zimfinalpush
The dishonoring of Africans
An excellent comment in this week's New Yorker by the venerated Philip Gourevitch about Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe's current situation. Gourevitch's strongest statement is this one:
No doubt, President Thabo Mbeki and, to a degree, his predecessor, Nelson Mandela, don't want to dishonor a fellow liberation leader. Yet they have dishonored themselves by failing to stand up to an oppressor who is as contemptuous of his people as Ian Smith was.
This point is rarely made—the fact that Mugabe is as disdainful and condescending to his people as Ian Smith, the last leader of the racist white minority government of what was then Rhodesia—but it could hardly be more true. Despite Mugabe's curious spell over his fellow African heads of state , and despite the fact that some in the West are, unbelievably, still trying to defend him , his unrelenting grip on power and his unwillingness to yield in any way, despite the fact that the walls crumbled down around him long ago, makes him awful. Period. How are the people of Zimbabwe in 2007 who are saddled with an eighty percent unemployment rate, four digit inflation rate, and the lowest life expectancy in the world, not to mention a total absence of democracy and freedom, better off now than they were under the racist Rhodesian regimes of the pre-independence period?
This is a very sad, uncomfortable reality about Zimbabwe today, particularly for African heads of state who came of age during the hopeful days of independence in Africa and for the good-hearted Westerners who supported them along the way. But it is a reality today and it is almost entirely the result of the actions of one man: Robert Mugabe.
Perhaps soon the rest of Africa and the rest of the world will wake up to this reality and do everything that it can to rescue the country that held so much promise three decades ago. Those same people who so rightfully fought for and advocated democracy and majority rule for Zimbabwe around the world back in those days should also be fighting and standing up for the people of Zimbabwe today.
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