Robert Mugabe in a much Warmer Place

Robert Mugabe is dead. Finally:

Mr Mugabe had been receiving treatment in a hospital in Singapore since April. He was ousted in a military coup in 2017 after 37 years in power.

The former president was praised for broadening access to health and education for the black majority.

But later years were marked by violent repression of his political opponents and Zimbabwe's economic ruin.

That commie bastard took a perfectly good country, Rhodesia, and wrecked it, comprehensively. Rhodesia was a net exporter of wheat. Now Zimbabwe starves. 

The Rhodesian Bush War is an interesting little conflict in which a quarter of a million whites held off 6,000,000 blacks for 15 years. The Rhodies never lost a battle but lacked a political program to counter Mugabe's Afro-Marxism. The insurgency made life unbearable for the whites, who by the mid 70's were leaving at a rate of a thousand a month. They didn't get much help from the South Africans, either. Pretoria preferred to cut a deal with a friendly black government.

The whites that remained handed over power in 1980 and...not much happened until 2000, when Mugabe decided the white farms were epicenters of black resistance and seized them.

And so Rhodesia became another rich African colony wrecked by Africans. Just like Congo...Ghana...Nigeria...South Africa...

On African Crap Holes

So it looks like they've finally run Mugabe aground. Zimbabwe is a crap-hole of course but it didn't have to be.

At one point the country was Africa's breadbasket.

Now its just a basket case.

Here's a pic of some Zimbabwe money a friend sent me:

What's with the rocks?

Zimbabwe's fall is an old story for Africa, one of Afro-nationalist politics which don't work any better in Africa than they do in Detroit, tribalism, and brazen Kleptocracy that would shame the most corrupt NAACP backed Chicago Alderman.

The story is the same in Nigeria, Congo, Uganda all three of which produced first rate psychotic dictators. Back in our professorial days we used to make the students write up African dictators.  Choose your Psychopath we called the assignment. The department asked if we could knock it off, since the assignment reinforced the stereotype of Africans not being able to govern. 'How can it be a stereotype if its true?' I asked. Hadn't these people ever scene the Gieco Caveman ads? Were we to shift the assignment to say, good African leaders we just don't know who the students would pick. Mandela? Haile Salaise? Hell, Nyerere and Nkruma are merely the least worst dictators, being contend to wreck the economies of Tanzania and Ghana without feeding their citizens to the crocodiles. 

[Well bully for them, Clap...Clap...Clap...-Ed].

Anyway, if the reader is interested in how and why Africa sucks we suggest Martin Meredith's excellent The Face of Africa.  Reading it will be something of a test. If this book doesn't kill your faith in humanity nothing will. It's all there, from the civil war that broke out three days after independence from Belgium to We are the World.

As for Zimbabwe, the nation was the scene of a counterinsurgency waged by Ian Smith's white minority government. They won every last battle but failed to win the war because they had no political program for blacks who might not have been interested in the guerrilla's Marxism. The white's lost the peace too. Of course most of the whites bugged out to all points of the empire. The blacks were stuck. For the Rhodesian Bush War, we've read and strongly recommend Moorecraft's work below.

Back in Congo, future psychotic Mobuto Sese Seko hired a mercenary named Mad Mike Hoare to clean things up. Read his memoir, it's great, like the Christopher Walken movie Dogs of War. Actually, Dogs of War is based on Mad Mike Hoare and Frederick Forsythe's history of the Nigerian Civil War.

Coup in Zimbabwe

Most Americans reading this are like, 'You mean like a mini-cooper, the car?' and 'Where's Zimbabwe, is that the new Indian restaurant?'

Zimbabwe is just another African crap-hole. These have been a part of the news landscape for our entire life: Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan....

Zimbabwe is run by a cookie cutter African psychopath, Robert Mugabe who has ruled since 1980 and is now 93 years old. 

Forty years ago Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia and run by an apartheid style regime led by Ian Smith. The country had six and a half million people, a quarter of a million of them white. When Rhodesia declared Independence from Britain in 1965 there began a fifteen year insurgency notable for the fact that the Rhodies never lost a battle but ended up packing it in because they didn't have a political program to accompany their military victories.

That's Counterinsurgency-101 guys.

Mugabe actually left the white farms alone until 2000. These farms became a kind of political oasis where thousands upon thousands of blacks worked under white leadership. Understanding that these farms were a threat to his power, in 2000 Mugabe began a pogrom against them. Once the breadbasket of Africa, Zimbabwe is now a humanitarian basket case.

Hence we see what happens when the African is left to his own devices.

Mr. we could a man like Ian Smith again