The enemy within is our greatest threat, but it is also the one we are least likely to confront.
November 29, 2006 (Press Release) --
They should bring back white minority rule in Zimbabwe. Allow me to repeat. I, Jonathan Ledwidge, a proud member of the African Diaspora, am calling for the return of white-minority rule in a predominantly black African nation.
OK, I agree. It is a shocking thought. The intention is to awaken your from the stupor which paralyses so much of the world. Moreover, despite what you may think, it is far less shocking than what Mugabe, under the guise of black majority rule, is inflicting on his own people.
The UK newspaper, The Independent, reports that the average life expectancy of a woman in Zimbabwe is now only 34. Think about it. How many of you reading this article are either near or past that age. Just imagine for one second that you were living in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and then realise that you would be either dead, dying, or expecting to die.
Thousands have died and many, many thousands have been displaced – forcibly uprooted from their homes by a government that refuses to countenance any form of opposition. Famine, disease, murder, oppression, corruption, mismanagement, and an economic meltdown are all combining to make life in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe a hell on earth.
Ian Smith’s racist government was never like this.
Amidst all the gruesome tales emerging from Zimbabwe perhaps there is none worse than the reports of 20 foetuses a week being found in the sewage systems of Harare, the capital – a horribly reflection of the extent of the country’s economic and social crisis.
The white minority government never reached such depths. To be sure, it would not have dared – the international community would not have allowed it.
Why does the world now allow Mugabe to get away with much worse?
Even the Apartheid government in Southern Africa while wholly disgusting was never as brutal. Anti-Apartheid activists like to remember the 26 people that died in the 1976 Sharpsville Massacre. This year, they commemorated the 30th anniversary of that tragic event.
They should have focused more of their efforts on devising ways of toppling Mugabe.
In its heyday, white minority rule in Southern Africa was useful to much of the rest of the world for two reasons. It allowed white liberals to show just how interested they were in equality and social justice, while simultaneously allowing blacks to take refuge in the idea that all the ills of the world could be placed at the feet of the white man.
We should have been more wary of both.
Neither black activists nor white liberals devoted much time to the overthrow of despicable African regimes such as Mobutu in Zaire and Bokassa in the Central African Republic, even though their human rights records were far worse than the white minority regimes in Southern Africa.
There was worse.
During the era of white minority rule, Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam was responsible for what some observers describe as the 7th largest genocide in the 20th century. Mengistu and his cabal killed some 1.5 million people. I simply do not recall either white liberals or blacks voicing anywhere as much opposition to this regime as they did the considerably less vile minority governments in Rhodesia and South Africa.
With hindsight, when Robert Mugabe offered asylum to Mengistu Haile Mariam we should have been forewarned of the reckoning to come. In addition to all his other grotesque sins, Mugabe has steadfastly refused to deliver Mengistu to justice.
When Mugabe’s ruthless and unethical land-grab resulted in the deaths of a few white farmers, the stories made large headlines all over the world. While land reform was desperately needed in Zimbabwe and the killings of white farmers completely unjustified, it is a pity that the white media had not expressed similar shock and outrage when Mugabe was busy killing thousands of his black opponents in Matabeleland a few years earlier.
And what should we make of the governments in Washington and London who now claim that they invaded Iraq because of concern for human life under Saddam Hussein?
Well we can now offer them a once in a lifetime chance to prove that their actions are and were motivated by the most noble of human ideals – all they have to do is invade Zimbabwe and save it from Mugabe.
I would not hold my breath.
What I find most disturbing in all this is the hypocrisy relating to race on both sides of the divide. Why should it be OK for a black tyrant to kill more people than a white one? Why are white lives more valuable than black ones?
I have been on a journey for more than 30 years. It started in the early 1970s when I was at high school back in Jamaica. I tried to understand the nature of who I was and my place in the world – and that of people of colour in general. I call it a journey towards objectivity.
It is a journey because objectivity is not a destination – you can never get there, as ever so often something comes along to challenge your understanding of what you believe. Then it dawns on you that you don’t have all the answers, and that you can only begin to develop a greater understanding by continuing on that journey – by learning more.
At the time my journey began, Jamaica was just beginning to throw of the vestiges of colonialism, European powers were still waging war in Africa, and civil rights were still high on the agenda in the US. It was a world where it was not easy to be positive about being black. Yet, I began my sojourn with the unshakeable belief that ultimately, colour had nothing to do with one’s predicament or race – it was all about history, circumstance, and time.
Thus, I was a Christian living in Jamaica simply because Europeans needed slaves in the New World, and they had thought that converting us to Christianity was a good way off keeping our minds away from rebellion.
Moreover, I understood that initially, racism was merely a ploy to justify subjugation and exploitation – the fact that the stigma of it has lasted long afterwards is an unpleasant historical by-product of the original crime.
As I have continued on my journey, the most important lesson I learned was not about me, but about others – other peoples, other religions, other races, other nationalities. I realised that everyone else in the world was who they were and what they were not because of any innate feature of their being or race, but because of their history, their experience, and their circumstance.
