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Zimbabwe...


Boerseun

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There is no known cure. The only rational response is to enforce quarantine. And wait.

Well on that happy note.... :naughty:

I must agree about the "tribal mentality" perspective though.

I didn't realize this was an old thread and just read the first post, and then started typing.

Oh well, I'll go ahead and post this anyway....

===

 

 

Below is one hour of ...recalling various stuff... writing while watching Craig Ferguson.

===

ZIMBABWE:

 

The horrors of destitution ...the violence of desperation....

 

Is inflation still 32 million percent with empty shelves in the stores? ...or was it billion percent?

 

I don't know what Mugabe has done specifically, but it's like a tribal rivalry thing isn't it? ...and it's devolved into an extreme of the "haves" and the "have-nots." Wasn't this the place where he was "clearing out" the slums on the edge of the cities--sort of outlawing them--and literally bulldozing peoples homes (shanty/scrap walls) and chasing them out into the countryside with whatever they could carry despite their injuries?

 

I know lots of fleeing folks become refugees (with no rights) in South Africa, if they survive the robbery and rape on the way across the border. Lots of folks cross the border just to get commodities to sell back in Zimbabwe.

 

Zimbabwe, was Rhodesia, borders S. Africa on Indian Ocean coast of Africa ...South of the southern Rift Vally countries and Tanzania ...and the Great Lakes.

[That'll be fun to check on a map later.... I confess I've been looking at an atlas lately, but focusing on Nigeria and Ethiopia]

 

Doesn't that name, Zimbabwe, mean "Stone House" or "houses of stone" ...since the pre-contact cultures, that were wiped out by disease after European first contact (13-1400?), built great stone cities?

 

I usually catch part of DemocracyNow! on PBS (praise be to PBS...).

The last I heard there were gangs of teens going around and attacking the few remaining anglo land owners and burning/destroying their property to drive them out. Locals move in to squat on the land, but nobody is farming at anything above a subsistence level.

 

No wonder they had an epidemic last year(?) of cholera(?). I wonder if that is still going on....

 

But the vast arable lands of Zimbabwe are sitting idle. They used to be intensively managed (I think) and now sit naked and barren--no ground cover, and probably virtually exhausted and sterilized by chemicals--I wonder if they will have some dust bowl problems as their Spring/Summer proceeds. Biochar would help reduce dust-bowl problems....

 

I was recently thinking....

This might be a good place to introduce subsistence biochar use--making your own charcoal out of local detritus, instead of buying/making regional, big-tree charcoal--to at least make the squatter's lives a bit healthier and less tenuous ...and help the land and planet in general.

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  • 2 months later...

I think the best thing the world can do for places like Zimbabwe is to liberalize immigration policies and to allow (and perhaps encourage) NGOs to work within the constraints unique to each individual situation. There is neither a successful historical precedent nor a demonstrated rationale to expect cookie cutter solutions to all of the worlds despotic regimes to accomplish anything more than our horrible track record of the past few centuries in Africa, Central and Southern America, and Southern Asia.

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Yeah, well.

 

The chief garners as much power as possible for himself, uses parliament as a rubber stamp, cheats in the elections using violence and ballot-stuffing and corrupt officials to ensure landslide victories each and every time - in order to stay in power. He is the Strong Man, and the people will fear him and he will suck the very last penny from their pockets because they are only so many cattle, and said herd of cattle is the Strong Man's personal property to do with as he wishes.

 

That is the story of Africa, and it has been the story of Africa since long before Western Civilization came to these sad shores. And it will be the story long after Western Civilization left.

 

There is no way that any of Africa's Strong Men will relinquish power to any form of continental-wide "Union". African culture simply does not allow for the Strong Man to give up any power. It's a sign of personal weakness. African culture is broken, and need to be fixed before anything good will come from this godforsaken place. Take Mugabe as a case in point. He is not an individual idiot on a power-trip, he is the embodiment of African culture, which will push a Strong Man forward, and that Strong Man can pretty much do to them as he pleases - and they will keep voting for the sod because "leader" in African cultural terms equates to "father" - and you have a father for life. You can't vote your father out to replace him with a better father. This amusing piece of political logic has actually been explained to me by a Zimbabwean journalist I've met over the holidays - and is also the reason this entire continent will come to naught.

 

African culture is malignant. And its killing this continent.

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This is the sort of crisis that I was speaking about in the world government thread, and the sort of thing a fully empowered "African Union" or even "World Union" would hopefully prevent.

 

Did you see my thread on Ugandan witch doctors and human sacrifice :eek_big:or know about the subject as it falls in with all this?

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I expect that education will have a lot to do with African culture changing over the next generation. As various global issues impact on Africa they'll be forced to solve their own problems. I for one am hoping the AU can lead Africa into a more modern political system that genuinely tracks the proclivities of its leaders and holds them to account through real elections.

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I expect that education will have a lot to do with African culture changing over the next generation. As various global issues impact on Africa they'll be forced to solve their own problems. I for one am hoping the AU can lead Africa into a more modern political system that genuinely tracks the proclivities of its leaders and holds them to account through real elections.

 

As they say 'Educate a man and you educate a person - educate a woman and you educate a nation (i.e. the next generation)'

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The AU is an old boys' club, the members of which jet in periodically to party, pat one another on the back, whinge about the West's reluctance to pour more money into their bottomless begging bowls, and discuss how to further squeeze the last drops from their doomed economies and starving subjects to support their own lavish lifestyles.

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