cecil rhodes and de beers genocide diamonds

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Cecil Rhodes & De Beers: Genocide Diamonds

Cecil Rhodes & De Beers:

Genocide Diamonds

RBG Communiversity

ICEBREAKER VIDEO

Cecil Rhodes & The Round Table Group

…“The atrocities that took place in Sierra

Leone and West Africa were what

DeBeers itself has done to African people

for a hundred years. On knees Africans,

with cans, body cavity searches, Zulu

forced to pull rickshaw for owners.

Diamonds have long played a role in

neocolonialism in Africa. Mobutu’s villa

on the Riviera , his diamonds, Mobutu

one of richest men in the world which

says something about the worth of the

resources in Congo. CIA worked with

Kennedy, Eisenhower and DeBeers to

assassinate Lumumba”…

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https://www.facebook.com/RBGCommuniversity

http://youtu.be/9iRHbBiHuuA



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Cecil Rhodes: A Bad Man in Africa

The evil that men do lives after them – and rarely more miserably than in the

case of Cecil Rhodes, who died 100 years ago this month.

By Matthew Sweet

Source: http://espressostalinist.wordpress.com/genocide/cecil-rhodes-and-de-beers-genocide-diamonds/

North of the Zambezi, they have long known about the suppression of free speech, about the

bloody redistribution of land along racial lines, about politicians happy to employ armed – and

sometimes uniformed – mobs to kill their opponents. They are practices imported to this region,

along with the railways, by the British.

Unlike the African press, the Western media rarely invoke the name of Cecil John Rhodes:

nearly a century after his death – on 26 March 1902 – his name is more associated with Oxford

Scholarships than with murder. It’s easier to focus on the region’s more recent, less Anglo white

supremacists: Ian Smith, for instance, who – despite his Scottish background – seems cut from

the same stuff as those Afrikaner politicians who nurtured and maintained apartheid farther

south.

But it was Rhodes who originated the racist “land grabs” to which Zimbabwe’s current miseries

can ultimately be traced. It was Rhodes, too, who in 1887 told the House of Assembly in Cape

Town that “the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a

system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa”. In less oratorical

moments, he put it even more bluntly: “I prefer land to niggers.”

For much of the century since his death, Rhodes has been revered as a national hero. Today,

however, he is closer to a national embarrassment, about whom the less said the better. Yet there

are plenty of memorials to him to be found. In Bishop’s Stortford, his Hertfordshire birthplace,

St Michael’s Church displays a plaque. The town has a Rhodes arts centre, a Rhodes junior

theatre group, and a small Rhodes Museum – currently closed – which houses a collection of

African art objects. In Oxford, his statue adorns Oriel College, while Rhodes House, in which the

Rhodes Trust is based, is packed with memorabilia. Even Kensington Gardens boasts a statue –

of a naked man on horseback – based on the central feature of his memorial in Cape Town.

But his presence is more strongly felt – and resented – in the territories that once bore his name.

Delegates at the Pan Africanist Congress in January argued that “the problems which were being

blamed on [President Robert] Mugabe were created by British colonialism, whose agent Cecil

Rhodes used armed force to acquire land for settlers”. He is the reason why, during the campaign

for the presidential election in Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s Zanu-PF described its enemies – white or

black – as “colonialists”; why, when Zimbabwe gained full independence in 1980, Rhodes’s

name was wiped from the world’s maps.

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The prosecution case is strong. Rhodes connived his way to wealth in a lawless frontier culture,

then used that fortune to fund a private invasion of East Africa. He bought newspapers in order

to shape and control public opinion. He brokered secret deals, issued bribes and used gangs of

mercenaries to butcher his opponents, seizing close to a million square miles of territory from its

inhabitants. Although he did this in the name of the British Empire, he was regarded with some

suspicion in his home country, and when it suited him to work against Britain’s imperial interests

– by slipping £10,000 to Parnell’s Irish nationalists, for example – he did so without scruple.

Rhodes was born in the summer of 1853, the fifth son of a parson who prided himself on never

having preached a sermon longer than 10 minutes. A sickly, asthmatic teenager, he was sent to

the improving climate of his brother’s cotton plantation in Natal. The pair soon became involved

in the rush to exploit South Africa’s diamond and gold deposits – and unlike many prospectors

and speculators who wandered, dazed and luckless, around the continent, their claim proved

fruitful.

When Rhodes began his studies at Oriel College, he returned to South Africa each vacation to

attend to his mining interests – which, by his mid-thirties, had made him, in today’s terms, a

billionaire. By 1891, he had amalgamated the De Beers mines under his control, giving him

dominion over 90 per cent of the world’s diamond output. He had also secured two other

important positions; Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony, and president of the British

South Africa Company, an organisation that was formed – in the manner of the old East India

companies – to pursue expansionist adventures for which sponsoring governments did not have

the stomach or the cash. The result of his endeavours produced new British annexations:

Nyasaland (now Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (now

Zimbabwe).

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RELATED:

The Scramble for Africa: Berlin

Conference of 1884-1885 to Divide

Africa

Neocolonialism Introduction

ROOT EVILS OF AFRIKA's

DOWNFALL, Concepts in White

World Terror Domination

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http://www.scribd.com/doc/102674227/The-Scramble-for-Africa-Berlin-Conference-of-1884-1885-to-Divide-Africa






http://www.scribd.com/doc/102664469/Neocolonialism-Introduction




http://www.scribd.com/doc/102590047/ROOT-EVILS-OF-AFRIKA-s-DOWNFALL-Concepts-in-White-World-Terror-Domination






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Rhodes imprinted his personality on the region with monarchical energy: dams, railway engines,

towns and anti-dandruff tonics were all named after him. But his expansionist zeal was not

always matched at home in Britain. “Our burden is too great,” Gladstone once grumbled. “We

have too much, Mr Rhodes, to do. Apart from increasing our obligations in every part of the

world, what advantage do you see to the English race in the acquisition of new territory?”

