How bad are things in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe? Some blacks are pining for the days of white rule:
Binga, Zimbabwe — The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970's.
"If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we'd do it," said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. "Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job."
Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.
Let's be clear about something here. This isn't about racism. Or to be more exact, I'm not trying to endorse (and columnist Nick Kristof most certainly isn't) the bad old days when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, and had a "Whites Only" sign at the border.
On the other hand, this is about racism. Or rather, about manufactured racism. It's about dictator Mugabe whipping up white hatred in order to cover up his own brutal ineptitude, to enrich his cronies and himself, and to maintain his power. It's the southern Africa version of Nazi anti-Semitism, only without all the gas chambers. (Yet.)
White-on-black racism, however genuine, was still no better than Mugabe's black-on-white racism, no matter how manufactured -- no one would really say, "At least Ian Smith made the trains run on time." No one is really calling for a return of white rule, even if it was more economically efficient.
Now that both races have had a chance to royally screw up the country, it's time for Zimbabwe to look forward instead of to the past. It's time to get past the racism and get to building a decent country.
Getting rid of Mugabe - perhaps using the same international pressures brought against South Africa's white government - would be a good start.
NOTE: I know I've made fun of Nick Kristof in the past, but he's often a damn fine dirty-boots foreign correspondent. Read his entire column today.
Thanks for continuing to cover and pay attention to the news coming from Zimbabwe. Sadly the country only becomes news worthy on "election" years, but as each year goes more attention is drawn, and maybe just maybe Mugabe will someday be struck down.
Mugabe has in the past shown himself to be good at black-on-black chauvanism. In the early eighties he used North Korean troops to punish members of another tribe of black Africans in Zimbabwe for not supporting him. The generally accepted body count was 20,000.
Take race out of it and it's still telling. Whenever a dictator finds himself using the success of a minority (be they Chinese, Jewish, or 'white'); it is often to mask the true suffering of the majority of his countrymen.
By all rights, Zimbabwe should be richer than South Africa, Mugabe ruined it.
