Notes on Africa

I've read some newspaper stories on Africa which put that continent in a new light.

Take the example of Angola. There is still considerable poverty in that country. Even so, the economy is growing rapidly (thanks to its oil reserves) to the point that Portugal, the old colonial power, recently asked Angola for economic help. It is now wealthy Angolans who are buying up prime real estate in economically depressed Portugal.

A car dealership in Luanda, Angola

The daughter of the Angolan president has become Africa's first female billionaire.

And it is China which is now the overseas power most active in Angola. China has been described as the new colonial power in Africa, with an estimated 1,000,000 Chinese moving there:

There have also been riots in Zambia, Angola and Congo over the flood of Chinese immigrant workers. The Chinese do not use African labour where possible, saying black Africans are lazy and unskilled.

In Angola, the government has agreed that 70 per cent of tendered public works must go to Chinese firms, most of which do not employ Angolans.

As well as enticing hundreds of thousands to settle in Africa, they have even shipped Chinese prisoners to produce the goods cheaply.

In Kenya, for example, only ten textile factories are still producing, compared with 200 factories five years ago, as China undercuts locals in the production of 'African' souvenirs.

A Chinese overseer in Zambia

The Western countries do still give aid to African nations, but there has been controversy about such aid programmes when African nations are spending billions to develop space programmes:

The row over aid spending intensified yesterday when it emerged Britain is pumping more than a billion pounds into oil-rich Nigeria which has plans to put a man in space.

But taxpayers are also funding aid programmes in South Africa, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya – all of which have their own space agencies. Many are in their early stages, but include ambitious and expensive plans for satellites and even rockets.

Over the five years of this Government, the four nations will receive more than £1.5billion from British taxpayers.

I think it's worth being aware of these trends. There are some who have wanted to make Europeans believe that they are responsible for poverty in Africa. But there is now a very wealthy black elite in these nations: they are the ones who hold the power and the wealth. And if there is a colonial power it is now very clearly the Chinese rather than any Western country.

Farmers in court for growing crops

Via Lawrence Auster comes the latest news from Zimbabwe:

Ten white farmers appeared in court in Zimbabwe yesterday accused of growing crops on their land — in a country where millions of people will need food aid within the next few months ...

Since 2000, when the government began seizing white-owned farms, many of them violently, the agricultural sector has collapsed and the economy has gone into freefall, with inflation now at 6,600 per cent, the highest in the world.

The World Food Programme estimates that it will be feeding 4.1 million Zimbabweans, one third of the population, by the end of the year.

Now the Chegutu group is charged with violating the Consequential Provisions Act, which gave the few hundred remaining white farmers a final deadline of Sep 30 to leave their land and homes.

The farmers ... have already given two-thirds of their farms to the government for resettlement ... They pleaded not guilty and face up to two years in prison if convicted ...

Didymus Mutasa, the lands minister, has said that the few hundred remaining white farmers will be forced out, one way or another.

"The position is that food shortages or no food shortages, we are going ahead to remove the remaining whites," he said recently. "Too many blacks are still clamouring for land and we will resettle them on the remaining farms."

In fact many farms were given to members of the government and their cronies, and one minister has admitted that the new farmers have failed in their cultivation efforts.

Outside the court, the scruffy shops of Chegutu were empty of basic foods, and street vendors sold small, sour oranges.

They came from a once-prolific citrus farm in the district now devastated after it was seized by Bright Matonga, the deputy information minister, earlier this year.

So the situation in Zimbabwe is this: the last remaining whites are being driven from their farms, the land is being redistributed to government cronies, leaving a third of the population dependent on international charity.

Zimbabwe has descended to the depths in a single generation and South Africa, which is plagued now by violent crime, corruption and attacks on white farmers, isn't far behind.

The lesson is that you can't take your security, your prosperity or even your civilisation for granted. We don't live in the kind of world in which you can hand over power and expect to be treated justly.

Volunteers beware Cape Town?

What's it like to live in South Africa? Liz Cincotta went there to do volunteer work in 2002. She wrote a report on her experiences for yesterday's Age:

... inner city houses were enveloped by layers of security: barbed wire fences, window bars, alarm systems and guard dogs. Many people carried firearms or other weapons. Carjackings, home break-ins, rape and other violence was commonplace.