I understood that everyone else was just like me, subject to the exactly the same foibles, weaknesses, and general trials of life. Once I had appreciated that, I found it truly liberating.
This revelation allowed me to look beyond race, religion, nationality, and all those readily accessible identifiers, and develop a belief in a common humanity – one that makes me wary of ascribing inherently negative attributes to other peoples, except that they can be explained by history, by experience, and by circumstance.
Unfortunately, I sense that much of the world is still so ensnared by those labels and readily accessible identifiers, that clear judgement on any issue, especially ones relating to nationality, race, religion, and ethnicity, is nigh impossible – even when ones own interest is threatened.
Consequently, people are constantly searching and seeking out the enemy outside, when invariably the true enemy lies within – and more often than not is far more dangerous.
Thus, we have the sceptre of Robert Mugabe, once a great black African freedom fighter, who liberated his people from white minority rule, now inflicting far more pain and destruction on those same people than whites ever did – or would have ever been allowed to.
What is worse, there appears to be no organised resistance to his reign of terror from the neighbouring countries. That was not the case in the Apartheid era when people talked about the frontline states – countries such as Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique that spearheaded the international opposition to the regimes in Pretoria and Salisbury (now Harare).
However, no one set of people or race has a monopoly on the enemy within.
Arabs reserve their greatest venom and hatred for an Israeli regime that oppresses Palestinians. Yet, in Iraq, we have Arabs inflicting levels of destruction on other Arabs that are well beyond what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.
We have Arab Muslims inflicting genocide on African Muslims in Darfur, even as Arabs speak of the evils of Israel and the US.
Each year in the US, there is an average of 15,000 murders. That is the equivalent of five 9/11s every single year. There are also 95,000 rapes, 400,000 robberies, and 850,000 cases of aggravated assault.
Thus, one may quite correctly ask, who should Americans be more afraid of – Al Qaeda or their fellow citizens? Rather than spending $300 billion making Iraq a worse place, shouldn’t the Bush Administration have spent that money making America a better place?
Western are countries using all the weapons they can muster to fight the war on drugs in places such as Afghanistan and Colombia. Yet, if they were truly honest with themselves, they would realise that the real problem is the demand at home not the production abroad. It is the enemy within which is causing the problem, not the presumed enemy without. Without the huge western appetite for drugs, there would be no international drugs trade.
The enemy within is always more dangerous, more harmful, and more pervasive. Sadly, it is the enemy we are least likely to confront. Thus, it will continue to undermine and eat away at everyone and everything around it.
Jonathan Ledwidge is the author of the book A Mannequin for President.
OK, I agree. It is a shocking thought. The intention is to awaken your from the stupor which paralyses so much of the world. Moreover, despite what you may think, it is far less shocking than what Mugabe, under the guise of black majority rule, is inflicting on his own people.
The UK newspaper, The Independent, reports that the average life expectancy of a woman in Zimbabwe is now only 34. Think about it. How many of you reading this article are either near or past that age. Just imagine for one second that you were living in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and then realise that you would be either dead, dying, or expecting to die.
Thousands have died and many, many thousands have been displaced – forcibly uprooted from their homes by a government that refuses to countenance any form of opposition. Famine, disease, murder, oppression, corruption, mismanagement, and an economic meltdown are all combining to make life in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe a hell on earth.
Ian Smith’s racist government was never like this.
Amidst all the gruesome tales emerging from Zimbabwe perhaps there is none worse than the reports of 20 foetuses a week being found in the sewage systems of Harare, the capital – a horribly reflection of the extent of the country’s economic and social crisis.
The white minority government never reached such depths. To be sure, it would not have dared – the international community would not have allowed it.
Why does the world now allow Mugabe to get away with much worse?
Even the Apartheid government in Southern Africa while wholly disgusting was never as brutal. Anti-Apartheid activists like to remember the 26 people that died in the 1976 Sharpsville Massacre. This year, they commemorated the 30th anniversary of that tragic event.
They should have focused more of their efforts on devising ways of toppling Mugabe.
In its heyday, white minority rule in Southern Africa was useful to much of the rest of the world for two reasons. It allowed white liberals to show just how interested they were in equality and social justice, while simultaneously allowing blacks to take refuge in the idea that all the ills of the world could be placed at the feet of the white man.
We should have been more wary of both.
Neither black activists nor white liberals devoted much time to the overthrow of despicable African regimes such as Mobutu in Zaire and Bokassa in the Central African Republic, even though their human rights records were far worse than the white minority regimes in Southern Africa.
There was worse.
During the era of white minority rule, Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam was responsible for what some observers describe as the 7th largest genocide in the 20th century. Mengistu and his cabal killed some 1.5 million people. I simply do not recall either white liberals or blacks voicing anywhere as much opposition to this regime as they did the considerably less vile minority governments in Rhodesia and South Africa.
