Zimbabwe: How soon we forget
Date: Tuesday, June 10 @ 06:34:29 UTC Topic: Zimbabwe
By Stella Orakwue June 10, 2008 The Herald
IT is a pity that the people who voted against President Robert Mugabe have no ability to remember the servitude they existed in prior to the last 28 years.
They did it for the money. What is the price of the loyalty? It is a heavy price to pay when "your" people are prepared to buy and sell you for Western money. Western money could not, and cannot, buy President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. But clearly, as the number of people who voted against him in the presidential election show, people of Zimbabwe, in Zimbabwe, are prepared to sell him to the West in return for money.
Land, property, money, buying and selling. The ownership of land, the ownership of property. Property and the European. Robert Mugabe knew, and knows, about what property means.
Other people's land. Land belonging to people with black skin. He knows what that means.
Property and the European are interchangeable, indistinguishable, inseparable. The one goes with the other. One without the other is untenable. The two together provide an almost visible exhibition of an orgasmic sensation-taking place.
But together the European and other people's land, particularly land belonging to black people, and we have climax, multiple orgasmic sensation.
Are the people of Zimbabwe prepared to return to servicing the orgasmic needs of the European desire for property, money, ownership and control of the people's land?
Whether that control and ownership is direct or indirect? Are Zimbabweans prepared, willing, and ready to be servicing foreign nations, foreign international bodies, foreign leaders, and foreign "global community"?
And what is the price of service to your own nation and your own continent, Africa? Robert Mugabe, fighter, liberator, leader, man, has paid heavy price upon heavy price. But he will stand fast because men like "Mugabe" come back once a century. Men who bring true transformational change to the lives of their people. It is a pity that "the people" in whose lives this fundamental change has been wrought have such short memories. It is a pity but it is irrelevant that they have no ability to remember the servitude they existed in prior to the last 28 years.
It is irrelevant because of all Africans, living and not yet born, for millennia to come, the actions of Robert Mugabe in returning land, African land, to the rightful ownership of African people, will live on inside all Africans. He will be the psyche of all Africans for all time. And there is nothing that anybody, particularly any foreign body or power can do about that. For they are not God, and it is God who gave us "Mugabe" to lead his people and to show African people the way. Viva Mugabe, viva!
But watch the European cocks crowing! They think their hour is nigh. These Zimbabwean elections aren't "fixed" or "rigged" when they think that their man, the "democratic opposer", has won. Only election wins they don't like are unstomachable.
They did it for the money, for the "help" they think will come. The white "helpers" with their dome-shaped bags laden with helping money. Money that is not available to men that they do not like. Friendly white money that will take the burden of the land off their black backs and hand it back to the white man. For is it not the land the white man's rightful burden? So you Zimbabwean friends white help, lie back, relax, let the white help show you how to do it. That's what friendly white money is for – loosening your control of things. Sit, take the load of the land off your back. Other people want to run your country.
Those people of Zimbabwe who want the democratic opposer, let us see how long it will last. Zimbabweans who want to put their lives in other people's monied hands – let us see how long you remain pleased with the results that await you. Perhaps you do prefer to reap where you do not sow. After all, the Europeans bringing friendly White Money say that those nice, poor blacks that they want to help, well, they don't know how to sow and grow anything on land because they are black and blacks have never been farmers, and they are helpless and they need help. White help.
You can shout at me, "What do I know about poverty and going without food and having no money?" and I will laugh in your face. Do you think that I don't know about poverty, about being poor, because I "live in the West"? I know about poverty. Poverty has been my closest friend for many years. There have been times when I have asked myself whether it is worse to have no food in a place where there is no food – and therefore you all go hungry – or to have no food in a place where food is aplenty but you have no money to buy food – and therefore you go hungry. You see, you can go hungry in the West, too. I know what it is like to count every single penny in my buttered old purse – not to save up for a car or a television, but to buy a loaf of bread, because that is all I have to eat.
It teaches me yet another thing about myself that I didn't know that I was capable of: Money could never, ever buy me. I have seen, and I see, that I would rather starve than bow down to anything that I did not believe in. I would rather starve than sell my fundamental principles. Yes, you cannot eat principles, but without them you don't deserve to eat. Without them you are better off dead.
Look at the Westerners circling like sharks! They flocked from their watching hotels around the globe. They came to bury Robert Mugabe, but he won't go without a fight. What an alarm this poses – what, a black man fighting instead of fleeing or cowering before the white man and his henchmen and women! Let them dig a hole in the ground, fill it with money, and bury themselves in it.
Do you think that if "Mugabe" had got the money, the financial credits, the financial buttresses that Zimbabwe needed, that Zimbabwe's economic situation would not be utterly different, and that "the people" would not have given him the vast majority he deserved? "The people" of the "democratic opposer" know that it is the presence of "Mugabe" that is preventing the West from giving them friendly White money. Money meant for them that that they are not getting because he is there. Sad. Very sad. Sad to see what people will do for money and how flexible their principles can be!
Is it too hard without the white man? Without the Westerner in charge of your resources, in charge of your money, looking after you behind the scenes? Would "the people" rather have the Westerner in charge of their land? Do "the people" actually want "their own" land, if the white man and his Friendly Money are not going to be looking after them?
How much money was taken out of the country by Friendly White Employers with their vast land holdings? How beneficial was that for Zimbabweans? The Friendly White Employers slept in lavish houses and mansions with all unnecessary necessities, all the finest purchasable amenities that money from land could buy; while their "loved" farm workers enjoyed a mattress on an earth floor in their basic dwellings fit for basic lives, and all the rudimentary things that just a teeny-weeny bit of money could buy.
How much money will pour in, Zimbabweans, if you sell out the man who gave you back your land? Will you luxuriate in money like you would in a vast deep bath, water swirling all around you? How long will the taps stay on? The white man's Friendly Money is running on empty. But don't tell "the people" – let them find out the easy way.
What is the rate of return on betrayal? What is the rate of return on a lack of fortitude, a lack of desire for self-being? What is the rate of return on flexible principles? Do you think that the West will ever forgive that land that his kith and kin once held was returned to its rightful owners, back into the hands of black people? It is untenable for them. It is not something that they can deal with, because it has never happened to them before. Their urge is to get it back, buy it back, lease it back, rent it back – do anything but have it back in their hands one way or the other. They need to be back in charge. In control, holding the land and its money again, and the "democratic opposer" and his supporters will help them. Do you think that there is some kind of mysterious white magic to running an economy? That only white people with their white money can do it? How shameful that after only one generation "the people" of Zimbabwe are already going down this road. What was it for, President Mugabe, I ask you?
I say this to myself: God provides, then it is up to each of us to decide what to do with his provisions. God provides, we decide. The Lord has given us that ability. And we do not bow down to people who behave, who conduct themselves, as if they are gods walking upon this earth: Do as they say or else die. Away with them! Your life is in your own hands.
Friendly White Money is nothing but a short-term pay off, a lease on comfort. It is here today, gone tomorrow. But in a worse economic state.
And then you will be back to where you were before but without your dignity, without your strength, without your pride. Back to dependence instead of independence. Back to tilling the soil for others instead of for yourselves. Back to waiting for what the white man wants to do with you, instead of what you want to do for yourselves. Back to no land.
The time you should have spent "suffering" – how does it compare to the war year? But learning about yourselves, your skills, your capacities, you spent in what passed for a "comfortable" life of dependency on the white man and his Friendly post-Mugabe Money. – New African Magazine.
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