Mukiwa - a white boy in Africa

Mukiwa: A White Boy In Africa by Peter Godwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

History can be dull without the personal touch, especially if one wants more than just a bare chronicle of events and dates, and it is books like this one that help to put flesh on the bare bones of history -- a memoir showing how one person and one family were affected by the events.

Peter Godwin was born in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia of British immigrant parents, The country was part of the Central African Federation, which broke up when Zambia and Malawi became independent in the mid-1960s, and Southern Rhodesia became just Rhodesia. Godwin's father managed a factory in the eastern part of the country, near Melsetter in the Chimanimani mountains. His mother was a medical doctor and as a child he often accompanied her on her rounds, helping her to vaccinate other children and sometimes assisting with postmortem examinations. This probably gave him a wider experience of life (and death) than most young children.

Some of the things he describes have strange echoes of my own life. 

A man had reported the deaths of his family as suspicious, and Godwin's mother, the district medical officer, goes to his remote rural home to perform a postmortem on the bodies. The complainant wore torn shorts and a tattered T-shirt with "Things go better with Coke" printed on it. He tells Peter, then a young child, that he suspects witchcraft.

"How?" I asked. "How did they die?"
The Coke man lowered his voice still further, so I had to strain to hear. "It was a spell he said, a spell cast on them by my neighbour, who is a muroyi."
A muroyi was an African witch. They didn't have long noses or warts, and they didn't wear silly pointy hats or ride on broomsticks. African witches were much more dangerous than European witches, and they rode around on the backs of hyenas at night.
"He suspect me of stealing his goat," said the Coke man. "So he cast a spell on my family and they died."

And I was reminded of the time, 45 years ago, that I met a man, Cain Nxumalo, suffering from gangrene, and his family believed that he had been bewitched by neighbours who had accused them of stealing their goat.

There were reminders of more recent times and events, too. 

Easily the single biggest life-saving aspect of my mother's practice was her vaccination programme. It was a long haul, though, to get it going. To start with, the witch doctors were totally opposed to it. A vaccination might initiate rural Africans into Western medicine and help to break down their fear of it. And for every patient who went West for medical treatment there would be one fewer for the nganga. The witch doctors put out the most hair-raising rumours abut the dreadful things that would happen to people who were vaccinated. They would be rendered infertile, they would go mad, they would die a lingering mouth-frothing death.

And one only has to look at the Internet to find similar rumours, spread by people in many Western countries, about all the dreadful consequences of being vaccinated against Covid19.

At the time Rhodesia was a British colony with self-government by a white-dominated parliament, and there were conflicting views of independence. Most whites wanted continued white rule after independence, and most blacks wanted majority rule. These conflicting aims led to a civil war, which becomes the theme running through the book, which dominated Peter Godwin's life. While he was still in primary school the Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, made a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI), thus rebelling against Britain, whose government's policy was "no independence before majority rule" (NIBMAR). As a result, the civil war hotted up, with two African liberation movements, ZANU and ZAPU, fighting against the Smith government and sometimes each other, though they formed a shaky alliance called the Patriotic Front and put the letters PF after their acronyms.

Peter Godwin's parents moved to the other side of the country, and he spent his high school years in Salisbury, the capital. After leaving school he had to spend a year in compulsory national service, and he opted to do it in the police force rather than in the army. But because of the civil war, the police became very militarised, and Godwin found himself caught up in the fighting. Even as a relatively new recruit, he often found himself in a moral dilemma. He witnessed atrocities committed on all sides, and their effects on the victims and wasn't really committed to fight for continued white rule.

After completing his national service he went to Cambridge in the UK to study law, but after only a year returned for his sister's funeral. She had been killed in an ambush by the Rhodesian Army, and since he had returned, the government wanted him to do more national service, but eventually allowed him to return to Cambridge to complete his degree.