With hindsight, when Robert Mugabe offered asylum to Mengistu Haile Mariam we should have been forewarned of the reckoning to come. In addition to all his other grotesque sins, Mugabe has steadfastly refused to deliver Mengistu to justice.
When Mugabe’s ruthless and unethical land-grab resulted in the deaths of a few white farmers, the stories made large headlines all over the world. While land reform was desperately needed in Zimbabwe and the killings of white farmers completely unjustified, it is a pity that the white media had not expressed similar shock and outrage when Mugabe was busy killing thousands of his black opponents in Matabeleland a few years earlier.
And what should we make of the governments in Washington and London who now claim that they invaded Iraq because of concern for human life under Saddam Hussein?
Well we can now offer them a once in a lifetime chance to prove that their actions are and were motivated by the most noble of human ideals – all they have to do is invade Zimbabwe and save it from Mugabe.
I would not hold my breath.
What I find most disturbing in all this is the hypocrisy relating to race on both sides of the divide. Why should it be OK for a black tyrant to kill more people than a white one? Why are white lives more valuable than black ones?
I have been on a journey for more than 30 years. It started in the early 1970s when I was at high school back in Jamaica. I tried to understand the nature of who I was and my place in the world – and that of people of colour in general. I call it a journey towards objectivity.
It is a journey because objectivity is not a destination – you can never get there, as ever so often something comes along to challenge your understanding of what you believe. Then it dawns on you that you don’t have all the answers, and that you can only begin to develop a greater understanding by continuing on that journey – by learning more.
At the time my journey began, Jamaica was just beginning to throw of the vestiges of colonialism, European powers were still waging war in Africa, and civil rights were still high on the agenda in the US. It was a world where it was not easy to be positive about being black. Yet, I began my sojourn with the unshakeable belief that ultimately, colour had nothing to do with one’s predicament or race – it was all about history, circumstance, and time.
Thus, I was a Christian living in Jamaica simply because Europeans needed slaves in the New World, and they had thought that converting us to Christianity was a good way off keeping our minds away from rebellion.
Moreover, I understood that initially, racism was merely a ploy to justify subjugation and exploitation – the fact that the stigma of it has lasted long afterwards is an unpleasant historical by-product of the original crime.
As I have continued on my journey, the most important lesson I learned was not about me, but about others – other peoples, other religions, other races, other nationalities. I realised that everyone else in the world was who they were and what they were not because of any innate feature of their being or race, but because of their history, their experience, and their circumstance.
I understood that everyone else was just like me, subject to the exactly the same foibles, weaknesses, and general trials of life. Once I had appreciated that, I found it truly liberating.
This revelation allowed me to look beyond race, religion, nationality, and all those readily accessible identifiers, and develop a belief in a common humanity – one that makes me wary of ascribing inherently negative attributes to other peoples, except that they can be explained by history, by experience, and by circumstance.
Unfortunately, I sense that much of the world is still so ensnared by those labels and readily accessible identifiers, that clear judgement on any issue, especially ones relating to nationality, race, religion, and ethnicity, is nigh impossible – even when ones own interest is threatened.
Consequently, people are constantly searching and seeking out the enemy outside, when invariably the true enemy lies within – and more often than not is far more dangerous.
Thus, we have the sceptre of Robert Mugabe, once a great black African freedom fighter, who liberated his people from white minority rule, now inflicting far more pain and destruction on those same people than whites ever did – or would have ever been allowed to.
What is worse, there appears to be no organised resistance to his reign of terror from the neighbouring countries. That was not the case in the Apartheid era when people talked about the frontline states – countries such as Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique that spearheaded the international opposition to the regimes in Pretoria and Salisbury (now Harare).
However, no one set of people or race has a monopoly on the enemy within.
Arabs reserve their greatest venom and hatred for an Israeli regime that oppresses Palestinians. Yet, in Iraq, we have Arabs inflicting levels of destruction on other Arabs that are well beyond what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.
We have Arab Muslims inflicting genocide on African Muslims in Darfur, even as Arabs speak of the evils of Israel and the US.
Each year in the US, there is an average of 15,000 murders. That is the equivalent of five 9/11s every single year. There are also 95,000 rapes, 400,000 robberies, and 850,000 cases of aggravated assault.
Thus, one may quite correctly ask, who should Americans be more afraid of – Al Qaeda or their fellow citizens? Rather than spending $300 billion making Iraq a worse place, shouldn’t the Bush Administration have spent that money making America a better place?
Western are countries using all the weapons they can muster to fight the war on drugs in places such as Afghanistan and Colombia. Yet, if they were truly honest with themselves, they would realise that the real problem is the demand at home not the production abroad. It is the enemy within which is causing the problem, not the presumed enemy without. Without the huge western appetite for drugs, there would be no international drugs trade.
The enemy within is always more dangerous, more harmful, and more pervasive. Sadly, it is the enemy we are least likely to confront. Thus, it will continue to undermine and eat away at everyone and everything around it.
Jonathan Ledwidge is the author of the book A Mannequin for President.
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