all united against the Western imperialist states backing Israel against Palestine.
--The UN General Assembly for the first time recognised as combatants in terms of the Geneva Conventions those African guerillas fighting for national liberation;
--Passage of the International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in 1973 opened the possibility that P. W. Botha, F. W. de Klerk, Ian Smith and their apartheid and UDI killers could be sent to The Hague to face trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Moreover, the Western arms suppliers and financiers of apartheid and UDI could be required to pay reparations to the African nations of the region which is now Sadc.
--As a result of the impending victories of African liberation movements, the Portuguese fascist regime and Portugal’s African empire collapsed.
This freed Angola and Mozambique and opened chances for intensifying the liberation struggles for Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa, leading to the beginning of the end of British hegemony in the region.
--The revolutionary climate created through these events gave the children of South Africa under apartheid the courage to stage the Soweto Uprising in 1976 at a great cost in lives. The brutality of the apartheid regime was exposed on camera to the whole world.
--Initially the response of imperialism came in the form of inquiries and books examining the future of the Southern African region. R. W. Johnson, a professor at Oxford, published How Long Will South Africa Survive. The Carnegie Foundation of the US commissioned a corporate inquiry whose report was significantly entitled South Africa: Time Running Out.
The problem for imperialism was that the inspiration for real democracy, for real human emancipation and popular sovereignty was not coming from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or from the so-called “mature democracies” of the West, who, in fact, advocated “constructive engagement” with apartheid and supplied arms to all the white settler regimes in the region.
Real democracy, human emancipation and popular sovereignty in the region were inspired by Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria and they were materially supported by China, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
That is why, from the point of view of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, time was indeed running out.
So in response, imperialism did what it has done for the last 500 years: adjust its instruments of ideological aggression; design a fresh doctrine of human rights and democratic change; and figure out ways of defaming and dehumanising African freedom fighters as the new oppressors, while baptising the Anglo-Saxon killers and oppressors from UDI and apartheid as the latest champions of human rights and democratic change.
The MDC formations were sponsored in order to advance that Anglo-Saxon agenda.
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