President Robert Mugabe and first lady Grace of Zimbabwe. Mugabe celebrated his 86th birthday on February 21. The country is still struggling against sanctions imposed by the US, UK and EU.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona Mahoso
Zimbabwe Sunday Mail
The month of February in Zimbabwe is associated with celebrations of the birthday of his Excellency President Robert Gabriel Mugabe on February 21.
In turn, the President is associated with the awakening and emancipation of the African on a global Pan-African scale, not only because of his countless university degrees which he earned despite more than a decade of imprisonment and detention at the hands of the white racist settler regime of British stock in “Southern
Rhodesia”.
As a freedom fighter who lived and learned in Southern Rhodesia, in South Africa under apartheid, in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania and in Samora Machel’s Mozambique — President Mugabe’s legacy will always be associated with the opening up of the African mind to the fullest possibilities of expanding and fulfilling indigenous aspirations and African power. He is associated with re-membering and expanding the African personality and memory through knowledge development.
Indeed, even one of his South African detractors, Mondli Makhanya of The Sunday Times (January 17 2010), admitted that when it comes to the opening up of minds and the regeneration of a culture of excellence in knowledge development, President Mugabe has no match in the history of Africa. This is what The Sunday Times editor had to say:
“Walking down the streets of Harare and Bulawayo, some years back, an amazing sight greeted me: pavement hawkers selling books: In the spaces where South African hawkers were selling potatoes an tomatoes at home, their Zimbabwean equivalents were peddling literature.
“I must say I was extremely envious at this outward display of literacy by a country that many notches below us on the development scale. I was even more envious at the hunger to read as people paused, looked and dipped into their wallets as if they were buying cans of cold drink.
“One day we will get there, I thought to myself. The impressive educational levels of Zimbabweans is no fluke. When Robert Mugabe came to power in 1980 he made education his top priority and ensured that come hell or high water, Zimbabweans would be an educated people. He insisted on all children of school-going age being in classrooms.
“Zimbabwe was a nation that was hungry for knowledge and was punching above its weight in the international intellectual and commercial communities. You just have to look at some of the Zimbabwean high fliers in South Africa’s financial services of our economy to see what that education system produced.”
White-Sponsored Anti-Mugabe Industry and the Spread of MDC-Related Know-Nothing Culture in Zimbabwe
By agreeing to be used by the Anglo-Saxon powers to reverse the legacy of the African liberation movement led by President Mugabe, the MDC formations became purveyors of a creeping “know-nothing” culture whose objective was to recolonise the African mind through “terror by forgetting” and through the “free-flow of lies”. Zimbabweans were suddenly confronted by an opposition movement characterised by intellectual hooliganism and intolerance sponsored by the former colonial power.
First a web of lies had to be spun to justify illegal and racist sanctions, imposed by white racist nations only, against Zimbabwe.
Second, another web of media lies had to be spun to make the people of Zimbabwe believe that the destruction of their livelihoods concurrent with the sanctions had nothing to do with the same sanctions.
Third, yet another layer of lies had to be developed to say that the sanctions did not constitute real economic warfare but just travel bans and “restrictive measures”.
Then, when it became clear that the majority of the people knew that the sanctions were real and they really hurt, yet another layer of lies had to be created to argue that the now real sanctions were doing so much good that they needed to be “calibrated” (in the words of David Miliband) or “staggered” (in the words of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai).
The effects of this creeping culture of denial have been devastating.
The MDC formations, particularly MDC-T, have had to train and deploy an army of “know nothing” anti-intellectuals and activists whose duty is to suppress African knowledge and memory on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon regime change axis. Let me give a few examples, for lack of space.
The Zimbabwe Independent on February 12 2010 carried a piece entitled “GNU birthday: Consolidate democratic culture”. But how was “democratic culture” and “inclusivity” supposed to be consolidated? The writer for The Zimbabwe Independent wrote: “Political institutions and civil society need to be infused (which means they are not so infused) with democratic practices . . . Authoritarian political discourses need to be rejected and authoritarian political actors such as Christopher Mutsvangwa, Jonathan Moyo and Tafataona Mahoso need to be neutralised . . .”
This is because of the realisation that informed people are creators, bearers and transmitters of knowledge.
This is a colonial plea to replace the popular culture of the African liberation movement with a donor-funded NGO culture masquerading as civil society and funded by imperialism.
The Financial Gazette of February 4 2010 published a long letter entitled “Mahoso’s Haiti piece showed lack of soul”. The key passage there says:
“Human life is of paramount importance such that Dr Mahoso should have drawn a clear line between social and political issues. No one gets political mileage through linking a genuine and timeous humanitarian rescue operation to a ‘perceived regime change agenda’ unless one is addressing a ‘dark-age’ readership.”
