Namibia joins anti-white crusade (MUGABE'S "LEGACY")

NAMIBIA’S President Sam Nujoma, who stunned delegates to the Earth Summit in Johannesburg last week with his unbridled attack on Tony Blair and all-out support for Robert Mugabe, seems bent on repeating the Zimbabwean leader’s anti-white and anti-farmer crusade in his own country.

In the past fortnight Nujoma, 73, has sacked Hage Geingob, a relative moderate who has been prime minister since independence and — having previously altered the constitution to allow himself a third term —is encouraging activists of his ruling South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo) to nominate him for a fourth term.

Nujoma has ordered the expropriation of 192 farms belonging to non-resident foreigners, but his furious anti-white rhetoric suggests this is just a first step. He has dismissed plans for land reform from Namibia’s 4,000 commercial farmers, who have offered to sell hundreds of farms, and refuses to rule out Zimbabwe-style land invasions. The 80,000 whites in a country of 1.8m are bracing themselves for a convulsion of “radicalisation”.

Nujoma has always been in awe of the far-better-educated Mugabe — for the Namibian leader, a former shepherd, office cleaner and tea boy, is one of the least educated men ever to head a state.

What he lacked in learning, he has made up for in determination: he founded the Ovamboland People’s Organisation in 1959 and became its president, a post he continued to hold when it changed its name to Swapo. He has held power in his party for 43 years.

Swapo’s struggle for independence from South Africa was conducted by ceaseless diplomacy at the United Nations and by a guerrilla war waged from bases inside Angola.

By the time Nujoma became president in 1990, however, it had become clear that he also had a great deal of blood on his hands. Some 2,000 Swapo activists who dared to ask for more democracy within the party were denounced as spies and traitors and flung into dungeons in Lubango, Angola.

Many were tortured, some until they died, and in the last few months before independence 1,000 were taken from the cells and disappeared for ever. On more than one occasion the future president toured the torture chambers.

“I remember him coming to visit us,” said Pauline Dempers, one of the Lubango detainees. “He said he didn’t know whether to call us comrades because we had become agents of the Boers. This was ridiculous and we told him so.

“I had been buried alive as a punishment. I was lucky to have been dug out before I suffocated — others weren’t so lucky. I had to listen while friends of mine were shot. In the end you had to confess to being an agent just to live.”

A presidential palace is now being built for Nujoma by North Koreans on a piece of land just outside Windhoek, the capital. The North Koreans have also just completed the building of Heroes’ Acre, a huge monument to Swapo guerrillas who fell in the struggle — and a replica of one they built for Nujoma’s hero, Mugabe.

Nujoma imitates Mugabe as faithfully as possible — and notably shares his homophobia. “In Namibia we don’t allow lesbianism or homosexuality. They must keep it in Europe”, he has declared.

He claims that Aids was invented by the CIA as part of its biological weapons programme, and many gays went into hiding last year when he urged that they should all be “arrested, imprisoned and deported”. The Namibian Society for Human Rights has noted a fivefold increase between 1999 and 2001 of “infractions upon civil and political rights”, including “virulent attacks on human rights defenders, the judiciary, the church, whites, Europeans, foreigners, women and sexual minorities as well as the banning of certain media”.

The crisis in Zimbabwe has created a dramatic new situation for Nujoma, who shares Mugabe’s belief that western criticism is part of a concerted imperialist assault on the national liberation movements of southern Africa: if Mugabe falls, goes the argument, then Nujoma and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa will be next.

Accordingly, the Namibian leader has indicated that he wants to radicalise his “revolution” so that it can never be reversed.

He intends to turn up the heat against white farmers and to clamp down on other perceived enemies.

Returning from the Earth Summit — where he accused the British of enslaving, colonising and robbing his country — Nujoma astonished even his own ministers by announcing that he had told western nations at the summit that he no longer wanted foreign aid, even though drought has left his country facing a huge shortage of food.

