Racism and Illegal Anglo-Saxon Sanctions Against Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe meets with former Sierra Leone President Ahmed Tejah Kabbah in Harare on Thursday, April 3, 2008.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

Racism and illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions against Zim

AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
Zimbabwe Sunday Mail

Professor Jonathan Moyo’s intervention in The Herald of February 4 2010 suggests that the sanctions issue and the imminent change in the Anglo-Saxon strategy on Zimbabwe will render MDC-T dispensable and disposable in the eyes of its white sponsors.

This observation is confirmed by the white racist Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU), according to The Financial Gazette story (February 4 to 10 2010) entitled “White farmers lose hope in unity government: MDC formations let us down, says CFU”.

For the last 10 years, the MDC formations sought and enjoyed benefits from racists and racist institutions in the belief that Anglo-Saxon racism would spare them and only target the African liberation movement represented by Zanu-PF.

MDC-T especially ignored hundreds of warnings about its ultimate disposability in the eyes of its sponsors. For example, the Zambian Sunday Post of February 2 2010 carried a feature article on the illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions against Zimbabwe which in The Herald reprint (February 2 2010) was entitled UK, MDC and strangulation of Zim.

Two paragraphs in that feature should strike any ideologically conscious African: The first represents the conclusion reached by Zambian Post journalists who lived in Zimbabwe under sanctions for years. This piece dealt with the myth that the sanctions target only 203 individuals: “To the contrary, the sanctions have not affected even one of 203 so-called targeted individuals (in the manner alleged by Anglo-Saxon powers or the MDC formations). After all, they, including President Mugabe, still travel to the US and EU. It is clear for all to see that the sanctions have affected the poor and ‘untargeted’. . . As at last year, three million people were estimated to have emigrated. The country recorded 90 percent unemployment levels.”

The journalists also quoted British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary David Miliband’s statement in the House of Commons on January 19 2010 which included the following: “A range of EU sanctions is in place . . . EU sanctions have helped to send a strong message, and . . . they have had a practical effect without hurting the Zimbabwean people, which would have been a sanction too far.”

The view of Zambian journalists is based on three years of living in Zimbabwe under sanctions; it is also consistent with that of Sadc, the AU, NAM, Zanu-PF and the majority of the people of Zimbabwe.
David Miliband’s view is the view of the Anglo-Saxon governments which have imposed and retained illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe; and it is the view still being peddled by the top leaders of MDC-T.

Some readers may jump and ask why I should characterise the sanctions as racist and intended to preserve a racist power structure and race-based privilege? After all, the United States has an African-American president in the person of Barack Obama who has also sent an African-American ambassador to Zimbabwe and appointed another African-American as Assistant Secretary for African Affairs?

George Bush’s Zidera is now Barack Obama’s Zidera? Such a question arises because white liberals have conveniently redefined racism to mean individual prejudices, often based on so-called “colour”, which definition causes many people to go around claiming to be “colour blind”.

In Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other, Professor Magubane makes it clear that Africans will always misunderstand racism if they do not learn and teach its 500-year history which began with the slave holocaust against Africa.

Magubane in this regard chooses Fabian Eboussi Boulaga’s definition of racism which defines it as: “A generalised and definitive privileging of difference, whether real or imaginary, to the advantage of the accuser, and to the disadvantage of the victim, in order to justify one’s privileges or aggressiveness. It is easy to discern the characteristic elements of the racist attitude: real or imagined differences are evaluated positively or negatively, generalised, made enduring. In this way, they found an unlimited, indefeasible legitimacy for privilege or aggression. Racism’s essential mechanism is an ambiguous oscillation between the orders of biological ‘nature’ and culture, between real differences and differences that are purely imaginary.”

And the key purpose is the accumulation and preservation of power which gives whites the right to privilege or aggression or both. Once Africans understand that they are dealing, not with individual prejudice or mere psychology, but with a strategic and institutionalised mechanism whose purpose is to yield advantages to the accuser and aggressor while compromising or eliminating the target or victim — then they will know that racism is a peculiar strategy for manipulating organised white power for the ultimate control and benefit of whites. It reserves its tactical right to treat Moise Tshombe, Afonso Dhlakama, Jonas Savimbi, Colin Powell or even Morgan Tsvangirai and Barack Obama as exceptional and privileged Africans as long as it is white power which allocates the rules of accumulation, exception and privilege. As long as white power remains intact, these “exceptional Africans” remain dispensable and disposable exceptions to the rules of white supremacy.

When the Anglo-Saxons dumped definitions of race based on biblical myths and Christian heresies for so-called scientific definitions, they focused on physical and observable differences. Such physical and observable differences were used in such a way as to make Africans appear to be a separate species of humanity who should never have any human relations at all with white people.

One of the founders of this bogus anthropology, Edward Long, went so far as to suggest that physical and observable differences in the Africans made them suitable as sexual partners of monkeys, donkeys, horses, dogs and orangutangs. Therefore white people should never have any human, let alone sexual, relations with Africans. That is what the slave-owning plantation masters taught their societies in order to maintain control based on class and race.

