President Robert Mugabe and First Lady Amai Grace Mugabe attending the funeral of the head-of-state's sister. The envoys from the imperialist states walked out of the memorial as a provocation against the Southern African nation.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
Courtesy of the Zimbabwe Sunday Mail
This year, people in 17 nations across Sub-Saharan Africa are proudly celebrating 50 years of independence. And by any measure, 1960 was an extraordinary year . . . a burst of self-determination that came to be celebrated as “The Year of Africa” . . .
“I am heartbroken when I see what’s happened in Zimbabwe . . . (President) Mugabe is an example of a leader who came in as a liberation fighter and I do not see him serving his people well.” — Barack Obama, US President, August 3 2010.
US President Barack Obama’s current Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, committed an act of desecration at Zimbabwe’s National Heroes’ Acre on August 1 2010 and then boasted about that act in the August 4 issue of News Day.
Charles Ray committed an act of desecration in terms of the values of unhu when he led a bunch of clueless Caucasian representatives of Greece, Germany and the European Union out of the national shrine before the end of proceedings.
The walkout was supposed to be a public demonstration against the speech of President Mugabe, the main bereaved relative of the deceased.
Now, in terms of unhu, a visitor who stages a demonstration at a funeral, instead of mourning, is clearly singling himself out as muthakathi or muroyi, the evil one.
This is because funerals are not compulsory. The only demonstrations allowed at such occasions are those that are consistent with the occasion: praises and celebrations of the life and legacy of the deceased or expressions of grief and sorrow.
Tete Sabina Mugabe fought the agents of imperialism all her life and, to her brother, President Mugabe, the continuation of illegal and racist sanctions against Sabina Mugabe’s country worsened the nation’s grief at Heroes’ Acre on August 1 2010 because it meant that the heroine’s work remained unfinished and all those who gathered to bid her farewell had to pledge to escalate the fight against the same agents of imperialism.
For Charles Ray and his clueless Caucasian entourage to stage a walkout demonstration at exactly that moment is to desecrate that very sacred national pledge!
If the President had wanted to do so, he could have outlined how the illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions directly compromised Tete Sabina’s medical treatment during the 15 years she was ill.
This is how the personal is linked to the historical.
Charles Ray’s president, Barack Obama, on August 3 2010 pretended to celebrate 1960 as “The Year of Africa” in a speech to 115 African young people sponsored by the US State Department to visit that country as “Young African Leaders” to whom has been donated not only air tickets and allowances but also a modified Obama slogan: “Yes youth can” derived from the “Yes we can” of the Obama campaign in 2008.
But given what the US has done against African liberation and African leadership since 1960, the slogan turns out to be most cruel.
It does not mean in the US what it means when Obama donates it to African youths.
In the context of US foreign policy toward Africa since 1960, the slogan means “Yes youths can also sell out the way Moise Tshombe sold out to the US and Belgium in 1960”.
In the context of that history, Obama is now saying: Yes we can donate leaders and heroes for you the way we donated Moise Tshombe, Joseph Kasavubu, Cyril Adoula, Justin Bomboko, Joseph Mobutu, Afonso Dhlakama and Jonas Savimbi.
But the problem for Obama and his slogan is that Africa has rejected all the major donated leaders and heroes. It will continue to reject them. Tshombe will never be an African hero.
Indeed the latest heroes and heroines to be donated to Zimbabwe by Obama’s State Department, the US National Endowment for Democracy and their EU allies include Jestina Mukoko, Farai Maguwu, Jenny Williams, Roy Bennett, Beatrice Mtetwa, Ray Choto and many others.
Indications are that these have also already been rejected just like Tshombe of 50 years ago. So 1960 is indeed relevant today.
After attacking President Mugabe on August 3 2010 the way his predecessors attacked Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s, US President Barack Obama went on to say: “Now, Changarai (meaning Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai) has tried to work . . . he has now tried to work to see if there is a gradual transition that might take place. But so far, the results have not been what we had hoped.”
Who does Obama mean by “we” and what exactly did the “we” hope to see happening in Zimbabwe?
If President Mugabe has stopped from happening to Zimbabwe the things which the killers of Lumumba did to Congo in 1960, then it is Obama, the US and their allies who are the problem, not President Mugabe.
Indeed, Africans may learn several things from the Anglo-Saxon fear and hatred of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba in that Year of Africa, 1960, and from those powers’ fears of President Mugabe in the Year of Zimbabwe, 2010.
First is the hysterical, desperate desire among the Anglo-Saxon leaders, their media hacks and African collaborators to portray Lumumba and President Mugabe in their respective times as crazy and isolated leaders hated by the African people.