This became all too real one morning when I arrived at my office to find someone I knew bloodied and bruised. She had been pack-raped in her home the night before, her boyfriend shot as he intervened.

Several friends were held up at knife point. I was chased more than once, but got away each time. There were attempts to break into my house most weeks and sometimes I would go to sleep with the sound of gunshots nearby. I lived, day to day, waiting for my number to come up.

I struggled with two overwhelming emotions: shame, for being better off than most, and fear, for my physical well-being.

The crunch point came five months after I arrived. Tiija, a fellow volunteer and friend, was thrown from the window of a moving train. She was close to death, but woke from a coma three months later ...

I returned home seven months early ... I was an altered person when I landed in Melbourne ...

South Africa is no happy blueprint for the future.

Does this explain Fraser?

Malcolm Fraser was the Liberal Party Prime Minister of Australia who played a significant role in bringing Robert Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe.

Fraser's biographer, Philip Ayres has written that:

The centrality of Fraser's part in the processes leading to Zimbabwe's independence is indisputable. All the major African figures affirm it.

At one time, Fraser and Mugabe were close. Mugabe once said of Fraser, according to Ayres, that:

I got enchanted by [Fraser], we became friends, personal friends ... he's really motivated by a liberal philosophy.

Since Mugabe took power 27 years ago, Zimbabwe has declined from a once prosperous nation to a hellhole marked by political violence, corruption, starvation, and a rapidly declining population.

What has been Fraser's response to this? You would think that having helped propel Mugabe to power that Fraser would have a good account of his own actions and a detailed explanation of Zimbabwe's plight.

But he doesn't. The few comments he's made about Zimbabwe reveal Fraser to be startled, perplexed and at a loss to explain the situation. Worse, he continues to play the role of "naive liberal" when it comes to African politics.

For instance, back in 2000 Fraser was interviewed by John Highfield on the ABC. The transcript of the interview is titled "Fraser perplexed at turn of events in Zimbabwe". Here's how it begins:

JOHN HIGHFIELD: Mr Fraser, what do you make of these goings on in Zimbabwe? After all it was in the late 1970s that you and your friend, Kenneth Kowunda, persuaded Mrs Thatcher to come across to your view and give Zimbabwe independence.

MALCOLM FRASER: I find it very hard to understand the disintegration that has, in fact, occurred because I really did believe, and I think many people who knew what was happening in the country believed, that President Mugabe started very well. I can remember speaking with Dennis Norman who was a white farmer in Mugabe's first government, and he spoke very highly of him and spoke very highly of his policies at that time.

Highfield later asks Fraser if the elections in Zimbabwe should go ahead. Fraser appears to put a great deal of misplaced faith in the elections:

MALCOLM FRASER: I believe that the elections should go ahead as scheduled. I also believe that the Government should commit itself to doing everything possible to try and ask the - well, not to try, to ask the whole community to be calm, because there are going to be elections. I suspected an announcement of an election date would itself have a calming influence because people would know, "Well, on this day I can have a real say." And then there also obviously should be a commitment to all parties to accept whatever the outcome of that democratic process might be.

In 2005 Fraser was again interviewed on the ABC, this time by Maxine McKew:

MAXINE McKEW: If I can cite one country where you've had a considerable input into its birth as an independent country, and of course that's Zimbabwe, if you look at the latest example of self-inflicted misery and poverty, it's really in that country and it's all because of the activities of President Mugabe and his forcible removal of thousands of people and, of course, in the process, ruining their livelihoods.

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, Zimbabwe seems to have gone through one tragedy after another and this is the latest chapter, it's the latest tragedy ... I really do believe that if President Mbeki, President Obasanjo of Nigeria - South Africa and Nigeria together can make it plain that Africa will not tolerate this kind of behaviour from African leaders.

MAXINE McKEW: But the point is they do tolerate it, don't they?

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, I think it's up to them to demonstrate that they don't. The African organisations, continent-wide organisations, now have a commitment to human rights, so it's up to them to make sure that that commitment is maintained, that human rights are preserved.

So Fraser has no explanation for what has happened; he regards it as a "tragedy" (as if it's a kind of accident that no-one could foresee). He then puts his misplaced faith in the intervention of African leaders.

All of which raises the question of how Fraser can remain so naive and perplexed about important international affairs.