So any obvious connections between “social” and “political” issues should not be allowed.
This was an effort by a Mr Benjamin Bendera, suggesting that The Sunday Mail’s African Focus instalment of January 24 should not have been published because the truth told in it was cruel and offensive to Haitians in the darkest hour of their history. Why?
Because the African Focus article dared to suggest, as Sir Hilaty Beckles and masses of Haitians themselves were also saying: That without US regime change, without Anglo-Saxon interference in and strangulation of the independence of Haiti since 1791, the cost of the January 2010 earthquake in human lives would have been less by more than 50 percent; and that all the humanitarian relief coming to Haiti would have been on the basis of solidarity and sovereignty (as in Indonesia recently) rather than on the basis of colonialist and paternalistic charity.
Indeed, on February 18 2010 the people of Haiti mounted demonstrations against the visiting racist French head of state, Nicholas Sarkozy, because, as Sir Hilaty Beckles has documented, the value of what France alone owes Haiti for its looting of Haiti (before the period of US regime-change interference) amounts to more than US$21 billion.
In other words, Benjamin Bendera is saying that The Sunday Mail should have suppressed the February 24 column because it tried to make a distinction between relief based on solidarity, mutual respect and sovereignty, on one hand, and the criminal humanitarianism the world has witnessed in former Yugoslavia (Serbia 1999), Nicaragua, Iraq and Zimbabwe. Criminal humanitarianism refers to relief which has the following characteristics:
--It is given by the same forces which either caused or worsened the crisis;
--It is meant to hide the active roles of those same forces in precipitating or worsening the humanitarian crisis;
--It is counter-revolutionary in that it seeks to further deepen the dependency of the population, making sure that the people won’t be able to help themselves or to have any say in how they should be helped; and
--It is meant to make the recipients of relief forever grateful to the very same powers and forces who have done them the biggest harm in their history.
What made The Sunday Mail column so upsetting was its resonance to the deceit which the same Anglo-Saxon powers are trying to get away with in Zimbabwe.
Much of the damage to the economy of Zimbabwe was inflicted by the very same forces who cry the loudest about the deterioration in the livelihoods of the people of Zimbabwe. That is criminal humanitarianism, especially since the very same forces are already campaigning against Zimbabwe’s economic empowerment laws and against the legitimate exploitation and sale of Zimbabwe’s gold, diamonds and platinum!
In other words, since the creation of a Western-funded opposition in Zimbabwe in 1999, Zimbabweans have been subjected to a growing tendency to deny or suppress historical information relevant for their continuing emancipation.
So we find that MDC-T members of the House of Assembly on February 3 2010 sought to suppress a motion by Cde Kudakwashe Bhasikiti because that motion again made a link, revealed connections, where MDC-T wants to maintain a veil. The motion sought to compel leaders of the MDC formations to go abroad and campaign against the same illegal sanctions which they asked for and got 10 years ago. Such a motion made uncomfortable linkages between sanctions and the damage to Zimbabwe’s economy; between the MDC formations and the Anglo-Saxon powers opposing Zimbabwe’s economic sovereignty; and between that opposition to Zimbabwe’s economic sovereignty and the charity which the same powers are so willing to dish out and publicise as a cover-up for their contribution to the current crisis.
Likewise, on February 2 2010, on ZTV’s Melting Pot programme, Senator Obert Gutu of MDC-T sought to prevent me from explaining to the people the meaning of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s House of Commons statement of January 19 2010. The Senator attempted to use insults and name-calling to stop me from being understood by the audience and to try to reduce (through sheer noise) the dignity and truth of the information I had.
Equally, on November 12 2010, Zimbabweans woke up to yet another MDC-T attempt to suppress debate.
In the second week of November 2009, Mashonaland East farmers demonstrated against the inclusive Government’s decision to remove direct Government support to farmers prematurely and in the middle of illegal sanctions and an impending drought.
Two days after the demonstration, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s spokesman James Maridadi told The Herald (November 12 2009) that Zimbabwe was not subject to sanctions at all:
“Which sanctions? I am not aware of them, I only read about them in your newspaper.”
On September 22 2009, former MDC Member of Parliament for Budiriro, Gabriel Chaibva, appeared on ZTV’s Melting Pot programme, again with Senator Obert Gutu.
Chaibva said that he was there in Nyanga in 2000 when top MDC leaders then drafted the document which they submitted to the US Congress before it was turned into the US sanctions law against Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (Zidera).
In that programme as elsewhere, Senator Gutu’s role became one of suppressing the truth, trying to heckle and insult his counterpart in order to prevent him from communicating what he had witnessed at Nyanga in 2000, where Gutu was definitely not present. The current official MDC-T spokesperson, Nelson Chamisa, on May 21 2008 played a similar role on ZTV’s Zimbabwe Today programme.
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