Portrait of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Lumumba was the elected representative of the people who was overthrown and murder by the imperialists and their stooges.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona Mahoso
The persistent involvement of a small number of young Zimbabweans in the Anglo-Saxon campaign to demonise Zimbabwe’s diamonds and maintain sanctions is quite shocking and hard to understand, until we refer to our recent history.
That history shows that the most determined and most zealous sellouts were not only greedy but also suffering what in former Yugoslavia was called “terror by forgetting”.
The concept of terror by forgetting was coined to dramatise the life-and-death consequences of losing one’s history and social memory. In the case of Sydney Chisi, Dhewa Mavhinga, Farai Muguwu and Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe, we see young Africans begging British, Canadian, Australian and US beneficiaries of the really bloody diamonds from Africa to tarnish their own recently redeemed diamonds as the “blood diamonds”.
What is erased or forgotten in order for the diabolic vilification to continue is not only the recent certification of our diamonds on August 11 2010, not only the verdict of the Kimberley Process meeting in Tel Aviv in June 2010, not only the verdicts of the St Petersburg meetings of the KP and the International Diamond Council in July 2010, not only the verdict of the entire African Diamond Producers’ Association (ADPA) which spent two whole days at Chiadzwa in August 2010, not only the original report of the industry-designated KP Monitor for Zimbabwe, Mr Abbey Chikane — not only these recent events which the youngsters should be proud of — but also the whole history of diamonds in our region and in the world.
Before going to the bigger history, it is necessary to demonstrate the clear patterns of the diabolic vilification in which the youngsters and their NGOs engage.
In order to undercut Zimbabwe’s position at the Kimberley Process meeting in Tel Aviv in June 2010, Sydney Chisi of Crisis Coalition was sent to appear on TV’s Melting Pot programme to denounce Zimbabwe’s diamonds as “blood diamonds” and to attack the Zimbabwean delegation.
Soon after the Tel Aviv meeting, Dhewa Mavhinga of the same Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe also appeared on the same ZTV Melting Pot programme to continue the demonisation, despite the positive outcome of the Tel Aviv meeting, and to try to undo the damage which the so-called “diamond activists” and their NGOs had inflicted upon themselves at the Tel Aviv meeting.
They had demanded and even written that they would drop the “blood diamonds” allegation and label against Chiadzwa diamonds in exchange for 1 percent share of the value of the diamonds to be invested in their NGOs in order to insure that they would have a permanent source of income to sustain their sellout business!
After Dhewa Mavhinga’s June 29 attack on Zimbabwe’s diamonds on ZTV, I challenged ZTV in a Herald analysis article to at least ask the NGO to put its name Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe into our indigenous languages so that the majority could understand what the NGO’s real mission was.
ZTV then invited me to debate Sydney Chisi on the same Melting Pot programme on July 6 2010. Chisi tried to continue with the same rampant and reckless attacks, but ended up saying that the facts which I had produced to expose him were not suitable for TV, and I should have been restricted to my Sunday Mail column. In other words, I should be banned from TV in the name of transparency.
Having suffered defeat on ZTV, Sydney Chisi then left for the USA, where he met US President Barrack Obama on August 3 2010 with 115 other young African leaders. There were two other Zimbabwean youths who accompanied Sydney Chisi to the White House: Masimba Nyamanhindi and Cleopatra Ndlovu.
Nyamanhindi published an article in News Day on September 14 2010 which was entitled “Time to move from politics of pangas” to sum up the youths’ US experience. The implications of such a summary would be ironic if one were to assume that the youths knew our history as much as US history.
The suggestion was that Africa was still stuck in the politics of the machete, whereas the US was using more remote and yet more deadly weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama particularly likes to wipe out whole Afghan and Pakistani villages, using drones guided by satellite co-ordinates and no pilots! That’s really humane and progressive. Nyamanhindi wrote:
“Those who accused us of not representing African values are, in fact, restricting progressive African values, relegating our systems to a politics of pangas, knobkerries and machetes.”
You couldn’t kill more that a million people the way the UK and US just did in Iraq, if you remained stuck with pangas and knobkerries, you see! Hiroshima and Nagasaki were really better and more civilised.
But there was more from Nyamanhindi: completely oblivious to John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman, Nyamanhindi praised Obama’s praise of the US Peace Corps:
“President Obama also juxtaposed the importance of the year 1960 (when 17 African nations became independent) in Africa to its importance in America; it was the year the idea of service to the world by Americans was born (really?), an idea which would become the Peace Corps. The idea was mooted by the late J. F. Kennedy. We also visited the Peace Corps offices and shared experiences of the service.”
One of the African countries which became independent in 1960 was the Congo (DRC). It was the US government then which joined Belgium, in illegally overthrowing the first popularly elected government of Congo and helped to get the popular prime minister Patrice Lumumba demonised, overthrown, arrested, tortured, assassinated and dissolved in sulphuric acid!
