Zimbabwe's white farmers find new homes

Mugabe......cuddling up to China now as well.

When i was at university, before the flood, i had a roommate from Rhodesia. His ambition in life was to assassinate Ian Smith. I'm sure he ended up fighting for Mugabe.

Smith financed fifteen years of defiance against the world community through the high-grade tobacco those farmers produced. The most expensive tobacco in the world, the golden (literally golden in appearance) Virginia tobacco they produced was such a valuable commodity that Rhodesia's African neighbors eagerly bought it up at a discount, and sold it world-wide at a handsome profit. Smith hired mercenaries from all over the world for his security forces, but mostly from South Africa. It not only paid for the private army, it paid to maintain and in some cases even to build the railway links with other African nations involved in trade with Rhodesia.

Smith and his regime eventually couldn't keep up with the numbers. In the late 1960s when his war was heating up, the source for mercenaries in Africa was already drying up thanks to the tremendous losses "soldiers of fortune" had suffered in the Belgian Congo. South Africans came less and less often in the 1970's, as their white supremecist regime began a bidding war for white soldiers, whom they needed for their own insurgency and their increasing involvement in southwest Africa. (Today, southwest Africa, formerly a German colony and made a protectorate of South Africa in 1919, is Namibia; Rhodesia, of course, became Zimbabwe.) Smith could never have accomplished any of it, however, without the fine Virginia tobacco which the "generations on the soil" farmers of Rhodesia produced.

Mugabe is an idiot, he has killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and hadn't even the opportunity to feast off the goose. Zimbabwe's loss stands to be an enormous gain for Nigeria. White African farmers always enjoyed advantages over both the black Africans and the colonists from Europe. They had the advantage of racial privelege and education over the former, and generations or even centuries on the land over the latter. I say, good for them, and good for Nigeria.