Is Mugabe right about the British?

Now I realize that it is not in good taste to abuse one's host but sometimes it is unavoidable. If one's host suggested that  one could no longer have an independent opinion about certain issues after downing the host's sumptuous dessert, one might be in order to protest vehemently.

Many of my readers live in Britain where they are, in a technical sense, guests of the British government and the British people at large. Previously, I have suggested that the tragedy of Zimbabwe can be laid squarely on the feet of successive British governments spanning more than a century. I know that some of you will start wondering if I am suggesting that Africans have no minds of their own; that everything begins and ends in London. Nothing could be farther from my mind.

Surely, you might ask, the British did not order ZANU-PF leader Robert Mugabe to massacre twenty thousand of his own people in the western provinces? Surely the Brits did not instigate the recent  murderous assault on the political opposition which claimed thousands of lives and livelihoods?

My point is simply that Mugabe was a good student of British history who learned the crucial lesson that his predecessor Ian Douglas Smith also had learned equally well: the cynicism and contempt of the British governing class about most things African. Notice I do not make a distinction between the left and the right in making this point as both Labor and the Conservatives have shared in this approach.

To be fair to the Brits, their cynical approach to all things African is something they have in common with much of the western world. It explains why Bill Clinton thought intervening in Rwanda was not worth the effort while Bosnia was good policy. It explains why Harold Wilson did nothing to stop Ian Smith's naked rebellion in southern Rhodesia and Margaret Thatcher's invasion of the Falklands.

Wilson's cynical approach to the Rhodesian case resulted in the deaths of at least fifty thousand Africans in Zimbabwe's war of independence. It also resulted in the radicalization of the nationalist movement in Zimbabwe and subsequently, to  the rise of one Robert Mugabe, who has haunted the good people of our fair plateau for more than a generation.

By extension or extrapolation, one can blame the British government for much of what has transpired in Zimbabwe in more recent times.

In a very real sense, when Mugabe says to blame the British, he may be right, after all.

Next week, I will review a book which makes a far more convincing case of British diplomatic cynicism with respect to southern African affairs going back to the nineteenth century.