The headline is laughable: "why a Robert Mugabe victory would be good for Zimbabwe." Roy pretends that the elections are something other than a rigged farce. Under Mugabe Zimbabwe has become the third most poorest country in the Africa, worse than Malawi or Togo, the country has a lower Human Development Index than Sudan, Yemen or Haiti.
Roy argues that the democratic world cannot "comprehend" Mugabe's "character" apparently we're all just jealous. Bobby "is more than just a politician, he leads a cause, or as his militant supporters would say, he has become the cause itself...A few days ago he told his supporters political independence was inadequate if it did not yield economic freedom." The guardian endorses the ravings of Mugabe and his thugs over the testimony of is victims. Roy admits that "it is fashionable to charge Mugabe with destroying Zimbabwe in its prime, little regard is given to the fact that the average African country has been granted nominal political independence amid economic subservience." Under Mugabe poverty increased and talk of independence is code for oppression by native dictators instead of White rulers.
Agyemang fantasizes that Bobby's "brand of post-colonial politics is steeped in the economic self-empowerment of the Zimbabweans." Roy's argument is marrow chillingly false, far from "independence" and "economic self-empowerment" Mugabe has brought slavery to Zimbabwe. The country's diamond industry depends on adult and child slave labor. The Guardian praises a man who has turned a country into "a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation." According to human rights groups "slavery has been 'legalised'" under Mugabe which has to lead to at least 10,000 deaths, an obvious undercount.
Roy and other warped characters justify Mugabe's tyranny with talk of 'colonialism' 'imperialism' and so on. As a state grows more oppressive in the present its defenders will talk more and more about crimes in the past. African dictators have either replicated conditions of colonial regimes or exceeded empires in cruelty. Mugabe's forced labor mirrors slavery in the French Congo, no one ever experienced horrors comparable to Bobby's regime in British Nigeria or French Tunisia.
Apologists for African dictators use arguments that echo colonial ideology. Like advocates for colonialism Roy depicts Zimbabweans as innocent beings without agency in need a strong guiding hand. Cultural relativist argument amount to the concept that non-westerners do not have the same human rights as westerners, which is nearly identical to the anti-universalism that justified colonial atrocities.
Roy mocks descriptions of Mugabe as "a terrorist, a Marxist ideologue, now a bloodthirsty tyrant" as "stereotypes" and "lore." Next he rambles about Bobby's "seven earned degrees spanning disciplines" he stops just short of staying that Mugabe is a master of art, literation and racquetball. The guardian would prefer for everyone to think that Mugabe is an erudite while ignoring the genocide that he carried with the help of North Korea.
The word Gukurahundi is a word that means "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains" and came to describe Mugabe's war of extermination against the Ndebele people. The DPRK trained Fifth Brigade committed "torture, rape and the purging of whole villages. Casualties were estimated in the hundreds of thousands..." Mugabe's victims, like all people, had educational aspirations, I wonder what they would have achieved if they had been allowed to live free lives.
Agyemang glosses over "the consequences (of land reform) have been there for all to see: an economic meltdown; a descent from breadbasket to a basket case; a rollback in civil liberties. The list of charges against him is endless." He complains of "sanctions which the western world had unleashed on Zimbabwe, ostensibly for imperiling human rights, many say as punishment for taking back the land, were biting his people as never before." The tactic of blaming conditions in a dictatorship on sanctions is widespread and false, Roy ignores Mugabe's use of slavery but condemns tepid western responses as pure evil.
There are no shades of gray when it comes to people like Mugabe you are either with the victimizer or the victims and Agyemang makes it obvious where he stands. He explains why he made "the film Mugabe: Villain or Hero?, where I spent three years in Zimbabwe gaining rare access to the Zimbabwean leader." Roy cannot even acknowledge slavery or extermination campaigns but by gawd he can plug his camcorder project. He deserves credit for not begging for kickstarter dollars; depravity does have its limits.
Ageymang has the self parodying gall to whine that Morgan Tsvangirai was a "flawed candidate" after lauding a man guilty of mass murder and slavery. Roy ends by arguing that Zimbabwean youth "are finding favour with Mugabe's fiery rhetoric, already founded in the land reform programme whose benefits are beginning to show." He does not provide evidence for either claim meaning that the quote should be dismissed.
Post-colonial extremism reminds me of Axis Japanese ideology. Both hold that the west is evil and responsible for all ills while the non-west is a victim that cannot do any wrong. Both define liberation as oppression and enslavement of the native by someone who shares his skin pigment. The extremism of the 60s and 70s have produced nothing but misery which does not stop sheltered enfeebled manchildren trying to keep fantasies of native utopias and masturbatory militarist 'resistance' alive.
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