When he returned after finishing his studies, Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe, but the civil war continued between ZANU and ZAPU after their alliance in the struggle for independence disintegrated. Now practising as a lawyer, Godwin found himself defending ZAPU members who were accused of treason by the ruling ZANU party,. After the one high-profile case, Godwin became disillusioned with the law, and became a freelance journalist, and covered more of the battles between ZANU and ZAPU, though it was mainly a matter of the Zimbabwe army against civilians in the south-west of the country, Matabeleland, who were suspected by the government of supporting ZAPU.

In all this, Peter Godwin was a witness to a lot of the the fighting, and how it affected ordinary people and families, And so he describes how that turbulent and violent period in the history of his country affected ordinary people and disrupted their lives, both of his own family, and other people he came into contact with, at school, as a policeman, as a lawyer, and later as a journalist. That is the strength of the book. It adds the human touch, and shows the human cost of war and conflict.

A weakness, especially for readers who are not familiar with the wider history of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, is that it does not have enough of the historical background. I have probably given more of the historical background in this review than appears in the whole book. He mentions background events in passing, as if everybody knows what they were.

 

I knew what he was referring to in most instances, but mainly because about 20 years ago I got involved in the publication of a book on Christian healing ministry in Africa, with a lot of case studies from Zimbabwe, and had to read up a lot of the history to be able to write a chapter on that history to set the healing accounts in their historical context of both church and secular history. That book is African Initiatives in Healing Ministry, and it could do with a few more reviews!

Another weakness, it appears to me, is that Godwin does not give enough of his personal history. Yes, he describes his childhood in great detail, and gives a great deal of detail about the events in Zimbabwe that he was involved in, but when he left to study overseas, we only learn after his return that he had studied law. It would be good to know why he chose that field, in the same way as he told us why he chose the police over the army. Though the book concentrates on the time he spent in the country, at least a page or two could have said something about his studies overseas, He was writing a book, not a play with the scene set in Zimbabwe, so that when the actors were offstage the audience could not see them at all until they reappeared. A book need not be confined to the main setting all the time.

I had other personal reasons for reading this book and finding it interesting. I had several friends and relatives, contemporaries of mine, who grew up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and I was curious about their life and the kind of society they had grown up in. And, coincidentally, the three that came most readily to mind were all, like the author of this book, named Peter. One was my best friend at prep school when we were aged 11. He was Peter Russell. I met him once later, in London in 1966, where he was training in hotel management. The second was Peter Bridges, who was at university with me, though he did not come back after a vacation, and I was told he had had a nervous breakdown. He was a gentle and innocent soul, and the only person I had ever met who was completely without guile or malice. I was convinced he was a saint, and wish I knew what had happened to him. The third is my second cousin, Peter Badcock-Walters, who has produced illustrated books on some aspects of the wars and violence.in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. One of them is Images of War.

 The three Peters I have mentioned were kind and gentle people, but in the 1960s, when I was a student at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg there were a lot of Rhodesian and Zambian students, all white in those days. And what struck me was that, with a few exceptions, like Peter Bridges, the Rhodesian students were far more racist than the South African ones, and many of them vocally professed their admiration for Dr Verwoerd and his policies, which few of the South African students did. And a lot of their attitudes are described in Godwin's book. 

They were also an interesting contrast to the Zambian students. In 1964, when Zambia became independent, each Zambian student received an independence kit from the Zambian government, with a small flag, the words of the national anthem, "Stand and sing of Zambia, proud and free" (which went to the same tune as Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika) and as a group they were given funds to hold a party to celebrate independence, which they did.

Godwin's book is well-written and very readable, and well worth reading for anyone who wants to know what life in war and conflict situations is like behind the scenes and behind the smokescreen of propaganda.

View all my reviews

The morality of the assassination of Osama bin Laden

An Anglican bishop's thoughts on the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Moral relativism is not enough...:

It follows from this basic theology from page 1 of the Bible, that if I commit an act, like a lynching, that denies the image of God in another human being I not only act out my own fallen nature (thus losing the moral high ground), but I also behave in a way that compromises my own humanity — thank God he gave it as an absolute that no human being can take away, not even me.

