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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Whilst undertaking a major reorganization of my house and all the junk accumulated over many years, I have been constantly rediscovering little treasures at the bottom of boxes or at the back of seldom visited closets which have not seen the light of day for many years.
One of the most interesting items to emerge today was a pristine £1 note issued by the Bank of Biafra: a poignant reminder of a truly savage war which raged between the Nigerian Federal Government and Ibo Separatists from 1967 until 1970. I acquired the banknote during a trip I took to Nigeria in the late 1970’s with my grandfather. A business associate of my grandfather was a former Biafran soldier and gave it to me after we had a very interesting chat when we visited his home in Port Harcourt.
click for bigger image The daily images of starving children with beri-beri during the dying days of the Biafran Republic was one of the first things I saw on television as a child which I recall having made a real impact on me. That was also what started both my fascination with Africa and my abiding cynicism towards it. I find objects like this bank note a fascinating bit of not-so-far-off history that one can hold in one’s hand and finding such things is one of the reasons I have always so enjoyed travelling.
Do you remember Liberia? There was a big fuss about it awhile back. Yeah, that one, the place in West Africa. The one with the bridge surface scattered with enough brass to build a Napoleonic cannon. The one with the guys who couldn’t hit a barn door at point blank range with a full AK47 clip.
It seems the post-Taylor era is working out as well as could have been expected. The violence has subsided, bands of marauding ‘rebels’ are disarming, loads of aid is flowing in and the new government is in place. Unknown to most of us, due to lack of media interest, US President Bush found time to keep on top of the affair and meet with Liberians.
Colin Powell says the former ‘President’ of Liberia will eventually pay for his crimes.
You can catch up on it here. You have not been hearing much because without doom and gloom, where is the story?
If you believed the media you would think there were no place in the world without a dead body or two casually laying about.
As the economy of Zimbabwe continues its steady collapse into a Mad Max like wasteland under the thuggish tyranny of Robert Mugabe, perhaps we are seeing the first signs of resistance.
The rebellion by 6,000 black workers is the first in nearly four years of state-sponsored terror on the country’s white-owned farms. Kondozi’s 1,500 profitable acres provide huge quantities of runner beans, mange tout and red peppers for stores including Safeway, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
But the minister for agriculture, Joseph Made, wants the business for himself. A few weeks ago, he arrived at the farm with colleagues and ordered out the workers and the white owners. A fortnight later, scores of ruling Zanu-PF party loyalists were sent in but around 200 women workers fought back with broken tiles, stones and broken bricks. Shots were fired, apparently by pro-government thugs, but they were forced to flee. Mr Made was not available for comment.
As I have suggested before regarding the Logistics of Tyranny, if the ‘aid lobby’ was actually serious about the welfare of people in the Third World generally, and places like Zimbabwe in particular, they would do better to call for ending 90% of all aid payments to the kleptocratic governments that rule them and in place of the remaining 10%, send an equal value of weapons and ammunition to people who actually oppose the regimes keeping Africa from sharing the vast economic improvements elsewhere in the Third World.
One would think that because the vast majority of Mugabe’s victims are not white land owners but are in fact the common black people of that woeful nation, this might move even the chattering classes in Islington, Berkeley and Grenwich Village to feel a spot of indigestion over their morning bowl of Muesli and hense to demand ‘something be done’, but I guess that only applies when the designated ‘bad guys’ are Jews (or Donald Rumsfeld), not black African socialists.
The only message people like Joseph Made understand weighs 55 grains and moves at about 3,100 feet per second. I do not lightly wish for bloodshed anywhere, but the occasional grimaces of the Guardian reading classes have not stopped the long nightmare of the people of Zimbabwe.
Arm the workers of Kondozi!
A couple truck loads of ammo and one for
these each of the workers of Kondozi and you
will have a real rebellion
I learned long ago not to hang my rhetorical hat on anything as unreliable and insubstantial as a scientific report, especially when they are described as ‘surveys’. It always conjures up visions of earnest researchers scurrying about with clipboards asking random people multiple-choice questions about household detergents.
However, that said, it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this does, in fact, have some substance to it:
Millions of Africans believed to have HIV/Aids are free of the disease, according to research published yesterday.
The survey will dismay those who claim the West is ignoring a pandemic so acute it could wipe out the populations of entire African states.
I know exactly who those ‘dismayed’ people are. They are the lobbyists, charity scammers, tranzi office-holders, preachy celebrities and other assorted NGO-fodder who have turned AIDS into an international fund-raising and foreign junkett circus. Joining them will be a host of African kleptocrats who know only too well that ‘AIDS’ is the magic word with which to open the purse-strings of Western treasuries.