Rhodes replied: “Great Britain is a very small island. Great Britain’s position depends on her

trade, and if we do not open up the dependencies of the world which are at present devoted to

barbarism, we shall shut out the world’s trade. It must be brought home to you that your trade is

the world, and your life is the world, not England. That is why you must deal with these

questions of expansion and retention of the world.”

At around the same time, Henry John Heinz was outlining a comparable manifesto: “Our field,”

he pronounced, “is the world.” By 1900, his 57 varieties were available in every continent.

Global capitalism and imperial expansion developed in collaboration; shared aims, aspirations,

patterns of influence. Today, most of the world’s political empires have been dissolved and

discredited, but the routes along which capital moves remain the same. After Rhodes came

Nestlé, Coca-Cola, BP, McDonald’s, Microsoft.

In 1896, Rhodes’s name was linked with the Jameson Raid – a disastrous (and illegal) attempt to

annex Transvaal territory held by the Boers, and a principal cause of the South African War of

1899-1902. His reputation in Britain accrued a lasting tarnish. A defence of his character,

published in 1897 and co-authored by the pseudonymous “Imperialist”, offers an insight into the

charges against him: “Bribery and corruption”, “neglect of duty”, “harshness to the natives” and

the allegation that “that Mr Rhodes is utterly unscrupulous”. His lifelong companion Dr Leander

Starr Jameson – a future premier of the Cape Colony and the leader of the ill-fated raid – added a

postscript insisting that some of Rhodes’s best blacks were friends: “His favourite Sunday

pastime was to go into the De Beers native compound, where he had built them a fine swimming

bath, and throw in shillings for the natives to dive for. He knew enough of their languages to talk

to them freely, and they looked up to him – indeed, fairly worshipped the great white man.”

Did anyone buy this stuff? After Rhodes’s fatal heart attack on 26 March 1902, the death notices

were ambivalent. News editors across the world cleared their pages for obituaries and reports of

public grief in South Africa, but few wholehearted endorsements of his career emanated from

London. “He has done more than any single contemporary to place before the imagination of his

countrymen a clear conception of the Imperial destinies of our race,” conceded The Times, “[but]

we wish we could forget the other matters associated with his name.” Empire-builders such as

Rhodes, the paper said, attracted as much opprobrium as praise: “On the one hand they are

enthusiastically admired, on the other they are stones of stumbling, they provoke a degree of

repugnance, sometimes of hatred, in exact proportion to the size of their achievements.” Jameson

and “Imperialist”, it seems, had not succeeded in rehabilitating their mentor.

But the story of Rhodes’s posthumous reputation is just as complex and contentious as that of his

life and career. And curiously, his sexuality was one of the main battlegrounds. In 1911,

Rhodes’s former private secretary Philip Jourdan wrote a biography of his late employer in order

to counter “the most unjust libels with reference to his private life [which] were being

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disseminated throughout the length and breadth of the country”. Despite the aggressive romantic

attentions of a Polish adventuress and forger named Princess Catherine Radziwill, Rhodes was

indifferent to women and gained a reputation for misogyny. His most intense relationships were

with men – his private secretary Neville Pickering, who died in his arms; Jameson, whom he met

at the diamond mines in Kimberley where, the doctor recalled, “we shared a quiet little bachelor

establishment”; and Johnny Grimmer, of whom Jourdan (defeating the purpose of his memoir)

said: “He liked Johnny to be near him… The two had many little quarrels. On one occasion for a

couple of days they hardly exchanged a word. They were not unlike two schoolboys.”

Rhodes’s excuse for remaining single was the one used today by members of boy bands: “I know

everybody asks why I do not marry. I cannot get married. I have too much work on my hands.”

Instead, he accumulated a shifting entourage of young men, known as “Rhodes’s lambs”. It’s

probable that these relationships were more homosocial than homosexual, but that didn’t stop the

gossips or biographical theoreticians. In 1946, Stuart Collete suggested Rhodes was “one of

those who, passing beyond the ordinary heterosexuality of the common man, that the French call

l’homme moyen sensual, was beyond bisexuality, beyond homosexuality and was literally

asexual – beyond sex. It appears to have had no literal meaning to him except as a human

weakness that he understood he could exploit in others”. The same biographer wove these

comments into an analysis of Rhodes’s appeal to another set of posthumous acolytes: the Nazis.

As the 20th century moved on, Rhodes’s memory became increasingly attractive to extreme (and

eventually moderate) right-wing opinion. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918)

hailed him as “the first precursor of a Western type of Caesar – in our Germanic world, the

spirits of Alaric and Theodoric will come again – there is a first hint of them in Cecil Rhodes”.

It’s easy to see why Spengler, and later Hitler, were fans. Asked by Jameson how long he would

endure in memory, Rhodes replied: “I give myself four thousand years.” To the journalist WT

Stead he said: “I would annex the planets, if I could. I often think of that.” When, in 1877, he

first made his will, he urged his executors to use his fortune to establish a secret society that

would aim to redden every area of the planet. He envisioned a world in which British settlers

would occupy Africa, the Middle East, South America, the Pacific and Malay islands, China and

Japan, before restoring America to colonial rule and founding an imperial world government.

“He was deeply impressed,” Jameson recalled, “with a belief in the ultimate destiny of the

Anglo-Saxon race. He dwelt repeatedly on the fact that their great want was new territory fit for

the overflow population to settle in permanently, and thus provide markets for the wares of the

old country – the workshop of the world.” It was a dream of mercantile Lebensraum for the

English: an empire of entrepreneurs, occupying African territories in order to fill them with

Sheffield cutlery, Tate & Lyle’s Golden Syrup and Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls.