The moral relativism of some journalists about this (“Normally, of course, we should respect life, but he didn't so we don't have to”) is a real slippery slope, morally. It betokens not Conservatism, but Pelagianism — one of the oldest heresies in the book. They must not be surprised if bishops, including the Archbishop, do not collude with their Pelagian views.

I'm not sure how Bishop Alan concludes that it is Pelagian, and I find it difficult to connect the dots. But the moral relativism he ascribes to the jounalists (“Normally, of course, we should respect life, but he didn't so we don't have to”) is the same slippery slope on which Western theologians who argue for a "just war" are to be found. Western legalism subscribes to the notion of "justifiable homicide". There is almost an obsession with justification. Whether we kill people by war, assassination, or abortion, there is the need to justify it.

The main consequence of this is that we can kill people and feel righteous about it, and see no need to repent, because our act was "justified".

But there can be no peace without repentance, as Doestoevsky showed in his novel Crime and punishment.

Damage Control: the independent homeland of BapetiKosovoti

No country in their right mind recognised the the independence of Mickey Mouse apartheid republics like Bophutatswana and Transkei, but those who created the independent homeland republic of BapetiKosovoti are now hastening to do damage control. I doubt that even Evita Bezuidenhout would be willing to help them out at top spin-doctor rates. Perhaps they could call in Dame Edna Everage as a consutant?

Damage Control in the Balkans by Nebojsa Malic -- Antiwar.com:

During the 1999 attack on what was then Yugoslavia, the BBC was one of the vocal NATO cheerleaders (its correspondent from the NATO HQ later got the job as Alliance spokesman). So it is both amazing and infuriating to hear Alistair Burnett, editor of BBC’s The World Tonight, talk about 'reassessing Kosovo' today.

On one hand, Burnett is refreshingly frank when he says:

'The offensive against Serbia in 1999 was presented by western leaders as a humanitarian act to prevent widespread ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s Albanian population by Slobodan Milosevic’s forces. This was widely accepted by western commentators at the time and since then reporting of the conflict in western media has been largely been framed as a story of Albanian victims and Serb aggressors.'

Notice he doesn’t mention that every word of this reasoning, and the ensuing media coverage, was a lie. What he says is merely that 'some of the recent commentary… has challenged this account and questioned whether the intervention and support for independence were misguided.'

Yes, all three of Tony Blair's wars when he was in office were "misguided", to say the very least. And Nato was, and remains, the North Atlantic Terorist Organisation.

Hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace.

Terrorist Threat Has Roots in U.S. Policy by Sheldon Richman

Terrorist Threat Has Roots in U.S. Policy by Sheldon Richman:

It is not al-Qaeda that inspires affiliates and radicalizes homegrown terrorists. It is America’s violent policies in the Muslim world. Other government officials have acknowledged that Muslim radicals seek revenge for those policies in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, but Napolitano perpetuates the myth that anti-American activity is unprovoked. The American people deserve to hear the truth.

Napolitano referred to recent unsuccessful attacks in the United States: “Other al-Qaeda affiliates have actually attempted to attack the homeland in recent months. These include Tehrik-e Taliban (TTP) [Pakistan] and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) [Yemen] — which, until their respective claims of responsibility for the attempted Times Square and Christmas Day terrorist attacks, had only conducted attacks in their regions.”

What she left out was that the U.S. government regularly fires missiles into Pakistan and Yemen from aerial drones, killing innocent people. The desire for revenge is a natural consequence.

Hat-tip to The Western Confucian: None Dare Call It Blowback

I'm reminded of Madeleine Albright's famous "We think the price is worth it" comment -- the price in question being the lives of half a million Iraqi children who died to maintain American hegemony in the Middle East. Weigh that against the under 3000 killed on 9/11, and somehow the word "disproportionate" springs to mind.