But the same white masters did not have to adhere to such teachings all the time and everywhere. As Magubane documents:

“While criticising white women for their lust for black men (in
England and Jamaica), whom he spoke about with utter repugnance, Edward Long (elsewhere) boasted that there was no sin or shame in white men cohabiting with (or raping) their negresses (African women) whether free or slave, and that 19 out of every 20 white slave owners did so. Long absolved those who engaged in this practice by arguing . . . that habit and prevailing fashion reconciled such sexual escapades.”

Magubane also quotes Scobie to the effect that “. . . as soon as a white man arrived in the West Indies, he was advised to set up an establishment with a black mistress and ‘if he hesitated, older residents’ laughed at him.” These African mistresses were accepted and used as disposable and dispensable exceptions to the rules of white supremacy precisely because their use served to bolster white power.

Some of our readers may begin to wonder what this history has to do with the present situation in Zimbabwe and in the world. These examples show how racism has operated and survived for 500 years. Let us consider the following:

--First, so-called integration, multi-racialism and multi-culturalism never actually abolish apartheid and racism. The Anglo-Saxon system of white supremacy has for 500 years relied on the principle of many are called but few are chosen as a way of maintaining white power especially in those cases where white numbers no longer add up to a dominant majority or in cases where resistance is too stiff to allow business as usual.

--Second, Africans get confused about racism because they look for moral and ethical consistency in the white Anglo-Saxon system which leads them to complain about “double standards”. This observation about double standards is correct but it is besides the point, since it cannot lead to African emancipation. In fact, the white racist or white supremacist does not mind such an observation because he sees it as a statement of the silent African wish to be integrated into the white power system as an “exceptional African”.

The African is seen as complaining thus: I really would love to belong to this system, even as a minority, if only the system could apply the same measure for human rights, equality, transparency, accountability and free and fair elections in Haiti and Afghanistan as in Zimbabwe; in Florida and Iraq as in Venezuela and Iran and so on.

This tendency to admire the system except for its so-called double standards makes the African miss the fact that the lack of moral and ethical consistency serves the white man’s “power-consistency”.

When the white numbers do not add up, a Muzorewa, or Tsvangirai or Obama can be allowed and should be allowed by white power to appear to have replaced white power completely, when in fact they are serving to prolong it in a situation of crisis which was supposed to bring white power to an end. The fact that more than 85 percent of all the white plantation owners in Jamaica raped or cohabited with African slave women was no proof of integration, liberalism or progressive civilisation, since the very same white men when necessary condemned and defamed the very same race of the same women as over-sexed bitches who slept with monkeys, horses and orangutangs! The fact that more than 85 percent of those white supremacists kept African mistresses and sired salve children by them was an expression of raw white power and not love or solidarity. Let us look at Zimbabwe.

While the British persuaded the entire Anglo-Saxon axis to boycott Zimbabwe and impose illegal sanctions in the last 10 years, they were also building the biggest embassy building in Zimbabwe, competing with the People’s Republic of China which has a population of one and half billion people!

While the US sought to convince the world that Zimbabwe was a violent and unsafe place, its embassy here was and is guarded by ordinary commercial security guards with sticks, unlike its embassies elsewhere in the world which are guarded by marines and sharp-shooting troops with machine guns placed at all corners and on roof tops. So, double standards are a constant and consistent feature of Anglo-Saxon racism. But too many Africans do not understand the full meaning of such behaviour. Here is one example: the Minister of State in Prime Minister Tsvangirai’s Office, Gorden Moyo, was reported in The Zimbabwe Independent insert for January 29 2010 as saying:

“The British government had only picked on Prime Minister Tsvangirai as the one that could advise them on the issue of sanctions because of his democratic disposition . . . those (David Miliband’s) remarks were made about MDC-T because the British government, in their own judgment, believe the Prime Minister (Morgan Tsvangirai) is the conscience and the voice of reason in the inclusive Government, the true conscience of Zimbabwe . . . It is not our (MDC-T’s) problem that the (Anglo-Saxon) world seems to see the Prime Minister and his party as the voice of conscience.”

That is exactly how the dispensable and disposable exception has been constructed and deployed by white power for 500 years!
To end with Boulaga: The last 500 years of the Anglo-Saxon relationship with Africans has been characterised by the former’s “. . . use of race as a solution to the problem of (accumulating), distributing or preserving power, along with its justification, or to the problem of radical social evil, (which) is called racism. It provides a principle of categorical and moral hierarchies as well as absolute excuse.”

Whether in Haiti, Jamaica, Iraq or Afghanistan . . . when the white Anglo-Saxon alleges certain evils and atrocities which other peoples are committing and which excuse his aggression and intervention . . . he is in fact describing his own evils, crimes and atrocities. This has been the case for 500 years. In the eyes of white supremacy, the real difference between Mugabe and Tsvangirai is not that Mugabe is a tyrant and Tsvangirai a democrat, as told by BBC.

The real difference is that Mugabe understands and fights white supremacy and white power, while Tsvangirai has been sponsored to play the role of the dispensable exception which leaves the white power structure intact. And Gorden Moyo thinks such an ancient role for Tsvangirai is most flattering.