In Obama, imperial America misappropriated my colour and redeployed it… against me.
The Herald
By Nathaniel Manheru
THIS week US Ambassador Charles Ray told the Press he was "still a student" learning Zimbabwe’s ways, with a clear assurance to all of us all that he would soon graduate.
This testament of studentship followed a delinquent walk-away by himself and his peers in the European Union, at the National Heroes Acre early this week following a barbed, brittle message from a defiant President Robert Mugabe denouncing illegal Western sanctions and imperious strictures from the same on our nation.
The walk-away was followed by a summons to Foreign Affairs where the ambassadors earned themselves a well-deserved admonition from Foreign Minister Mumbengegwi.
By way of self-recompense, the lashed ambassadors in turn convened their own Press conference at which they gave a show of unyielding defiance, even though Manheru knows better.
Even ambassadors do have faces that must be saved at times.
American treachery
More or less the same time this was happening, Ray’s boss, US President Barak Obama, was feting youngsters from Africa in a State Department-sponsored public diplomacy programme, dubbed President’s Forum for Young African leaders.
It is a propaganda outreach programme which has been running for years, all to provide a grand finale to that country’s studentship programme targeting Third World candidates for exposure to American soft power, including American values.
Zimbabweans were part of the crowd, Zimbabweans chosen on partisan lines.
The selection was done by MDC-T’s Usaid-sponsored civic faces, principally the so-called Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition and its support offshoots such as Youth Initiative for Democracy, Students Solidarity Trust and Women in Politics Support Unit.
Dear reader, you are watching instruments of American policy elaboration in Zimbabwe.
Thus, Obama had a captive audience, an audience he had founded and sponsored in the context of a broader search for world-wide hegemony.
His forum is attended by 115 "young leaders" from across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Not "leaders" as designated by their host nations or defined by values from Africa, but "leaders" for America and her broader strategic goals in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This strategy of buying into the loyalties of other people, other nationalities, for America’s insidious goals against those same nations, is a long established one in American geo-politics.
You may recall that among the early beneficiaries of this programme was one West African Nigerian playwright called John Pepper Clark who, after long internship in American universities and other socialising institutions, proceeded to expose and denounce this elaborate snare in a much-celebrated book called "America, their America".
It is a must read for anyone wanting to know that side of America. I wonder how many in that group are aware of this larger project. In the meantime, the continent delivers her children to America for ensnaring.
No knee-jerk
On the occasion of this gathering, President Obama revealed how "heartbroken" he was about goings-on in a Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, its President, whom Obama does not "see… serving his own people".
I said the audience was drawn from Sub-Saharan Africa.
The question is why Obama would choose to focus on Zimbabwe and President Mugabe.
The temptation is to link this focus to the fact that less than 48 hours before, President Mugabe had attacked Europe and America, precipitating a walk-out by concerned ambassadors.
That then would make the focus on Zimbabwe a mere knee-jerk, an off-cuff reaction to a slur.
I doubt that very much.
Whether or not the President had urged America and Europe to drown into a cistern or some such unseemly place, or even to spend an hour in the Pope’s bedroom for sorely needed penitence, Obama would still have focused on Zimbabwe and its President.
In fact this focus started well before his presidency, with all hopes that Obama would be different, ringing wishful and forlorn.
I even reminded you reader that Obama was a black man going into White House, not the other way round, adding only those with white hearts were eligible for such grand entries.
Obama had long arranged his ducks for an obligatory assault on Zimbabwe, an assault which only surprises those who are not familiar with dimensions of anti-Zimbabwe activities which the American mission here has intensified lately.
But that is a subject for another day.
Which Zimbabwe
What for me was unprecedented was the shallow nature of the assault.
I thought Obama would pull a clever one that would have got us thinking.
No, he didn’t.
He was banal, and terribly mistaken to the point of self-embarrassment.
Which developments in Zimbabwe are breaking his heart? Which Mugabe is he describing?
