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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Africa was known for a long time as The Dark Continent. It is fast becoming The Hopeless Continent.
Yes, We will be sending AID to them just like we do Hati. We sure could have put the BILLIONS we wasted there to much better use. . . . . .
Coming next, demands that the US aid Zimbabwe.
I didn't say SA, I said the southern part of SA (the whites colonized the cape area first). At that time the area was sparcely inhabited by tribes of hunter/gather types ethnically separate from the zulu/xhosa type negroids that are the black South Africans of today. Those people do not exist today. They were assimilated by the whites and coloreds, or killed off.
Don't really know how many blacks were native to what is now SA at that time (1600's) but do know that the great migration of blacks into SA happened in the 1700's/1800's. The Boer/african battles of the 1700's/early 1800's took place when whites migrating north met blacks coming south and the british/zulu battles of the 1800's took place when the british moved north to establish control of the Boers that moved north to get away from them.
What say ye, oh enlightened academic intellignesia?
You sponsored the anti-apartheid movements of the 1980s and 1990s. You initiated the divestiture movements that led the noble ivory towers of learning such as the ivy league schools to refrain from investing in South Africa and Rhodesia, so as to bankrupt their economies.
Why do you not claim credit for your handiwork? Where are the liberal professors now on this issue? Would they blame the white man for this catastrophe? They need only look in the mirror to assess blame.
I'm not an expert on the region. My opinion comes from the fact that Rhodesia fell in 1980 & SA held out until '94. I've been to SA and have Afrikkaner friends. I'm not condemning any african whites for what happened, it must be hard as hell to be outnumbered 10 to 1 at home and having the whole world against you as well.
SA is the same way. When I go there I give my SA friend in the states money and his family gives me south african currency over there. Only a few thousand dollars at a time but it helps get a little cash out of there. They are a rich family but are unable to take the family fortune and leave.
I ask my liberal friends to try to imagine the outrage if whites were doing this to blacks. This is a disgrace and the media, Nelson Mandela, and the free world should be ashamed.
Only game preserves and hunting fees were partially stemming the tide of black poaching that is slaughtering wildlife. In a continent where the vestiges of civilization are swept away, the only thing preventing the extinction of wildlife is if the people die off faster then they can kill the animals. So long as ivory and rhino horn can be traded for AK-47s and ammunition, I don't see this happening.
Instead, they'll probably make Zimbabwe the newest member of the Human Rights Comission.
So when Zimbabwe-Aid airs on TV and the United Way and Red Cross comes begging for famine relief, I will SPIT at the collection cup.
Woe to the conquered.
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