EDITOR’S NOTE
RON DERBY: After Mugabe, Africa’s creed should be pragmatism first
If Mugabe had remained pragmatic about his country’s faults, would circumstances not have been different?
When Africa's liberators set about freeing their people in the early part of the 20th century, the developed world was very much in the throes of defining what ideologies from hundreds of years of wars, including two world wars, worked best in establishing a new world order. A battle, in truth, between western and eastern elites, a choice between an elite in American corporate suites and an elite within government. It's a battle that muddied much of the early years of the continent's freedom, and in the case of South Africa, delayed our emancipation because of the US's support for an apartheid, but more importantly, a capitalist country. Waging a battle for freedom is a rather expensive exercise for a disenfranchised people. With capital, as it was then and now, locked in the capital cities of the world's northern climes, the only way the greats of this continent such as Patrice Lumumba (if given time) could raise finance for their liberated acre of the continent was to either choos...
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