But it was Rhodes’s Alma Mater that did most to brighten his prestige. In 1899, Oxford

University, an institution with a long and continuing history of accepting money from morally

dubious millionaires, agreed to administer a more cuddly and less clandestine version of the

“Imperial Carbonari” of the 1877 will: the Rhodes Scholars. In 1903, the first names were

selected. A group of men fitted for “manly outdoor sports”, who would display “qualities of

manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for the protection of the weak, kindliness,

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unselfishness and fellowship” – men such asBill Clinton, the CIA director Stansfield Turner, the

first Secretary General of the Commonwealth Sir Arnold Smith, and the Nato Supreme

Commander Bernard Rogers.

By 1936, ML Andrews was praising Rhodes’s “vision of world peace, to be brought about by the

domination of the English-speaking nations”. In the same year the Gaumont-British film

company produced the hagiographic movie, Rhodes of Africa. Two years later, the little Rhodes

Museum was founded in Bishop’s Stortford. When it reopens next year, children will, for a fiver,

be able to sign up as one of “Rhodes’s Little Rhinos”.

A 1956 children’s book, Peter Gibbs’s The True Book About Cecil Rhodes – one of a series that

also profiled Marie Curie, Captain Scott and Joan of Arc – is the best example of how, in the

mid-20th century, Rhodes was reclaimed as a national hero. More unalloyed in its enthusiasm for

Rhodes than any comparable 19th-century text, it makes for queasy reading. Especially, perhaps,

if you were voting in Zimbabwe last weekend. Southern Rhodesia, it reports, is now “tamed and

civilised and cultivated, and many thousands of white people have settled there, and made it their

home. Today there are beautiful modern towns; homes, gardens, parks, towering blocks of

offices and flats; factories, railways and airports. It is a new and thriving country of the British

Commonwealth, where but recently only savages and wild animals dwelt. And it started from the

dreams of one young Englishman – Cecil Rhodes”.

All Diamonds are Blood Diamonds

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Editor video insert: Click to View

1. Africa and all its resources are the birthright of African people everywhere All Diamonds are

Blood Diamonds

2. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has forced us to recognize the terrible price paid by

peoples around the world the oil reserves necessary for the daily functioning of the U.S.

economic life. The slogan is “No blood for oil.”

3. In the Niger Delta of Nigeria African people living in dire poverty are fighting shell Oil for

control over the multi-dollar oil industry on their own land. 70 percent on less than a dollar a day.

The poverty, lack of electricity and sanitation and profound pollution. Yet Shell Oil and other oil

corporations have made more than $300 billion on Nigerian oil. White people live in mansions

with big SUVs in the same area. The people of this area are waging armed struggle. They say if

they cannot benefit from the oil, no one will benefit from the oil. They call it “blood oil.”

4. The U.S. and European controlled chocolate industry in Africa is a bitter reality. Ivory Coast

produces 40 percent of the world’s cocoa and in West Africa there are more than a quarter million

young African children working in enslavement in the cocoa plantations. All chocolate is blood

chocolate.

5. We can even show that even aluminum foil can be called Blood aluminum . In Guinea Conakry

earlier this year there was a general strike for over a month. Guinea has 40 percent of the world’s

bauxite, the mineral needed to make aluminum, but the average income of those considered

“middle class” is $500 a year. Alcoa, Reynolds and other corporations are making billions of

dollars but the people are forced to live under a repressive government and cannot even afford to

buy rice in a country where gas costs almost $5 a liter.

6. In Congo 5 million people have been killed in the past few years in U.S. and imperialist backed

wars over Coltan the mineral that is the electrical conductor necessary for cell phones and

computers. 80 percent of the world’s coltan is in Congo. So we say all computers and cell phones

http://youtu.be/eThlmx7w9r0

http://youtu.be/eThlmx7w9r0

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are blood computers and cell phones. Coltan worth over $400 a pound in a world where 1.7

billion people have wireless phones–one out of every 4 on the planet. Child labor, murder, dire

poverty–a few dollars a day at best–rape, death in the mines–thousands die in the mine shafts and

also from starvation–mostly children.

7. Blood cell phones and computers

8. We don’t have to go to Africa or other places. The U.S. is built on African enslaved labor. IIn the

U.S. a multitude o products such as office furniture, jeans, clothing, bedding, clocks and signs are

made by slave labor inside of prisons. The prison industry has half a million workers more than

any Fortune 500 corporation. With more than 2 million mostly African and Mexican people

incarcerated With more than 2 million mostly African and Mexican people incarcerated inside the

U.S. facing Three Strikes and mandatory minimums, one in three African men between the ages

of 20 and 29 is either in jail, on probation or parole. In a private Texas prison guards were

videotaped beating, shocking, kicking and setting dogs on prisoners—what u.S. soldiers did in

Abu Ghraib has been practiced against African people in U.S. prisons for years. So we can say all

prison products are blood products.

9. In a system built on centuries of the enslavement of African people, on genocide, oppression and

colonialism in this country and around the world we can say that beneath the sparkling veneer of

every resource that we take for granted is a very ugly story.

10. So this is the context that we say that All diamonds are blood diamonds!

11. We are sold the idea that diamonds are a symbol of beauty and long-lasting love. “Diamonds are

forever,” “a girl’s best friend.”

12. The truth about diamonds is not beautiful—diamonds are steeped genocide, colonialism, poverty

and oppression–controlled by the brutal DeBeers diamond cartel.

13. In 1938 DeBeers cartel hired a Philadelphia public relations firm when sales were sagging– to

market to Americans that diamond rings were a necessity for engagements and weddings. In the

past diamonds were relatively rare as engagement rings. To do this they launched slogan “A

diamond is forever,” and promoted the myth that a diamond ring should cost two months salary.

14. The reality is diamonds are not particularly valuable. They can be found around the world. Their

value is created by manufactured scarcity—forcibly keeping diamonds off the market to increase

their value. Unlike most other precious stones they do no appreciate with age and have a poor

resale value.

15. Finest large gem-quality diamonds come from Sierra Leone, along with Angola, Namibia and

Congo.