Which Zimbabwe is he talking about?
The same Zimbabwe which his Secretary of State says "bars" Congressman Donald Payne by welcoming him into the country?
The same Zimbabwe whose ambassador "is still a student"?
The same Zimbabwe that is now Africa’s most literate society? The same Zimbabwe whose agricultural performance surpasses projections?
The same Zimbabwe that falls within the Kimberly Process?
The same Zimbabwe that rescues an American contingent in Mogadishu from being dragged and roasted in hostile streets?
That protects its embassy here from a scheduled attack by Al Qaeda?
Which Zimbabwe?
Heart too hard
Viewed that way, you begin to realise that while Ambassador Charles Ray is still a student, someone else is much worse: miles and miles away from the classroom, well into the winter-ploughed field, his empty head sagging, big mouth spouting gibberish.
In so short a time, big America has embarrassed itself with revealing goofs, goofs that uphold its abiding image as the most ignorant yet most powerful nation on this earth.
The Zimbabwe America is organising against is not a country.
It is an idea, much the same way al-Qaeda is.
It is another idea governors of America need for catharsis, the same way they needed the concept of al-Qaeda and bin Laden following a spectacular security lapse.
America exploited our chrome here throughout the Rhodesian days.
They dis-obligated themselves from UN sanctions against racist Rhodesia, all in the name of their national security concerns.
Today we have mounds and mounds of dead earth left in the wake of this exploitation by the Americans.
Yet no Zimbabwean expresses heart-break.
Or accuses America of not serving our people.
Do the mounds of this dead earth have to float
in Florida for Obama to realise even little Zimbabwe has rights, fauna and flora, to protect against marauding behemoths like BP?
Who cleans the cyanide left here by Union Carbide?
And broken lives abandoned to our creaking social security scheme?
And does a bully have a heart that can be broken?
Why slap sanctions on a people already "served un-well" by Mugabe, if you have a heart that can be moved by compassion, a heart moved vigorously enough to be broken?
Obama who?
But all this is to lose the larger context.
I listened to Obama addressing veterans of America’s wars, most of the wars fought overseas with no just cause.
Here was a black president waxing lyrical about these wars which his own colour peers – people like Muhammed Ali – denounced and refused to participate in.
No, for him these wars created heroes in the line of national service.
And these heroes had to be rewarded and compensated for killing lesser beings.
That is what an American President must say, not what a black man in American Presidency should say.
You look in vain for differences between Obama and Bush, between the Democrats and the Republicans.
In Obama, imperial America misappropriated my colour and redeployed it… against me.
In Obama, America has a golden chance to enforce its hegemonic policy on Sub-Saharan Africa without facing the charge of racist imperialism, of second colonialism.
That includes heightening tensions in the Horn of Africa in the name of al-Shabaab, in order to push the AU into accepting the idea of direct American deployment and base on the continent by way Africom.
African-African against Africa
Zimbabwe is especially vulnerable at this point in American imperialism.
Any American conflict with Zimbabwe will have taken place under an African-African American President, guided by an African-African American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, started by a President represented here by an African-African American Ambassador.
Yet the real problem is not Obama, Carson or Ray.
It is that about us which "poses a continuing extraordinary threat to American foreign policy", that which provoked Zidera in the first place, well before Obama was a White House prospect.
It is that which requires that America recruits a black for the furtherance of her interests as a construction of white power.
On this mater, Obama is not a boy playing in winter-ploughed field, playing a children’s game.
He is a professor well schooled and guided; a warrior of other people’s wars ready to draw yet more blood for America Plc.
Zanu-PF’s flaws
I promised I was going to throw the spotlight on Zanu-PF this week.
Much space has already been taken up in dealing with rogue America.
I will make a point or two about Zanu-PF in the era of inclusivity.
Zanu-PF has been in power since 1980.
It has had long enough time to understand this society from pebble to mountain. Yet it does not.
