mugabe

Why is cultural pluralism always used as a smokescreen to deny cultural differences? Is it so that we cannot see the woods for all the trees?

I actually argue in my thesis that Mugabe take more than a leaf or three out of Ian Smith's book. Have you heard of Operation Hectic / Operation Quartz?

But things are always infinitely more complicated than the black and white identity politics that Westerners habitually read onto the (post)colonial scene so that they may apportion blame along exactly those lines. In many respects the colonised of Zimbabwe saw the colonisers through the lens of tribalism, rather than in terms of Modernising domination. The colonisers were considered in some respects to be a white tribe who had conquered them and were to be respected and ultimately defeated on those terms. So the white influence in Zimbabwe was not read -- at least not entirely -- as a colonial plague from the outside, whose influence was to be eliminated in order to make Zimbabwe pure again.

The white Zimbabweans left a legacy of ...certainly oppressive practices, but also Christianity, a notion of democracy (for white liberals also intervened) and so on. This interpollenation between black and white cultures cannot be reduced to the terms of a simple morality play.