Shaka Zulu and Zimbabwe Today

SHAKA ZULU AND ZIMBABWE TODAY I am just back from a trip of about 1 200 kilometres around Zimbabwe. Everywhere I went I saw the empty skulls of a people driven off their land. Farm homes without windows, windows without curtains, gardens overgrown and dying, staff quarters empty and lifeless. Croplands idle and overgrown with weeds. Farm equipment rusting in the broken down sheds, hungry cattle without water, vultures having a feast day. It reminded me of …

…the creation of an open and transparent society. A pipe dream? No it need not be – would the people of the South African highveld ever dreamed that one day a third of the economic power of Africa would come out of the area known as the "whitewater ridge" in the Transvaal? No of course not, but within 100 years of the terrifying nights of the mfecane, this was already a reality and Shaka only a memory.