EMAIL TO A KENYAN FRIEND!

My dear Peter,

I respect all of you here - and had decided that I wouldn't respond to any more postings on Zimbabwe: so that none would take offence at my views. But since you address me directly, I must, out of common courtesy, respond to you.

No one reading what I actually wrote, as opposed to what they think I wrote, would think I was either condemning the white race in general, or seeking to excuse Africa's many failings, by pointing fingers at any Western government. Peter, I feel for the people of Zimbabwe, just as much as you all do.

Just this morning, my son's mother, called me from London to say her aunt, a white Zimbabwean, had had to flee her home - and was now in Cape Town, South Africa, living with her son (a white South African national). Perhaps for some Africans, friendship with white people, is a status symbol.

Well, for me, it is not - for, there are many white people intertwined with my family tree. They are an everyday living part of my existence - and I do not regard them as exotic creatures, who are either inferior or superior to me. I simply see them as fellow humans who are my equals: and have done so since my childhood.

As for those who think that any foreign nation is here for the love of Africans, let me just say that the systems running nation-states across the globe, are not moral entities. By definition, they have no feelings: and are ruthless and amoral creatures - without any scruples whatsoever. Nations have permanent interests, Peter, not permanent friends.

Their real interests in Zimbabwe is the desire to lay their hands (dripping with the blood of countless innocents over the centuries) on the wealth of that unfortunate land - now under the jackboots of a monstrous and tyrannical African regime. Let me quote a few passages from declassified CIA and State Department documents, to buttress my point.

On the 15 of September, 1961, the then British High Commissioner to Ghana, Mr. A.W. Snelling, in a dispatch to the British secret services, wrote, inter alia: "His [Nkrumah's] knack of giving expression to the feelings of so many Africans, who are all the time rapidly becoming more politically conscious, is exasperating. ......We shall be better off without him."

And on March 12, 1966, in a memo to President Johnson, from Robert A. Komer, then the president's Acting Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, wrote, inter alia (source Johnson Library, National Security File, Memos to the President, Robert W. Komer, Vol. 21, 3/3/66--3/20/ 66. Confidential) : "The coup in Ghana is another example of a fortuitous windfall. Nkrumah was doing more to harm our interests than any other black African. In reaction to his strongly pro-Communist leanings, the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-Western. "

Nothing has changed, Peter. And in Ghana, even nine-year old Nkrumaists, will point out the cynical and contemptuous way, in which Komer dismisses the "pathetically pro-Western" military regime that overthrew Nkruamh on the 24th of February, 1966. It might interest you to know that the CIA paid those traitors to the black race, US$ 13 millions - and promised them more, if they succeeded in murdering Nkrumah!

They destroyed Ghana's economy then, too, in order to make that visionary pan-Africanist, unpopular in Ghana - and were it not for the effrontery of being called long-winded, I would go on to quote copiously from those CIA and State Department documents, to show you the systematic way they destroyed Ghana's economy, in order to make ordinary Ghanaians turn against Nkrumah - who by the way, was never a communist.

He was simply a non-aligned leader, who only sought to protect Africa's interests, as a matter of fact! I am an Nkrumaist and a pan-Africanist - we have seen it all here before, Peter: and we know how contemptuous they also regard today's stooges for neo-colonialism!

Just ponder over the fact that Mobuto, the very definition of a kleptocrat, and the epitome of a brutal African dictator, was kept in power for as long as he was, by those same nations sabre rattling today.

And if I may be permitted to ask you, Peter: do you not think it would be absurd for any one to suggest that I would call decent people like Andrius; Pamela; Benoit; Edward, as well as all those generous-spirited Westerners who are part of this conversation, racists? So I do hope that no one will misinterpret what I wrote.

Peter, what is going on in Zimbabwe is truly appalling - and I know the ends which decent human beings like you and the rest here, seek, in your concerns for the people of Zimbabwe. And they are also the same just and humane ends, which all the Westerners who are part of this conversation, also seek: freedom; a life of dignity; and the protection of the Zimbabwean nation-state, for all Zimbabweans, irrespective of race, tribe or their religious beliefs.

But make no mistake, the systems in place that underpin the Western nations have an agenda all their own. And to say that is not to point fingers and find excuses for the failure of the economic and political systems of many African nations, to provide a good quality of life for all their people. Never.

And if I may make a small point before I end, no Nkrumaist ever uses that fawning and outrageously servile phrase "colonial masters". In our view, the colonialists may have ruled Africa once upon a time, but they were never our masters. Period. I rest my case!

PS In thirty years hence, when C.I.A. and State Department documents, covering this tragic period in Zimbabwe's history, come to be released to the general public, it will really be interesting to know exactly what were their actual opinions, about today's stooges for neo-colonialism (contrasted with today's fine-sounding public platitudes, which we hear daily about the MDC leadeship, in the Western media! ).