The tendency for the West to treat sovereign states as rebels while supporting illegal regime change forces as human rights defenders is exactly what Zimbabwe confronted at Tel Aviv in June 2010. A country can cope with such mischief only if it builds a strong and competent central state.
The Sunday MailAFRICAN FOCUS with Tafataona Mahoso
The Western media coverage of crises, riots and protests in Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen does not only personalise the causes of the crises, riots and protests; it stresses emotional and dispositional factors over economic, structural and financial factors.
It details how long the leader or the party has been in power and blames that longevity for the riots, protests and crises but will never suggest that students attacked Prince Charles’s motorcade because he has been a prince for too long.
African media and media in Africa usually copy the Western framing and accept the resulting dispositional explanations, as Anver Versi of African Business once wrote in the February issue of 1998. The article was called “On knocking African leaders”. “So, if a leader is rotten, it must follow that (powers) who support him are equally rotten . . . the names of Idi Amin Dada and Bokassa immediately spring to mind. But who are the midwives in the birth of these monsters?
“In the case of Amin it was the British and Israel; in Mobutu’s case, it was that great champion of freedom and democracy, the United States of America.”
Versi then referred to the problem of lack of research, borrowed framing, poor training and lack of confidence among African journalists:
“Leaders who have grown up from their native soils cannot be put in the same category (as foreign-sponsored puppets). Many of them suffered great tribulations and made enormous sacrifices for (and with) their people . . . The challenges they faced (and continue to face) have been far more daunting than anything any Western leader has to confront since the World War . . . The issue of African leadership is a complex one and it needs substantial study. Unfortunately, most of us in Africa, particularly poorly qualified and badly paid journalists, just do not have the analytical tools to work through leadership issues. We tend to look to (those we think are) the experts, the well-educated, thoroughly trained and richly resourced Western journalists for a lead. When they dismiss African leadership with a few worn-out clichés, we follow suit.
In the process we reduce our own politics, economics and situation in history into the juvenile language of (Western) tabloids.”
The problem which the editor of African Business referred to here is the removal of history and context from media stories.
It is no coincidence that the pastoral letter of the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued in January 2011 focused on ownership of Zimbabwe’s liberation history. The bishops’ conference is part of a long lineage of intercessors, interveners and mediators between African leaders and African communities, between African nations and white imperialism.
This long lineage to which the Catholic Church belongs is responsible for the stubbornness of the white template through which even the mass media owned by Africans themselves continue to misrepresent African leadership
This lineage started with the white missionary as the smiling face and intelligence officer for imperialism and colonialism.
In the 18th century the white missionary alone was no longer adequate to play the function of smiling face and intelligence officer of imperialism and colonialism. Another layer and persona had to be added to the system because the white template needed to look more scientific and more rigorous than the missionary could muster. The missionary was a good communicator for the empire, but he was not scientific and he did not sound scientific in his missionary anthropology.
So the crude anthropological work performed by the missionary was taken over by academic anthropologists in order to give the white racism and the racist template a pseudo-scientific aura.
But while the academic anthropologist was a good researcher and good organiser and interpreter of data on Africans, he was a poor communicator in the propaganda sense. He could not adequately popularise the pseudo-scientific conclusions reached. He was a bit slow, abstract and hesitant.
So, in the 19th century, especially as imperialism became a scramble after the Berlin Conference of 1884, the white journalist was found to be a better user and populariser of the great prejudices and distortions of Africa documented by the missionary and the anthropologist.
But after the two European wars against Germany, after the emergence of the former Soviet Union and China as socialist societies subscribing to an entirely different template — the missionary, the anthropologist and the journalist were yet again found to be inadequate by themselves.
The missionary was found to be restricted by too much religion and the journalist was too much of a reporter and not adequately imbedded in African society in order to defeat the appeal of the Soviet Union and China. What the Soviet Union and China presented was not only a non-religious challenge to the missionary and a different approach to the media but also a shortening of the path to what the West called “civilisation”, which was quickly renamed “development”.
