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July 17, 2008 These two men may have fought similar battles maybe suffered close to similar fates under colonial dictatorship but that is as far as the comparison may go, Nelson Mandela choose to go to prison sheepishly for 25 years while Robert Mugabe fought tooth and nail to finally wrest Zimbabwe – then Rhodesia from the bloody capitalistic clutches of Cecil Rhodes’ descendants. Today, it is no surprise that the Madiba is the toast of the West, the icon, the beacon and type of the blatant colonialists guide to a good, a black person – docile, obedient, groveling… If Nelson Mandela had resisted arrest and had become nuisance to the Boers and by extension to their British masters then, there would no have been swan songs on and on of his famed time on Robben island. That is just the tip of ‘Table Mountain’ for Mugabe has jousted verbally, Mugabe has spared intellectually with the so called masters at their own game and turf, Mugabe has shattered the myth of the African as being a primitive unthinking and unreasoning brute who can be ‘put into place’ with equal amount of brute and feral force, Mugabe has used the words – the grammatical arsenal of the colonialists to throw back at them whatever verbal diarrhea that has been thrown at him. One may not have to look too far in history at ‘vocal’ African leaders who have stood up against this sort of Western classification of the stereotypical African. Notable is Patrice Lumumba who irked the CIA so much that they laid the groundwork for his eventual assassination. If one were to closely examine the deaths of Late Murtala Mohammed of Nigeria, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso one may not be too surprised to find a conspiracy thread leading to M16 or the CIA. Since when did the West begin caring about African lives? People die in hordes everyday because of malaria and that is not a top priority – only meddling. This is where the analogy of Sambo comes in ,Sambo was the white man’s black man, ‘Sambo was the supine, grateful, irresponsible, unmanly, banjo picking, servile, grinning, slack jawed, docile dependent, slow witted, humorous, child loving, child like, water-melon stealing, spiritual singing, blamelessly fornicating, happy go lucky, hedonistic faithful black servitor’. People, people make a table and check the two, Mugabe and Mandela against it and find who most qualifies to be adulated in London and Washington and all over the West and who gets bashed in the same halls of inconsistency and hypocrisy. Madiba and Mandela, two freedom fighters who chose two different paths, two different destinies. The Madiba chose a path of least resistance while Mugabe chooses (not a grammatical error) – chooses because Mugabe in his mind rightly or in error continues what he perceives as an ongoing fight to the death against ‘white skinned devils’ and in his estimation, it is a fight to the death with absolutely no thoughts or desires to be serenaded by pop stars raucously cheering and celebrating the life of a man violated and abused by their ancestors in his own land. In a larger context, South Africans are really a rainbow people – chameleons to be specific not really knowing which color they are. The people of Zimbabwe can deal with their problem literally – and by that I do not mean the stooge would- be President Morgan Tsvangari, who probably has signed a host of mineral exploitation concessions with the West already…I mean the mass of the Zimbabwean people be they minority or majority after all it just turned out that Al Gore did actually beat George Bush in Florida! Frankly my panacea for this Zimbabwe issue is just this – Gordon Brown, especially, and the Queen should meet with Robert Mugabe in Harare, return his knighthood and apologize to Mugabe and the Zimbabwean people for the past colonial injustices of Cecil Rhodes and I tell you Mugabe will heartily call in Tsvangari and step down – this is the bitter pill doctor ordered! ------------ About the author: Stephen Lonewolf Makama is a longtime contributor to Useless Knowledge. Email: lonewolfmak@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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