Most whites believe that Nujoma has no more respect for constitutional law than Mugabe does and fear that his latest moves are the prologue to a Zimbabwe-style frenzy of anti-white land invasions. Such a policy seems entirely unnecessary: Namibia is one of the emptiest and most beautiful countries on the planet with many natural resources.

“Sam’s never been very bright but now he’s lost the plot completely,” said one farmer who did not wish to be named.

“Everyone who can is getting their money out and investment has dried up. Blair shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened in Johannesburg. The penalty for not standing up to a Mugabe is that you end up having two of them.”

It is also in the process of destroying itself completely.
Not without a little help/support from their friends in the "progressive" community.
WARNING! The following is not for the weak of stomach.

Report from Zimbabwe:

Western Lies And The Struggle To Return Indigenous Land To Its Rightful Owners!

By Ron Wilkins
TBWT Guest Contributor
Article Dated 9/4/2002

I recently returned to L.A. from Zimbabwe as part of an official fact-finding team. As our mission neared an end, Elombe Brath, chairman of Patrice Lumumba Coalition and the leader of our 14 member delegation said to a newspaper reporter "our conclusion is that the land reform program is justifiable and long overdue". Elombe further echoed the sentiment of our team when he stated that "although we knew that the Western media was subjective in its interpretation of events in Zimbabwe, we were shocked by the level of bias and unprofessionalism in stories about this country".

I want it known that my very positive impressions of Zimbabwe, its people and the veracity of statements made by its leaders, have been expressed in nearly identical terms by the independent pan-African magazine, New African. I strongly encourage Africans in the U.S. to read New African magazine, for it has consistently provided comprehensive coverage on Zimbabwe and the African continent as a whole. New African's exclusive 16 page interview with President Mugabe in its May issue is required reading for anyone seriously interested in understanding the challenges facing Zimbabwe.

Our team included journalists, activists, lawyers and educators. We were Africans from Canada, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Uganda and the United States. Among our group of 4 women and 10 men was Adelaide Sanford, Vice Chancellor-New York State Board of Regents; Dr. Tony Martin, Black Studies Department-Wellesley College-Mass - author of "Race First - The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA" ; Dr. Georgina Falu, San Juan, Puerto Rico - translator of key contemporary African historical works from English to Spanish and Betty Dopson, Queens, New York - Co-Chair Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People (CEMOTEP), which is a leading organization which challenges erroneous reporting on Black leadership.

Our mission was to assess the land reform program, brief our respective constituencies and encourage them/us (Africans in the diaspora) to weigh in on what needs to be a public debate on U.S. government policy toward Zimbabwe. Presently, Western governments led by Britain and the United States, and mainstream print and elecronic media, are unanimous in their condemnations of Zimbabwe's land reform program. The U.S. State Department has labelled Zimbabwe's land redistribution initiatives as "reckless". CNN, BBC and a host of mainstream tabloids have portrayed Zimbabwe's white farmers as victims and its president Robert Mugabe as the villain. "A farmer as she packed to go", said "I can't cry anymore. I just don't have any tears left", wrote Time Magazine on August 19. Conspicuously absent from media images of distraught and teary-eyed white farmers, are the faces of destitute African peasants whose lands were expropriated during colonial rule, or optimistic new farmers who have achieved success.

The carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign to undermine and ultimately take down Zimbabwe's progressive government, is standard fare for U.S. rulers, who have never supported a single liberation movement on the African continent. Late last year, the U.S. government adopted the Zimbabwe Democracy Act, which has imposed stiff sanctions on Zimbabwe. With the noteworthy exception of the courageous former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, every member of the Congressional Black Caucus supported Bush's signing of the bill. Our delegation found itself, on a number of occasions, in the awkward and embarrassing position of being asked to explain the anti-Africa voting patterns of Black politicians. Our African brothers and sisters point to Jewish and Irish lobby groups, which act as links between their homelands and the U.S. political establishment, and wonder why so many of us are conspicuously silent on issues affecting the motherland.