Africa still has that ‘dark continent’ quality about it that makes it impenetrably mysterious to gringos in the West. So when we are told by talking heads with august-sounding titles that squinty million zillion trillion people are dying of AIDS in Africa every four minutes, very few of us (if any) have sufficient knowledge of the situation on the ground to raise so much as a batsqueak of doubt. By the same token, it would all look the same if the figure-compilers lumped in deaths from all manner of other maladies and diseases in order to inflate the victim-toll.
I remember so clearly when AIDS became a big public health issue in Britain in the mid-80’s. From out of nowhere came legions of ‘experts’ to assure us that it really was the new ‘Black Death’ and it was poised to wipe out the civilised world. Resistance was futile. Most of us would be dead before breakfast.
It never happened in the West and maybe it is never going to happen in Africa either.
I completely missed this posting at Freedom and Whisky on Boxing Day, until F&W supremo David Farrer rang me on another matter of mutual concern, and he mentioned it. I forget why, but I’m glad he did. (He also gave me some very helpful tips in how to use my Canon A70 camera. He now has a Canon A80, which is the same only rather more so.)
To tickle your fancies, and to ensure that a decent number of you do investigate, try this:
It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas on how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people’s affairs, telling them to do this and to do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.
Who do you reckon says that? Clue: look at the categories for this posting.
As an F&W commenter points out, we spend half our lives telling, if not everybody, then at least a great many people how they should be behaving better, so maybe we’re as bad … But, if we don’t, who will interfere with the interferers, meddle with the meddlers, nanny the nannies? Anyway, go there, and enjoy.
Robert Mugabe, that noted expert on the alleviation of Third World poverty, has been holding forth at a UN meeting in Geneva about the Internet. He may have left the Commonwealth, but he hasn’t lost any of his certainty of his own rightness and wonderfulness.
Here is my favourite bit of this BBC report:
He said there was no point in providing poor people with computers unless they were also given electricity and a phone network to run them.
Good point. And come to that, what’s the point in people having computers if they are starving to death or being beaten up or killed by government thugs?
I also liked Mark Doyle’s nicely ironic final paragraph, inviting comparisons between the monster Mugabe and all the other tyrants down the years who have also been rather bad people …
Opposition leaders in Zimbabwe may condemn Mr Mugabe for acting oppressively at home; but here in Geneva, many delegates – whether they agreed with him or not – were impressed by a lively speech.
… but who have likewise softened their various blows by making lively speeches which impressed everyone, whether they agreed with them or not.
It scarcely counts as news:
Herbert Ndlovu, 43, who retired from the Zimbabwean National Army in August after 23 years service, said he had been ordered to put a cross against Mugabe’s names on ballot papers that should have been sent to soldiers.
Instead, the papers were resealed in envelopes and driven to Harare where they were used to support claims that Mugabe won the controversial presidential poll in March last year.
There were numerous secondhand accounts of vote rigging and gerrymandering, but the statement in Johannesburg by Ndlovu, who was tortured by the regime and has fled Zimbabwe fearing for his life, is the first personal account.
Accusations of electoral fraud were so convincing that the Commonwealth expelled Zimbabwe, and the United States and the European Union imposed travel and financial sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies.
Mr Ndlovu, said: “I filled in hundreds of ballot papers, maybe thousands. There were six of us working from early in the morning.”
The real shock would have been if this kind of thing had turned out not to have been happening. If Mr Ndlovu has said: “I know everyone assumes there was cheating, but there wasn’t. I know. I was directly involved. Everything was done correctly, with no shady business.” If he’d said that, and been believed, that would have been a story. But “yes there was cheating”?
Put it this way. I don’t know where this story was in the paper version of the Telegraph, but not on page one would be my guess.
Time for me to take a break from all this lofty philosophising about the state of the world and indulge in a little bit of schoolboy humour, made possible by this BBC report on the death of the former Zimbabwean President, Canaan Banana:
A former Methodist minister, professor of theology and diplomat, he was 67 years old. He leaves four adult children and a wife with whom he separated in 2000.
The Bananas Split!
In Zimbabwe, things are just getting worse and worse:
An estimated three million Zimbabweans are seeking sanctuary in neighbouring South Africa, while 400,000 have gone to Mozambique. Anything from 10 to 20 per cent of the Zimbabwean population have left their homes to seek job security and wages in neighbouring lands.