16. Diamonds are not just for jewelry–it is the strongest material in the world.Used in cutting, in

airplanes and in defense–ESSENTIAL to the U.S. military industry. Industrial diamonds worth

$10,000 a pound.

17. DeBeers is a cartel which is a monopoly that controls every aspect of the economy of the product.

DeBeers controls not only mining but cutting, polishing, setting into jewelry, pricing and selling

world wide. Millions of children and very young people involved in diamond industry.

18. The concept of blood or conflict diamonds came about in reference to the brutal imperialist

backed wars in Sierra Leone and West Africa in the 1990s.

19. Sierra Leone is a former British colony on the West Coast of Africa.

20. British colonialism In the 1700s Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River was called the “slave

factory.” From here the British supplied captive Africans particularly to Charlestown South

Carolina and to Georgia. Americans. The North American slave ships that called at Bunce Island

were sailing out of Newport (Rhode Island), New London (Connecticut), Salem (Massachusetts),

and New York.

21. More than 50,000 Africans were kidnapped from Sierra Leone mostly into South Carolina and

Georgia. They were called the Gullah people–worked in rice paddies in cotton plantations in the

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U.S. They were fierce fighters and many escaped from enslavement by joining the Seminoles in

Florida where they built thatched roof houses as in their homeland. Thatched roof–

environmentally sustainable!

22. Sierra Leone won nominal independence from Britain in 1961 with the establishment of

neocolonialism as in the rest of Africa.

23. Sierra Leone is one of the most impoverished countries in the world–most of the people live on

less than a dollar a day. It has the highest infant mortality in the world and the life expectancy for

men is 38 years.

24. Yet Sierra Leone has immense natural resources Diamonds-some of the best in the world

Titanium ore (red)– ･ in the aerospace industry – for example in aircraft engines and air frames; ･

for replacement hip joints; ･ for pipes, etc, in the nuclear, oil and chemical industries where

corrosion is likely to occur. Bauxite used for aluminum Gold Chromite (green) used in stainless

steel.

25. Chromite–stainless steel. As in the rest of Africa the profits and benefits of Sierra Leone’s natural

resources are in Europe and North America. Although the resources are on their land, the people

are deeply impoverished. 80 percent of households in Sierra Leone must use charcoal and wood

for cooking. . In the world 2.4 billion people still cook over wood , charcoal or dung fires.

26. Neocolonialism. Former British colonizers continue to control the economy, the military and the

governing of Sierra Leone — neocolonialism leaving only crumbs. Along with other imperialist

states they continue to extract the wealth.

27. In the 1990s The Revolutionary United Front emerged led by Foday Sankoh. At first the people

thought they were fighting in the interest of the people. But they were imperialist influenced

fighting for crumbs of the colonial plunder. They launched a brutal war against the people of

Sierra Leone with 50,000 murdered and tens of thousands of mutilations. It is said that DeBeers

and Israel were the biggest benefactors of the war.

28. By cutting off the people’s hands-signature torture used by the Belgian colonizers against African

people in Congo during Belgian colonialism.

29. The RUF forced young children to fight and to carry out most of the atrocities–often against other

children The child soldiers given tea, coffee and stimulant drugs.

30. RUF took over some of the diamond mines–this is a picture of one — and began selling

diamonds on the open market outside of the control of DeBeers.

31. From DeBeers website Because this served to depress DeBeers artificially high prices for

diamonds based on manufactured scarcity, the DeBeers cartel was threatened. This prompted

DeBeers to come up with the concept of the “blood” or “conflict” diamond–not because of

concern for the people but because they did not want to see the price of diamonds go down.

32. So DeBeers diamond cartel set up the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme–that would

supposedly determine if a diamond is “blood” or clean. Police policing themselves–like Alberto

Gonzalez policing himself.

33. The reality is DeBeers is the key figure behind the issue of blood diamonds. Under the

“legitimate” diamond mines of Sierra Leone–meaning the DeBeers and imperialist controlled

mines–African miners are forced to work for almost nothing. Most of the diggers must work

“independently getting only a tiny percentage on any diamonds that they find which are taken by

the mine. Only a few workers actually get a salary–from 30 cents to $2 a day. Nicky

Oppenheimer and CEOs of DeBeers–one world’s richest men worth 3 billion dollars–eats organic

foods and farm.

34. According to an international trade union report 72 percent of the children of Sierra Leone

between the ages of 5 to 14 are forced into paid or unpaid labor–in the legitimate diamonds mines

or other industry. In that region nearly a half million children are forced into labor. Childhood is a

result of privilege.

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35. There is no electrical grid. Only oil lanterns at night. Only electricity is from generators and 82%

of that is in Freetown. In sierra Leone only 1% use generators and 85 percent use oil lamps.

36. Sierra Leone has no running water, no water purification system, little hygiene or few toilets.

37. Sierra Leone has no system of roads, few paved roads and most roads are impassable in rainy

season.

38. How things got the way they are

39. Africa is the birthplace of civilization–all science, mathematics, art, philosophy, religion and

archeology originated in Africa. Sierra Leone and most of West Africa was part of the African

civilization of Mali (the people called it Manden) from 1235 to 1645 — ended by the

enslavement of African people. It had enormous influence in the whole world. One of its cities

Timbuktu was a center of learning–people came from everywhere to study and to enjoy the lively

social and artistic culture. There was a medical school that taught delicate eye operations to

remove cataracts. Mansa Musa was one of the famous rulers of Mali in the 1300s. He brought

architects and scholars into Mali. His rule was known for prosperity and stability of the country

as well as for artistic, educational and technological achievement.

40. Europe in the middle ages was backwards, disease ridden, poor oppressed and warlike.

41. In the 1300s the plague swept through Europe killing up to a half of the population and

destroying the already impoverished agricultural economy of feudalism.

