Category Archives: Africa

UPDATE II (12/18): Why All Three South-African Presidents Supported Robert Mugabe

Africa, Colonialism, Democracy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, History, Race, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN, “Why All Three South-African Presidents Supported Robert Mugabe,” is on Townhall.com. An excerpt:

On November 21, after 37 years in power, Zimbabwe’s dictator, Robert Mugabe, resigned in infamy.

By contrast, the late South African leader, Nelson Mandela, was revered in the West. His successor, Thabo Mbeki, was well-respected.

Yet over the decades, both Mandela and Mbeki lent their unqualified support to Mugabe.

When the baton was passed from Mbeki to the populist polygamist Jacob Zuma, the current leader of South Africa’s dominant-party state, little changed in the country’s relationship with Zimbabwe.

Why?

And what is the significance of the support Zuma and his predecessors, Mandela and Mbeki, have lent the Zimbabwean dictator over the decades?

Wags in the West love to pit the long-suffering African people vs. their predatory politicians. As this false bifurcation goes, the malevolent Mugabe was opposed by his eternally suffering people.

While ordinary Africans do seem caught eternally between Scylla and Charybdis, the government of Zimbabwe—and others across Africa—doesn’t stand apart from the governed; it reflects them.

Consider: Early on, Mugabe had attempted to heed “a piece of advice that Mozambican president Samora Machel” had given him well before independence. As historian Martin Meredith recounts, in The State of Africa (2006), Machel told Mugabe: “Keep your whites.”

Mugabe kept “his whites” a little longer than he had originally envisaged, thanks to the Lancaster House agreements. These had “imposed a ten-year constitutional constraint on redistributing land. … But in the early 1990s, with the expiration of the constitutional prohibition, black Zimbabweans became impatient.”

Nevertheless, noted African-American journalist Keith Richburg, “Mugabe remained ambivalent, recognizing, apparently, that despite the popular appeal of land confiscation, the white commercial farmers still constituted the backbone of Zimbabwe’s economy.”

Restless natives would have none of it. Armed with axes and machetes, gangs of so-called war veterans proceeded to fleece white farmers and 400,000 of their employees without so much as flinching. In the land invasions of 2000, 50,000 of these squatters “seized more than 500 of the country’s 4,500 commercial farms, claiming they were taking back land stolen under British colonial rule.” (CNN, April 14, 2000.)

These Zimbabweans assaulted farmers and their families, “threatened to kill them and forced many to flee their homes, ransacking their possessions. They set up armed camps and roadblocks, stole tractors, slaughtered cattle, destroyed crops and polluted water supplies.”

The “occupation” was extended to private hospitals, hundreds of businesses, foreign embassies, and aid agencies. The looting of white property owners continued apace—with the country’s remaining white-owned commercial farms being invaded and occupied.

This may come as news to the doctrinaire democrats who doggedly conflate the will of the people with liberty: These weapons-wielding “mobs of so-called war veterans,” converging on Zimbabwe’s remaining productive farms, expressed the democratic aspirations of most black Zimbabweans. And of their South African neighbors, a majority of whom “want the land, cars, houses, and swimming pools of their erstwhile white rulers.” Surmised The Daily Mail’s Max Hastings:

“[M]ost African leaders find it expedient to hand over the white men’s toys to their own people, without all the bother of explaining that these things should be won through education, skills, enterprise and hard labor over generations.”

At the time, former South African president Mbeki had chaired a special session of the United Nations Security Council, during which he ventured that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe. Some American analysts had therefore hastily deduced that Mbeki, who was president of South Africa from 1999 until 2008, was “a sidekick to the man who ruined Zimbabwe.”

How deeply silly. And how little the West knows!

Mbeki led the most powerful country on the continent; Mugabe the least powerful. The better question is this: Given the power differential between South Africa and Zimbabwe, why would Mbeki, and Mandela before him, succor Mugabe? Was Mandela Mugabe’s marionette, too? Yet another preposterous proposition. …

… READ THE REST. “Why All Three South-African Presidents Supported Robert Mugabe” is on Townhall.com. 

UPDATE I (12/2):

UPDATE II (12/18):

Why Hatred Of Whites Is Here To Stay

Africa, America, Colonialism, Crime, Democracy, History, Race, Racism, South-Africa

“Why Hatred of Whites Is Here to Stay” is the current column, now on The Daily Caller. An excerpt:

Not so long ago, mere mention of the deliberate murder of whites in South Africa—country folk and commercial farmers, in particular—was called “racist.” “Raaacist!” the media collective brayed when candidate Trump retweeted a related “white genocide” hashtag.

It’s still “racist” to suggest that the butchering of these whites, almost daily, in ways that beggar belief, is racially motivated. Positively scandalous is it to describe the ultimate goal of a killing spree, now in its third decade, thus: the ethnic cleansing of white, farming South Africa from land the community has cultivated since the 1600s.

Be thankful for small mercies: At least the international media monopoly is finally reporting facts, such as that just the other day Andre and Lydia Saaiman, aged 70, were hacked to death in Port Elizabeth. (Imagine being chopped up until you expire.)

