{"id":3434,"date":"2011-10-22T13:52:09","date_gmt":"2011-10-22T13:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=3434"},"modified":"2011-10-22T13:52:09","modified_gmt":"2011-10-22T13:52:09","slug":"more-on-solomon-mujuru","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/more-on-solomon-mujuru\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Solomon Mujuru"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Joshua Hammer has an article in the November 2011 issue of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/archives\/2011\/nov\/10\/sinister-turn-zimbabwe\/\" target=\"_blank\">New York Review of Books<\/a>\u00a0about the mysterious recent death of General Solomon Mujuru (aka <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2010\/02\/memories-of-underdevelopment\/\" target=\"_blank\">Rex Nhongo<\/a>) in Zimbabwe. The article\u00a0 presents an account of Mujuru&#8217;s death, an account about which most of us can only speculate.<br \/>\nHowever, the article has a couple of minor errors, which may not add to a\u00a0 reader&#8217;s confidence in the article&#8217;s authority:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>&#8220;When I visited the renovated Victoria Falls Hotel, built by the British colonial government in 1904 at the site of a railway bridge over the Zambezi River . . .&#8221;<\/em>\u00a0 Except for a brief period of four months in 1979-80, Zimbabwe never had a British colonial government.\u00a0\u00a0 Between the first settlement by Europeans in 1890 and the award of self-government (on a restricted franchise) in 1923, the region now called Zimbabwe was governed as a <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2009\/12\/lancaster-bombing\/\" target=\"_blank\">concession<\/a> by the British South Africa Company (BSAC), advised from 1898 by a partially-elected council. \u00a0\u00a0 This might seem a very minor point, but the fact that the modern nation was founded by a brutal, unelected, profit-oriented corporation strikes me as germane to its present sad state under a brutal, unelected, profit-oriented oligarchy.\u00a0 The violence and brutality of the white occupation is only just beyond living memory, and is certainly within the memories of the children of those affected.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In particular, the fact that white settlers and the BSAC stole farm land from the black inhabitants, and often did so violently, has been used to justify the often-violent and illegal occupation of commercial farms by agents of the Mugabe regime a century later. \u00a0 While Minerva&#8217;s owl is taking flight at dusk, her chickens are busy coming home to roost.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0<em>&#8220;I headed to a leafy northern suburb and entered the gated estate of Ibbo Mandaza, a liberation war veteran who served for ten years in Mugabe\u2019s cabinet until his ouster in 1990.&#8221;\u00a0<\/em> Well, actually, the good Dr Mandaza was never a member of the Cabinet, as far as I am aware, but only a civil servant.\u00a0\u00a0 In any case, the word &#8220;ousted&#8221; implies some sort of estrangement.\u00a0 In fact,\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newzimbabwe.com\/pages\/ciogate19.13284.html\" target=\"_blank\">well after 1990<\/a> Dr Mandaza was still working\u00a0 actively for ZANU-PF victories in national elections.<\/li>\n<li>On the other hand, the author could have noted that almost all the residences in the northern (formerly whites-only) suburbs of Harare are gated, so no inference should be drawn from Dr Mandaza&#8217;s residence being gated (unlike the situation were his residence to be gated and in the USA).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joshua Hammer has an article in the November 2011 issue of the New York Review of Books\u00a0about the mysterious recent death of General Solomon Mujuru (aka Rex Nhongo) in Zimbabwe. The article\u00a0 presents an account of Mujuru&#8217;s death, an account about which most of us can only speculate. However, the article has a couple of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-politics","p1","y2011","m10","d22","h13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}