42. Europe rescued itself by its assault on Africa. In 1415 Henry the Navigator (never sailed a ship)

sent Portuguese fleets out to the west coast of Africa to attempt to gain control of the wealthy

African trade in gold, silver and other resources–trade that had gone on for centuries–millennia–

connecting trade routes to the Middle East and Asia. They found African people themselves to be

their most valuable commodity. The Arabs had a trade in African people as slaves for a thousand

years. The slave trade started almost 80 years before Columbus sailed for the Americas By 1500

Portugal had extracted 700 tons of African gold, shipping it to Portugal and had kidnapped more

than 81,000 African people into slavery.

43. Men, women and children in chains were stacked on top of each other on pallets in the holds of

ships with the hideous stench of open pits of human waste. The pallets (seen on the lower left)

were no more than 15 inches high. Hundreds of thousands of African people died of disease or

starvation, or were murdered for attempted resistance and thrown overboard. The ecology of the

Atlantic Ocean was changed by the slave trade. Schools of sharks would follow the slave ships to

feed off the African men, women and children who died and were murdered on board and who

were thrown overboard.

44. The trade in African people was the key ingredient in the triangular trade bringing captives from

Africa as forced labor for the plantations of the Americas, transporting resources such as cotton,

sugar, tobacco and rum to North America and to England.

45. Along with the assault on Africa was the genocide against the Indigenous people and the theft of

their land and resources. Above is aftermath of U.S. slaughter at Wounded Knee in 1890. And

VOLUNTEER cavalry.

46. This slaughter, genocide, rape and plunder of the peoples of the Earth brought unprecedented

wealth into Europe for the first time.

47. This is what brought about the industrial revolution and transform Europe from feudalism to

capitalism.

48. In the U.S. the “founding fathers” were slave masters, owners of African people and instigators of

the genocide against the Indigenous people. This is the “founding values” of America. This slide

shows an idealized, falsified serene picture of the treatment by George Washington of enslaved

Africans who was known for his brutality. Washington “owned” more than 300 African people,

giving them meager daily rations of a few ounces of grain and fish by-products.

49. There were tens of thousands of burnings and lynchings like this one in Kansas City.

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50. Children at lynchings

51. As Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and leader of the Uhuru

Movement states all classes of white people sit on the pedestal of the enslavement of African

people and colonized and oppressed peoples around the world.

52. Wall Street was the center of New York’s slave auction blocks. In the 18th and 19th centuries

enslaved Africans were one fifth the population of New York. When the civil war was declared,

New York was so dependent on the cotton industry that the city considered joining the

Confederacy. It is telling that an African cemetery was found in recent years under the high rise

buildings of Wall Streets—American wealth resting literally on the bodies of African people.

53. White people sit on the pedestal of slavery and genocide.

54. Throughout Africa and the Americas the resistance of African people was fierce and powerful.

We do not learn enough about that–covered over in history books. On the slave ships resistance

was the major cause of death for captain and crew. The African Revolution in Haiti in the early

19th century, resistance by the Maroons in the Caribbean and South America the resistance of

Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, two city-wide African rebellions in New York City, Gabriel

Prosser, Cinque, Harriet Tubman. In Brazil, Surinam–everywhere Africans were enslaved they

were in a state of resistance.

55. The Shona, Zulu, Chokwe and many other African peoples waged fierce resistance to colonialism

and the colonial borders imposed by the Berlin conference. The Ashanti people in Ghana waged

armed resistance to the British for 200 years.Above is Yaa Asantewaa, the Ashanti woman

resistance leader in 1900.

56. King Leopold of Belgium was a leading Abolitionist of his day. He was responsible for turning

Congo into a rubber plantation to provide tires for bicycles and the newly emerging automobile

industry in Europe and the U.S. in the 1890s. At least 10 million Africans were slaughtered by

Leopold’s forces before there was even a word for genocide. Millions had their hands chopped

off for resisting being enslaved on their own land. People were sexually assaulted and mutilated.

Children were stolen from their parents and taken into camps to be groomed as a colonial army–

genocide under international law. Leopold GAVE Congo to Belgium–it was his personal

business!

57. The scramble for Africa and Africa’s resources. At least two million Africans were killed in the

scramble for ivory tusks for piano keys and billiard balls–the center of the ivory trade was

Connecticut.

58. 80 percent of the Nama and Herero peoples in Namibia were wiped out by the Germans They

were rounded up and left to die in the desert without food, water or shelter to die a slow torturous

death. Germany has never recognized this genocide or paid reparations even as they paid billions

in reparations to Israel. Same methods used by Hitler.

59. During this same time the British colonizer Cecil Rhodes came to southern Africa. Rhodes was an

ideological colonizer. He believed in British imperialism and promoted it. He said to “prevent

civil war you must become an imperialist “ among the workers of England….He created the

Rhodes scholarship.

60. His goal was to install British imperialism from Cape Town to Cairo and built the Cape-Cairo

railway.

61. His vision was part of the British empire on which they boasted “the sun never set” because it

went around the world. The British empire included 77 countries including India and15 countries

in Africa. 458 million people were oppressed in this empire–one quarter of the world’s population

at that time under British colonialism. At that time England had the highest standard of living in

the world based on the near starvation of the people in Africa, India and the other colonies.

62. Cecil Rhodes was a perpetrator of genocide, responsible for the displacement of millions of

African people for the benefit of white settlers and enslavement of African people on their own

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land. White people came from Europe and became wealthy from the theft of the gold and

diamonds in Southern Africa. Pass laws.

63. Cecil Rhodes founded DeBeers diamond cartel. Rhodes went to south Africa from Britain when

he was 18 years sold–he took over the diamond mines at Kimberley south Africa and others in the

area. By his early 20s he was a millionaire but he did not retire–he believed in subjugating Africa

for the benefit of England.

64. Rhodes went to Zimbabwe, the land of the Matabele and Shona who launched fierce resistance

led by their leader Lobengula.