Since independence Zimbabwe's government has constructed hundreds of needed hospitals, nearly doubled the number of primary schools to 4,500, increased secondary schools from 177 to 1,548, teacher training colleges from 4 to 15, universities from 1 to 8 (Zimbabwe now has the highest literacy rate in Africa at 85%), piped water schemes from 26 to 520 and dams from 121 to 2,438. Actually, a considerable amount of information which places Zimbabwe in a much more favorable light, is not being disseminated by Western news sources.

Following our discussions with a wide range of Zimbabweans, which included landless peasants, white and black farmers, government officials, media representatives, war veterans and President Mugabe himself, we determined that;

1) the primary two reasons for Western hostility, unfair reporting and sanctions against Zimbabwe are President Mugabe's determination to return land to Indigenous African peasants, who are its rightful owners; and Zimbabwe's intervention in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), at the request of its legitimate government, to repel Western-sponsored aggressors. Zimbabwe's timely dispatching of troops to the DRC, whose numbers rose to 12,000 during the peak of the conflict, helped to prevent the recolonization of the richest country in Africa.

2) land reform has been ongoing for the past four years and 360,000 families, which include the opposition, have received land. Many white farms are unusually large and range between 3000 and 20,000 hectares, while an average family-owned farm in the U.S. is between 200 and 250 hectares. Three members of Britain's House of Lords own land in Zimbabwe. Some white farms are not even listed in Zimbabwe's national records and the Opppenheimer Ranch is 300,000 hectares. However, the vast majority of black peasants must eke out an existence in "rural areas" on land that is rocky, poor and arid. Seventy-five percent of Zimbabwe's food is produced by black farmers, including sixty percent of its maize or corn, which is the country's staple crop.

3) the coming food shortages and "famine", which Zimbabwe's detractors have connected to the land reform program, have no relationship to each other at all. The anticipated food shortage is being produced by a regional drought that is undermining crop production in a number of countries. In truth, droughts, which are cyclical in the region and occur every ten years, are a fact of life. While death from starvation has occurred in the neighboring countries of Zambia and Malawi, no Zimbabweans have died. Despite very limited resources, Zimbabwe has gotten itself through food crises quite admirably.

4) white farmers in Zimbabwe are being permitted to keep one farm and are being compensated for all capital improvements on land reclaimed by the government. Exceptions to this rule are farms which are in excess of permissable acreage, idle or under-utilized farms and farms next to communal lands. Some farmers own as many as 7 and 8 farms. African laborers on white farms are treated poorly and receive inadequate pay. Ian Smith, who lead white resistance to the black independence struggle, pays black laborers on his farm $4,300 Zim dollars ($72 US) per month and crowds them into one room hovels which lack electricity and other necessities. During the current phase of land reform, defiant white farmers have been arrested, but there has been no violence and no farmer has been forced out.

5) some white farmers, resentful after receiving section 8 notices to surrender their farms to the government, are poisoning the soil with herbicides, poisoning livestock, destroying maize crop, blocking boreholes (wells), setting wildfires and commiting other forms of sabotage.

6) Zimbabwe's presidential elections in March, which saw President Mugabe returned to office, were declared "free and fair" by monitors from several African countries and the African Union. Since independence more than 20 political parties have operated in the country, including the MDC which is openly supported by white farmers, Britain and others opposed to the present government. Zimbabwe's election outcome stands in sharp contrast to the U.S. presidential election where thousands of black votes in Florida, which favored Bush's opponent, were thrown out.

For Zimbabwe's Indigenous population the land redistribution struggle represents the "Third Chimurenga". The first was the courageous yet unsuccessful 1890's resistance against white colonizers, and the second was the liberation struggle, won at a cost of more than 50,000 lives, which led to independence in 1980. In his book titled "British Betrayal of the Africans - Land, Cattle and Human Rights", Zimbabwean historian Aeneas Chigwedere writes, "thousands of Africans were killed, maimed and tortured in 1893, 1896-97, 1900-1904 and between 1970 and 1980; the Africans were impoverished and starved by the seizures of their cattle, goats, sheep and crops by an illegal regime; Africans were denied the necessary health facilities and continued to be decimated by the common tropical diseases; the Africans were denied education facilities and toiled as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the white man... I have a fair picture of the histories of all the former European colonies in Africa. I cannot find a single colony that was treated as mercilessly and as ruthlessly as Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)". And then there is this observation by Mr. Chigwedere," Judging from their performance in Africa, the British are undoubtedly the worst racists that have existed on the face of the earth".