I wonder if it has to do with liberal ideas about equality. When liberals talk about equality, they usually don't have in mind the idea that people are equal but different. If you were to ask if men and women were equal, it probably wouldn't satisfy a liberal to answer "Yes, but not at the same things." A liberal is looking for an equality in kind.

Perhaps this is because liberals think of equality in terms of people having the same potential. At any rate, I expect that some liberals are naive because their ideal of equality leads them to think of people as being the same.

It's possible that Fraser believes that having liberal political values is what gives you worth. This means that if everyone is to be equal, in the liberal understanding of equality, we must all have the same potential for such liberal values. To doubt this would be a denial of the possibility of human equality.

Therefore, African leaders who make the right kinds of liberal noises, who sign up to charters of rights, or who seem like decent fellows to white liberals, are to be taken at face value as expressing the same kind of things that Malcolm Fraser himself holds to.

You would think that liberals, having wandered away from a belief in a transcendent morality, would be free to act in a worldly-wise, crafty, Machiavellian way in politics. And Fraser has been accused of doing so in some aspects of his career and business dealings.

In foreign affairs, though, Fraser represents the gullible, unperceptive side of the liberal political personality - the side which cannot, and doesn't want to, comprehend deep-seated differences in political cultures and which utterly fails, time and again, to predict the ultimate outcome of political events.

Rethinking the left: Hamilton on immigration

Here's some good news to end the year on. A leading member of the Australian left, Clive Hamilton, has declared his support for a reduction in immigration.

In an article for the Sydney Morning Herald Hamilton has written that:

1) There are plans to house an extra 1.1 million people in Sydney which will increase congestion and reduce the quality of life.

2) Australia is a dry continent, with settlement concentrated in a narrow green strip along the coast.

3) There is no economic benefit to high immigration. Although high immigration increases gross domestic product the additional income is spread amongst a greater number of people.

4) John Howard is running immigration at record levels (130,000) and plans to increase numbers even further.

Hamilton proposes a zero net migration policy in which the number of people entering Australia roughly matches the number leaving (about 40,000 a year).

He wants this reduced immigration intake to be made up of asylum seekers rather than business migrants. As he puts it:

The immigration program is a response to pressure from big business ... under the business migration visa scheme, the wealthy can effectively buy Australian citizenship ...

Immigration should be aimed at improving the moral capital of the nation rather than our financial stocks. Instead of fast tracking money-obsessed, self-interested business migrants, or overseas students who slip in the back door through visa scams run by dodgy universities, we should welcome more people who have suffered from oppression and have learned the value of human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

Why would Hamilton put things like this? Hamilton as a left-liberal doesn't share the right-liberal belief that society is best regulated by a profit-driven, self-interested free market ethos. Hamilton doesn't believe that economic interests should be paramount in shaping a society and he has written at length against the idea that material progress alone creates wellbeing.

So Hamilton is being true to his left-liberalism in believing that migration policy should be determined more by moral considerations, or quality of life concerns, rather than demands by the business lobby for a free movement of labour.

Which leads me to a criticism of Hamilton's argument. According to Hamilton, asylum seekers are to be preferred as migrants because they have learned the value of "human rights, democracy and the rule of law".

I doubt if this is the case. A lot of recent refugees are Sudanese or Somalians. According to a report in the Melbourne Age, the Sudanese have trouble even accepting the reality of Australian authority figures, let alone respecting the rule of law. According to Clifton Maberly, an anthropologist in Toowoomba:

They have trouble seeing Australians as real ... Everyone becomes like an actor to them, or a two-dimensional cartoon figure. So when a white woman teacher stands before a class telling them what they should so, or a policeman pulls them over for driving without a licence, it's difficult for them to take such things seriously.

Just this week there was a warning by police in Melbourne about young African men forming gangs and turning to violence and crime:

A growing gangster mentality among young African men is worrying community leaders ... Young African leader Ahmed Dini said some Somali, Sudanese and Eritrean men ... felt disconnected from mainstream society and were either forming or joining ethnic groups for protection and also for a sense of belonging ... some had trained with heavy-duty military weapons while they were serving in militias overseas. Violence is not something new for these young people," he said ... Mr Dini warned that gang and crime-related problems within the African communities would eventually lead to "race riots" similar to those in France if governments continued to ignore the problem.