The progressive Belgian author, Ludo de Witte, exposes this false alibi effectively:
“If it is true that Lumumba was an isolated politician, why did Brussels, Washington, (London) and New York set up such a gigantic and long-lasting military operation, including the deployment of several thousand Belgian soldiers and Blue Berets, operations of destabilisation, murder and corruption, as well as a huge media campaign? Surely the Western powers which led these operations did not ignite one of the biggest crises since the Second World War solely to get rid of an isolated . . . political leader (hated by the Congolese masses)?”
The same question can be asked about the current onslaught on Zimbabwe and President Mugabe by the very same powers led by the US.
Just read part of US President Barrack Obama’s renewal of former US President George W. Bush’s Executive Orders 13328 of 2003, 13391 of 2005 and 13469 of 2008 by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of the US.
Obama’s renewal of these imperialist piracy powers extends George W. Bush by one year, calling the actions of President Mugabe’s Government to empower the African majority “the unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States of America” and suggesting that what Mugabe’s Government has done through land reform and economic indigenisation and empowerment programmes has precipitated “a national emergency” in the US.
Therefore, through Obama’s Bush order and through renewed EU sanctions against the same Zimbabwe — the entire Anglo-Saxon world is invited to throw against Zimbabwe everything they have, short of direct military intervention.
No sane power would mobilise such awesome imperialist instruments against one unpopular, isolated and discredited leader!
Second the Anglo-Saxon powers have created such a huge anti-Mugabe media industry and mobilised their diplomatic, political and economic systems against President Mugabe precisely because President Mugabe has had the courage and privilege to pursue and implement the vision of African independence and sovereignty which Obama pretended to celebrate on August 3 2010 and which Lumumba was never given a chance to put into practice.
US President Barack Obama is an African-American President of the US who is trapped in a gigantic white racist and imperialist structure which forces him to try to repeat in Zimbabwe what his predecessors did and failed to achieve in Congo in 1960.
In his August 3 2010 speech to 115 sponsored African youths, Obama was honest enough to admit what his ambassador here tries to deny: That there are real Anglo-Saxon sanctions against Zimbabwe; that the sanctions have hurt and are hurting real people, families, schools, hospitals, farms and factories; and that these sanctions may backfire against the very same US policy objectives which they were supposed to assist.
Obama, in fact, made it clear that he renewed the Bush sanctions only because he believed they could force an externally induced transfer of power from the liberation movement and President Mugabe to Prime Minister Tsvangirai’s MDC-T.
But now, Obama was no longer sure whether that was going to be the result of the sanctions.
This then begs the question: Why was it necessary to murder Lumumba and force a transfer of power from him to Moise Tshombe and from Tshombe eventually to Joseph Mobutu?
Why is it still necessary in 2010 to use illegal sanctions to force the transfer of power from Zanu-PF to MDC-T?
Why is Zimbabwe under President Mugabe a problem to the US and its white allies?
In his Revolutionary Pressures in Africa (1978), the late Claude Ake defined the challenge which Zimbabwe faces and presents to the Anglo-Saxon powers:
“The priority for the indigenisation of African economies is the liberation of Africa from the (derivative) African (petty) bourgeoisie, since African societies cannot fight imperialism under the leadership of agents of imperialism . . .
“The indigenisation of African economies must entail their disengagement from exploitive relations with international (Western) capitalism; this indeed is why indigenisation is important.
“Therefore, if indigenisation is to be anything more than a token gesture, it will jeopardise the interests of international capitalism.”
This means that indigenisation must come down to a battle against international capitalism . . . (But) any attempt to disengage African economies from their crippling dependence will create grave economic hardships in the short run as the economies re-adjust and absorb the sanctions which the Western powers are bound to invoke.
In other words, a government of national unity between those who want African empowerment through indigenisation and those who invite and celebrate the sanctions meant to stop indigenisation could be entered into only as a temporary, tactical, move backwards, in the belief that the indigenisation forces would survive and dilute the anti-indigenising sanctions party in the process and move forward later.
Now, Zimbabwe under President Mugabe has done more than pass indigenisation laws.
Indeed, as Obama was lecturing the sponsored African youths, Zimbabwe was busy convening and consolidating the Opec of African minerals, the African Diamond Producers’ Association; and South Africa was urging the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme to be objective and fair in its treatment of Zimbabwe’s application to certify its Marange diamonds.
These developments signalled defeat for the position which the Anglo-Saxon powers had taken against Zimbabwe in Tel Aviv in June and in St Petersburg in July 2010.
The bunch of racist ambassadors who desecrated our Heroes Acre on August 1 2010 complained that they could not find their way to the hell which President Mugabe told them to go to.
Well, they could not find the way because they are already in hell.
The slave-built Anglo-Saxon economic empire of the last 500 years has come to an end. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are frantic efforts in denial of that fast approaching reality.
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