Saturday, January 14, 2012

South Africa and zimbabwe

In south Africa majority of the wealth and resources is still controlled by the white people from colonial era hand me downs. naturally this creates resentment among the indigenous groups who owned all the land but to see basically a foreign people who came in using force to get rich off their resources. Heck america still won't let dubai control its ports, so I don't see how Africans are more racist when whites control most of the financial resources in south africa.

zimbabwe is a bit different but it came down to the fact that upon independence the 10,000 whites controlled 80% of all the arable farmland. Meaning the 12 million black people in a largely agricultural society would be doomed to poverty forever without land reforms. While Mugabe is heavily criticisized for his actions with white farmers, my suspicion is you'd have a full blown race war if he did not do what he did and many white people would end up dead. It is a sticky situation because the apartheid zimbabwe government was kicking blacks off their land and giving it away to white people until the mid 70s. Many of those people want their land back and then you get the so called land occupations. It is not really possible for a willing buyer willing seller plan to work because zimbabwe as a country is too poor to buy off these multi million dollar value farms at market value. The other complexity comes from the fact that for whatever reason (probably not wanting to leave their multimillion dollar farms - the average white farmer in zimbabwe owns 10 farms) the whites in zimbabwe did not return to their country of origin. This is unusual in what normally happened when African countries gained independence. Ie. when mozambique became independent almost all the white farmers left.

I do agree with the rest of your post, but it would misguided to ignore the role of the spanish in dominican republic racism or the role of arabs in sudanese racism or role of the europeans in rwanda genocide etc.

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