Those killed on 9/11 just about balance the number killed in the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia, which was every bit as "terroristic" as 9/11, and was cowardly to boot, because, unlike 9/11, the bombers did not risk their own lives. But, brave or cowardly, terrorism is still terrorism, and the notion of terrorists waging a "war on terror" should lead to severe cognitive dissonance, but it somehow doesn't, at least not for those who support the terrorist "war on terror."

Three-score and five years ago two-thirds of Japan's Catholics were annihilated

The Holy City of Nagasaki | Spero News:

At 11:02 AM, two-thirds of Japan's Catholics were annihilated. On that day that will live in infamy, more Japanese Christians were slaughtered than had been martyred in four centuries of brutal persecution.

Hat-tip to The Western Confucian: Three Score and Five Years Ago Today.

New Statesman - Blair must be arrested

New Statesman - Blair must be arrested:

Now consider the Proceeds of Crime Act. Blair conspired in and executed an unprovoked war of aggression against a defenceless country, of a kind the Nuremberg judges in 1946 described as the 'paramount war crime'. This has caused, according to scholarly studies, the deaths of more than a million people, a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.

In addition, four million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes and a majority of children have descended into malnutrition and trauma. Cancer rates near the cities of Fallujah, Najaf and Basra (the latter 'liberated' by the British) are now higher than those at Hiroshima. 'UK forces used about 1.9 metric tonnes of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,' the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, told parliament on 22 July. A range of toxic 'anti-personnel' weapons, such as cluster bombs, was employed by British and US forces.

Hat-tip to Neil Clark: who notes

Let’s just hope that when Blair is finally in the dock, he doesn’t come up against a judge like Judge Griffith-Jones.'Started an illegal war which led to the deaths of 1m people'? 'Took part in the illegal bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as well?'
Well, you have a rather respectable background and you're not a lower-class yobbo so I'll only give you three months in jail.'

In May 1999 someone set off nail bombs in various places in London, and Tony Blair went on record as denouncing this as "barbaric". And at the same time there were news reports that Father Milivoje Ciric, who left a special service in his church to help victims of a Nato bombing, has been decapitated by a follow-up blast. This is a typical terrorist tactic -- set off a bomb, and when a crowd gathers to help the injured, kill even more people with a second blast. You can read about the incident here, and see pictures here.

The nail bombs, of course, were barbaric. They were designed to cause the maximum injuries. But Natos cluster bombs were designed to do exactly the same thing, only far more efficiently. Look at the pictures, and see Tony Blair's handiwork. Yes, it is truly barbaric.

As the playwright Harold Pinter noted on his web site, quoting the Socialist Review, www.haroldpinter.org - Serbia and Kosovo:

When the bomb went off in Old Compton Street, Mr Blair described it as a barbaric act. When cluster bombs go off in Serbian marketplaces, cutting children into pieces, we are told that such an act is being taken on behalf of 'civilisation against barbarism'. Mr Blair is clearly having a wonderful time. But if Britain remains America's poodle, she is now a vicious and demented poodle. The Nato action is in breach of its own charter and outside all recognised parameters of international law. Nato is destroying the infrastructure of a sovereign state, murdering hundreds of civilians, creating widespread misery and desolation, and doing immeasurable damage to the environment.

Barbaric? Yes. But as the prophet Nathan said to King David, "Thou art the man." (I Sam 12).

But there is one crucial difference, for it is recorded that King David repented, but Tony Blair has not.

Brit elections: the elephant in the room

I watched a couple of the televised debates between the three front-runners in the UK election, and I've read several British blog posts about the hustings in various constituencies, and one thing that has struck me is that they all seem to be silent about the elephant in the room -- that the Labour Party, since it came to power in 1997, has led Britain into not one, but three imperialist wars.

Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats did, to his credit, make a passing reference to the fact that the war in Iraq was illegal, but he did not follow it up, and Gordon Brown and David Cameron did not respond to it.