China and the former Soviet Union insisted that Africans could achieve for themselves in two generations what the West claimed to be doing but failed to do for them in 400 years of empire and colonisation. So the West quickly reinvented “development” as a strictly anti-socialist, anti-communist ideology with “foreign aid” projects as its props. The West was forced to tone down the religious tenor of the missionary. And the Western journalist required the help of a new secular missionary in the form of the programme officer and project officer of development aid who now implements the secular chema economy of today while the journalist gives it publicity and legitimacy. The NGO programme officer and project officer enjoy the advantage of being secular and being “professional”, which means that he or she can do excellent spy work for imperialism under the cover of development aid.
Because of the disastrous effects of neoliberal economic structural adjustment and (in Zimbabwe) because of the effects of illegal sanctions as well, the number of foreign-funded NGOs has increased more than 10 times since the late 1980s.
Moreover, this aid is not limited to the civilian NGO sector. It is also military and strategic.
Africa is opening itself to much worse manipulations if it allows the US Africom project to grow and spread on African soil.
The Anglo-Saxon powers, led by the US, already control a continental network and superstructure of “civil society” throughout Africa. It ranges from individual activists and NGOs at the village level to national headquarters of the same NGOs operating on a nation-wide basis; it ranges from donor-funded, quasi-judicial human rights commissions to regional bodies such as the Sadc Tribunal, all the way to the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR.)
Running parallel to the “civil society” network or superstructure is the series of military and intelligence co-operation programmes which Africom is supposed to consolidate. Once Africom is in place, the recolonisation process will have been completed. Newman Chiadzwa and Farai Muguwu would then have their military counterparts right in our midst. And there would be no end to co-ordinated manipulations such as what was recently attempted against Zimbabwe in Tel Aviv during the fourth week of June 2010 at the Kimberley Process Certification meeting.
What to do? The Need for a Strong State
It is no coincidence that all the attacks on Zimbabwe over the Chiadzwa diamonds have been meant to weaken the role of the State in securing national assets and to persuade Zimbabweans who are engaged in national constitution writing to create a constitution which elevates NGOs to demi-gods while whittling down the State to a minimal necessary evil. While the Africom proposal would mean the global extension of the US state on African soil from Kisangani to Chimanimani, the people of this region (Zimbabwe in particular) are being advised by activists funded by the same US state to downsize their own State and its laws while multiplying the number of NGOs and “independent” tribunals which are totally dependent on foreign and mostly Anglo-Saxon donors for their survival.
It is important for Zimbabweans to recall that the same Anglo-Saxon cartel which admitted its ownership of Farai Muguwu and others in the anti-Chiadzwa network also looted Angola’s diamonds for 31 years under the guise of fighting communism through Jonas Savimbi’s Unita. The Western hypocrisy and racism did not begin in Tel Aviv in 2010.
As John Peck once wrote in his October 2000 Z Magazine article:
“This spring 2000, De Beers promised to certify that all its consignments of diamonds do not include any diamonds controlled by rebel forces rebelling against the legitimate and internationally recognised government of the relevant country.”
This De Beers certification was not true. But the same Western media and governments looked the other way because Savimbi’s Unita was seen as a Western anti-communist client movement. In Angola as in Zimbabwe, there were attempts made by the Western cartels to make the legitimate government appear to be the rebel or terrorist movement simply because it was supported by Cuba, the OAU and the former Soviet Union.
According to Peck: “Blissfully ignored by the New York Times and conveniently accommodated by De Beers’ new ‘rebel-free’ label is the role diamonds play in the (imperialist-approved) corporate militarism across Africa. With 70 percent of the total global diamond market under its control (at 2000) and record sales of US$5,24 billion in 1999, De Beers has been widely criticised for bankrolling instability across Africa.”
And Zimbabwe has been a target of similar destabilisation attempts for the last 10 years. The current Anglo-Saxon hostility arises from the realisation that the destabilisation efforts have failed so far.
