Why is the left so silent about the alarming brutality of post-apartheid regimes in southern Africa

[Nat Quinn]

 

South African President Nelson Mandela and Second Deputy President F.W. de Klerk hold their hands high as they address a huge crowd of people in front of the Union Building after the inauguration ceremony in Pretoria, South Africa in this May 10, 1994

Zimbabwe is in dire straits as a result of abuses of power first by Mugabe and now by the Crocodile. And yet, as I say, there are very few expressions of outrage from the sort of people who demonised Ian Smith and white minority rule.

It’s a similar story with South Africa, mired in corruption and maladministration under the African National Congress (ANC). Apartheid was morally repugnant and it was a wonderful day for humanity when it ended. It so happens that, during Apartheid’s misguided existence, the country had functioned pretty efficiently. For example, electricity was cheap and there weren’t frequent power cuts, as there are now.

The ANC has been losing support but the beneficiaries may not be the moderate main opposition but a rising Far-Left party called Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema, a wild and dangerous man.

At a recent rally in Johannesburg, Malema roused the 100,000-strong crowd to ecstasy by yelling: ‘Shoot to kill! Kill the Boer, the farmer!’ Boers are synonymous with Afrikaners, who comprise about 60 per cent of the 4.5 million white population in South Africa, the remainder being mostly of British descent.

In fact, a lot of Boers have already been killed, the majority of them farmers. More than 4,000 white farmers have been murdered since 1994. Over recent years, killings have been running at the rate of about one a week.

And yet this gruesome bloodshed receives little coverage here, and engenders no indignation in circles that would once have been appalled by white brutality. Would they be so quiescent if 4,000 blacks had been slaughtered by whites over the past 30 years? I don’t think so.

In a brilliant recent article in the Spectator magazine, Andrew Kenny provided a grisly inventory of recent murders. A housewife is forced to watch as her partner’s skull is smashed by intruders. A two-year-old daughter runs to her father, who has been slashed to death with machetes, before being shot dead.

Andrew Kenny mentions that Julius Malema travels in Range Rovers and Mercedes, wears a Breitling watch, and has a wardrobe full of Italian clothes. In other words, he is in the mould of post-colonial African leaders who want to live high on the hog.

Malema could be South Africa’s deputy President after next year’s elections if the ANC does less well, and turns to his party for support. How the incorruptible Nelson Mandela would have hung his head in shame!

Many on the Right are probably as unconcerned as the Left by the collapse of good government and endemic corruption in Zimbabwe and South Africa. My point is that the Left used to be preoccupied with white brutality, but is relatively unconcerned about black brutality. They also seem uninterested in why these terrible things are happening.

There’s a kind of inverted racism among some who say they abhor racism. If the perpetrators of bad acts are black Africans, that is judged less serious than if they are white Africans. And if the victims of persecution are white, that is also assumed to matter less than it would if they were black.

When I first went to Rhodesia in 1978, I was dismayed by the racism, and the sense of entitlement of some whites. I remember being shocked by the inhumane way a white farmer treated his black farm workers.

But I also recall a country that at least worked, for all whites and many blacks, and was a net exporter of maize, cotton and tobacco. I believe there were fewer hungry people in Rhodesia than there are in Zimbabwe now.

A few years before his death in 2007, I interviewed Ian Smith in Zimbabwe. The former wartime RAF pilot wouldn’t accept that the horrors of Mugabe’s rule might have been avoided if he had encouraged moderate black leaders earlier. He left it far too late.

But he did say one true thing. I doubted him when he said that blacks often approached him in the street and told him he had governed better than Mugabe. He suggested I canvas opinion.

So I did. I asked one black Zimbabwean after another. None of them much liked Ian Smith. They wanted democracy. But, yes, almost all of them said that Ian Smith had been preferable to Robert Mugabe.

 

 

source:

STEPHEN GLOVER FOR THE DAILY MAIL

UPDATED: 22:21 BST, 23 August 2023

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