By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE link between imperialism and white supremacy does not only mean that white racists value white lives over African lives.
It also means those African lives which whites choose to value for white reasons will also be valued selectively over other African lives.
It means that, for their own convenience for instance, Rhodesians like David Coltart will go out of their way to document Gukurahundi as an atrocity and choose to ignore Chimoio, Nyadzonia, Sharpeville, Kasinga and many other war crimes.
So, an intellectually alert African will not fail to ask the question why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 did not make a difference in the launching in the same year of the doctrine of apartheid and its subsequent imposition on Africans in southern Africa which lasted well into the 21st Century.
UDHR neither universal nor about human rights
According to Paul Treanor, the UDHR is a classic Cold War document:
l “In many cases, the governments and political systems in these states (in the UN in 1945) had been installed in 1944 and 1945 by Allied military action. (In Europe especially, the Soviet Union and the US manipulated the political process to obtain the desired government inside their new spheres of influence.) Even by the limited standards of parliamentary elections, (the installed) governments did not ‘represent’ their inhabitants…
l “Some of the signatory states were, at the time, de facto protectorates [that is occupied colonies] of Allied powers — such as Persia (Iran), Egypt and Iraq. Others were self-ruled [settler] colonies, but with a whites-only government, such as Australia and South Africa.
“Several of the states excluded large sections of the population from any political influence — such as the remains of the German minorities in Eastern Europe at the time. Germany and Japan themselves were under military occupation, and not represented.
“Most notably, Africa was ‘represented’ by [settler] colonial powers. All political activity by natives was forbidden.”
Treanor concludes, then, that:
“Not only are human rights not universal, they are not even ‘Western’ or ‘European.’… Human rights are not [even] culturally specific, they are politically specific. The human rights doctrine is a political ideology.
The imposition of human rights on the world of that political ideology.
And with it comes the rest of the (neo-) liberal package. The supporters of (the whiteman’s) human rights are also the supporters of free trade, democracy, an open society and the free market.
The two recent explicit military interventions to protect human rights, in (East) Timor and Kosovo (later Iraq in 2003), have also brought open free-market economies to these regions.”
For Africa, the human rights doctrine represents the whiteman’s strategy and cage to frame anti-imperialist leaders and movements, to imprison them and their peoples by redefining what is good and bad leadership from man’s linear vision and on grounds laid downby the West.
The human rights crusade is one of the latest pretexts of intervention in a long line of other pretexts which started with the slave trade.
A few paradoxes about 1948 will show how and why humanity should move out of this cage called the UDHR.
First, 1948 is the year when white settlers in South Africa, under the domination of the newly elected Afrikaner Nationalist Party, proclaimed apartheid as the official political and social policy of the South African state.
As Anthony Thomas has demonstrated in his biography of Cecil John Rhodes, the British settlers, under the leadership of Rhodes, were the true founders of apartheid in South Africa in the 1880s.
The British kept and practised apartheid informally and effectively, helping to maintain the myth of Rhodes as an open-minded white liberal who loved Africa and the Africans. But in 1948, apartheid was proclaimed officially as a state policy.
This is important because South Africa, in 1948, was a self-governed British colony. Britain, as one of the five truly autonomous signatories of the UDHR, would not have allowed its star-colony South Africa to proclaim apartheid at exactly the same time as the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights if that document had been about human rights and if it had been truly universal.
Even more shocking is the fact that the white settler-racists of South Africa were represented by Jan Smuts at the same UN conference in Los Angeles which proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Smuts had with him a team of white lawyers who participated in the great event before going back home to benefit from what the UN, in 1973, was to condemn by adopting the International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crimes of Apartheid.
The 1973 condemnation of apartheid as a crime against humanity was not the result of any consistent application of the UDHR.
Rather, it was the product of consistent liberation struggles in the Third World.
In the fourth place, both Britain and the US, as key promoters of the UDHR, played equally critical roles helping the proclamation and defence of yet another apartheid state in 1948, which still exists today, Israel.
Israel remains today the hub of the new Anglo-American strategy for extending apartheid in the Middle-East, through the bantustanisation of Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Libya.
In the fifth and final place, the year 1948 ushered, in southern Africa, a long chain of racist laws against the diselected African natives.
These laws included:
– The Railways and Harbours Act of 1949 which segregated both passengers and workers on trains and ships on the basis of race;
– the Unemployment Insurance Act, which was amended to exclude Africans from social security and unemployment benefits;
– the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which was added to the Immorality Act of 1927;
– the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, which equated African aspirations for liberation with ‘communist terrorism and subversion’ and therefore legalised and legitimised the total denial of pan-African values and African aspirations for liberation to suit US Cold War ideology;
– the Bantu Education Act of 1950, which clearly sought to deny quality education to all Africans;
– the Race Classification Act of 1950 and the Population Registration Act of the same year which brought to South African practice the procedures
and techniques of racist population classification and diselection which the British and the North Americans had just finished condemning at the Nuremburg trials in Germany;
l the Group Areas Act of 1950, which required racially classified individuals and groups to be forcibly removed according to the settler state’s arbitrary classifications;
l the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act which, by 1952, extended the compulsory carrying of passes to African women, so that Africans (male and female) were required to have passes on them all the time and to be treated as visitors and superfluous appendages in all areas designated white.