Precisely because the entire Anglo-Saxon axis and its NGO media cohorts were willing to look the other way, Unita helped the West to loot diamonds valued at more than US$4 billion, counting just the period between 1992 and 1998 alone.
The tendency for the West to treat sovereign states as rebels while supporting illegal regime change forces as human rights defenders is exactly what Zimbabwe confronted at Tel Aviv in June 2010. A country can cope with such mischief only if it builds a strong and competent central state.
According to African Business editor Anver Versi in his editorial called “On knocking African leaders” (February 1998):
This is true of Zimbabwe. It is true of DRC. It is true of Angola. It is true of most countries in Southern Africa. But the Western media template will always downplay or erase the historical contexts of these countries.
Two questions make up two sides of the same coin: For what future political environment are we designing a constitution, given the needs and aspirations of our people as expressed through previous struggles, elections, and referenda? For what sort of state should the current constitution-making process provide safeguards?
The answer should not be based on wishful thinking or uncritical “benchmarking” and “modelling”. The peace, sovereignty and unity we have enjoyed for the last 31 years are the fruits of efforts and sacrifices made by freedom fighters who in order to succeed had to study the objective economic, political and military environment in Southern Africa and the rest of the world as well as the art and science of guerilla warfare.
In order not to be vague and abstract, let us step back and examine some of the indicators of the future environment which we often gloss over.
According to some perceptive observers, if the conflicts which have taken place in our region between the CIA-South African invasion of Angola (1976) and the Rwanda, DRC and Darfur conflicts had so taken place in North America or Europe, they would have been characterised as a world war, a global upheaval much bigger than the so-called First World War. The aftermath of these conflicts would have required a worldwide response similar to the reconstruction efforts which followed the Second World War. But there has been no such reconstruction and the concerned states have had to cope on their own.
The current “global recession”, which is a direct result of reckless neoliberal financial gambling on a global scale, is also described as a disaster more far-reaching than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and as a direct response to the disasters caused by that depression of the 1930s, we know that nations turned to the strong capable state for mass protection.
The combined effects of the prolonged “world war” crisis between Angola and Darfur, between 1976 and 2009, together with the current global financial tsunami, have diminished the credibility of international institutions such as the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, inter-governmental organisations and the media. The reputations of these institutions have suffered an objective decline far worse than that which the League of Nations suffered in the crisis period leading to the Second World War.
Just like the global financial tsunami, global warning or climatic change also threatens disasters of enormous mass impact which require a strong capable state to mitigate their destructive effects on the whole population.
Dovetailing into these global and regional crises affecting the future of Zimbabwe is the mass shock inflicted on the entire Zimbabwean population through illegal and racist sanctions at the instigation of the United Kingdom.
Without going all the way to admit that the mass shock was a result of illegal sanctions, former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell had this to say to Africa University students and faculty on November 2 2005:
“The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 is the cornerstone of US policy toward Zimbabwe. Under the Act, the United States conditions aid and financing for Zimbabwe . . . Ladies and gentlemen, no issue today is more important to the future of Zimbabwe nor has the potential to harm the (Sadc) region than the growing collapse of the Zimbabwe economy . . . It was more than dismaying to read a paper published in July by the Centre for Global Development in Washington on the Costs and Causes of Zimbabwe’s Crisis. It is estimated that Zimbabwe’s economic crisis has set the country back more than half a century. The paper calculated that the purchasing power of the average Zimbabwean in 2005 had fallen back to the same level as in 1953 . . . That’s an astonishing reversal of 52 years (at 2005) of progress in only half a dozen years.”
Last but not least, the emergence of long-evolving epidemics and pandemics such as HIV and Aids, bird flue, swine flue and others seems to contradict the donor-sponsored neoliberal view of the ideal state of the future as a feeble, retiring and down-sized structure, hen-pecked by well-funded and globally net-worked “civil society”.
These six indicators have a bearing on the society, the state and the ideal constitution for a future Zimbabwe.
