by K.B. Chandrasakara

The natives of Zimbabwe, the blacks, are facing starvation we are told. And all because President Mugabe seized the farmlands occupied by white settlers. The BBC and related rags in England and Oz have co-opted some cricketers to complain of ‘security threats’. But their fig-leaf is "moral issues", especially how white commercial farmers have been treated and their properties taken over by black goons. And other "human rights abuses."

What a bloody laugh!

Leonard Woolf is a name well known in this country, and there is a pervasive belief, especially among our half baked academics, that he was an anti-imperialist, a "liberal". He was so regarded in England too, when the British Empire was collapsing on itself, as the American one is collapsing right now. And yet, Woolf regarded the natives of Africa as "non-adult races". What he actually thought of the Ceylonese and why he left this country is another story.

In his book on Empire and Commerce in Africa, published in 1922, Woolf records how the whites-German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and English-appropriated the wealth of Africa. And turned the African people into slave labour for the whites, by grabbing their fertile valleys and forcing them to make the land profitable for the whites. Let us see what Woolf had to report.

"I wish...to give the most favourable view possible of modern imperialism as a civilising agent. Experience and temperament have made the rule of the British over non-adult races an example of everything that is best in modern imperialism...Even the French and the Italians are notoriously lacking in some of the qualities which have made the Briton born to empire."

"The population of British East Africa consists of about four million natives and a few hundred Europeans. The Europeans are either Government servants or planters and farmers...Land exploited by Europeans is either devoted to cattle or sheep farming, or to the production of grain, pulse, rubber, coffee, sisal, etc." That’s "commercial farming", since supplemented by tea.

"East Africa is an agricultural country, and therefore the question of the land is of the most vital importance to the condition of its inhabitants...It is only some thirty years ago that...the British East Africa Company "acquired" the country. At that time the land was undoubtedly in the occupation and possession of the natives...How does the Government treat the Africans with regard to the land of Africa? The Government alienates from 300,000 to 600,000 acres of land annually, but it is a remarkable fact that not one single acre of this land is either leased or sold to the native inhabitants of the country...The result is that no native of Africa has a legal title to a single acre of the soil of British East Africa. The exploitation of the soil of this "possession" is reserved for the British inhabitants."

"The majority of the natives live in tribes, and to these tribes the Government has allocated Reserves...A Reserve can at any moment be cut down or abolished by the Government, and neither the tribe nor the individual native would have any legal claim or title to the land from which they were ousted." That is precisely what the ‘Waste Lands Ordinance’ and the ‘Crown Lands (Encroachment) Ordinance’ proclaimed by the British who usurped power did here.

"It has some curious customs, among which a circumcision festival, held once in eight years...were made the most of by those settlers who...are keenly desirous of appropriating the best of their grazing grounds..."

The process began in 1902, when "a British joint-stock company, the East Africa Syndicate, applied for a large grant of land on both sides of the railway at Gilgil in the grazing grounds of the Masai...320,000 acres were then leased to the Syndicate...a rent of one peppercorn for the first seven years and thereafter a yearly rent of £500...

Sir Charles Eliot....stated that "if the [natives] are allowed to keep the best land, there will be danger of a "Jameson" raid [i.e. forcible occupation] by the whites. None but Europeans have a right to the best parts of the land. The Masai and many other tribes must go under. It is a prospect which I view with equanimity and a clear conscience...The Secretary for Native Affairs, in an official report to Government in 1910 states that "from the first the white settlers regarded the highlands of East Africa, with their salubrious climate and exhilarating breezes, as a white man’s country, and envious eyes were cast on the vast grazing areas..." Once the natives had been forced to work for them, it generated a nice life-style:

However, "The land is useless to the European unless he can get the expropriated native to work for him. But the native shows a marked disinclination to work for the European and the wages offered to him...Such native labour as is obtained by the white settler is, therefore forced labour...The wages paid by them vary from Rs. 3 per month (or a little over a penny a day) to Rs. 7 per month. One planter said that methods of indenturing young native labour appeared to him to be excellent. ‘He himself had had splendid results from utilizing child labour on his farm, both boys and girls of about fourteen years of age...Children were paid at the rate of R.1 (1s. 4d) for fourteen days’ actual work, without food’...the hours of labour varying from eleven to nine..."The able bodied natives that they captured were transported for days in closed compartments.

"Under such conditions the British Government and the English settlers have found it impossible to inculcate in the native mind the dignity of human labour.

"The planters and farmers who gave evidence before the Government Commission were practically unanimous in their demands of or a solution of this labour problem. Their solution was a simple one. They asked the Government to cut down the native Reserves so that they would be unable to maintain the native population, and to increase the hut tax to Rs.10 for those natives who did not work on a European farm, while reducing it for those who did work.

One of them said that "Reserves should be cut down so as to force the natives to take up their residence on European farms". Dr. Norman Leys, Government Medical Officer, Mombasa, stated... "The Reserves are thus below the standard demanded by Sir Edward Grey from the Congo Free Sate, namely, land adequate for the development of two generations." The Commission [sent down from London, all the way] recommended that "the Reserve should then be re-demarcated and cut down "with a view to reserving sufficient land for the present population only." The effect would therefore be that any increase of native population would immediately make the Reserves insufficient to maintain the population, and natives would be forced out of the Reserves to work on the white man’s land."

"Forced labour was labour forced to work by physical means; but if you compelled a native to work by taxing him so much that he was compelled to work for the European and the wage offered by the European, this was not forced labour, but moral suasion." Put that way, it was only labour extorted "by taxation, law, and starvation."

"The revenue of British East Africa is spent almost entirely upon the interests of the few hundred European settlers and upon "law and order."...the only property tax, the hut tax, is levied on the natives."

"The only method left to them for defending their land is, as in the case of every independent sovereign, force of arms, and if they attempted to use that method, they would have to contend with the armed force of the whole British Empire." Which is what the white racists, including those whose profession is playing cricket-as ever by rules that can shift the wickets their own way-continue through their bombardment via "the media".

"The situation is therefore that in East Africa the natives are relegated to Reserves, consisting of the least fertile and least valuable land, that they are not allowed to buy or lease land outside the Reserves, and that they have no legal title at all to the land within the Reserves. Meanwhile the best land is sold at extremely low prices or leased for very low rents to white settlers.

"The only methods by which the native can support himself are by cultivating land himself, or by cattle and sheep farming, or by working on the Europeans’ land for a [minimal] wage." So they are today-it should be made routine that such anti-humans, anti-life turds be made to understand that when they seek to invoke other people’s territory in the guise of a Global Environment Facility or a Global Water Partnership into which they bring in no ‘share’, they are putting trivial lives on the line.

"By fraud or by force the native chiefs and rulers were swindled or robbed of their dominions. Any resistance by the inhabitants to the encroachments...was treated as "rebellion," and followed by massacres known as wars or punitive expeditions...The dogma of economic imperialism prevailed with the aid of modern rifle an gun. the slaughter of the most warlike Africans encouraged the survivors to submit, and peace descended upon the greater part of Africa...The ferocity and cupidity of the European are themselves unregulated, and the native is either exterminated or enslaved... The State...can always make a wilderness and call it peace, or make a conquest and call it civilization."

"The general effects of European policy in Africa," concludes Woolf, "have been almost wholly evil."

The people in Africa-or Asia-were far from facing starvation when the goons from Europe descended on them. There was starvation elsewhere though. Here is Cecil Rhodes in 1895:

"I was in the East End of London [a working class quarter] yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism....My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists."

And yet, we have the BBC and Tony Blair sounding off about ‘moral issues" and "human rights".