Or, that the elderly Bokkie Potgieter was dealt a similar fate as he tended his small, KwaZulu-Natal holding. Potgeiter was butchered during the October “Black Monday” protest, which was a nation-wide demonstration to end the carnage. Internationally reported as well were the facts of Sue Howarth’s death. The 64-year-old pharmaceutical executive was tortured for hours with … a blowtorch.

This black-on-white murder spree has been ongoing since a dominant-party political dispensation (mobocracy) was “negotiated in my homeland for South Africans. (Learn about “The American Architects of The South-African Catastrophe.“) But while the criminal evidence is at last out in the open, the motive for these hate crimes is only mumbled about for fear of offending the offenders.

In South Africa we find a criminal class, born into freedom after 1994, that burns with white-hot hatred for whites.

Why? …

… READ THE REST. “Why Hatred of Whites Is Here to Stay” is now on The Daily Caller.

You can read the Mercer Column weekly on the Daily Caller, Unz Review, WND.com, occasionally on Townhall.com, and certainly on the other fine outlets listed here. It’s always posted, eventually, on IlanaMercer.com, under Articles. Please share.

NEW COLUMN. Niger: Finally, A War John McCain Doesn’t Love

Africa, Foreign Policy, Iran, John McCain, Middle East, War

NEW COLUMN. No war makes Johnny a sad boy. But finally, “Niger: A War John McCain Doesn’t Love.” It’s on the Mises Wire, standing for Austrian Economics, Freedom and peace. An excerpt:

News first broke about America’s Niger misadventure on October 4. “The real news here is that the US has forces in Niger, where they’re conducting covert operations,” this writer tweeted out. “Hashtag America First.”

Official media ignored the ambush of the American Special Forces, until the story gained anti-Trump traction. No word came from John McCain. Three weeks hence, the senator from Arizona is making history. McCain, who has never encountered a war he wasn’t eager to prosecute, is questioning the folly in Niger.

The senator from Arizona can run but can’t hide from the pollution he has left along his political path. Republicans wisely rejected war in Kosovo; McCain jettisoned party loyalty to call for bombs from above and “more boots on the ground.” At the prospects of war with Iran, McCain burst into song, “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran.” The possibility still makes this war ghoul smile. Before that, McCain promised a 100-year war in Iraq.

Senator McCain’s jingoism has encompassed Syria, Georgia, Mali, Nigeria, and China. Where the US could not effect regime change, as it did fecklessly in Afghanistan and Libya—McCain would typically call to side with an imagined local “friend of America” against an imagined “foe of America.” McCain has many imaginary friends.

Where his target country was beyond US bullying (Russia), the idea of the resumption of a cold war was an option McCain liked. He is currently fulminating over a slight delay in sanctions against Russia. When all efforts to tame the world militarily fail, McCain is partial to the idea of UN troops acting as his surrogates, say in Sudan.

No war makes Johnny a sad boy. But now he’s considering a subpoena over Niger.

GLOBAL CENTRALIZER

Playing out in Niger are the permanently entrenched, unchanging, American foreign-policy interests. Keen observers will detect a familiar pattern. Once again, the American bias everywhere is toward a powerful, overweening central state. This conceit has put our forces on a collision course with the tribal interests America toils to tame. …

… READ THE REST. The complete column is “Niger: Finally, A War John McCain Doesn’t Love.” It’s on the Mises Wire.

 

 

UPDATE II (12/22): South-African Law Gone From Roman-Dutch To Tribal

Africa, America, Justice, Law, South-Africa

Two South African farmers, not the brightest, were convicted of “intent to murder” for pranking a trespasser, to teach him a lesson. Farmers are being killed by trespassers like Mr. Victor Mlotshwa, who turn home-invaders if they see an opportunity. The two farmers, Willem Oosthuizen and Theo Martins Jackson, wanted to teach him a lesson that would stay with him next time he entertained trespassing or thought of graduating to the next level of property invasion.

Judge Segopotje Mphahlele, also not the brightest, found the two guilty of attempted murder. Is there even a higher court in South Africa, manned with the kind of minds that might be able to explain to the country the imperative to overturn this silly judge’s verdict?

The “victim” was frightened but uninjured. Where is evidence of the intent to kill? Where’s mens rea?

Willem Oosthuizen and Theo Martins Jackson … were also found guilty of kidnapping, intimidation, and assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm.

If the trespasser was on the farmers’ property, how was this a kidnapping?

Dan Roodt provides comment:

It’s a travesty of justice. A simple prank out of frustration that the police offer no protection against trespassers, thieves and murderers becomes “attempted murder”. It was also trial by media and social media, because the cellphone video went viral. So it is mob justice, a cyber-mob but mob justice all the same. The black judge got carried away by all the cries of racism. He should have been more even-handed and fair, like a real judge. Every white South African should be worried after this: you could be the next accused and you will not receive a fair trial. After this, I am very worried about our courts.

There is an excellent section in Into The Cannibal’s Pot about the Courts. It dissects judgments rendered and shows how the law of the land is being ‘Indigenized’ (page 75).

UPDATE I (10/24): “Culturally Incompetent To Stand Trial”:

American law:

UPDATE II (12/22): Via The Economist:

Among measures urgently needed to reassure potential investors is a repeal of Mr Mugabe’s “indigenisation” law that called for firms to be majority-owned by black Zimbabweans.