True Left

'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes

After growing up in a Zimbabwe convulsed by the legacy of colonialism, when I got to Oxford I realised how many British people still failed to see how empire had shaped lives like mine – as well as their own

It was true that Rhodes was a racist and imperialist who built a society based on racism and exploitation. But Mugabe used this history to deny the corruption of his own regime. He made white farmers the scapegoats for the country’s economic problems and tarred the opposition as un-African. He argued that the values his political rivals stood for were a cover for neoliberal policies that, like colonialism before them, would only serve to exploit Zimbabwe on behalf of the west. Real nationalism, Mugabe said, was about finishing the anti-colonial liberation struggle by taking back the land.

In 2000, bolstered by Mugabe’s rhetoric, Black war veterans began occupying commercial farmland owned by white people. The occupations spread widely across the country. They were sponsored by the ruling party, while partisan militias carried out evictions on the ground. In less than five years, the number of white farmers actually farming the land dwindled from about 4,500 to under 500, while as many as 200,000 Black farm workers lost their jobs, and often with them their homes. About 10 white farmers were killed by militias, while the number of black farm workers killed by the same militias was just under 200, with many thousands more suffering violent assaults.

The foreign and white media soon introduced its own distortions into the crisis, portraying the occupations as a racially motivated attack against white people, and not as a violent political uprising rooted in the complex history of colonialism. At home, my father praised Mugabe and lambasted western powers as hypocrites who preached democracy but practised imperialism. He had no patience for the opposition party, whose members he saw as stooges serving the interests of white capitalists in Zimbabwe and Britain. I later came to see the land seizures as acts of political and economic grievance that answered directly to Zimbabwe’s colonial history, and to feel that, in many ways, Mugabe and my father were right: real emancipation from that history could not be accomplished if white people still owned more than their share of the land.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jan/14/rhodes-must-fall-oxford-colonialism-zimbabwe-simukai-chigudu?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Real emancipation from Western colonial history cannot be accomplished as long as "white" identity exists.