Why Does The West Hate Mugabe?
By Tsungai Chipato
08 July, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Robert Mugabe
In a world where political diatribe has been coupled with modern day punditry and perceived as being the norm; with misinformation often easily inserted within journalistic dialogue surreptitiously. Searching for the truth in our current world has become an ever difficult task to accomplish. Therefore finding the truth about a person like Robert Mugabe is usually a difficult task to decipher what really is true and what is really fiction.
Painted as a modern day incarnation of the devil himself Robert Mugabe has been made out to be the embodiment of everything wrong with Africa today. If one searches his name online, all you find populated on your search results are caricatures of a senile old man spouting conspiracy theories of a hateful Western world bent on world domination. Actually for all intent and purposes Robert Mugabe has now been made into the modern day version of the tyrant who expects his people to survive on cake for sustenance.
Due to the magic of copying and pasting online, anyone can easily find copy upon copy of remade versions of footage; all messaging, embedding and imposing an imagery of an aloof dictator lording over his subjects while they whither and die within Zimbabwe.
In reviewing the man we will need to engage in the difficult and unpleasant issue of separating domestic politics from the actual man in order to understand how he as Mugabe; ended up influencing the very same domestic policy he is now known for worldwide. Ground zero to understanding this man should start with the year 1924, the year he was born and the generation into which he was born to.
The man we know today was born into an era where eugenics was the popular biological theory and black people were thought of as far inferior to white people, discrimination and oppression was based on science, and at the time majority of scientists were all usually Caucasian.
While Hitler was fomenting his views on Aryan domination, and the British were implementing a segregationist policy that is still visible today in instances such as the Ferguson riots in America, Robert Mugabe grew up as a black boy buttressed by the residual psychosis of a World War 1 generation that unknowingly and continuously taught him, that being black was worse than a sin in the eyes of God, and that he was lucky to have Caucasians to help him.
Against this backdrop imagine being taught to think and be as smart as a white man, yet in the same instance be constantly reminded that this ideal was actually not possible for you as a black man. Robert Mugabe was raised in a generation where white people were still trying to tolerate and comprehend the intelligence of black people, whilst still manipulating them.
Try as you can to rationalize the emotional contradiction of smiling at your family during your graduation, as you see them rightfully proud at the accomplishments you have achieved in their lifetime, towards finally being viewed as a Caucasian in society, yet inwardly you know that this is all a facade and at the end of the day you are still viewed as a lesser being
Fast forward to 2015 in a post-Obama world and we now live in a world were everything is being intentionally blurred to mask the struggle and injustice still in the world. We now live in a world were politics is the law of the land and messaging is everything, views held by Mugabe are considered not only toxic by a Western world, but also an unnecessary nuisance that muddies the waters on what is deemed far greater important foreign policy issues facing the world besides Zimbabwe.
The man Robert Gabriel Mugabe and not the politician, is where the real crux of the matter lies in this article, why would an individual widely known within Africa to have more clout that Nelson Mandela himself be still condemned as a crazy conspiracy theorist by western pundits?
In our current generation world revolutionaries are being expropriated or assimilated into Western thought such as Nelson Mandela, whose philosophies are being revised and repackaged to subjugate the very same masses the revolutionaries fought for. This form of reverse engineering of revolutionary leaders such as Mandela or Martin Luther King has now become the norm in quieting the masses into a sense of self imposed subjugation in our current world.
This phenomena alone is a fact that many black indentured intellectuals choose not to comment on thus, the history and legacy of black oppression is being hurried to its shallowly grave, as ignorance gleefully buries it; with the dirt of revisionist history.
The city of Toronto in Canada recently picked its first black police chief in the city’s history, choosing to implement this decision at a time when the city was experiencing a scandal based on known racial profiling of black people within the city. What many in Toronto would have been surprised to know, was that the same system in Toronto called “carding” was actually a variant tactical method of oppression used not only in South Africa’s Apartheid era “pass system” but also in the Zimbabwe that Robert Mugabe grew up in. All of which Canada and the United States have and are intimately associated with.
Across the border pick any city in the United States and you will find at least one police department that has racial profiling and racist policies towards African Americans reminiscent of South Africa or Zimbabwe. There is a valid reason why black people in Southern Africa feel so strongly against white people and why African Americans gravitate towards Africa.
In a recent article by Zimbabwean Garikai Chengu a Harvard scholar, he succinctly phrases the xenophobia going on in South Africa, as under the guise of internalized racism, elaborating further he states that:
“Internalized racism, a term first coined by Black scholar W.E.B. DuBois in 1903, involves accepting a White supremacist social order that places Black people at the bottom, and adopting society’s negative stereotypes about Blacks concerning their lack of abilities, inherent violence and low intrinsic worth.
Internalized racism is a major legacy of Apartheid. South African society historically judges violence inflicted on Blacks less harshly than violence against Whites; consequently, Black people begin to believe that their own life and the lives of other Black African people are worth very little. Thereby creating the preconditions for the ongoing Afrophobic violence”.
This can somewhat be likened to you as a person, having your stolen laptop, cellphone,car or PlayStation returned to you by the police with all the settings and login information for apps still configured to the thieves’ browsing history and gaming preferences, whilst leaving you with no options of resetting your own preferences on the device without calling its providers for assistance. Welcome to Africa.
This in a nutshell is why the west does not like Mugabe, he represents change and an awareness for us as black people to accept our reality, to the fact that our lives have been made unjust; and unfair by Caucasians. His sheer legacy is an awakening and constant reminder that we as black people need to be cognizant of the past.
If it wasn't for the geopolitical value of Zimbabwe, nobody would care what Robert Mugabe said or did within Zimbabwe. Any political strategist worth his or her salt will tell you that simply put, whatever happens in Zimbabwe, so goes the rest of Southern Africa. If anyone is to analyze the current disquiet happening in South Africa and Namibia against Western influence based on oppression, all roads always lead back to Zimbabwe as having had some type of influence behind it.
If you choose to listen closely to what is often dismissed as the rantings of an old senile man, therein masks the stark truth and depth of an individual consistently speaking out against the years of seeing, regime change, economic warfare, military and social colonialization ever since 1924. There lies the reason why the West hates Mugabe, his ideas are for more potent than his politics.
Tsungai Chipato is a journalist, and is also currently the creative director for a grassroots cultural online Zimbabwean organization called Bongogzozo. Contact him at [email protected]
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