So, the envisioned home-grown constitution must not only create laws to cut out foreign intervention and interference; it must also create proper space for effective indigenous leadership and efficient state institutions to serve the people.
The Western media coverage of crises, riots and protests in Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen does not only personalise the causes of the crises, riots and protests; it stresses emotional and dispositional factors over economic, structural and financial factors.
It details how long the leader or the party has been in power and blames that longevity for the riots, protests and crises but will never suggest that students attacked Prince Charles’s motorcade because he has been a prince for too long.
African media and media in Africa usually copy the Western framing and accept the resulting dispositional explanations, as Anver Versi of African Business once wrote in the February issue of 1998. The article was called “On knocking African leaders”. “So, if a leader is rotten, it must follow that (powers) who support him are equally rotten . . . the names of Idi Amin Dada and Bokassa immediately spring to mind. But who are the midwives in the birth of these monsters?
“In the case of Amin it was the British and Israel; in Mobutu’s case, it was that great champion of freedom and democracy, the United States of America.”
Versi then referred to the problem of lack of research, borrowed framing, poor training and lack of confidence among African journalists:
“Leaders who have grown up from their native soils cannot be put in the same category (as foreign-sponsored puppets). Many of them suffered great tribulations and made enormous sacrifices for (and with) their people . . . The challenges they faced (and continue to face) have been far more daunting than anything any Western leader has to confront since the World War . . . The issue of African leadership is a complex one and it needs substantial study. Unfortunately, most of us in Africa, particularly poorly qualified and badly paid journalists, just do not have the analytical tools to work through leadership issues. We tend to look to (those we think are) the experts, the well-educated, thoroughly trained and richly resourced Western journalists for a lead. When they dismiss African leadership with a few worn-out clichés, we follow suit.
In the process we reduce our own politics, economics and situation in history into the juvenile language of (Western) tabloids.”
The problem which the editor of African Business referred to here is the removal of history and context from media stories.
It is no coincidence that the pastoral letter of the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued in January 2011 focused on ownership of Zimbabwe’s liberation history. The bishops’ conference is part of a long lineage of intercessors, interveners and mediators between African leaders and African communities, between African nations and white imperialism.
This long lineage to which the Catholic Church belongs is responsible for the stubbornness of the white template through which even the mass media owned by Africans themselves continue to misrepresent African leadership
This lineage started with the white missionary as the smiling face and intelligence officer for imperialism and colonialism.
In the 18th century the white missionary alone was no longer adequate to play the function of smiling face and intelligence officer of imperialism and colonialism. Another layer and persona had to be added to the system because the white template needed to look more scientific and more rigorous than the missionary could muster. The missionary was a good communicator for the empire, but he was not scientific and he did not sound scientific in his missionary anthropology.
So the crude anthropological work performed by the missionary was taken over by academic anthropologists in order to give the white racism and the racist template a pseudo-scientific aura.
But while the academic anthropologist was a good researcher and good organiser and interpreter of data on Africans, he was a poor communicator in the propaganda sense. He could not adequately popularise the pseudo-scientific conclusions reached. He was a bit slow, abstract and hesitant.
So, in the 19th century, especially as imperialism became a scramble after the Berlin Conference of 1884, the white journalist was found to be a better user and populariser of the great prejudices and distortions of Africa documented by the missionary and the anthropologist.
But after the two European wars against Germany, after the emergence of the former Soviet Union and China as socialist societies subscribing to an entirely different template — the missionary, the anthropologist and the journalist were yet again found to be inadequate by themselves.
The missionary was found to be restricted by too much religion and the journalist was too much of a reporter and not adequately imbedded in African society in order to defeat the appeal of the Soviet Union and China. What the Soviet Union and China presented was not only a non-religious challenge to the missionary and a different approach to the media but also a shortening of the path to what the West called “civilisation”, which was quickly renamed “development”.
