Irony: Africa Edition

Double irony: Graca Machel was the wife of former Mozambique President Samora Machel, the man who hosted Mugabe’s Zanu while they were launching military raids into apartheid Rhodesia during the 1970s. The story of Zimbabwe is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. Once a first world nation, Rhodesia — and Zimbabwe during the 80s — exported enough food to feed roughly half of Africa. Though deeply stained by the apartheid policies of the white minority government, Rhodesia still boasted the largest black middle class in Africa, had a top-tier educational system for both blacks and whites that rivaled those in Europe and the United States, a Rhodesian dollar that was nearly equal with its U.S. cousin, and unemployment that was in the low single digits. Today, after Robert Mugabe’s tyrannical 28 year reign, Zimbabwe has become one of the poorest nations in the world. Unemployment is at 80 percent and rising. Inflation is an unbelievable 2000 percent, also rising. Once the breadbasket of Africa, Zimbabwe is now reliant on Western food relief to feed its people. Refugees pour over the South African and Botswanan borders by the thousands, as AIDS (and now cholera) ravage the countryside. Life expectancy for a Rhodesian male was appx. 67 years. That number has collapsed to an unthinkable 37 years. To this day, Carter is unrepentant for his assistance in Mugabe’s rise to power. That he was denied entry into the very state he helped create underscores the dangerous naivete of Carter’s foreign policy, and serves as a warning shot to administrations to come: the history and nature of Marxist dictators is both universal and constant. To legitimize them, as Carter did with Mugabe, can create humanitarian crises that span decades. For more on the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian elections, see James Kirchick’s How Tyranny Came to Zimbabwe.