Mick Hartley

How seriously should we take this?

Trevor Gifford, president of the Commercial Farmers Union of Zimbabwe, which in the wake of Mugabe’s land redistribution has seen the ranks of members still farming drop to 500 from 4,600 in 2000, said groups of as many as 200 young men, organized and paid by ZANU-PF and chanting party slogans and shouting anti-white epithets, have invaded 60 farms and driven out their inhabitants.

“It’s ethnic cleansing happening,” Gifford said in a phone interview. “We can very quickly become extinct. People are losing their homes, businesses, lives. It’s really desperate.”

The state-run newspaper, The Herald, reported Monday that Mugabe, speaking at a funeral, had called on blacks to hold onto the land and never let the whites reclaim it.

Ethnic cleansing?

There are those who claim that only whites can be racist. The history of the past few centuries at least gives plausibility to such a view. And really, who’s going to get worked up over the fate of a few members of an avowedly privileged group, much of whose wealth, arguably, derives from a colonialism which was justified by racism?

Yet anti-white racism does exist. You can find it in the Nation of Islam. And the kind of rhetoric that Mugabe uses to stay in power surely qualifies. Check out some of the YouTube videos that I linked to last week: the evil pink “white” race is a virus we should hate and remove from Africa. This may not be the official language of ZANU-PF, but it’s the kind of language they encourage. At those times when Mugabe’s power is threatened, like now, it’s this anti-white racism that he plays on. The gangs of youths rampaging across Zimbabwe are motivated by hate: by a poisonous racism that encourages their belief that opponents of Mugabe, like the MDC, are just pawns in the hands of evil white men.

By the nature of Zimbabwe’s history, no one’s going to be shedding too many tears over the fate of those few white farmers, but it’s a poisonous legacy that Mugabe’s bequeathed to his country.