Opinion
Robert Mugabe is a hero to many in Africa, a fact that Western media struggles to grasp
As Mbeki pointed out in his speech, land redistribution meant that 300,000-400,000 peasants became land owners, a not inconsiderable number in a country of just over 14 million people.
Mugabe could have been less brutal in carrying out the exercise. But did this attempt to correct historical injustices really merit the crippling sanctions slapped on Zimbabwe?
Belgium, which has been urging the European Union to reconsider the restrictions it has imposed on Zimbabwe (because it has a strong interest in Zimbabwe’s diamonds, naturally), estimates the embargo costs the country US$400 million a year.
Yet you never see any of this background, that sanctions are a key driver of the poor economic situation in that country, in Western media analyses.
The most disturbing aspect, according to Mbeki, is the fact that Africans have swallowed unchewed the Western media propaganda on Mugabe “and continue to be enslaved by a narrative about ourselves told by other people”.
“Good boys”
There are many questions any analyst of the obsessive coverage of Mugabe should ask. Why Mugabe and not, say, the Equatorial Guinea strongman Obiang Nguema who came to power in a coup in 1979 and keeps his people wallowing in poverty despite their country being one of Africa’s largest oil producers?
Where is the Western media criticism of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Joseph Kabila, patron of the world’s richest semi-failed state? The answer, of course, is that the pair and others are “good boys” who dare not disturb the status quo.
Mugabe has his flaws. But who doesn’t? In the past week the British press has been awash with stories praising Winston Churchill.
It is true he was a war-time hero but he was also a terrible racist who dismissed the Mau Mau as “brutish children” who should be crushed in the most savage manner; described Indians as “a beastly people with a beastly religion”; suggested Gandhi should be trampled upon by an elephant with the British viceroy on its back, and described the Palestinians as “barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung”.
