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I am not sure if the guy told the story in full, atleast he tried, though not convinced with title and content)
That Robert Mugabe's regime has brought Zimbabwe to its knees is unquestionable, but the responsibility for creating that regime lies uncomfortably closer to home. Michael Holman, a journalist who grew up in the town of Gwelo in Zimbabwe, explains.
Missing from the acres of newsprint devoted to coverage of Zimbabwe's deepening crisis, absent from the radio and television coverage, is an unpalatable fact: Robert Mugabe is a creature shaped by British colonial rule. And a century after white settlers established the racially skewed land ownership that remains at the heart of the country's turbulent politics, colonial chickens are coming home to roost.
It was British settlers who, in the 1890s, occupied the country soon to be called Southern Rhodesia; nearly a hundred years later, London played midwife to the birth of Zimbabwe, hosting the Lancaster House constitutional conference. With an almost audible sigh of relief, Britain welcomed an independent Zimbabwe.
But its responsibility lives on. Between the arrival of settlers and the handover to Mugabe in 1980, the UK record was a shoddy one.
Three decisions stand out:
* At the break-up in 1963 of the Central African Federation of Southern and Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe and Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1963, it was Britain that allocated the bulk of the Federal army to white-ruled Rhodesia. This gave the minority regime of Ian Smith the muscle to make a unilateral declaration of independence two years later, in 1965, and to wage war against black nationalist guerrillas.
*
It was Britain that effectively vetoed landlocked Zambia's request in the early 1960s for World Bank funds to build a railway that would link it to the east African port of Dar es Salaam. The decision forced continued dependence on trade routes through apartheid South Africa – and rebel Rhodesia.
*
And it was Britain that reneged on the spirit, if not the letter, of a provision in the Lancaster House settlement intended to tackle the worst feature in the legacy of white rule - half the land was owned by whites. The UK contributed (in real terms) to the buyout of 5,000 white farmers in Zimbabwe just half the amount it had provided for a similar exercise in Kenya in the early 1960s – although its former East African colony had barely a thousand white farmers.
More at;
Robert Mugabe: a beast created by colonial Britain?