So being an asylum seeker doesn't mean having a special respect for the rule of law. Furthermore, it's not clear that asylum seekers aren't pursuing their economic interests, just as business migrants are. For instance, Michael at NZ Conservative has reported that half of Christchurch's Somalian refugees have already moved on to Australia. This can't be to find refuge, but is presumably motivated by the higher average incomes here.

Similarly, I'm informed that the next wave of refugees is likely to be Tamils from Sri Lanka. It's true, of course, that there has been conflict in Sri Lanka between Tamils and the majority Sinhalese. If, though, some Tamils are seeking refuge because of this, why not go the very short distance to Tamil Nadu in India? What can explain the long trip to a very foreign country if not an economic motivation?

So I don't agree with Clive Hamilton that asylum seekers are a morally superior option in filling migration places. However, it is significant that someone from inside the political class is proposing to reduce the level of immigration. This is a welcome development and I hope that Hamilton has some influence in winning over a section of the left to his position.

Flanagan's cause

What happens when an Australian liberal is confronted by the realities of the new South Africa?

The liberal in question is Martin Flanagan, a good test case as he represents so well that caste of Anglo left-liberals who so thoroughly permeated our culture in the 1970s and 80s.

Flanagan’s visit to South Africa began with a bus trip through Johannesburg. The guide was an Afrikaner, a man who “made it clear that he supported what is called ‘the new South Africa’“.

The Afrikaner guide took Flanagan through Soweto, visiting the school where the Soweto uprising began, and then to Nelson Mandela’s house, as well as various other sites significant to the campaign against the old South Africa. By the end of the day, relates Flanagan,

I had got to know our guide a bit. We were sitting in a cafe at the end of the day when he revealed, in general conversation, that his daughter was shot dead by two black youths in a carjacking in Johannesburg two years before. And this man still believes in the new South Africa.

It seems to me a bitter fate for this Afrikaner. The new, more violent South Africa took his own daughter, yet he works to showcase it for tourists.

Flanagan then considers the story of the Afrikaner journalist, Max du Preez. Du Preez was an opponent of the old South Africa and worked hard to bring about its demise. The new order showed little gratitude. After the transition to black power, he went for a job, failed to get it, and was then,

taken outside by the white who headed the selection panel and told there is something he should understand. The job had to go to a black. “History has turned against you, my brother,” he is told.

Flanagan, then, knows what happens to Europeans when they lose political power. They are subject to greater violence and they are increasingly excluded from work. So what conclusion does Flanagan draw about his South African experience? He writes,

What I do know is that returning to Australia from that country is to be aware that we live in a protected reality. We have gone back to the “lucky country” mentality. John Howard is the leader you have when you don’t have to think or care too much.

I don’t know if I could live in South Africa. You’d need strong nerves. But I do know there is something in what Max du Preez said at the end of his book. South Africa has problems far greater than this country’s, but in South Africa you keep coming across a great invigorating passion for the future that is unlike anything here. We equate nationalism with beating the drum on Anzac Day and playing up sporting wins. They have people like the little man who took us through Soweto.

It is striking that Flanagan objects to living in a “protected reality”. This puts him at odds with the most basic of masculine instincts, which is to protect family and tribe from physical harm. It means, too, that he has little sense of what this task draws forth from men.

He is attracted instead to what he calls the “social adventure” of the new South Africa. It is, it seems, a kind of intellectual attraction he feels, as he doesn’t actually want to subject himself to living there. But the idea of it appeals to him, the idea of the drama of living under more extreme circumstances.

And so he comes to admire the Afrikaner guide, a man who appeared to him initially as a fool, but who reveals himself to be so strongly committed to the cause of the new South Africa, that he will serve it loyally even to the utmost cost to himself.

I can’t help but think that Flanagan’s view is a product of the alienation of liberals from what is significant in everyday life. Liberalism presents us with such a pared down individualism, that the more deeply sustaining aspects of our daily lives and our natural loyalties are lost to us. Some liberals respond by looking for causes to commit themselves to.

And what of Flanagan’s cause? Is the South African social adventure likely to lead to a great humanitarian outcome?

Turning just a few pages of The Age from Flanagan’s piece, you find an article about another southern African nation with a white minority, namely Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe has been pursuing the same kind of adventure as South Africa, but for a longer time. The results have certainly been dramatic and Europeans have certainly lost their protected status, but it’s difficult to see the results as positively “invigorating”.

