There is one subject almost guaranteed not to be discussed at the National General Council meeting of the African National Congress in Durban City Hall, which begins today - the dictatorship of the "predator elite" in Zimbabwe, at South Africa's northern border.Silence, dissimulation, collusion. Collaboration.
This is the outcome of the so-called liberation struggle, of the so-called struggle for freedom, of the so-called national democratic revolution in southern Africa, after all those clouds of rhetoric over the past 50 years.
A sham, a fraud, a disgrace, a threat, and a standing accusation against every single member of the ANC.
How dare members of the sole governing party of South Africa of the last 16 years not discuss the shame and tyranny of the Mugabe regime to their north, which has cast out one quarter of the country’s population, the overwhelming majority to South Africa…without sharing in its shame.
How dare COSATU talk, and talk, of solidarity, of the working class, and socialism, when beyond the country’s northern border a regime of slavery and mass murder worse than Sharpeville has been instituted in the predators’ diamond fields at Chiadzwa, in the district of Marange.
What was the point of “African independence”, when license has been given to the army of a foreign power, China, to plunder Africa’s mineral resources at Chiadzwa, in guilty partnership with Zimbabwe’s genocidal elite, the champions of the Gukurahundi massacre of the amaNdebele a quarter of a century ago.
No “Smith regime”, no “apartheid regime” would have dared to murder on this scale, or police its labour relations with the helicopter gunship, as at Chiadzwa.
Last Saturday, while the dictator – brought up and educated as a Catholic – was further liberating the masses in his presidential grandeur, and while Pope Benedict XVI celebrated the mass of the most precious blood of Christ in Westminster Cathedral in London, the London Daily Mail carried a long, detailed and firsthand report on “Mugabe’s darkest secret: An 800bn blood diamond mine he’s running with China’s Red Army”.
I must ask readers, and especially readers who are members of the ANC, to read this for themselves, here, and then to make up their own minds. They have an account to settle with their conscience.
I must ask these readers, also, please, to take time next to read another long and detailed report, published a year ago, on the same subject, in the same newspaper, “The return of the bloody diamonds: Miners at gunpoint in Zimbabwe”, here.
I must ask these readers then, is there any chance they could acquire such knowledge for themselves, as responsible adults, if they themselves were Zimbabweans living in Zimbabwe?
And will they be able to acquire such knowledge in South Africa too, if the ANC government’s media control proposals come into force, in emulation of the reign of ZANU-PF to the north?
Betrayed by their own government, and by their neighbour states, Zimbabweans inside and outside Zimbabwe can only hope and pray such thoughts will rankle in the minds of members of the ANC, while its National General Council meets this week.
But it is doubtful.
As TS Eliot wrote, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
Post published in: News
Animal Farm repeated all over again comrade. Was George Orwell not such an amazing genius!? All the promises of the early 1980’s. Mugabe was my hero once but now I have no one to look up to. Everywhere you turn there is utter rot.