Posted on 11/24/2001 11:56:15 PM PST by cmvc3
Zimbabwe Whites Finished - Nation 'Like One Big Departure Lounge' The Sunday Mail - London 11-25-1 HARARE - We marked Heroes and Ancestors Day - or Gooks and Spooks, as we prefer to call it - in Harare yesterday. The city was a place of eerie calm but in the bush all hell was breaking loose, with women, children and old folk being evacuated hourly by light aircraft.
There is a 'fin de' everything, atmosphere among white people now, a sad, bitter resignation to the fact that our world is crumbling around us. It,s like going through a bereavement for the beloved country many of our families came to from England 100 years ago. It's an agonising process: anger, denial, bargaining - then maybe death.
The entire generation of whites know they are not wanted and have left or are leaving. The older generation is still desperate to live out what remains of their lives in what is left of British colonial style.
I saw a prosperous looking elderly couple in the supermarket last week looking at the prices of pet food. The woman said: "I don't think we can afford to keep the dogs anymore." They are lucky. Upcountry other pensioners have resorted to cooking with dog food - they cannot afford proper meat. Their fixed pensions have been almost wiped out over the past two years by an inflation rate which must be well over 150 per cent. With their children and grandchildren going or gone, many have been reduced to a kind of genteel poverty, trading in their beautiful old homes to huddle together in old age compounds.
The elderly are not the only vulnerable ones. A few days ago I saw a pretty white girl of about 17 touting for business at a flea pit hotel north of the city centre, in a mini skirt despite the cold winter wind. In a country where one in four people is thought to have AIDS, you have to be really desperate to become a prostitute.
There's simply no money here and certainly no security, not even in death.
Suburban street signs have been removed wholesale - we think they are being melted down and made into coffin handles. Graves have been opened, corpses dumped in the bush and coffins taken for resale, spruced up with aluminium from the signs. The other day I was trapped in a huge traffic jam - a rush of middle class black people applying for white land at the Ministry of Agriculture. Spectacles like that make even the bitter-enders talk about quitting.
The government's 'indigenisation' policy makes it more and more difficult for us to be employed instead of the millions of jobless black Zimbabweans. And without a very good job you can't afford a ticket to get out. There used to be a joke that if whites and middle-class blacks waited too long they would have to sell their plush mansions just to pay for the air fare to London. That joke is rapidly coming true as the value of the Zimbabwe dollar depreciates weekly. It's expected to reach 500 Zim dollars to the pound within a month, yet when the current government took over 21 years ago, one Zim dollar was worth £1.
The country feels like one big departure lounge in which we carry on our day to day activities while waiting for our flight. You go to the café but you only talk about who's gone, who's going and then you see someone you used to take coffee with who,s now sleeping on the pavement.
A chronically optimistic farmer friend told me recently he had always thought the rest of Africa could learn from Zimbabwe, but last week he changed his mind. "I was so naïve," he said. "to think that 50,000 whites could really make a difference and hold out against the tidal wave of chaos that is engulfing the rest of this continent." An opposition party supporter, he revealed that what really depressed him was the seeming indifference of most black Zimbabweans to what was happening to the whites.
Mobs of veterans - the catch-all name for Mugabe thugs - and party supporters have been surrounding farms, building road blocks and forcing farmers to flee in what is seen as the start of campaigning for the presidential election next year.
As I flew over the bush I watched crowds of people looting from the abandoned farmhouses, taking away white families possessions on their heads, donkey carts and on 'liberated' farm vehicles, some of which they immediately crashed.
At one farm in the Doma area I saw looters load bags of fertiliser from a smashed open warehouse on to a donkey cart. At another I saw beds, tables, cupboards and other bits of furniture scattered over the lawn and thrown into the swimming pool. I spotted caches of stolen goods in the bush around the farms. One farmer told me many workers had been forced at gunpoint to plunder their employers property but some loyal ones were hiding valuable stuff such as computers so they could return it later when law and order was restored. The farmer said that if that happened he would never miss another church service again.
Despite all this, Jack Straw, the UK'S new Foreign Secretary, has done nothing to help whites in what was for so many years a British colony, and in which so many of the white tribe still hold British passports.
