Apartheid

land that had been the Empire of Zimbabwe during the European Middle Ages. In less than
one hundred years, the Whites caused havoc in the country. It still has not recovered.
Old Zimbabwe had dwarfed all contemporary European states in both size and
importance at that time. It had become powerful and wealthy due to gold and ivory exports,
which were mostly traded across the Indian Ocean. Arab traders, Indians and even the
Chinese had sent ships to trade directly with Zimbabwe prior to the Portuguese destruction of
the extensive Indian Ocean trade networks in the 16 th century, and their replacement by a
eurocentric one.
Today, Zimbabwe has an ethnic Shona majority, an Ndbele minority, as well as other
smaller minorities, including Whites, who are disproportionately wealthy, as elsewhere in the
world. The historical background is complicated. The indigenous South African 19 th -century
Zulu Wars were prompted by white invasions of the South African Cape regions and
northwards, and by white European and (illegal and covert) US American slave raids in what
is today Mozambique, as well as the Afrikaner invasions of the lands that would become
Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Zulu Wars led to further turmoil in the
Munhumatapa state, which covered almost all of present-day Zimbabwe, when the Ndebele
people migrated northwards, partly out of what is today South Africa, and subjugated the
Shona, who had inhabited Zimbabwe since ancient times.
Rhodes, an English diamond magnate who came to economic and political power in
South Africa, then turned on the former Zimbabwe in search of gold, and also in order to
counteract and pre-empt German expansionism on the colonialized continent. The new British
colony was named after its creator, and later split into Northern Rhodesia, which was to
become Zambia, and Southern Rhodesia, which is now, again, known as Zimbabwe. Only a
little gold was found in Rhodesia by the British (it seems that most of it was mined during
ancient Zimbabwean times), and they instead started to settle on the land and to use it for
commercial farming above all, but also for mining other minerals, a certain amount of
industrialization, and for hunting, fun, and games, as well as for almost whatever else the
oppressors wished to use the land.
As in South Africa, Rhodesia’s neighbor in the south, the Whites seized most of the
arable land, much of the cattle, and forced, directly and indirectly, many or most of the
indigenous to become sharecroppers, labor tenants or migrant miners. They also demanded
colonial taxes as well as periodic unpaid labor from the indigenous. The cities and towns were
segregated ethnically, into White, Indian, Coloured and Black zones, just as in South Africa.
Only servants and ‘garden boys’ were allowed into the plush white areas, and they had to
carry passbooks with ethnic and professional identification, as well.
There was both resistance to the conquest and several subsequent uprisings against the
British, but none of them ultimately successful. As British decolonialization in Africa
gathered steam, the Southern Rhodesian Whites, who numbered around a quarter million at
the most, felt bold enough to declare independence from Britain in 1965, as ‘Rhodesia’. (Tens
of millions of white Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians never worked up such an
audacity.) An estimated six and a half million indigenous Africans in Rhodesia were now
facing even more severe human rights violations under an even more discriminatory system
than colonialism, i.e. even more similar to that of Rhodesia’s main remaining ally, South
Africa. After having cut their ties with Mother England, white Rhodesians faced a
corresponding, new situation. Yet, they had support not only from South Africa, but also from
the USA. Then, the liberation war erupted. It intensified as Mozambique gained independence
from Portuguese rule and joined on the side of the liberation forces in 1975 and was
concluded in 1979 with a negotiated settlement, as in South Africa in 1994. Zimbabwe
became an independent state again in 1980. Britain promised to compensate white settlers for
the land they had together stolen from the indigenous people, but the former colonial ruler has
so far to live up to its promise, as do many of the white settlers who challenged the 1979
peace agreement in courts in order for them to hold on to the land, thus violating the British-
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