China and the former Soviet Union insisted that Africans could achieve for themselves in two generations what the West claimed to be doing but failed to do for them in 400 years of empire and colonisation. So the West quickly reinvented “development” as a strictly anti-socialist, anti-communist ideology with “foreign aid” projects as its props. The West was forced to tone down the religious tenor of the missionary. And the Western journalist required the help of a new secular missionary in the form of the programme officer and project officer of development aid who now implements the secular chema economy of today while the journalist gives it publicity and legitimacy. The NGO programme officer and project officer enjoy the advantage of being secular and being “professional”, which means that he or she can do excellent spy work for imperialism under the cover of development aid.
Because of the disastrous effects of neoliberal economic structural adjustment and (in Zimbabwe) because of the effects of illegal sanctions as well, the number of foreign-funded NGOs has increased more than 10 times since the late 1980s.
Moreover, this aid is not limited to the civilian NGO sector. It is also military and strategic.
Africa is opening itself to much worse manipulations if it allows the US Africom project to grow and spread on African soil.
The Anglo-Saxon powers, led by the US, already control a continental network and superstructure of “civil society” throughout Africa. It ranges from individual activists and NGOs at the village level to national headquarters of the same NGOs operating on a nation-wide basis; it ranges from donor-funded, quasi-judicial human rights commissions to regional bodies such as the Sadc Tribunal, all the way to the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR.)
Running parallel to the “civil society” network or superstructure is the series of military and intelligence co-operation programmes which Africom is supposed to consolidate. Once Africom is in place, the recolonisation process will have been completed. Newman Chiadzwa and Farai Muguwu would then have their military counterparts right in our midst. And there would be no end to co-ordinated manipulations such as what was recently attempted against Zimbabwe in Tel Aviv during the fourth week of June 2010 at the Kimberley Process Certification meeting.
What to do? The Need for a Strong State
It is no coincidence that all the attacks on Zimbabwe over the Chiadzwa diamonds have been meant to weaken the role of the State in securing national assets and to persuade Zimbabweans who are engaged in national constitution writing to create a constitution which elevates NGOs to demi-gods while whittling down the State to a minimal necessary evil. While the Africom proposal would mean the global extension of the US state on African soil from Kisangani to Chimanimani, the people of this region (Zimbabwe in particular) are being advised by activists funded by the same US state to downsize their own State and its laws while multiplying the number of NGOs and “independent” tribunals which are totally dependent on foreign and mostly Anglo-Saxon donors for their survival.
It is important for Zimbabweans to recall that the same Anglo-Saxon cartel which admitted its ownership of Farai Muguwu and others in the anti-Chiadzwa network also looted Angola’s diamonds for 31 years under the guise of fighting communism through Jonas Savimbi’s Unita. The Western hypocrisy and racism did not begin in Tel Aviv in 2010.
As John Peck once wrote in his October 2000 Z Magazine article:
“This spring 2000, De Beers promised to certify that all its consignments of diamonds do not include any diamonds controlled by rebel forces rebelling against the legitimate and internationally recognised government of the relevant country.”
This De Beers certification was not true. But the same Western media and governments looked the other way because Savimbi’s Unita was seen as a Western anti-communist client movement. In Angola as in Zimbabwe, there were attempts made by the Western cartels to make the legitimate government appear to be the rebel or terrorist movement simply because it was supported by Cuba, the OAU and the former Soviet Union.
According to Peck: “Blissfully ignored by the New York Times and conveniently accommodated by De Beers’ new ‘rebel-free’ label is the role diamonds play in the (imperialist-approved) corporate militarism across Africa. With 70 percent of the total global diamond market under its control (at 2000) and record sales of US$5,24 billion in 1999, De Beers has been widely criticised for bankrolling instability across Africa.”
And Zimbabwe has been a target of similar destabilisation attempts for the last 10 years. The current Anglo-Saxon hostility arises from the realisation that the destabilisation efforts have failed so far.
Precisely because the entire Anglo-Saxon axis and its NGO media cohorts were willing to look the other way, Unita helped the West to loot diamonds valued at more than US$4 billion, counting just the period between 1992 and 1998 alone.
