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Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk
No country has done more damage and injustice to Zimbabwe than South Africa.
Since way back when, South Africa has had inglorious ties with Zimbabwe.
Regardless of who is in power, South Africa has always played the spoiler, first in Rhodesia and now in Zimbabwe.
Former South African President Thabo Mbeki and the current one, Jacob Zuma, continue where their white masters left off: and that is to repress Zimbabwe.
Ian Smith, and other white minority governments before him in the then Rhodesia, survived for as long as they did because of the help, sympathy and assistance they got from apartheid South Africa.
Today, South Africa is considered to be the regional leader, pivotal in everything that goes on in the region.
Even the regional body, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), today acts lamely, as if it is a department in South Africa’s Foreign or Home Affairs Ministry.
No country or organisation will do anything about Zimbabwe without consulting South Africa.
SADC takes orders from South Africa, not the other way round.
South Africa still considers and behaves as if its neighbouring countries, particularly Botswana and Zimbabwe, are “lost colonies of its empire”.
Botswana is not a province of South Africa, never was.
Zimbabwe is not an extension of South Africa, although the evil that is destroying Zimbabwe today came from South Africa, whose current patronising black leaders still continue to do what the white rulers did to us.
South Africa now has a big brother mentality.
Mbeki and Zuma forget that many countries in southern Africa, and as far as Tanzania and beyond, suffered because of South Africa and yet the South Africans are supporting the continuation of suffering of people in the region.
Botswana, Zimbabwe and other countries helped South Africans gain independence but, today, South Africa supports those leaders who oppress and kill their own citizens.
Let us cut the bull, what does South Africa think it is doing?
I blame South Africa for its continued patronising of countries to its north and for taking its neighbours for granted.
South Africa, after apartheid, should have apologised to Africa for the role it played as a springboard from which other countries were colonised.
Today, long after apartheid has been defeated largely with outside help, including that from Botswana and Zimbabwe, the likes of Mbeki and Zuma support dictators who do to Africans in Zimbabwe the same things colonialists did to us all.
Hard as it might be for small minds, such as that of Zuma, it must be understood that South Africa is no one’s master.
South Africa is a country like all others and, if it finds itself in a position to bring peace and harmony to other countries, it should do so without the malice that they inherited from the colonialists, wanting to make itself the saviour of Africa.
What the hell do they think they are doing in Zimbabwe?
Africa saved South Africa and South Africa is now encouraging bad governments in the region.
South Africa needs SADC more than SADC needs it.
South Africa is in a hurry to be different and it forgets that it is in Africa and that it belongs in Africa.
Every African country has its own history.
Every nation has its own birth.
Uniqueness is abundant in Africa.
We, in Africa, are so different, yet we are so much the same.
That is where the slogan ‘Rainbow nation’ comes from.
Look at us closely. Different but the same, like the rainbow.
But, like Mbeki once ominously said, ‘there are some among us’ who do things that are detrimental to the success of our efforts to improve our lot.
Like Mbeki himself.
Like Zuma.
Like the state of South Africa.
Like Abby Chikane, a South African of note, who is the Chairman of the South African Diamond Board.
The Kimberley Process tasked Chikane to investigate Zimbabwe’s diamonds originating from Chiadzwa in the Marange area where murder and brutalities against small scale miners were being reported, causing concern that Zimbabwe was producing “blood diamonds”.
Just like Mbeki and Zuma have done, Chikane betrayed the abused Zimbabweans.
Having been given confidential documents by an informant to shore up the claim of the atrocities being perpetrated at the mine, Chikane surprisingly went to the police and divulged the confidential information and the person who gave him the documents, causing the arrest of the informant.
The alleged informant, rights activist Farai Maguwu, is now being held without bail and is being shunted from police station to police station in Zimbabwe, prompting the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights to issue an alert yesterday, saying that Maguwu’s life is in danger, after police officers who abducted him from remand prison were alleged to have tampered with his medication.
Meanwhile, a South African court ordered that Jacob Zuma release a hidden report on Zimbabwe’s 2002 elections but this week the South African government said that it is appealing the court order to release the report, all to protect Robert Mugabe and further raising suspicions of the report’s contents.
Against terrible odds, few of our African countries were born through little or no violence, like Ethiopia and Malawi
Some were born through great fire power and violence, like Zimbabwe. Some were delivered through political Caesarean section, like South Africa, where something as simple as sanctions achieved what guns, bazookas, spears in Kenya and anti-air missiles failed to do peacefully elsewhere on the continent.
Africa has a notorious record of people enslaving themselves after colonialists had been driven out of power.
The most cruel thing African leaders do is to use the people’s resources, the nation’s wealth and energy to abuse the owners of that country, with public wealth and energy, like the famed Biblical anecdote prohibiting the use of a mother goat’s milk to cook its very own kid.
Remember how Sierra Leone cannibalised itself?
Remember Liberia’s immolation at the hands of Charles Taylor?
You don’t have to remember the tragedy in the DR Congo because it is still in progress.
I have nightmares looking at Sierra Leone’s dismembered youths, men and women, who are paraded on international television, some of them surprisingly smiling as they continue trying to eke a living in a country that stole limbs from them.
In 1980, I remember seeing a young black boy in flowing robes with an Afro, at the White House with Ronald Reagan.
Samuel Doe had just toppled the William Tolbert government and magazines had just published photographs showing some of Tolbert’s cabinet ministers tied to poles erected at a beach in Monrovia as they were being executed.
But, Americans being Americans, especially at that time when there was mutual hatred and mistrust of the Soviets, Doe was welcomed at the White House as the new president of Liberia.
But what followed after Doe took over is still the subject of emotional debate for the sheer brutality of the aftermath, with other vicious players, such as Charles Taylor, also toppling Samuel Doe and implementing their own type of terror upon the people of Liberia.
Charles Taylor’s violent barbarism landed him at the Hague, where he is being tried, at the protest of bloodthirsty African leaders.
In spite of the deaths he continues to cause in Sudan, African leaders are reluctant to let Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir be tried.
African presidents are, so to speak, The Brethren; they are complicit in the murder of their own people.
I am intrigued that South Africa, under black rule, continues to tacitly support the subjugation of people outside its own borders.
The heart of the matter is that South Africa must remember that it is an African country situated right here in Africa, with poverty, diseases and all the ills afflicting Africa.
South Africa must stop supporting the abuse of African people by their leaders.
It must not look at itself as anything more special than any other country and its leaders must stop playing the games of betraying African people, always siding with those who abuse fellow Africans.
What do you think?
Send me your comments on tano@swradioafrica.com
It is true that if South Africa had wanted, the problem in Zimbabwe could have been solved a long time ago.
If South Africa had wanted it to be, we could have a democratically elected government in Zimbabwe, with Robert Mugabe nowhere near the halls of power.
South Africa must work for its role as a leading African country and stop thinking that throwing money around is going to buy them success.
If South Africa does not wish to help people who are trying to free themselves from bondage, it must not intervene on the side of those leaders who are subjecting their people to atrocities.
South Africa must learn to be impartial if unwilling to stand on the side of the suffering.
Why should South Africa, whether under Hendrik Verwoerd or Jacob Zuma, maintain the same patronizing attitude towards other African countries?
Zuma gotta answer.
I am Tanonoka Joseph Whande and that, my fellow Zimbabweans, is the way it is today, Thursday June 17, 2010.
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