"Simple Minded President Was No Friend of Africa"

The East African Standard (Nairobi)

Makau Mutua
Nairobi

President Ronald Reagan pursued a corrosive, hateful and ultimately racist policy towards Africa. It is shocking that the American Press has over the past week engaged in revisionist history over President Reagan's legacy. He was perhaps the most polarising, insensitive and simple-minded American president of the past century.

Both his domestic and foreign policies were disastrous. in the US, who can forget his cutbacks on social programmes, including lunch programmes for needy school children, his sacking of striking airport tower control workers, his opposition to affirmative action, his refusal to recognise the Aids crisis, his tripling of the nation's red ink, and his coddling of racist individuals and groups such as Bob Jones University? In foreign affairs, he supported Contras, destabilised Nicaragua, traded arms for hostages with Iran, paid homage to Nazis by his visit to a death camp in Eastern Europe, and committed countless other foreign policy blunders.

But Reagan saved his most hateful policies for Africa. With Jeane Kirkpatrick, his UN ambassador, Reagan developed and amplified the policy of support for right-wing dictatorships around the world, as long as those despotic states could be used as pawns in the Cold War. Thus, he supported Apartheid South Africa, and declared that Nelson Mandela and the ANC were terrorists. He vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Sanctions Act, but was overridden by the Congress and it became law. You may also recall that Reagan referred to Jonas Savimbi's Unita killers as freedom fighters! Full Article

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Monday, June 21st, News Update posted:

The ugly side of Ronald Reagan
By Murithi Mutiga
Ronald Wilson Reagan was no great friend of Africa. His death, after a long period of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in the US 10 days ago, was greeted with a mass outbreak of media-fuelled veneration and posthumous encomiums across America.

He was hailed as a "sunny optimist" who crushed communism, and restored America’s pride and dignity in the global theatre.

Time magazine eulogised the 93-year old ex-president as "a man of clear conviction who was capable of compromise where necessary and growth where possible, whose ideas were both deeply held and able to evolve as circumstances changed or expediency required."

If journalism is history’s first draft, though, liberal commentators will hope that the writers of history will ultimately ignore the revisionist patriotic blindness of the American Press.

Full Article