Things fall apart, the center cannot hold

Let no man deceive you with vain words.

When Heroes are Villains

By Jani Allan

August 26, 2004

According to New Africa, a London-based magazine, Robert Mugabe was voted the third greatest African of all time, topped only by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah.

When I read the list of New Africa’s "heroes" it was hard not to laugh out loud, so I laughed out loud. It is a pity that more people aren’t doing the same. The recently published list of most admired black people in the history of the world proves that all discrimination flies out of the window when the British deal with black people. On top of the list is Kwame Nkrumah who became Ghana’s first prime minister when that country achieved its independence in 1957. Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966. He then headed for Hanoi, where he said he intended to find a solution to the Vietnam War. Ghanaians furiously tore down the statue he built for himself, charged him with extortion and corruption and sent his photograph to 60 member countries of Interpol.

The man who won independence for Ghana was not even honored with a state burial as a final tribute.

At his inauguration, Nkrumah declared "We must achieve in a decade what it took others a century." In his quest for uncontestable power, he sought the elimination of all opposition – the first step in the march to dictatorship. Within a year of Ghana’s independence, Nkrumah’s parliament had introduced the 1957 Avoidance of Discrimination Act, which banned various ethnic organizations, allegedly to promote national unity. Each treacherous step Nkrumah took towards despotism was defended in pursuit of socialism. He imposed a bewildering array of legislative controls and regulations to assure state participation in the economy (precisely as Mbeki is doing in South Africa). There were controls on imports, capital transfers, industry, the rights and powers of trade unions, prices, rents and interest rates. The plethora of controls brought in its wake two interrelated and pernicious problems; bribery and corruption.

Thus was born a practice Ghanaians called kalabule -- or profiteering. Although Nkrumah’s parents were peasant farmers, Nkrumah virtually ignored these groups. To him peasant agriculture was "poor nigger’s business." These peasant farmers and traders, without whose support Nkrumah would not have come into power, were jailed and their produce confiscated by the state.

By 1966 Ghanaians were so fed up with Nkrumah and his rhetoric and he was ousted in a military uprising. His socialist experiment was a miserable failure. When Nkrumah took control of the country its foreign exchange reserves stood at $400 million. When he was ousted in 1966, Ghana had a foreign debt of $856 million.

Now he turns up in New Africa magazine as numero uno - most important and influential black people in the world.

Second on the list is Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Since 1980 Mugabe and his Shona tribesmen have slaughtered more than 43,000 Ndebele tribesmen. In the same year, the Zimbabwe Mass Media Trust was set up to buy out the country’s five main newspapers. Nathan Shamuyarira, the minister of information, declared that the purchase was motivated with a "view to getting the right news through to the consumer."

As in Nkrumah’s Ghana, each repressive measure in Zimbabwe was dressed with in anti-colonialist or anti-racist garb.

In the July 1985 elections Mugabe could not conceal his contempt for the Zimbabwean constitution. He referred to it as "that dirty piece of paper." By 1988 criticism of Mugabe became illegal. Mugabe openly stated his determination to make Zimbabwe a one-party nation and his ZANU party a "truly" Marxist-Leninist party to ensure the charting of an irreversible social course and create a socialist ideology.

Nelson Mandela? My flabber has been well and truly ghasted.

Suffice it to say that Amnesty International never recognized him a political prisoner. As Peter Hitchens pointed out in the Spectator recently "Political faith is sacrosanct these days. And Mr. Mandela is a saint of that faith revered far beyond the boundaries of reason. Only a confirmed heretic, an outcast from the mother church of Political Correctness with nothing would criticize him. Why is it that such reverence is accorded to this flawed human being who has spent so much of his time as a fig leaf for the far-from-saintly African National Congress?"

When is the world going to acknowledge that the barbarism in Africa is, in proportion to the population far worse than the mortality rate of the Second World War. Why does the world prefer to retain an overstated deference for the sovereignty of African countries? Why does the world adopt a myopic view of the atrocities of their ruling tyrants?

In 43 African states we find military governments, "president for as long as I like" and one-party Marxist regimes. In some the constitution was suspended 35 years ago and remains so. Eighty-five percent of black adults in Africa are disenfranchised. White hegemony has been replaced by black dictatorship through military or one-party rule in which the exploitation of the average black citizen is infinitely more ruthless.

While applauding the soi-disant development in Eastern Europe and the overthrow of Communist tyrants, in Africa, the world blithely continues to support the monstrous regimes of African Stalinists. Banda, Bongo, Banana, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Amin et al, were saluted not only as statesmen in their own countries, but as world historical figures who could offer mankind a new and better way. When these incompetent, corrupt scoundrels and tyrants whom they saluted, turned out to be incompetent, corrupt scoundrels and tyrants, the liberals averted their gaze. The Politically Correct world has yet to find the moral courage to address the question of why colonial withdrawal has not resulted in black democratic self-government or prosperity.

Uninformed liberals have seldom been known to examine the underlying causes of the various self-induced holocausts that inevitably follow when an African country is ‘liberated’ from their evil, white colonial oppressors and becomes "democratic." Even if it exists in legislation, nowhere has the democratic one-man, one-vote principle, in the American sense of the concept been implemented.

When the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world pay homage to those who extol the virtues of Marxism and Communism, they are choosing to ignore the countries that lie ravaged and poisoned in its wake.

It is worse than naïve. It is sinister.

Return to Main Page