Zimbabwe descending into dark ages

Rense.com ^ | 12-29-1 | Cathy Buckle

[Magician]

Thank you all for the Christmas cards, emails and messages offering words of support, encouragement and hope this last week. I apologise for not responding to an awful lot of them but each one was read and treasured, thank you.

All week we have been absolutely bombarded by State owned radio and television reports telling us that this has been the best Christmas for 100 years because Zimbabweans have been given back their land and are expecting "bumper harvests." I went away for a few days, traveled a couple of hundred kilometres and saw for myself the state of the crops on Zimbabwean farms and am still in a state of deep shock. On the entire 220 kilometres of my journey there were less than a dozen fields on the roadside growing a saleable crop. Of these not one was maize, Zimbabwe's staple food.

There were many dozens of little patches, some perhaps as big as one acre, where newly resettled farmers have claimed a vast field and managed to plant only a minute fraction of it with food. Zimbabwe's newly resettled farmers have not planted enough food for themselves, let alone a surplus with which to support 13 million Zimbabweans.

Perhaps what struck me most is that we have gone backwards in time. From tractors and pivot irrigation tending crops for sale to support the nation, the view now is of oxen pulling hand ploughs in little squares to feed perhaps one man and his wife for three or four months. Having been all my life in Africa and a farmer for a decade, I find it criminal in the extreme that our prime growing season is going to waste like this and that our Agriculture Minister is sitting in Harare saying that we are in for a bumper harvest.

More criminal is that our Minister of Environment is doing and saying nothing about the vast environmental degradation that lies there along the road sides for us all to see. On countless fields along the road dozens of indigenous trees have been hacked down to be replaced by one or two primitive grass huts. In the middle of timber plantations hundreds of prime trees, grown for poles and furniture, have been felled to make room for one ramshackle hut. On almost every field our 'new farmers' have planted maize along the river banks, gullies are visible, chemicals are leaching into our water systems, siltation has started, contours have been ploughed through.

We have gone from being a vastly productive country to one of primitive subsistence and all the highly-educated Ministers who govern us with their Masters degrees and Doctorates are saying nothing, doing nothing. They have watched in political silence as commercial farmers have been stopped from growing food by "war veterans", they have taken Zimbabwe back into the dark ages. For over a year I have been saying that starvation is approaching, this week I saw the reality of it.

This has been the best Christmas in 100 years for a very few Zimbabweans. 4 people were murdered in political violence this week. Trymore Midzi, 24 years old was brutally assaulted in Bindura by men wielding machetes. He died in hospital. Titus Nheya, 56 years old was stabbed to death in Karoi. Milton Chambati, 45 years old, attacked by a mob of fifty was stabbed in the back and then beheaded in Magunge. Laban Chiweta, 24 years old was beaten to death by armed riot police near Bindura. My love and condolences go to their wives and lovers, their children, friends and families.

On the morning of Christmas Eve a barefoot and barely clothed young woman, perhaps 20, appeared outside my door. She was suckling an infant at her distended breast and had a toddler at her feet. She was starving, her eyes were filled with tears and her pleas for help were garbled but desperate. She carried her life, her home and her children's security in a small, blanket enclosed bundle. This is the face of Zimbabwe in 2001.

When I returned home, the hate mail again filled my screen. "Go back to Britain" it said, "there is no place for you here." The writer said that the starvation is the fault of of white farmers who are not delivering their produce to create artificial shortages. He did not seem to be aware of the cold hard fact - there is no produce to sell 21 months after politicians decided to use race and land to secure their re-election.

The educated men and women who govern Zimbabwe, the civil servants and the police who have turned a blind eye for almost two years must now find ways of feeding us all. The time for hate and accusations, for greed and jealousy is long gone, now we must all work together before it is our mothers and daughters carrying their lives in small bundles begging for help.

Until next week, with love, cathy

[silmaril]

Poor, poor Zimbabwe. Poor Rhodesia. It's heartbreaking, and archetypically African.

[Tijeras_Slim]

ping

[backhoe]

Sadly indexing....

I'll never forget a Jeff McNelly cartoon of Iran after the Shah fell-- it showed the Ayatolla riding an oxcart over a hill, and the sign by the road read:

"Leaving
20th Century
Please
Dim Lights"

[corkoman]

the use of the term Dark Ages as used here is clearly racist therefore all discussion of Mugabe should be avoided. Nothing to see here. Move along.

