Zimbabwe became an independent country on 18 April 1980. The country it became independent from was Britain. Prince Charles, later to be crowned King Charles III, flew in to sign the documents. Until that moment, it was still the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. The funny thing is that the colony of Southern Rhodesia hadn’t actually existed for almost 15 years. The British had specially recreated it as a colony under the Lancaster House Agreement in December 1979 with the sole purpose of granting it independence as Zimbabwe five months later.
During the 15-year hiatus from British rule, it had been an independent country called Rhodesia which the British had refused to recognize. Despite its many faults, Rhodesia had not been a dictatorship, had not been a recipient of foreign aid, and its people had not starved — all rare achievements in Africa and ones that have eluded Zimbabwe for the entirety of its existence.
Rhodesia had suffered from high unemployment and a constant shortage of homes, schools, and hospitals, ills that had repeatedly been laid at the feet of its white government. There were of course many other reasons to argue that the government of an African country should have been black, but blame for material and developmental shortfalls had been continuously presented as a conclusive argument that a black government should replace it. The logic of why a black government would necessarily do better in these endeavors was never explained.
And the issue was not simply one of having a government that happened to be comprised of black men. White voters in 1978 had themselves ushered in what became the country’s first black government. The issue was to have a black government that did not attempt to govern in the model of the white governments that came before it. The Muzorewa government, like all Rhodesian governments, attempted to keep the streets free of garbage and abhorred illegal construction, even if this meant crowded living spaces. They continued to promote officers and civil servants based on merit, which meant most of them continued to be white. They conducted peaceful election campaigns. They also abided by court rulings.
That is the country that had existed prior to 1980. It was the continuation of the transition from white to black rule that had begun in 1961 when white voters had first approved a new constitution expanding the franchise. The British had it in their power to allow this transition to continue, particularly in the years 1978-9, but this is not what Britain wanted. The return to colony status and the creation of Zimbabwe in 1980 meant an abrupt end to everything that came before. It was the end of meritocracy and the rule of law and the beginning of one-party rule, nepotism, sprawling shantytowns, arbitrary violence, and food insecurity.
As a newly created country suddenly breathed into existence by Prince Charles, Zimbabwe seemed to have won the lottery of newly created countries. Its economy was intact and its institutions functioned. The end of the war and of international sanctions lifted everyone’s spirits and filled hearts with hope for the future. Good will abounded. For a brief moment, so far as anyone was paying attention, the entire world was on Zimbabwe’s side. Bob Marley, then at the height of his popularity, wrote a song about Zimbabwe and arrived in country around the same time as Prince Charles to perform it.
Any white people who truly had a problem with black rule had already left. As it was, two thirds of the white population stayed. They wanted to prove that their intentions had been honorable all along and that they belonged in Africa. Clem Tholet, an advertising man who doubled as a pop singer and who was also Ian Smith’s son-in-law, released an album titled Two Sides to Every Story that embraced the new era. It even contained a tune called Zambezi Zimbabwe sung in a noticeably African accent. It was a far cry from Rhodesians Never Die, his defiant patriotic hit single recorded less than a decade earlier.
Almost immediately, white people were furloughed from the police, army, and civil service. Small numbers of whites remained for just enough time to train their black replacements. They accepted this as their lot in their new country. What disgusted them was not that they were being replaced by blacks, but that their promising black trainees were being passed over for promotion in favor of mediocrities and incompetents with ZANU-PF connections.
But no matter, they thought, whites could still contribute to the national effort by excelling in the private sector. But in addition to the erosion of property rights and the rule of law that make free enterprise possible, Zimbabwe was also plagued with the idea that the reason black people are poor is because the whites stole all the resources, and in particular the land. As black poverty continued to increase in the 1990s, the government launched a series of piecemeal “land reform” schemes. Ian Smith writes of this period:
People who wished to have the privilege of owning a piece of land, but had no farming experience or training, could within one year destroy natural resources which would take a hundred years or more to replenish.
Zimbabwe was soon following the African template of using massive amounts of foreign aid to make poor people ever poorer. James Peron summed up the era in the Foundation for Economic Education on August 1, 2001:
Since moving to black-majority rule in 1980 Zimbabwe has regularly received financial aid to promote “land reform.” For 20 years the government used these funds to buy up land, which when “reformed” typically ended up in the hands of the ruling party’s elite. Land that was actually redistributed was turned into communal farms and given to peasants who didn’t have the know-how to run them. Many of the farms were pillaged for any saleable items and then deserted. About one-fourth of the communal farms are so unproductive that they require food aid just to prevent the farmers themselves from starving.
The government’s response to these failures was the wholesale takeover of the remaining white-owned farms during the first decade of the 21st century. Nicholas Kristof reports on the aftermath of the farm takeovers in The New York Times on April 7, 2010:
In a week of surreptitious reporting here (committing journalism can be a criminal offense in Zimbabwe), ordinary people said time and again that life had been better under the old, racist, white regime of what was then called Rhodesia.
“When the country changed from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, we were very excited,” one man, Kizita, told me in a village of mud-walled huts near this town in western Zimbabwe. “But we didn’t realize the ones we chased away were better and the ones we put in power would oppress us.”
“It would have been better if whites had continued to rule because the money would have continued to come,” added a neighbor, a 58-year-old farmer named Isaac. “It was better under Rhodesia. Then we could get jobs. Things were cheaper in stores. Now we have no money, no food.”
