You wrote that:

Smith “… kept a tight grip on power, justifying this by saying he was protecting the country from Communists who were using the Blacks as a tool for their agenda to take over the world … Access to opportunity was based on colour of skin” …

and you wrote that:

Mugabe “ … keeps a tight grip on power, saying that he is protecting the country from Imperialist forces who are using Blacks as a tool for their agenda to take over the world … Access to opportunity is based on political patronage.”

~

I found your “illustrative” comparison between what Smith was (& still is & will always be!!) and what Mugabe is crude, shallow and almost joke-like sounding to me. And I am fully confident that the majority of Zimbabweans -- (… blacks, especially the CONSCIOUS ones or those who lived under the terror of the brute known as Ian Smith) -- would consider your cocky statement misinformed, immature, anti-patriotic, anti-Zimbabwean and actually an insult to all Afrikans! How dare you can compare Smith to Mugabe? What amount of bad has Mugabe done to you, to tip your scales in favour of Smith? What do you think you have in common with Smith? What do you think Smith would ever think he has in common with you??

Please do not deceive us, (when referring to Smith), with vague phrases such as “colour of skin”, where you should straight away just mention “race”! Smith’s regime was brutal, arrogant, racist, unapologetically nazi-like, inhuman & anti-Afrikan. And I think especially due to demographic factors and the Rhodesian whites’ geographical fears (of ‘isolation’), we can, today, understand why there was so much paranoia surrounding Smith’s UDI, or why Smith and his ilk of “abandoned trekkers” refused to let loose ... Today, we can see them as being nomadic ingrates still living in the past, but overtaken by the pace of time … We can actually understand why Apartheid, in South Africa, rose like an invincible giant but finally crashed to the ground!!

You call yourself a writer: Do you honestly think you -- or indeed any black person -- could as easily have had the opportunity to aspire to be that/(a writer) under Smith’s racist regime as you eloquently prove yourself to have become under Mugabe’s patriotic government? What else would you, or any one of us black Afrikans, more likely have become under Smith, other than an extension of a broom-stick, or a toilet-cleaner or a simple factory machine-hand? … But it is people like you who don’t see the difference. Perhaps guys like you, judging from the way you think, what you write, would still have ‘run for cover’ -- (from ‘Commies’) -- by seeking ‘political asylum’ in the heart of the Empire, sitting back, forgetting and relaxing, in a cosy bourgeois environment (that is not even theirs!).

Remember the “Bantu Education”, Bantustan and Pass laws of South Africa, after Hendrik Verwoed (1948)? … Perhaps you would have preferred living under Verwoed or Smith; it seems you would be a happier man then.