TAKING ISSUE with Marcus Browning

Cricket and the Zimbabwe reality

So, cricketer Stuart MacGill won't be going on the Australian 
team's tour of Zimbabwe, making himself unavailable on the 
grounds of "maintaining a clear conscience". PM John Howard, who 
has led the West's economic and political offensive against 
Zimbabwe, was quick to spew kudos over MacGill, using his usual, 
pathetic appropriation of the battlers' idiom ("He's not only a 
wonderful player, but he's a good bloke" etc.)

Interestingly, a microcosm of the situation in Zimbabwe can be 
found in its national cricket team. Watching a Zimbabwe match on 
television a couple of years ago my then 12-year-old daughter 
asked me why an African nation had only white players in its 
team.

I told her that Zimbabwe is a cricketing nation because it was a 
colony of Britain and that inequalities are everywhere to be 
found as a legacy of colonialism: they can take a long time to 
overcome. Now, Zimbabwe's leading white cricketers have spat the 
dummy over what is being called race-based selection criteria 
i.e. quotas of black players in representative teams.

Those white farmers in Zimbabwe, who grabbed their valuables and 
skipped out of the country (some to the sheltering arms of white 
Australian pastoralists) because black Zimbabweans are reclaiming 
what is rightfully theirs, faced a similar dilemma.

They could have stayed and become farm workers employed by those 
they had dispossessed — just as the cricketers could stay and 
help develop a national team that reflects Zimbabwe's reality.

Of course, the white farmers were never going to take the step 
down from the position of overlord with absolute power that the 
racist regime had conferred upon them, to become common labourer 
working for blacks!

A brief look at history gives a context to the reality of 
Zimbabwe, a nation which gained its independence from Britain in 
1970 following centuries of occupation by various colonial 
powers. One of the leaders of the independence struggle, Robert 
Mugabe, became president.

His government began redistributing farmland that had been seized 
by the British colonialists, and to take control of the country's 
rich mineral resources out of the hands of foreign mining 
corporations.

At the time of independence, 5200 white settler farmers owned 
most of the productive land while 4.5 million black farmers were 
confined to poor peasant status on infertile "tribal lands" where 
they had been forced to scratch out an existence. Many supplied 
cheap labour to the white farmers.

Zimbabwe has developed and maintained an independent foreign 
policy, including providing support to its neighbours threatened 
by outside interference. (For example, Zimbabwe dispatched troops 
to the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s to support 
that nation's government against a US-backed invasion by Rwanda 
and Uganda.)

These developments are the real reasons why those serving the 
powerful corporate interests in the West have imposed sanctions 
against Zimbabwe and why an orchestrated media blitz has 
portrayed Mugabe and his government as dictatorial and despotic.*

It is also why the forces within Zimbabwe seeking to overthrow 
the government have Western backing, including funding from the 
right-wing US Heritage Foundation. The most high-profile group, 
the Movement for Democratic Change, has even been exposed 
organising the assassination of President Mugabe.

Most people don't take the trouble to look into the background to 
world events, and I wouldn't expect Mr MacGill to, either. People 
are swayed by objective and subjective factors in a tidal wave of 
information, and misinformation.

But it is not stretching things too far to suggest we turn our 
eyes to home, to our government, which in our name has, using 
lies and deceit, invaded and occupied another nation, Iraq, at 
the ongoing cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives.

Zimbabwe is reclaiming its sovereignty and the very land that 
defines it as a nation: the Howard Government has given up our 
sovereignty and the very land that defines us as a nation. We 
have a long way to go.

* * *

See Zimbabwe: The Struggle for Land, the Struggle for 
Independence by Rob Gowland. Available from SPA Books $5 plus 
postage.