The slaughter and robbery might seem random but it is not. There is a brutal logic at work. The government knows if it can drive the whites out of Zimbabwe, the rest of the world, and particularly the Western media, will lose interest and then it will be able to deal with its political opposition in no uncertain terms.
If that happens, there will be a descent into poverty and terror from which Zimbabwe, a once civilised and sophisticated nation, may never emerge.
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One more time to let it sink in. I would only replace the word "could" with "will".
Wasn't that bad last time I was there ('97)... Sandton was supposed to be pretty safe. I stayed at the Holiday Inn in Pretoria a few days and it wasn't too bad at night. Thought it was pretty funny that you had to pay to have your car guarded while parked on a busy public street though.
Everybody (black & white) said don't go to Joburg at night, and from the look of it in daylight, I wouldn't want to. Damn shame whats happening over there. In this country, when you start making enough money that you can afford luxuries, you start buying things to improve your lifestyle. Over there, if you want to keep anything, you have to spend a fortune on security systems first. I read on another thread that thieves are actually going into nice neighborhoods and stealing the grass to sell as sod!
Will be? Shouldn't that read a further descent into poverty and terror?
Ah, diversity...
Starting to happen? Just curious, but how long have your friends lived in Kenya? I have heard and read of this going on there for decades.
What is truly scandalous & shameful is how our media turns a blind eye to the tragedies currently occurring in Africa.
The home security demands are pretty much universal in Africa it seems. In Dar es Salaam, all homes have a "safe haven" room which is usually a room on the second floor with an iron door at the top of the stairway. The understanding is that the thieves can ransack the house but tend to leave everyone alone in the "safe haven" part of the house. More often than not, the local private security personnel are involved in the robberies. Nice way to live, no??
Sounds like a multi-cultural paradise. Wish all our liberals would go there to live!
Thank God we have a few more options here (for now, anyway). I moved far away from the 'joberg' I work in (Savannah, GA) and my 'security' room is any room that me and my .45 happen to be in.
Ah yes, nothing says security like the big hole a .45 makes.
I'm living overseas and the gun restrictions are such that expats, or anyone other than the military, police, and criminals cannot own firearms...makes me a little uneasy when my Rotties start barking at night.
THAT is where liberalism has triumphed:
The downward spiral of Africa is not a result of genetics or of colonialism. There are too many talented and capable black persons outside of Africa to pretend that race is the cause. There is ample indication that colonial structures held many of these places together long after the powers shifted.
WE have the same root problem in America and throughout the world. Criticism of a black person, for anything up to and including murdering his wife and a waiter, is instantly redefined as criticism of an entire race of people. Instantly discredited.
A hate crime.
The politically correct reaction of the world's elites gives Mugabe, Anan, Al Sharpton, and Maxine Waters equal and total license to exploit those who would listen and to disrupt any effort at moderation and resolution.
You are partly correct. Most do not have a "plan", for that implies thinking ahead with some sort of abstract reasoning process. But, as for the leaders (Mugabe and his band of thugs), they have a very definite plan.
They have found a happy fact of reality.....there always seems to be new, green pastures just over the horizon to loot once they've exhausted the ones next door. In this case, the new pastures are your and my paycheck. Once they are done raping and pillaging their way through Zim's white farms, they plan on raping and pillaging their way through our pockets.....forever.
I feel for ya... with the anti-gun extremeists we have here I already have a cache buried on a friend's property. I'm sure that it will be illegal to posess firearms here one day but they'll have to put me in a camp (or kill me) to keep me from having one (or ten!)
Absolutely. A form of this thinking has already taken place here in the US. The decay of our inner cities is not blamed on the people who live there who have made DC, Detroit, etc into uncivilized hellholes. The decay is blamed on "white flight".....in other words, they fled for their lives (often losing all of their property equity on the way out the door), and left with their paychecks too. Now, without a tax base, the parastitic populations and city governments no longer have anyone to loot.
We'll have it here one day, too. I can't believe that the whites didn't keep a few hidden away though.
Out of curiosity, when was the zim military fully integrated? I came across a reference to muggs using a 'white' military unit to stop fighting between zim army units sometime after he seized power.
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