Perhaps our delegation's most memorable meeting was with President Robert Mugabe. The meeting lasted nearly two hours as the president outlined the land issue and responded to our questions. Yet another meeting with Dr. Olivia Muchena, Minister of State with responsibility for monitoring the land reform program, provided us with additional insights into the land question. Dr. Muchena described how Western education contradicts traditional African values by making it clear that " when white people took the land, they disqualified themselves from being human, because they had done an inhuman act. They (the white people) took what belonged to God -- a form of sacrilege if you like".

Dr. Muchena then said, "the land is not a commodity. It cannot be bought and sold. The land is the sum total of who we are as human beings. This fundamental belief is at the core of our tenacity and the courage that you see in our president".

The government of Namibia, which firmly supports Zimbabwe, recently announced plans to expropriate 192 farms in its territory. Namibia's congress noted in a resolution"that it was concerned at the slow pace of land redistribution, which has the potential to cause civil strife". Namibia and its sprawling next door neighbor South Africa, each have land hungry populations whose patience has worn thin. Namibia's President Sam Nujoma, responding on one occasion to white claims of land ownership asked " so how much land did the white man bring to Africa?".

In an editorial appropriately captioned "The end of Rhode's dream", a European newspaper opposed to Zimbabwe's land reform program, sadly recalled how "Cecil Rhodes imperial dream to move north from the Cape into the uncharted interior of Africa, exploiting its mineral wealth and introducing settlement", had come to an end. Rhode's dream to have whites dominate and exploit Africans "from the Cape to Cairo" has been Africa's long nightmare. Africa belongs to its people, and not to others, whose home is elsewhere! Zimbabwe is on the threshold of restoring stolen land to its rightful Indigenous owners. We must have no illusions about what is at stake here. The principled, defiant and resolute stand taken by President Mugabe and the Zimbabwean nation has shaken the imperialist world at its foundations. Restoring the land to the people is what Kenya's Land Freedom Army, disparagingly referred to as the Mau Mau, sought to achieve. Retaking the land has been the cornerstone of the fight for independence in every part of the African continent, if not the world. There are many who can recall how one of our greatest revolutionaries, Malcolm X, during his speech titled "Message to the Grassroots" said "revolution is based on land... the landless against the landlord ...land is the basis of independence".

Allow me to end this article with words spoken by President Robert Mugabe, words which drew sustained applause, during his historic August 12 Heroes Day Commemoration speech at National Heroes Acre. National Heroes Acre is a shrine and the final resting place for Zimbabwe's martyrs. "We are a child that imperialism would never have wanted to see born, one it would have rather scotched and quashed in the belly than see born. We emerge from circumstances of a resolute liberation struggle and thus carry a stamp of stolid, defiant protest. We do not kowtow to erstwhile imperialist forces with avid appetites for the control and manipulation of our lives and destiny and the continued exploitation of our wealth and resources". President Mugabe went on to point out that the process of retaking Indigenous land settles "the grievance of all grievances" that Zimbabweans would "not be deterred on this one question" and that "the land is ours"!

Ron Wilkins currently teaches the history of Africans in Latin America & the Carribbean and African American history at several Los Angeles area colleges and is Deputy Chairman of the Harlem based Patrice Lumumba Coalition. Mr. Wilkins, who has travelled extensively throughout the African continent, is a veteran sixties Black power activist and was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. e-mail: politicart@excite.com (contact address-not for public distribution)

At press time, venues at which Ron Wilkins will be speaking on Zimbabwe include; KJLH Radio 102.3FM-Front Page, Thurs. September 5, 4:30AM and Eso Won Books Thurs., September 19, 7:00PM.

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