/ 14 December 2001

Zimbabwe’s world first: teaching whites to share

Your coverage of Zimbabwean issues smacks of malice. A precedent is being set in Zimbabwe. Nowhere in the world has a white man been disposessed of his “property” like what is happening in Zimbabwe right now without compensation. After getting his stash on the back of initially slavery then colonialism and now neocolonialism, the white man is getting a taste of his own medicine and apparently the pill is too bitter to swallow. The Durban anti-racism meeting this year saw the white man refusing to own up to his terrorist past; refusing to compensate the victims of years of subjugation by the white man. The white man has literally gotten away with it. But not in Zimbabwe. We are going to show that whoever was robbed of his things by the white man can also reclaim it without compensation. Black South Africans had better take a leaf out of President Robert Mugabe’s resolve to redress glaring imbalances of the past. They should not be fooled by the media hype of a “rainbow” nation. That description is only being used to hoodwink them into thinking that apartheid is dead and buried. The white man must learn to share, otherwise the future, especially in Southern Africa, is really bleak. Misheck Khosa

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