65. Rhodes paid a mercenary army from England and stocked them with Maxim machine guns. With

just 5 machine guns the English slaughtered 5,000 African people in one afternoon alone–then

they celebrated with dinner and champagne.

66. Winston Churchill and Baden Powell boy scouts. Cecil Rhodes, gay, said he, “thoroughly

enjoyed the outing.” Saw the slaughter of Africans as sport and adventure.

67. The Chokwe, Shona and Zulu people were among those who led powerful struggles against the

European invasions.

68. Cecil Rhodes helped set up the apartheid system in south Africa and the pass laws–based on the

Jim Crow laws of the United States.

69. Pass laws, colonial taxation of African people to force them to work to be used as near slave labor

in the diamond mines.

70. Africans in the diamond mines were forced to stay away from family and wife, in compounds

with only cold tea and bread.–much the same conditions today.

71. When Cecil Rhodes died the DeBeers diamond cartel was taken over by the Oppenheimer family.

72. The atrocities that took place in Sierra Leone and West Africa were what DeBeers itself has done

to African people for a hundred years. On knees Africans, with cans, body cavity searches, Zulu


73. Diamonds have long played a role in neocolonialism in Africa. Mobutu’s villa on the Riviera , his

diamonds, Mobutu one of richest men in the world which says something about the worth of the

resources in Congo. CIA worked with Kennedy, Eisenhower and DeBeers to assassinate

Lumumba.

74. Neocolonialism continues today. Mandela with Nicky Oppenheimer in front of statue of Cecil

Rhodes. Mandela has praised DeBeers and Cecil Rhodes. Below: Mandela with Mobutu

75. Under Mandela and the ANC the conditions are worse for African workers and better for white

people. Today 12 years after the end of apartheid, 61 percent of African people live below the

poverty line in South Africa, while only one percent of whites. 96 percent of commercial arable

land is still in the hands of whites. Conditions are 14 percent BETTER for white people than they

were under apartheid.

76. Africa also has up to 90 percent of the world’s reserves of cobalt, manganese, chromium and

platinum–in West and Southern Africa. U.S. military needs these to function in the defense

industry. Pentagon report say they would do anything to maintain those resources.

77. U.S. military and AFRICOM in Africa–says its in the name of “war on terror” U.S. military

deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian

contractors in other nations.US has more than 700 military bases–growing to 1000 by end of

decade in 130 countries around the world.

78. What is the solution?

79. Our lifestyle requires the suffering of African people–in this country There is colonialism inside

the U.S. Two Americas Wake up to reality.

80. In Africa–our lives are at the expense of African people.

81. African people are a colony inside the U.S.–not racism- not ideas inside our heads–political and

economic relationship–same as in Iraq, Palestine etc. Two Americas.

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82. Uhuru Movement is led by Omali Yeshitela, leader of the African People’s Socialist Party, united

African People around the world for one united and liberated Africa. In the spirit of Marcus

Garvey, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba.

83. Africans are one people all over the world.

84. Not charity, not peace corps, missionaries, movie stars adopting African babies.

85. African resources belong to African people everywhere!

86. Building the African Socialist International around the world. Touch One! Touch All!

87. Africa in the hands of African working class people, not neocolonialists.

88. Unite with the struggle for reparations to African people!

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Sierra Leone and Angola , West Africa.

http://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/mapcopy.png

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British colonizer Cecil Rhodes came to southern

Africa. Rhodes was an ideological colonizer – he

believed in British imperialism and promoted it.

He said to “prevent civil war you must become an

imperialist.” He created the Rhodes scholarship.

His goal was to install British imperialism from

Cape Town to Cairo and built the Cape-Cairo

railway. His vision was part of the British Empire

on which they boasted “the sun never set” because

it went around the world.

The British empire included 77 countries

including India and 15 countries in Africa. 458

million people were oppressed in this empire–one

quarter of the world’s population at that time

under British colonialism. At that time England

had the highest standard of living in the world

based on the near starvation of the people in

Africa, India and the other colonies.

Cecil Rhodes was a perpetrator of genocide,

responsible for the displacement of millions of African people for the benefit of white settlers

and enslavement of African people on their own land. White people came from Europe and

became wealthy from the theft of the gold and diamonds in Southern Africa.

Cecil Rhodes founded DeBeers diamond cartel. Rhodes went to south Africa from Britain when

he was 18 years sold–he took over the diamond mines at Kimberley south Africa and others in

the area. By his early 20s he was a millionaire but he did not retire–he believed in subjugating

Africa for the benefit of England.

Rhodes went to Zimbabwe, the land of the Matabele and Shona who launched fierce resistance

led by their leader Lobengula Rhodes paid a mercenary army from England and stocked them

with Maxim machine guns. With just 5 machine guns the English slaughtered 5,000 African

people in one afternoon alone–then they celebrated with dinner and champagne.

Winston Churchill and Baden Powell boy scouts. Cecil Rhodes, gay, said he, “thoroughly

enjoyed the outing.” Saw the slaughter of Africans as sport and adventure.

The Chokwe, Shona and Zulu people were among those who led powerful struggles against the

European invasions.

Cecil Rhodes helped set up the apartheid system in south Africa and the pass laws–based on the

Jim Crow laws of the United States.

http://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/image8.gif

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Pass laws, colonial taxation of African people to force them to work to be used as near slave

labor in the diamond mines.

Africans in the diamond mines were forced to stay away from family and wife, in compounds

with only cold tea and bread.–much the same conditions today.

When Cecil Rhodes died the DeBeers diamond cartel was taken over by the Oppenheimer

family.

The atrocities that took place in Sierra Leone and West Africa were what DeBeers itself has done

to African people for a hundred years. On knees Africans, with cans, body cavity searches, Zulu


Diamonds have long played a role in neocolonialism in Africa. Mobutu’s villa on the Riviera ,

his diamonds, Mobutu one of richest men in the world which says something about the worth of

the resources in Congo. CIA worked with Kennedy, Eisenhower and DeBeers to assassinate

Lumumba.