Three points suffice.
The diamond flaw
How is it that we did not know we had diamonds in Marange?
These were discovered in the 1950s, held since then by one De Beers; exploited surreptitiously after then by the same.
Why did we not know, we gods of this land?
What is worse, even after we knew it, we never quite grasped the extent of the wealth in our possession, until some Jew told us we controlled between 25 to 35 percent of the world supply.
It is a claim we are still to test and authenticate, we the gods.
Our ignorance has far-reaching consequences.
Globally, State power and diplomacy - its expression - is founded on a nation’s worth flowing directly from its strategic asset.
We did not know our asset and thus did not know our worth, which is why we have been a paper-ball in the playground.
Any feet kick it.
Blind literates
Two; from 1980 we taught children, built schools for them until they saw the light.
Today we a nation of enlightenment and we bring greater light to the rest of the world, Obamas included.
We have conquered knowledge, mastered all difficult arts, including the art of harnessing thunder and lightning, admittedly and regrettably for petty deployments such as evening out on unsettled small debts in the village.
We are one people where small debts are not resolved by small claims courts - but by Amandiora, the god of lightning and thunder.
We deploy a super gun to quash a gnat and confront bullies with blunt needles.
We endured colonialism for so long, but with the secret of lightning, somewhere in Manicaland.
Yet it takes a report from a UN agency to tell us that ah, your nation is literate, most literate on the continent.
But we the most reviled, with even the dark clay ports daring to laugh at our ebony-dark bottoms.
Who educated those children for that spectacular literacy level?
Who inventoried our success and achievements? Who proclaims them?
Not us! We are Zanu-PF please!
Unclaimed halcyon
Three; we have been punched silly as a ruling party that destroyed a once buoyant economy, condemned it to a total meltdown.
And the years of glory, succeeded by years of infamy are given: 1980 to 1999; 2000 to 2008 respectively.
Demurely, we take all in, mouths sealed, we of Zanu-PF.
Two points: who governed Zimbabwe during her so-called halcyon days? Whose credit is it?
Secondly: what was happening between 2000 and 2008?
What bearing do all these occurrences have on what is happening today in 2010, well under two years of this so-called inclusive Government, happening in spite of spiteful sanctions?
Floating on a giant wave
We wake up to be told by an MDC secretary-general, now Finance Minister, that the economy will register upward of 7 percent growth.
No, it will slide into the negative zone.
No, no, no, it will register a modest 3,5 percent growth.
Ah, no, no, no, no, it is now 5 percent-plus growth.
And like nhuba on a giant wave, we rise and fall along, seemingly with no mind of our own.
We the gods in the chair for the past 30 years, can’t we count?
Zip sagging
The secretary-general elaborates.
Agriculture has surpassed all projections, led by tobacco and grain cereals.
FAO corroborates.
Again we discover that we have given rise to recovery without knowing it.
Mining.
We are again told mining has done exceedingly well. Sky-high, we jump again, we who are accused of killing mining through indigenisation.
So whence comes this growth?
The upshot?
Zanu-PF is the universal fall guy, its spectacular achievements, the orphan claimable by any father.
We allowed them to tell us that for that decade of infamy, there was no investment in the country.
Zimbabwe came to a standstill before starting to peddle backwards.
Yet in the countryside, on the heels of our land reforms, huge investments were taking place, quietly.
We made the love, but cannot recognise the resultant pregnancy and birth.
We the father asks: whose child is this?
Need we wonder when MDC-T yells "mine, mine", zip sagging? When MDC-T is tired of pilfering the outcome of our hard-made investments, it then invokes the myth of "surprising performance", as if economies are some kind of deus ex machina, gods from machines.
Budiriro yeZanu-PF haina rupfawo.
In Zimbabwe success has no brand, which is why record-less parties and politicians walk stout, all on greatness thrust upon them, thanks to Zanu-PF’s reticence.
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