The impunity of the Rhodesian regime demonstrated by the Chimoio war crime was encouraged by US foreign policy. The US Marshall Plan, after the Hitler wars, was not limited to the economic reconstruction of Europe.
It included the reconstruction of white supremacy by replacing European nationalisms in Europe and in European settler-colonies with what Gerald Horne calls a ‘synthetic whiteness’ or a superior form of pan-European solidarity driven by a right-wing anti-communism.
The US-sponsored form of global white supremacy considered itself to be above German racism, Italian fascism and colonial apartheid because it offered pan-European solidarity under the guise of combating communism and promoting ‘development’.
Therefore, the involvement of the US in Zimbabwe has consistently reflected one of the consequences of the Marshall Plan; the ability of the US to influence and even determine the policies of its European allies through strategic resource control, such as the control of petroleum, for instance.
By declaring southern Africa to be ‘the Persian half of Minerals’, the US served notice to its European allies that their southern Africa policies had to be in line with US policy and US interests, just as in the real Persian Gulf itself.
Using pan-European solidarity and anti-communism, the US was able to get Rhodesia to be treated as an exception to UN sanctions when the Byrd Amendment allowed the importation of Rhodesian chrome in violation of UN mandatory sanctions. In this way, British policy toward Rhodesia became subsumed under US policy.
By 1951, the US, as the leading imperialist power, was benefiting from European colonialism and settlerism in Africa so much that white settlers felt reassured about the permanent future of white rule.
What appeared to be a far-fetched position of the white South African regime in 1951 was reaffirmed by the Nixon administration of the US in US National Security Memorandum 39 of 1969, otherwise known as the Kissinger Study of Southern Africa, which concluded, among other things, that:
“The whites (in Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa) are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them.
There is no hope for the blacks to gain the political rights they seek through violence, which will only lead to chaos and increased opportunities for the communists.”
Just as now, in 1969, the US Government and its ambassadors and advisors also doubted the determination of the African people of this region (including Zimbabweans) to define their interests and objectives and to pursue the same to the end.
Moreover, the 1969 Kissinger study did not see the African people as the drivers of change.
It therefore concluded that:
“Military realities rule out black victory at any stage. Moreover, there are reasons to question the depth and permanence of black resolve.”
In this context, the Chimoio massacre was ‘justified’ not only because the Rhodesians were fighting ‘communism’ but also because US policy under Nixon and Reagan, especially, did not view Zimbabweans as justified to wage war to liberate themselves.
In the words of former US Ambassador Elliot P. Skinner, who was also the Franz Boaz Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in 1979:
“Our (Western) tragedy is that, whether we like it or not, the US has inherited the role of ‘metropole’ (or mother country) of all the whites in southern Africa.
This is not a role we welcomed, but it is one we cannot avoid…we are the ones who have led the discussions about the future of these countries (Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa).”
This ‘mother country’ role on behalf of just European settlers only is what makes the illegal and racist sanctions against Zimbabwe a uniquely Anglo-Saxon problem which has exposed the MDC formations who agreed to be used. Professor Gerald Horne, in his study From the Barrel of A Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980, calls this white ‘mother country’ role a ‘synthetic pan-European solidarity’ which former UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson called the ‘kith-and-kin’ bond.
It is the US which, through its Cold War posture, provided the over-arching synthetic ideology which made it possible to protect all white settlers from Kisangani to Cape Town under the banner of anti-communism and anti-socialism.
When Ian Smith’s Foreign Minister P. K. F. V. Van der Byl wrote his last appeal to the Western white empire to save white Rhodesia from the freedom fighters of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and from the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA on January 12 1979, he couched his appeal in terms of a struggle between the ‘Christian’ faith and ‘communism’.
Van der Byl wrote:
“The attacks which are presently being mounted on Rhodesia, a Christian nation, are by terrorists trained and supplied by anti-Christian communists.
Determined to root out and destroy Christianity whenever it is found, these terrorists have targeted many of their attacks on innocent missionaries and their families in Rhodesia.
The future of Christianity in Rhodesia will be influenced by the actions of the US Government in supporting the majority rule Government of Rhodesia.
It will be tragic if the greatest Christian nation on earth (that is the US) turned its back on its Christian brethren in Rhodesia.”
The overall ideological and political umbrella provided to white regimes by the US Government and its white allies meant that white Rhodesian war crimes would be swept under the carpet and white hate language to demonise the African freedom fighters would be put on reserve and be dusted up for use by foreign-sponsored parties and agents during the land revolution and even now.
When George W. Bush was declared winner of the US presidential election in 2000, a white farmer in Odzi deliberately crushed a war veteran called Mapensauswa with his vehicle as a way of celebrating Bush’s election and anticipating that the Government of Zimbabwe would be overthrown by white powers in order to return white settler-farmers to farms now being occupied by war veterans.
The African lesson from this brief history is that African governments and research institutions should set up financial grants to facilitate the documentation and interpretation of our history from the point of view and real experience of the African people.