Recently there were news reports of black people of Zimbabwe (formerly known as Rhodesia) robbing land belonging to white people. White people who represent 1% of the population occupies 50% of arable land. The British government announced plans to help evacuate 50,000 people threatened by the action of the blacks. According to yesterday's report, the British government 'feels responsible for those white people given the history linkage'.
I took a look at website of Slate magazine and found this historical background. A review commentary by contributor to Slate on a film made by BBC on Rhodes:
Rhodes' story is an inherently implausible one: a sickly, asthmatic vicar's son from Bishop's Stortford, England, heads to South Africa for the sake of his health and ends up the richest man in the Western world and the colonizer of a vast tract of Africa. Rhodes had three simultaneous careers in his 49 years--diamond magnate, politician, and imperialist. His big idea was to "save Africa from itself." Only after his death, in 1902, did the dizzying extent of his imperial fantasy become apparent. In his will, he left a fortune for the establishment of a "secret society" modeled on the Jesuits, with the aim of extending British rule throughout the world.
He was one of few men in history, apart from Simón Bolívar, who managed to get a sizable mainland country named after himself--two countries, actually, Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Only one person topped that, the Italian-born explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who claimed an entire continent. Of course, Northern Rhodesia became Zambia in 1964. And when "Southern Rhodesia" was jettisoned for "Zimbabwe" in 1980
His most enduring legacy in the post-apartheid world is the De Beers cartel, which he set up to manipulate the world diamond market.
But somehow this shabbily dressed buffoon, with his falsetto giggle; this fidgeting, bumbling public speaker who was once described by a senior Colonial Office mandarin as "grotesque, impulsive, school-boyish, humorous and almost clownish - not to be regarded as a serious person" rose to become a business colossus and the prime minister of the Cape Colony, and ran rings around the British government. Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, eventually granted Rhodes his royal charter to occupy the north. "Take all you can--and ask afterwards," was his typically wimpish advice, as Rhodes' pioneer column trekked into the interior. So, like much of British imperialism, the conquest of Rhodesia was a private-sector colonization, costing the British taxpayer nothing, at least initially.
All that remained in the way of Rhodes' imperial vision of controlling the African interior was "one naked old savage," as Rhodes called King Lobengula. The story of how the ruler of the Matabele, a tribe that lives in what is now southern Zimbabwe, was cheated of his lands is truly a sad one, and one of the most affecting parts of the miniseries. A pair of binoculars here, a few hundred Martini-Henry rifles there failed to do the trick. So Dr. Jameson, Rhodes' sidekick (played by Neil Pearson), treats Lobengula for his gout by turning him into a trembling morphine junkie, prepared to sign anything put in front of him for his next fix. As Rhodes announces to his shareholders in London that shares in the Charter Company have risen 1,500 percent, Lobengula, defeated, his people reduced to servitude, kills himself.
The film leaves the impression, too, that had it not been for Rhodes' invasion of Mashonaland and Matabeleland, they would somehow have been spared the terrible subjugation of colonization. Hardly: Paul Kruger and the Transvaal Boers were already eyeing the territory north of South Africa avariciously, as a haven to which their trekkers could escape from British domination. And the Belgians, Portuguese, and Germans were also scrambling for African territories.
Rhodes and the white pioneers in southern Africa did behave despicably by today's standards, but no worse than the white settlers in North America, South America, and Australia; and in some senses better, considering that the genocide of natives in Africa was less complete. For all the former African colonies are now ruled by indigenous peoples, unlike the Americas and the Antipodes, most of whose aboriginal natives were all but exterminated.
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