Trains, buses and lorries have been used by the South African authorities to deport 498,321 since the crisis began in 2000, according to official figures, although it is believed that only one in six illegal immigrants is caught.
Even desperately poor Mozambique is now attracting Zimbabweans. Thousands have streamed over the mountainous eastern border into Manica province, hoping to be paid in any currency other than the Zimbabwean dollar.
Ironically, many black Zimbabweans are leaving for Mozambique to work on farms being run by the same white farmers kicked off their land by Mr Mugabe.
Zimbabwe may hate the white farmer, but scores have been welcomed into Mozambique by the authorities keen to lure agricultural specialists, especially in the tobacco sector.
Botswana, too, has also been inundated. A rare African economic success story, it is now under threat from hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. It is dramatic proof of the regional chaos caused by Mr Mugabe’s chaotic rule.
So is anything being done about this horror story? According to Zimbabwe “Information” Minister Jonathan Moyo, something is being done:
“Britain, America, Australia … and New Zealand are truly and seriously committed to regime change, they seek a regime change in Zimbabwe,” he said.
“They are pursuing it through acts of economic sabotage and they use weapons of mass deception, (under the cover of) instruments of democracy, human rights rule of law, good governance, to sound reasonable,” Moyo said.
“They steal our foreign currency earnings, they attack even our own currency to the point of saying it’s scarce, to blame the government, to seek regime change, and they drive the parallel market,” he told top government, economic and civic officials seeking solutions to the economic malaise.
We can hope, I suppose. But you get the feeling that although lots of people know what’s going on out there, nobody important in the world has this horror story near enough to the top of their to-do list for anything to be done about it at all soon. Only when, having destroyed Zimbabwe itself, the Mugabe regime destroys itself, as it presumably will when there’s nothing else left to destroy, will this horrible chapter in human affairs draw to a close.
The final paragraph of this second story, originally from Agence France-Presse, is a classic of Gallic gallows humour:
The two day conference convened by government and business heard yesterday that Zimbabwe’s economy was being undermined by contradictory and ineffectual government policies, corruption, greed and the country’s negative image abroad.
Yes how true. Government policy isn’t being imposed nearly firmly enough. If government officials were murdering people selflessly and ungreedily, instead of how they’re doing it now, and if Zimbabwe could shed its negative image abroad, all would be well.
For some people, Africa is the conscience of the world. For others, its a land of milk and honey:
Kenyan women with mixed-race children claim activists encouraged them to lie about British soldiers, reports Adrian Blomfield in Nanyuki
Human rights activists have encouraged Kenyan prostitutes to submit fake rape claims against British soldiers, according to allegations made to The Telegraph. They were allegedly promised a share in any compensation payments.
At least three witnesses claim that representatives of Impact, a Kenyan organisation working with a British lawyer to prepare the lawsuit against the Ministry of Defence, have approached impoverished prostitutes in the town of Nanyuki, in central Kenya, with a tantalising proposal.
Angela Muguri, 24, claims three Impact activists sought her out and promised to make her a millionaire. All she had to do was pretend that British soldiers raped her – and then give them a cut of any forthcoming compensation.
Those ‘human rights activists’ are just concerned, caring people who are fighting for social justice and a better world.
According to the Independent, Robert Mugabe is being bought out of office by President Bush.
Robert Mugabe will relinquish his leadership of Zimbabwe’s ruling party by December, paving the way for his exit as President and new elections by June 2004, the South African President Thabo Mbeki has told George Bush.
The Independent has established that Mr Bush has pledged a reconstruction package for Zimbabwe worth up to $10bn (£6.2bn) over an unspecified timeframe, if a new leader takes over.
Unwrapping the delicate wordage of the Independent story, Mbeki told Mugabe to go, and now he’s going (which obviously has something to do with this). But why? What’s in it for Mbeki?
Privately Mr Bush is said to have exerted pressure on the South African President by indicating that South African companies would benefit from the aid package for Zimbabwe, since many of them would be well placed to bid for contracts. South African firms are owed huge amounts of money by Zimbabwe, mainly for fuel and electricity supplies.
Ah.
Oh well. Better than nothing being done at all. I think. I hope.
Just when you think that the world could not possibly get more insane:
President Robert Mugabe’s regime pulled off an extraordinary diplomatic coup yesterday when it was given a senior position within the African Union, the grouping set up to promote good governance in Africa.
What are the odds on Mugabe being appointed as the next UN Commissioner on Human Rights?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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