"After the Family Trade - a story of Inter-Universe Paranoia" comes out real soon now, too, doesn't it?
]]>Firstly, the events being talked about were in South Africa, not Rhodesia, and exploitation does not constitute murdering people by the trainload. Even at its worst, that was never a feature of the Boer/British exploitation, though it WAS a feature of the Bantu invasions and some of the other Bantu conflicts. Wikipedia seems pretty balanced:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaka
The history of the Rhodesias from the European colonisation on was never as brutal or oppressive as in South Africa, and it was FAR more liberal and less racialist, at least in the 1950s and 1960s, until Wilson fucked it over. I am not claiming that it was a utopia, but the anti-white propaganda in the UK was extreme in its falsity and malice, even by the usual standards.
]]>My sources were in the period 1900-1930. They were describing local conditions. White colonists took the best farmland and told the blacks who were already there to go away. They started building businesses that hired the displaced people, who had some tendency to be worked to death. Other parts of Rhodesia may have been doing fine, but these local people couldn't just leave and be taken in by relatives elsewhere for some reason or another, something to do with the blacks.
They didn't say what happened in the 1950's and 1960's, both left Rhodesia before that.
]]>Certainly it wasn't the worst murder in the world. I've seen claims that the black population of the whole "country" actually increased. It was nowhere near as bad as the US genocide of native americans, though of course it probably would have been if there had been as many settlers.
And the reasons you refer to were almost certainly tribal.
Yes, but my authors didn't know much about that. One of them made some african friends while she was a little girl. They showed her how to block all the entrances but two of a mouse colony, and blow smoke into one entrance and catch the mice coming out of the other. Roast them whole on the fire and eat them. She said they were delicious. She didn't write about their politics, though.
Saying something was tribal in africa is a lot like saying something is political here.
]]>And, of course, the motivation for the founding Boer myth, the "Great Trek" to avoid British "oppression". Now what was the form of that oppression? The permanent abolition of slavery, within all areas governed by Britain, that's what. Which tells you something.
]]>Secondly, slavery was not widely practised among the Boers, and was a minor part of the reason, as is shown by the fact that the new republics they created banned it. As I have pointed out, there is often little difference between serfdom / indentured labour and the better end of slavery.
]]>Somehow this reminds me of a south Italian joke. Back in the WWII era, southern italy was much poorer than northern italy, so the northern italians made jokes about it. Like, Mussolini sent a telegram to south italy saying "TIGHTEN BELTS" and got a reply "SEND BELTS". He sent one saying "HATE JEWS" and got a reply "SEND JEWS". That kind of thing.
Or a welsh joke. "You had a shoebox to live in? We would have died for a shoebox."
What, the Boers put blacks on trains before they killed them? We rhodesians didn't have the trains for that!
Something like that. Oh well, I thought it was funny.
]]>Quite enjoyed it, excellent ending.
]]>