The tendency for the West to treat sovereign states as rebels while supporting illegal regime change forces as human rights defenders is exactly what Zimbabwe confronted at Tel Aviv in June 2010. A country can cope with such mischief only if it builds a strong and competent central state.
According to African Business editor Anver Versi in his editorial called “On knocking African leaders” (February 1998):
This is true of Zimbabwe. It is true of DRC. It is true of Angola. It is true of most countries in Southern Africa. But the Western media template will always downplay or erase the historical contexts of these countries.
Two questions make up two sides of the same coin: For what future political environment are we designing a constitution, given the needs and aspirations of our people as expressed through previous struggles, elections, and referenda? For what sort of state should the current constitution-making process provide safeguards?
The answer should not be based on wishful thinking or uncritical “benchmarking” and “modelling”. The peace, sovereignty and unity we have enjoyed for the last 31 years are the fruits of efforts and sacrifices made by freedom fighters who in order to succeed had to study the objective economic, political and military environment in Southern Africa and the rest of the world as well as the art and science of guerilla warfare.
In order not to be vague and abstract, let us step back and examine some of the indicators of the future environment which we often gloss over.
According to some perceptive observers, if the conflicts which have taken place in our region between the CIA-South African invasion of Angola (1976) and the Rwanda, DRC and Darfur conflicts had so taken place in North America or Europe, they would have been characterised as a world war, a global upheaval much bigger than the so-called First World War. The aftermath of these conflicts would have required a worldwide response similar to the reconstruction efforts which followed the Second World War. But there has been no such reconstruction and the concerned states have had to cope on their own.
The current “global recession”, which is a direct result of reckless neoliberal financial gambling on a global scale, is also described as a disaster more far-reaching than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and as a direct response to the disasters caused by that depression of the 1930s, we know that nations turned to the strong capable state for mass protection.
The combined effects of the prolonged “world war” crisis between Angola and Darfur, between 1976 and 2009, together with the current global financial tsunami, have diminished the credibility of international institutions such as the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, inter-governmental organisations and the media. The reputations of these institutions have suffered an objective decline far worse than that which the League of Nations suffered in the crisis period leading to the Second World War.
Just like the global financial tsunami, global warning or climatic change also threatens disasters of enormous mass impact which require a strong capable state to mitigate their destructive effects on the whole population.
Dovetailing into these global and regional crises affecting the future of Zimbabwe is the mass shock inflicted on the entire Zimbabwean population through illegal and racist sanctions at the instigation of the United Kingdom.
Without going all the way to admit that the mass shock was a result of illegal sanctions, former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell had this to say to Africa University students and faculty on November 2 2005:
“The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 is the cornerstone of US policy toward Zimbabwe. Under the Act, the United States conditions aid and financing for Zimbabwe . . . Ladies and gentlemen, no issue today is more important to the future of Zimbabwe nor has the potential to harm the (Sadc) region than the growing collapse of the Zimbabwe economy . . . It was more than dismaying to read a paper published in July by the Centre for Global Development in Washington on the Costs and Causes of Zimbabwe’s Crisis. It is estimated that Zimbabwe’s economic crisis has set the country back more than half a century. The paper calculated that the purchasing power of the average Zimbabwean in 2005 had fallen back to the same level as in 1953 . . . That’s an astonishing reversal of 52 years (at 2005) of progress in only half a dozen years.”
Last but not least, the emergence of long-evolving epidemics and pandemics such as HIV and Aids, bird flue, swine flue and others seems to contradict the donor-sponsored neoliberal view of the ideal state of the future as a feeble, retiring and down-sized structure, hen-pecked by well-funded and globally net-worked “civil society”.
These six indicators have a bearing on the society, the state and the ideal constitution for a future Zimbabwe.
So, the envisioned home-grown constitution must not only create laws to cut out foreign intervention and interference; it must also create proper space for effective indigenous leadership and efficient state institutions to serve the people.
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