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A Brutal Toll
Freeth says he has every intention of returning to his farm. "I'm hanging in there," he said. "We hung in there the last eight years and we don't know what the future brings, but we're going to hang in there no matter what it brings." In his open letter before the election, he quoted another white farmer who was evicted after his home was destroyed: "'The first thing that I shall do when I am back on the farm is start digging foundations again.' And so, upon the ruins perhaps, that is the way it will have to be. But we pray the rebuilding can take place before everything is destroyed."
Mike Campbell too had written an open letter during the election, complaining that election observers were not coming out after dark, when most of the violence and intimidation took place. "We ask you to pray and send brave people and peace keepers to stop the atrocities before they get even worse," he wrote. "Maybe I write this in vain; but I write this crying."
© 2008
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Member Comments
Posted By: pbpace @ 07/11/2008 5:00:07 PM
Comment: The Indian Wars, or genocide, as you call it, was partly a black/white collaborative effort. For instance, what of the role of the much romanticized "buffalo soldiers"? They played an especially integral part in the Apache subjugation. Their memory is not revered by the aboriginal's descendents.
http://www.captainbuffalo.com/pdf/onthetrail2.pdf
Posted By: pbpace @ 07/11/2008 3:52:44 PM
Comment: I agree with the observations about Britain's "divide and conquer" governance strategy. In fact, the British employed this tactic even more successfully/conivingly in India with the Hindus and Muslims. Despite this fact, post-independence India is a democratic regional power - one the world's great economic dynamos, with a nuclear arsenal to boot.
Colonialism is but one small factor. I would submit that a bigger obstacle for sub-Saharan Africa development is overcoming the damage done by recent despotic rules - many of them Marxist in orientation (e,g., Mozambique, Angola, Zimb. etc). It would be hard to characterize these rulers as "stooges". In reality these tyrants have often made the colonialists look desireable by comparison http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.html
In summation I agree that many lingering problem result from this era. Yes, Europeans were NOT as "bad as they could have been" and NO they deserve zero credit for lofty values. That's no insinuation...just fact.
Posted By: pbpace @ 07/11/2008 3:07:57 PM
Comment: It would APPEAR joe_mama has much knowledge yes. I question the veracity of many of the claims, however. We all need to be more aware of this issue so we don't have so-called "experts" dictacting the "facts" to us. We should make our own independent judgements based on our collective intellects and wide varierty of sources.
Much of this appears to be speculative (e.g., the first university being established at Timbukto and the claim about African slave holders not beating their slaves (earlier post)).