Mamdani’s article is a compendium of errors. He should know that the reason for the suspension of British aid for land reform was that the land was going to Mugabe’s cronies, not to the poor....
Mamdani writes of the ‘war vets’ as if they all wanted to be farmers: those who worked with them say that wasn’t so...
Mamdani describes the trade unions as if they were an Anglo-American creation and represented mainly Ndebeles. This is nonsense: ...
Mamdani talks as if ‘land reform’ was a popular revolution, which is rather like writing a history of Cambodia in which Pol Pot’s genocidal re-ruralisation was carried out by popular demand...
Mamdani does not mention the fact that the land invasions were a massive attack on farm workers, whose numbers he gives as 300,000, though together with their families there were 2.4 million of them living on white farms...
Mamdani talks of the repression ‘in Ndebele areas in 1986’. Hasn’t he read the authoritative report Breaking the Silence, which shows how much wider than that the phenomenon was?
Mamdani throughout underplays the huge role mass torture played in his supposed popular revolution..
Mamdani remarks ‘how little turmoil accompanied this massive social change’. The mass beatings, the torture, the killings have all been whited out.
Mahmood Mamdani never met a third-world dictator whose crimes he couldn't exculpate.
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