Over and over, I cringed as I heard Africans wax nostalgic about a nasty, oppressive regime run by a tiny white elite. Black Zimbabweans responded that at least that regime was more competent than today’s nasty, oppressive regime run by the tiny black elite that surrounds Mr. Mugabe.
A Times colleague, Barry Bearak, was jailed here in 2008 for reporting, so I used a fresh passport to enter the country as a tourist. Partly for my own safety, I avoided interviewing people with ties to the government, so I can’t be sure that my glimpse of the public mood was representative.
People I talked to were terrified for their personal safety if quoted — much more scared than in the past. That’s why I’m being vague about locations and agreed to omit full names.
But what is clear is that Zimbabwe has come very far downhill over the last few decades (although it has risen a bit since its trough two years ago). An impressive health and education system is in tatters, and life expectancy has tumbled from about 60 years in 1990 to somewhere between 36 and 44, depending on which statistics you believe.
Recall that in its heydey, Rhodesia was at war and under international sanctions, while in its current state of destitution, Zimbabwe is at peace and is a perineal recipient of international aid.
This then is that future the British had been holding out for. For twenty years (early 1960s to late 1970s) they refused to acknowledge any of the changes implemented by successive Rhodesian governments. They insisted on the installation of authoritarian one-party rule that used pan-Africanist rhetoric to mask cronyism and incompetence.
Nor were any of the developments in Zimbabwe since 1980 a surprise. This was the same trajectory Britain had already seen all its other colonies follow after they had been granted independence twenty years earlier.
This same all-too-familiar pattern now continues to spiral across Africa and the rest of the developing world, under the close supervision of a spiraling constellation of international organizations and the western governments who finance them, the collective successors to what was once the British Empire.
Edward Ring writes of Somalia in American Greatness on February 8, 2023 in terms that could well describe many other countries that have been taken down this same road:
...the primary cause of Somalia’s current difficulties is a population that has grown beyond the capacity of a primitive agricultural economy to sustain. In 1950, Somalia’s population was only 2.2 million. By 1983, 40 years ago, it had nearly tripled to 6.1 million. Without investment in infrastructure and adoption of modern agriculture, Somalia was already overpopulated...
Today Somalia has a population of 18.1 million, triple the number of people living there in 1983. There is no end in sight... Their population is increasing at a rate of more than 3 percent per year. This means their population will double to 36 million people by 2045, just 22 years from now.
If Somalia were possessed of a vibrant and growing economy, modern infrastructure, and a robust agricultural sector, one might applaud their fecundity. After all, prosperity, as we have seen throughout the world, tends to correlate almost perfectly with population decline. But nothing of the sort has happened in Somalia. It is a failed state, utterly dependent on foreign aid.
Ever since African nations gained independence in the 1960s, the policies of mostly Western nations have centered around shoveling billions of dollars in food aid and medical aid, with the utterly unsustainable result being exploding populations in societies that don’t evolve and advance internally because they don’t have to...
Even now, Somalia could produce all the food it needs internally and withstand droughts. The nation has two rivers running out of the highlands of Ethiopia that could irrigate vast areas of fertile land in Somalia’s southwest...
In the same article, Ring touches on another new twist the successors to empire have cooked up to keep poor countries impoverished: opposition to development of fossil fuels:
Somalia also has abundant oil and gas reserves. They could drill and refine oil and gas to fuel their growing industrial and transportation sector, generate electricity, produce fertilizer, and have plenty left over to export.
If there is hope for Africa, it will have to begin from opposition to this final insult imposed from abroad to keep them poor and oppressed forever. As Fortune Charumbira, a Zimbabwean Chief and president of the Pan-African Parliament in 2022 put it: “So when you say stop to your fossil fuel, what’s the alternative?”
Cameroonian lawyer N.J. Ayuk writes on his LinkedIn page in 2022:
Blame the clever intelligentsia, foreign aid, handout and African elites/politicians for energy poverty. NOT Oil and Gas companies. Business pay their taxes and royalties. They don’t control governments.
Africans don’t hate Oil and Gas companies. We love Oil and today we love gas even more because we know gas will give us a chance to industrialize. No country has ever been developed by fancy wind and green hydrogen. Africans see Oil and Gas as a path to success and a solution to their problems. The demonization of oil and gas companies will not work.
The clever intelligentsia from wealthy countries who protest the work we do and show up in every event I get invited to are wrong. I will never agree that Oil and Gas is bad for #Africa. Foreign Aid and Handouts and Charity are bad. We are fools to sign on to radical climate policies that will impoverish the next generation because of spare change from aid Organisations.
Blame me if you want, we need to demand more of ourselves as Africans. Personal responsibility. The idea that we will develop Africa with handouts from the wealthy countries is preposterous and sickening. You cannot take people of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization -- including work, free markets, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, fossil fuels, financial literacy and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain -- without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
The legacy of colonization argument by the African Elites and western elites is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior of the African Elites/Politicos and the political class that are more willing to sell out the poor for more foreign aid and their membership in the fancy clubs in London. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times that has created a fixation on and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.
If Africans can succeed in liberating themselves from the yolk of climate ideology, they could perhaps become leaders of the world, and an example to the rest of us.