Teachers abandon Rhodesia

LAND REFORM BEGAN IN 2000
The Zimbabwe government began the process of serious land reform in 2000. At that time, when whites in general made up only 2 percent of the population, 2,000 white farmers still owned 70 percent of the best farmland.
Most of what they produced was cash crops for export. They employed African workers to do all the hard work on the farms and paid them the barest minimum needed to survive.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor people, many of them veterans of the Chimurenga War--the war for liberation--were clamoring for land.

When President Robert Mugabe's government began to implement land reform, a furious round of attacks on him issued from the powerful U.S. and British media that virtually monopolize the dissemination of world news.
They portrayed the white landowners as the bedrock of Zimbabwe's economy. Without them, the constant theme was, the country would fall apart.

Britain was balking at living up to its obligations under the Lancaster House agreement, signed in 1980. Under that pact, the British agreed to provide half the funds to compensate white farmers for lands seized, and the new Zimbabwe government agreed to wait 10 years before beginning the process of land redistribution.
So when many of the countries of southern Africa suffered a serious drought from 2001 to 2003, causing widespread crop failure, the British and U.S. corporate media in particular seized on the hunger in Zimbabwe and blamed it on the land reform.
Now, the drought has finally eased. In Zimbabwe, the production of maize and other crops has rebounded.
The government has told the World Food Program that it no longer needs assistance.
The number of white farmers has been reduced from 2,000 to 500.
Many of those bought out by the government have moved to other places, like Australia and Mozambique. The percentage of Zimbabwe's prime cropland in their hands has shrunk from 70 percent to just 3 percent.

The land that used to belong to them has been turned over to Black farmers on 99-year leases. In this way, the government has in effect nationalized some of the best cropland. This is important, because small farming is risky.
In a totally capitalist market economy like the United States, for example, most small farmers who once owned their land but had to mortgage it to the hilt have been forced out by economic forces that favor big agribusiness corporations with the capital to modernize and capture the market.

In Zimbabwe, if small farmers decide to leave their land for whatever reason, it will revert to the government, not to richer farmers or agribusinesses. This policy leaves open the possibility of developing Zimbabwe's agriculture further through a movement to collectivize or to set up state farms on some of the most productive land.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe is well positioned in other ways to move forward. Even though it has a serious and debilitating AIDS crisis, its people are among the best educated in the developing world.
According to UNESCO, at the end of the 1990s Zimbabwe spent a greater portion of its GNP on education than did the U.S.: 7.1 percent compared to 5.4 percent. It ranked 22nd in the whole world.

And its educational policy is progressive in other ways. The literacy rate among young women in 2000 was almost 96 percent, virtually the same as for young men.

Zimbabwe's leaders are still under sanctions by the U.S. and British imperialists, who cannot reconcile themselves to any independent Black state not subservient to their dictates.
But with more and more popular movements and struggles around the world now challenging imperialist domination, it is to be hoped that this important African country will have more breathing space to develop its programs--like land reform and education--aimed at improving the lives of the vast majority of the people.

That is the dream of John Chirimanyemba and the millions who live for the fulfillment of their liberation.

Deirdre Griswold [Workers World]
posted Saturday, 26 June 2004

John Taviringana Chirimanyemba is probably the oldest person in Zimbabwe.
He was born on Sept. 17, 1896, in Zvimba, and can actually remember when the British came and displaced his family from their land.
At that time the British South Africa Co. was laying claim to all of southern Africa. In the area it called Rhodesia--which today is Zimbabwe--British troops had tried, but failed, to conquer the Matabele people in 1893.
Their continued efforts to subjugate the Matabele and Mashona people led to an 1896-97 uprising that was put down after fierce fighting.

The administrator of Rhodesia, the "Right Honorable" Earl Grey, wrote a report on these events in which he listed two principal causes of what he called "native unrest":
1) The incompleteness of the conquest of the Matabele Nation in 1893.
2) The incapacity of a warlike and aristocratic race to give up their old habits, and to accept their natural place in the peaceful and industrial organization of a settled civilized community."

Colonial conquest then, as now, had to hide its racism behind the mask of bringing "civilization.