[weikel]

No this can't be true the liberal media said Ian Smith was the bad guy(/sarcasm).

[keithtoo]

Africa returns to its savage equilibrium

Who know but that this sort of activity went on all the time before the Euro colonists arrived. We'll never know since the natives never bothered to record anything in writing.

[Tacis]

Strongest exception is taken to your use of the term "dark ages." It smacks of racism by equating black with evil. The brave leaders of Zimbabwe are simply ridding themselves of the vestiges of European slavery and returning to the natural, self-governed principles of their heritage. The white invaders have pillaged the land, stolen the wealth, and corrupted the natural path. Once Zimbabwe is rid of European evil, its people can get back to tribal butchery, canabalism, and human sacrifice. Mugabe has had a properly cooked baby in years. No matter how many billion dollars he has hidden in European and Panamanian banks, you simply can't get a decent roasted enemy tribesman outside of Harare.

[Cicero]

In point of fact, the true "dark ages," between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Medieval Church and states, was relatively short. And anyone who has read much about the middle ages in the way of real history and literature (as well as the history of science) will recognize that it was a relatively good time, in which civilization in the broadest sense was moving forward and upward. A dark age is when the barbarians are destroying things and pulling everything down into chaos, when the rule of law disappears, and that appears to be an accurate term for what is happening in Zimbabwe now.

[dread78645]

Ping

[Marianne]

BTTT

[dfrussell]

Nothing can halt Zimbabwe's slide into chaos, and to attempt to do so is a rather dangerous exercise in futility.

The kindest thing to do is step aside, let it fall completely apart, and then try to pick up what is left.

[annalex]

While the West had every right to dismantle the colonial regime in the 60's -- which gave it nothing but grief --, the retreat from Africa was nevertheless a selfish act, the moral consequences of which we are beginning to reap.

[thucydides]

Zimbabwe slowly sinks back into the utter savagery that has always characterized much of Africa. South Africa, where the nation's president has asked his people to stop raping infants, is not far behind. Cannibalism never really died out. One African president kept a refrigerator in his office for these purposes. The average IQ in these countries is 70 - 75 (85 is borderline retarded). Succumbing to the anti - colonialist claptrap of Lenin, the West abandoned Africa after WWII. The result was nominally socialist kleptocrat regimes, and a steadily declining GNP. "The horror, the horror..." (Kurtz, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness)

[Centurion2000]

Zimbabwe descending into dark ages

Good .... bad socialists !

[Cultural Jihad]

The silence of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the DNC, the UN, Kofi Annan, and NAACP over the "ethnic cleansing" in Zimbabwe is deafening.

[Centurion2000]

While the West had every right to dismantle the colonial regime in the 60's -- which gave it nothing but grief --, the retreat from Africa was nevertheless a selfish act, the moral consequences of which we are beginning to reap.

So now you blame Zimbabwes troubles on the West ?? Please. The only reason this is happening is because the West gave in to feel good policies of liberalism and took the controlling hand off of the native peoples. WE are not reaping anything. This is Africa's problem not ours.

Want to blame something ? Blame the Zimbabwean leadership for being too stupid to recognize elementary economics.

[Billthedrill]

Ugly stuff, somewhat reminiscent of the Ukraine in the 30s. There, the real crop had to be expropriated in order to create the artificial shortages that resulted in the Kulaks' starvation. In Zimbabwe the shortages will be real, created for exactly the same purpose: to disenfranchise a "privileged" class. The starvation will be real as well.

But it will be much harder to blame colonialization for this one. The old slogans aren't sounding so good these days, and their shouters will be the last to find out.

[LarryLied]

There is a tradition in the west that we do have a burden to bear. Been politically incorrect to point that out for some time now however.

[Tailback]

This reminds me of T-shirts being sold at the Berlin wall after the wall was opened. Tens of thousands of East Germans were flooding across the border into West Germany driving their little 2cycle engined trabants on the autobahn at their max speed of 50 MPH. The T-shirt was a picture of the Eastern side of Checkpoint Charlie with the saying "Der letzte raus, licht aus" underneath. That means last one out turns off the light.