Cecil Rhodes and the Cult of Eugenics

The British East India Company, modeled on the older Levant Company of Venice, had been

raping India since the early 1700s; but it wasn’t until 1763 that this Venetian faction was able to

seize control over the Empire as a whole.

It was the rapacious looting policies of this faction that forced the American colonies to declare

their independence.

British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, founder of the British Roundtable,

set out to establish institutions which would ensure that his white supremacist policies would

outlive him.

After the American Revolution, the British launched a renewed drive against India, completely

conquering the Subcontinent by the first years of the new century. It was in this period that the

opium trade, for which India was the linchpin, became the dominant pursuit of the Empire.

After Lincoln’s victory over the Confederacy in the American Civil War, and even more so after

the 1876 Centennial Celebration, it became clear that the United States could not be conquered

militarily. The British responded by launching the pseudo-science of eugenics, and also the

Round Table movements of Cecil Rhodes and Lord Alfred Milner.

In the 1880s and 1890s, this elite movement created:

the Eugenics Society, founded by Sir Arthur Balfour of the Venetian-origin Cecil family

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John Ruskin’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, opposing the entire European Renaissance

the Round Table of Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner, Balfour, and their friends, strategists from the

African and Asian empire, seeking world power for the Anglo-Saxon master race.

These men shared a bored contempt for the existence of mankind, like the satanic Zeus of

Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Their idea was to convince the United States to join them in their

quest for Anglo-Saxon world government.

The Round Table of Cecil Rhodes was centered on the imperial networks of South Africa, which

later spawned raw materials monoliths such as,

Rio Tinto Zinc

Anglo American

Lonrho

DeBeers

It was this inhuman cabal which ran the Boer War, conducted genocide against the black

population, and later set up the horrendous Apartheid regime.

One of the wealthiest, most influential, and evil men of his day, Rhodes was a virulent racist, or

as he and his friends termed it, a race patriot, who wrote in a document called Confession of

Faith:

“I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the

better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most

despicable specimens of human beings; what an alteration there would be if they were brought

under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our

dominions gives. I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the future birth to

some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.

Added to this the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the

end of all wars; at this moment had we not lost America I believe we could have stopped the

Russian-Turkish war by merely refusing money and supplies. Having these ideas what scheme

could we think of to forward this object?

“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object: the furtherance of the British

Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, for the recovery of

the United States, and for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire?

“Africa is still lying ready for us, it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity

of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes: that more

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territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most

honorable race the world possesses”

Over the course of his life, Rhodes commissioned seven wills to be written, all expressing this

same purpose.

His fortune was to be used for setting up the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarship as a means of

recruiting American and Commonwealth Anglophiles into the imperial faction:

“Let us form the same kind of society, a Church for the extension of the British Empire.

A society which should have its members in every part of the British Empire working with one

object and one idea we should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and

should watch the English youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every thousand

would have the mind and feelings for such an object, he should be tried in every way, he should

be tested whether he is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty details of life,

and if found to be such, then elected and bound by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his

Country.

He should then be supported if without means by the Society and sent to that part of the Empire

where it was felt he was needed.”

In his will, Rhodes authorized provisions for:

“…the extension of British rule throughout the world. The colonization by British subjects of all

lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise and

especially the occupation by British settlers of:

the entire Continent of Africa

the Holy Land

the Valley of the Euphrates

the islands of Cyprus and Candia

the whole of South America

the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain

the whole of the Malay Archipelago

the seaboard of China and Japan

the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire”

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It was this same British network of families (including the Huxley clan, the Cadburys, the

Darwins, and the Wedgewoods) and banking interests, with offshoots in North America and the

rest of Europe, which spawned the early 20th-century eugenics movement.

This set ran the zoos, and said men were base animals, and they directed British colonial strategy

and official science. Eugenics claimed that the English upper class ruled because they were

genetically superior.

The English masters humored themselves with this doctrine enforced on their beaten-down

subjects, in India, which the English reduced to starvation and political impotence by closing

native industries; and in South Africa under white rule.

These were the very same families who funded Hitler, and exerted their influence over the

German banking system to have him appointed Chancellor in 1933. In 1917, while World War I

was still raging, Lord Lothian, one of Lord Milner’s most important protégés, suddenly departed

from his previously fanatical anti-German rhetoric. As soon as Germany is crushed, he said, let

us rearm and remilitarize it under the most reactionary leaders, and point Germany towards war

with Russia and France.

This was done 16 years later, in 1933.

At the same time, the Anglo-Saxon eugenics doctrine was imported into Germany, to help shape

Nazi rule.

The cabal called for the sterilization or euthanizing of unfit members of society, to spare the

expense of their lives, much like today’s privatized HMO system functions; and these policies

have always been a doctrine of racial aggression.

In 1932, the Third International Eugenics Conference was held in New York City, chaired by the

rabid bigot Fairfield Osborn, whose like-minded nephew would later create the Conservation

Foundation.

Osborn was president of the American Museum of Natural History and a close colleague of the

notoriously racist Julian Huxley, and the co-host of the conference, the Harriman family.

Rhodesia

The state was named after Cecil John Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company acquired the

land in the 19th century.

The state was governed by a predominantly white minority government until 1979, initially as a

self-governing colony then, after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, as a self-

proclaimed sovereign Dominion, and latterly a Republic. Throughout its history, Rhodesia

continued to be referred to by the British, who did not recognize the state, as “Southern

Rhodesia”.