As an Australian journalist notes, t r u t h o u t | Voting for War. Take Your Pick:

All three party leaders are warmongers. Nick Clegg the Liberal Democrats leader and darling of former Blair lovers says that as prime minister he will 'participate' in another invasion of a 'failed state' provided there is 'the right equipment the right resources.' His one condition is the standard genuflection toward a military now scandalized by a colonial cruelty of which the Baha Mousa case is but one of many.

For Clegg as for Gordon Brown and David Cameron the horrific weapons used by British forces such as clusters, depleted uranium and the Hellfire missile which sucks the air out of its victims lungs do not exist. The limbs of children in trees do not exist. This year alone Britain will spend £4 billion on the war in Afghanistan and that is what Brown and Cameron almost certainly intend to cut from the National Health Service.

One other thing that all three front-ronners studiously avoided mentioning, and none of the public questions mentioned either, was the Labour Party's attempts to destroy civil liberties and turn Britain into a fascist police state. Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown tried to introduce 90-day detention without trial.

In the 1960s, when South Africa introduced 90-day detention, Harold Wilson's Labour Party imposed military sanctions, and cancelled an order for Buccaneer aircraft destined for the South African Air Force. Now the British media laud Blair's and Brown's attempts to turn Britain into a Vorsterstan as "taking the moral high ground".

My, how the mighty have fallen!

Brian Cloughley: Kid Killers are Barbarians

Brian Cloughley: Kid Killers are Barbarians: "People who kill kids, for whatever reason and no matter in what manner, are disgusting, murderous, cowardly barbarians."

I take that to include aerial bombing, suicide bombing and abortion.

Hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace

US, Germany agree to recognize Kosovo after Serbia elections - The Boston Globe

The US and Germany, which fuelled the Wars of the Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, are planning to fan the embers to a flame again.

US, Germany agree to recognize Kosovo after Serbia elections - The Boston Globe:

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia - The United States and Germany have agreed to recognize Kosovo and get the rest of Europe to follow suit after the province declares independence following the Serbian elections next month, according to senior European Union diplomats close to negotiations over the future of Kosovo.

In a recent conversation about the future of Kosovo, EU officials said President Bush and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany had agreed it was imperative to secure the stability of the western Balkans by coordinating the recognition of Kosovo after the second round of Serbian elections planned for Feb. 3.

They said Washington was aggressively pressing the EU to ensure that the recognition of Kosovo was not delayed by even a week.

Remember how it started?

As Samuel Huntington (1998:282) described it in his book The clash of civilizations:

The breakup of Yugoslavia began in 1991 when Slovenia and Croatia moved toward independence and pleaded with Western European powers for support. The response of the West was defined by Germany, and the response of Germany was in large part defined by the Catholic connection. The Bonn government
came under pressure to act from the German Catholic hierarchy, its coalition partner the Christian Social Union Party in Bavaria, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other media. The Bavarian media, in particular, played a crucial
role in developing German public sentiment for recognition. 'Bavarian TV', Flora Lewis noted, 'much weighed upon by the very conservative Bavarian government and the strong, assertive Bavarian Catholic Church which had close connections with the church in Croatia, provided the television reports for all of Germany when the war began in earnest. The coverage was very one-sided'... Germany pressured the European Union to recognise the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, and then, having secured that, pushed forward on its own to recognize them before the Union did in December 1991.

Austria and Italy promptly moved to recognize the two new states, and very quickly other Western countries, including the United States, followed. The Vatican also played a central role. The Pope declared Croatia to be the "rampart of Christianity," and rushed to extend diplomatic recognition to the two states before the European Union did. The Vatican thus became a partisan in the conflict, which had its
consequences in 1994 when the Pope planned visits to the three republics. Opposition by the Serbian Orthodox Church prevented his going to Belgrade, and Serb unwillingness to guarantee his security led to the cancellation of his visit to Sarajevo. He did go to Zagreb, however, where he honored Cardinal Alojzieje Stepinac, who was associated with the fascist Croatian regime in World War II that persecuted and slaughtered Serbs, Gypsies and Jews.