The late President of Ghana, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, was among the first opponents of imperialism to document the fact that the Peace Corps is one of the most important recruiting and training conduits for US intelligence services, including the CIA. US citizen John Perkins confirmed Nkrumah’s findings in his Confessions of a Economic Hitman. He himself was recruited through the Peace Corps in Ecuador.
To return to our tracing of the patterns, Chiadzwa diamonds were certified on August 11 2010. But it did not matter; ZTV’s Melting Pot brought back Dhewa Mavhinga on August 17 2010 to continue the diabolic vilification on the screen. A month later on September 16 2010, the same Dhewa Mavhinga continued the same attacks on ETV in South Africa. Ten days later, it was the turn of The Sunday Times of South Africa, again using some Zimbabweans.
But who benefited from the real blood diamonds?
In 1899, Rhodes felt so generous about African diamonds that he set up the Rhodes Scholarships for Anglo-Saxon males only. So generous was Rhodes that he willed two scholarships per year for each state of the 48 states of the United States of America at the time.
The white settlers in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) were reserved nine scholarships per year, while Cape Colony and Natal were given a total of 15.
Rhodes’ racially exclusive will was not changed to consider Africans, other racial groups and women until 1977, that is 76 years after the first will. The result was that by 1983, more than 2 035 US citizens had been able to study at Oxford University, fully paid for through stolen African gold and diamonds.
By the same date, 1983, only 102 South Africans had received Rhodes Scholarships. Of the 102 South Africans who had received the scholarships by 1983, only two were non-Caucasian. At that time more than 45 percent of African children in South Africa did not attend school.
Africans and other non-Caucasian groups were not included in Rhodes’ will. The British Parliament had to legislate to change Rhodes’ will in order to save the white race the embarrassment which became palpable, especially in the 1970s, because of the increasing influence of African liberation movements in the Southern African region. This is the context of Marange, Chiadzwa and Mbada.
The purpose of the Rhodes Scholarships, according to Rhodes’ will, was to spread and strengthen imperialist values by making them appear to be universal global values, by forging a global Anglo-Saxon ruling class. It is significant that the white males from the US who have studied at Oxford have also come to occupy positions of leadership.
They include, for instance: William (Bill) Clinton, former US president and husband of the current US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Karl Albert, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives; Michael Kinsey, Director of the Wilson Centre of the Smithsonian Institute; Bernard Rogers, former supreme commander of Nato forces in Europe; Russel Feigngold, a current US Senator involved in trying to fine-tune the US sanctions law against Zimbabwe and in efforts to get Zimbabwe’s Chiadzwa diamonds banned from the world market.
What it means is that it is the stolen resources of South Africa and Zimbabwe, especially gold and diamonds, which have been used to educate and train the ruling white male elites of Britain, North America and white South Africa at the following rates, for example:
--15 per year from Natal and Cape;
--96 per year from the USA, at two per state (when they were 48 states);
--Nine per year from Rhodesia; and many more from the British Isles.
But, what does it mean to lose one’s resources educating the ruling elites of one’s enslavers, colonisers and oppressors? One of the white male elites educated at Oxford University at Southern Africa’s expense was US Senator Fulbright who later set up the famous US Fulbright Scholarships inspired by the African money called Rhodes Scholarships.
The Rhodes Scholarships and the real blood diamonds and blood gold
Readers may wonder what it is that makes the minerals which made possible the Rhodes Scholarships the real blood diamonds and blood gold.
First of all, in South Africa as in Zimbabwe, Rhodes obtained mineral claims by waging wars to kill or overcome the native owners of the minerals. Where war was not necessary, Rhodes used fraud, bribery, intimidation and extortion to get his way.
Second, the Africans used to work in the mines lived in concentration camps. Anthony Thomas tells us that:
“From photographs and contemporary accounts we gain a clear impression of the ‘native’ compound, as perfected by Rhodes’s De Beers Mining Company. Over 11 000 African labourers were housed 20 to 25 to a room in corrugated iron barracks, set out in a square and surrounded by a 12-foot fence (3,6 metres), which was patrolled by company police with dogs. The whole area was roofed over by double-meshed wire netting, and guard towers with search lights were placed at each corner.”
The miners wore sack cloth which they took off at the end of their shifts in order to file naked and to be thoroughly searched. The body searches are described in Thomas’s book:
“The guards ran fingers through the miners’ woolly hair, pressed their flat nostrils, felt inside their mouths, under their tongues, in the ears, and up their rectums. Then the native had to lift his arms, stretch apart his fingers, and ‘jigger’ (jump), so that any diamonds concealed by muscular contraction would drop to the floor.”
When their contracts were over, the miners were kept naked in a detention centre for 10 full days. During that time their faeces would be collected and analysed to remove any and all diamonds.
This is the system which produced the wealth which allowed Cecil John Rhodes to be so generous as to offer scholarships to educate a good percentage of the Euro-American ruling class at the expense of Africans who were excluded until after 1977.
