I was born in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, in August 1957. Both of my parents were also born there and some of my grandparents were part of the early settlers that built that country. When the settlers arrived parts of the country were inhabited by tribal people, steeped in witchcraft and savagery, still living in the stone age. They practiced slash and burn agriculture, (destroying the country as they went), slaughtered and enslaved each other through tribal warfare, fueled by thousands of years of inter-tribal hatred. Democracy had never existed and the chief with the biggest, bloody, stick ruled like a god with power over life and death.
The people had very short life spans, rampant diseases, no sanitation, no healthcare, no education, no written language, not even a wheel. They were ruled by tribal dictators and were involved in frequent tribal battles and killings.
My first African ancestor arrived in Table Bay in South Africa in 1688. He was a French surgeon, fleeing religious persecution in Europe. Unlike the attitude towards indigenous people prevalent in a number of other Western nations, my African ancestors took it upon themselves to "save" the tribal people they found and turn them to God. History documents how other nations set about systematically destroying their own indigenous people. We never had Abo-hunts. We never had the KKK. It is ironic that, when I was a boy in Rhodesia, these nations set about attacking us, trying to make out that us white Rhodesians were the ultimate racial scum of the earth. Whereas they had closets stuffed full of skeletons and were merely trying to turn attention away from their own dark past and focus it on us. The "sheople" of the world fell for it hook, line and sinker. Precious little was ever mentioned of the good that a few, white people did in Rhodesia. It was only when I was older and able to travel the world that I began to see, first hand, how hypocritical so many of these nations are.
It is so simple for the media to distort the facts. I could take a video camera today and easily make, shall we say the UK, France, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, etc. look really bad - but would that mean it is true? It is flawed logic to take a few bad examples and apply them to the whole. The media tried to make it look like all of the white people in Rhodesia lived in the lap of luxury off the backs of the black people and that we all treated them badly. It tried to make out that events in Rhodesia were purely racist, a black/white struggle, and that , in plain and simple terms, is a flawed oversimplification and a lie. The situation was far more complex than that. In essence it was a clash of first world and third world cultures coupled to the incongruity of democracy and tribalism.
The sad story of black Africa is that once the colonial governments were thrown out, tribalism returned with a vengeance - and the majority of the new black leaders revealed their true colors and turned into brutal dictators intent on destroying their opponents and terrorizing their people into silent submission. Just go and try to speak out against Mugabe in Zimbabwe today and see how much freedom you have - if you continue to live that is. And where are the cries from the liberal media and politicians about that?
Rhodesia was a wonderful place to live for all of the races that were there. Sure, it was not perfect, there were problems, but the government had a plan in place and was working on protecting, educating and uplifting the indigenous people. Due to the tremendous clash of cultures, this was not something that could happen overnight. It is never proclaimed in the media how about 250,000 white people, (men women and children, so we only had about 60,000 tax payers) built the country from absolutely nothing to one having a national power grid, a bustling economy, a stable government, healthcare, a high standard of education and a national transportation system in about 80 years. No-one mentions how these few white tax payers also supported a population of over 5,000,000 black people and subsidized their housing, electricity, water, sanitation, transportation, education and healthcare. No-one seems to question why, at the end of about 18 years of terrorist war, with sanctions and embargos from the world, the Rhodesian Dollar was worth about $1.20 US. and today, after 20 years of Mugabe's rule with no sanctions and billions of dollars of aid pouring in, the Zimbabwe Dollar is worth about $0.0000001 US and inflation stands at 100,000% (April 2008). Mugabe and his government sit there blaming the West and no-one in the West has the guts to take him to task over this.
As a former prime minister of South Africa said "... if you shoot a Zebra in the white stripe, the black stripe also dies..."