The focus then moved to Bosnia, where John Major agreed to recognise Bosnia's independence in return for German support for Britain's position on the Maastricht Treaty, thus condemning Bosnia-Herzegovina to a bloody civil war. And what was the result?

As Brendan O'Neill (Comment is free: The Bosnian connection) notes:

Far from being radicalised by the failure of the west to act, large numbers of Muslims were radicalised by western intervention in the Balkans. Their movement to Bosnia was facilitated by Washington's support for a military gateway between the Islamic world and Bosnia, and inside Bosnia they fought with a military outfit that Washington armed. They were also inspired to take up arms against the Serbs by western media depictions of the Serbs as sub-human savages who deserved 'punishment'. The mujahideen meted out such punishment, in the form of stabbings, beheadings and forced circumcisions, as well as ordinary warfare.

Many of the mujahideen who fought in Bosnia went on to become al-Qaida operatives. They learned their trade of simplistic moral fury and brutal violence on the battlefields of Bosnia, where they were enticed and inflamed to execute holy war against the Serbs by western meddling and western media coverage.

And now it's Kosovo -- deja vu all over again!

Kosovo

Nilkola writes on Kosovo

The EU has just sent a high level delegation to Serbia to 'press' the Serbian government to take part 'positively' regarding UN talks on the future of Kosovo. I dont take kindly to the United Nations meddling into the internal affairs of my country, but I take even less kindly to the EU poking its nose in. We're not even part of the EU. Who do these arrogant bastards think they are. Does Serbia send special envoys to tell Spain to allow the Basques to have independance. Do we threaten them with withdrawal of an assortment of economic goodies if they dont play ball.

At a time when all kinds of people, including the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, are trying to dissuade the US government from invading Iran, it is as well to remember that the other US political party was in power when Kosovo was invaded, and the problem is no nearer to solution than it was before the invasion. All that NATO (the North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation) succeeded in doing was exacerbating hatred, and making peace unattainable.

When the Butcher of Belgrade left the White House, the Butcher of Baghdad moved in. I'm not sure that he's crazy enough to want to invade Iran as well, but perhaps he wants to add the Terror of Tehran to his epithets.

But none of these invasions has solved anything.

But perhaps Serbia should bomb Madrid until the Basques are given their freedom. After all, everyone else is doing it.

Telling it like it is

Christians suffer for the Iraq policies of the US and UK governments, says the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Christians in the Middle East are being put at unprecedented risk by the Government’s “shortsighted” and “ignorant” policy in Iraq, The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, says today.

In an extraordinary attack, Dr Williams accuses Tony Blair and the US of endangering the lives and futures of many thousands of Christians in the Middle East, who are regarded by their countrymen as supporters of the “crusading West.”

He has been backed by bishops across the Church of England, who say that Christians in the Middle East are now paying the price for the “chaos” in Iraq after the British Government failed to heed their warnings about the consequences of military action.

Well good for him, for them. The Anglican moral compass seemed to have lost its bearings with all the wild gyrations about homosexuality, but it's encouraging to see some clear thought about Iraq, which, unlike homosexuality, is an issue of life and death.

American elections

In reply to a comment on the US Congressional elections by golodhwgwath over on LiveJournal someone (non-American) commented that they now hoped that the US Congress would now tell the President that they money he wanted to spwnd on wars and bombs they were going to spend on hospitals and education.

My reply was:

Seconded, from another non-American.

One of the things I find quite bewildering, reading stuff on the net, is the number of Americans who claim to be Christians, and yet are prepared to argue vehemently, and indeed self-righteously, about how positively immoral it is to spend money on healing the sick, and yet believe it is quite moral to spend that money on fragmentation bombs to shred little children to pieces.

And they urge their fellow Christians, as Christians to vote for politicians who promise to do those things.

It's a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack!


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