From that time on, the British waged total war on the African people. British soldiers were promised cattle and land if they drove the Africans off the fertile farmland where they had lived for generations. The soldiers went from village to village, burning the houses, killing or driving off the people and seizing their livestock.

Dr. Chika A. Onyeani, writing in The Black Commentator of Aug. 22, 2002, addressed the "crocodile tears" being shed in the West over white farmers in Zimbabwe being displaced by land reform:
It seems the height of hypocrisy that the world should be focused on the plight and non-payment of compensation to white farmers, without as much as a mention of the savagery with which the Black African owners were massacred and their lands seized without compensation.

The word Bulawayo, the second-largest city in Zimbabwe, is an Ndebele word for 'slaughter,' and it refers to the savagery of the British settlers, including the infamous Cecil Rhodes who had crushed the attempt by the indigenes to fight back, leading King Lobengula to swallow poison rather than be captured.

Or should we forget the savagery of the bestial Sir Frederick Carrington, who had publicly advocated that the entire Ndebele race should be forcefully removed or be exterminated.
In 1910 John Chirimanyemba's family lost the land they had farmed near the Manyame River. They had to flee from the British to less productive areas where the soil would not support many of the crops they were used to growing.

The family lived on the edge. Chirimanyemba eventually wound up walking to South Africa to look for work, but was then rounded up with others and sent back to Rhodesia.
Thomas Madondoro, the chief economic correspondent for ZANU-PF, the liberation movement that won Zimbabwe's independence, interviewed Chirimanyemba in November 2003, shortly after he turned 107.
Madondoro asked the centenarian what he thought about the land reform going on in Zimbabwe today, where the government has been taking over the land held by descendants of the British soldiers/settlers and distributing it to poor Black farmers.

"Now that land is being given back to its rightful owners, new farmers should work hard and produce enough food for the country. The government should address the unfair distribution of land and empower the landless peasant farmers," he said.

Chirimanyemba spends much of his time these days educating the youth on their ancestors' long struggle against colonialism.

It certainly says nothing about the high IQ of above member but a lot of her low morality and lack of any feelings when calling humans "living creatures".

That just might be the prize for dumbest statement of the day.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

It certainly says nothing about the high IQ of above member but a lot of her low morality and lack of any feelings when calling humans "living creatures".

That just might be the prize for dumbest statement of the day. What are humans supposed to be if not living creatures?

It certainly says nothing about the high IQ of above member but a lot of her low morality and lack of any feelings when calling humans "living creatures".

Gandhi ... viewed black people as lazy savages who were barely human.

Forced to share a cell with black people, he wrote: "Many of the native prisoners are only one degree removed from the animal and often created rows and fought among themselves."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1064687,00.html

This is what he (Schweitzer) said shortly before his death:
I have given my life to alleviate the sufferings of Africa. There is something that all white men who have lived here, must learn and know; that these individuals are a sub-race; they have neither the intellectual , mental or emotional abilities to equate or share in any of the functions of our civilization.
"I have given my life to try to bring unto them the advantages which our civilization must offer, but I have become well aware that we must retain this status; white, the superior, and they the inferior; for whenever a white man seeks to live among them as their equal, they will either destroy him or devour him, and they will destroy all his work; and so for any existing relationship or for any benefit to this people let white men from anywhere in the world who would come to help Africa remember that you must continually retain this status; you the master, and they the inferior, like children that you would help or teach.
Never fraternize with them as equals, never accept them as your social equals ; or they will devour you; they will destroy you."

- Dr. Albert Schweitzer, winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize for peace, in his 1961 book, From My African Notebook.
http://www.schweitzer.org/english/diverse/asefaq.htm

Pamela Rosa knows that she is not very intelligent person, but her intelligence, or whatever it is, allow her to be independent and in Africa she alone in her garden produces enough food for herself and her friends.

Reading today's BBC news has made me worry. Not because millions of living creatures in Zimbabwe (IQ 66) are hungry, but because after destroying economy of their country, they like a destructive locust coming now to South Africa.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6982183.stm
and Zimbabweans IQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

...."There's no heaven in South Africa. We are from Zimbabwe, you f*****g piece of s**t. We can do whatever we want with you."......