The economy is shattered. Inflation is over 1000 per cent, life expectancy has fallen to the world’s lowest and food aid is required for 4 million people.

President Mugabe, who recently referred to white farmers as “filth” and “murderous thieves” is now inviting some of them back on long term leases to try and restore food production.

But many will decline the offer. Vernon Nicolle is one such farmer who won’t subject himself to Zimbabwean conditions. He lost his land in 2003 to a Zimbabwe High Court judge (not much point in appealing) and is now farming in the Margaret River region of Western Australia.

He thinks it “stupid and naive in the extreme” for white farmers to accept the offer to return to Zimbabwe. As for claims that white farmers would be welcome as long as they remained loyal to Mugabe, he has the following response:

Sorry to be boring, but we as the Nicolle family produced 24 per cent of the national wheat crop. We fed the nation. We thought we were OK because we weren’t political animals, we were just farmers. And when it suited them (the regime), they chucked us off.

So in reality the experiment of living precariously in southern Africa has not bred in Vernon Nicolle a grand passion for the future of his country. There is no invigoration, no great cause to follow. Just a flight to somewhere else – to a place, in fact, which Martin Flanagan believes we should abandon, a place which is, for the time being at least, a “protected reality”.

Who is oppressed?

Back in the 90s Australian feminists often turned to the circumcision of girls in northern Africa as proof of their theory that men were an oppressor group and women a victim group.

The argument only works though if it's only the case of northern Africa that's considered. In southern Africa it's actually not girls but young men who undergo dangerous forms of circumsion.

An article in the Melbourne Herald Sun this week (Pointed end to men's ritual 5/1/05 - not online) discussed the issue of dangerous circumcision ceremonies for young men in South Africa. According to Sizwe Kupelo of the Eastern Cape provincial health department "at least 10 young men had died during the current initiation period" in the Eastern Cape alone.

So, if you look at the whole of Africa it's not clear at all that only women are the victims of dangerous circumcision pratices. It appears that young men also suffer badly through such customs. You won't hear feminists publicising this, though, as it upsets their political assumption that you can divide society into male oppressors and the female oppressed.

South African land siezure

Will South Africa suffer the same fate as Zimbabwe? There are some ominous signs. The following Age newspaper report tells the story of white South African farmer Abraham Duvenage who once ran a successful 1780 acre farm. That all changed when 40,000 immigrants from Mozambique took over the property. The courts have upheld the rights of Mr Duvenage to his property, but the local and national authorities have ignored the court orders. The squatters have effectively expropriated the land, the farm is no longer productive, and Mr Duvenage has so far failed to gain any compensation.

Out of Africa

Was Stuart MacGill right to boycott Zimbabwe? Decide for yourself after reading this article on the latest attacks on white farmers in the troubled country.

Here is one of the incidents described in the report,

Arthur and Ansy Swales, who grow maize in the Banket district, 60 miles north of Harare, said they had first been approached in 2002 by nuns from the Little Children of the Blessed Lady order, led by Sister Helen Maminimini and Sister Notvurgo, about using some land to help grow vegetables. The couple donated around 90 acres and helped the sisters prepare it, but said the nuns grew increasingly aggressive, demanding expensive equipment and more and more land.

Then last month the nuns gave the Swales 24 hours to leave the farm. The couple refused. Eleven days later a group of youths from President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party arrived at midnight. "They went and woke up all the workers, and made them run and sing government songs," said Mrs Swales. "They forced the guards to open the barn gates so they could get to the equipment."

The farm is still being occupied, despite a condemnation of the sisters' actions by the local archbishop.

Another incident involved a 62 year old grandmother:

The latest victim of the renewed violence is a British grandmother, Pat Campbell, 62, who was beaten by a "security guard" wielding a stick and an AK47 rifle last week when she attempted to feed her cattle on her farm, 90 miles north of Harare. The farm has been allocated by the government to Lieutenant General Phillip Sibanda, commander of the Zimbabwe National Army and a former UN peacekeeper.

In the past four years 80% of white farmers in Zimbabwe have been driven from their land and it's thought that the latest attacks are part of a campaign by Robert Mugabe "to drive all whites out of Zimbabwe by the end of the year".