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Rhodes has been portrayed by Dr. C. Magbaily Fyle as a violent and brutal racist who used

forced labour tactics as a means of founding De Beers and other portions of his lucrative success.

lan Smith promised the whites who elected him Prime Minister of Rhodesia in 1982 that he

would keep Rhodesia white, at any cost. To stop the black guerrilla fighters trying to overthrow

his regime, Smith rationed food for Africans whom he believed were feeding the guerrillas. This

cruel measure only served to starve the already undernourished black population. Studies found

that over 90% of Rhodesia’s black children were malnourished and nutritional deficiencies were

the major cause of infant death. Smith rounded up blacks into concentration camps he called

“protective” villages. Believing that ignorant people were less likely to revolt, he cut funding for

black education, spending $5 on each black child compared to $80 on each white child. His all

white Parliament passed a law protecting officials who took actions for the suppression of

“terrorism”, enabling the police and military to commit atrocities. An international trade boycott

against Rhodesia arose, but while the US publicly condemned the government, it continued to do

business there. In 1971, President Nixon lifted the chrome embargo against Rhodesia at a time

when there was a surplus of chrome in the US. Blacks were eventually given the right to vote for

some officials, but the opposition to Smith’s government grew so strong that he was ultimately

forced to give up some power to blacks. In 1979, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, a country

primarily ruled by blacks.

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Rhodes to Hell

Was the father of Rhodesia really the epitome of pure evil?

By Peter Godwin

When I was growing up in Rhodesia, the foreboding image of Cecil John Rhodes, our founder,

glowered from bank notes and coins, and from the obverse side of the medal white boys were

awarded for doing national service in the Rhodesian security forces. It was a brooding face of

livid complexion, a prominent nose overhanging disapproving jowls and a drooping mustache.

Even then he struck me as an unlikely visionary and hero.

Rhodes’ story is an inherently implausible one: a sickly, asthmatic vicar’s son from Bishop’s

Stortford, England, heads to South Africa for the sake of his health and ends up the richest man

in the Western world and the colonizer of a vast tract of Africa. Rhodes had three simultaneous

careers in his 49 years–diamond magnate, politician, and imperialist. His big idea was to “save

Africa from itself.” Only after his death, in 1902, did the dizzying extent of his imperial fantasy

become apparent. In his will, he left a fortune for the establishment of a “secret society” modeled

on the Jesuits, with the aim of extending British rule throughout the world.

He was one of few men in history, apart from Simón Bolívar, who managed to get a sizable

mainland country named after himself–two countries, actually, Northern and Southern Rhodesia.

Only one person topped that, the Italian-born explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who claimed an entire

continent. Of course, Northern Rhodesia became Zambia in 1964. And when “Southern

Rhodesia” was jettisoned for “Zimbabwe” in 1980, the new black government began

energetically wiping away all signs of the man.

In the new South Africa, Rhodes’ statue still clings to the side of Cape Town’s Table Mountain,

for the moment at least. Standing on a rough-hewn granite pedestal in his trademark crumpled

linen suit, he points northward. “Your hinterland is there,” the inscription mocks, as whites flock

out of Africa. Other than that, the scholarships–originally envisioned by Rhodes as part of his

plan to create a worldwide, English-speaking ruling elite–which have sent Bill Clinton and

thousands of other Americans and Commonwealth students to Oxford, are about all that save

Rhodes’ name from obscurity. His most enduring legacy in the post-apartheid world is the De

Beers cartel, which he set up to manipulate the world diamond market, and even that looks

increasingly shaky. [...]

But somehow this shabbily dressed buffoon, with his falsetto giggle; this fidgeting, bumbling

public speaker who was once described by a senior Colonial Office mandarin as “grotesque,

impulsive, school-boyish, humorous and almost clownish … not to be regarded as a serious

person,” rose to become a business colossus and the prime minister of the Cape Colony, and ran

rings around the British government. Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, eventually

granted Rhodes his royal charter to occupy the north. “Take all you can–and ask afterwards,”

was his typically wimpish advice, as Rhodes’ pioneer column trekked into the interior. So, like

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much of British imperialism, the conquest of Rhodesia was a private-sector colonization, costing

the British taxpayer nothing, at least initially.

All that remained in the way of Rhodes’ imperial vision of controlling the African interior was

“one naked old savage,” as Rhodes called King Lobengula. The story of how the ruler of the

Matabele, a tribe that lives in what is now southern Zimbabwe, was cheated of his lands is truly a

sad one[.] A pair of binoculars here, a few hundred Martini-Henry rifles there, fail to do the trick.

So Dr. Jameson, Rhodes’ sidekick (played by Neil Pearson), treats Lobengula for his gout by

turning him into a trembling morphine junkie, prepared to sign anything put in front of him for

his next fix. As Rhodes announces to his shareholders in London that shares in the Charter

Company have risen 1,500 percent, Lobengula, defeated, his people reduced to servitude, kills

himself.

[Rhodes] was discredited even before his death, by his implication in Jameson’s raid on Boer-

ruled Johannesburg, an effort to overthrow the Kruger regime and take over the Transvaal that

was never sanctioned by the British and turned into a military fiasco and grave political

embarrassment. [...]

White men’s memorials don’t usually fare well in Africa. The old pioneer memorial in

Chimanimani, the eastern Zimbabwean village where I grew up, was smashed by a posse of

comrades from the ruling party’s youth league shortly after independence. But Rhodes’ grave

remains intact and undisturbed. A heavy brass plaque marks the spot where his body lies interred

within a swollen granite hill–a dwala, we call them–and I dare say it will probably still be there

when the next wave of reassessment breaks over Rhodes’ legacy. For Africans are loathe to

offend the dead: There is no surer way of provoking ancestral spirits than interfering with their

graves, and for all the mixed feelings he evokes, Rhodes is still a powerful spirit.

Rhodes and the white pioneers in southern Africa did behave despicably by today’s standards,

but no worse than the white settlers in North America, South America, and Australia; and in

some senses better, considering that the genocide of natives in Africa was less complete. For all

the former African colonies are now ruled by indigenous peoples, unlike the Americas and the

Antipodes, most of whose aboriginal natives were all but exterminated.

History

his nation declared its independence from the United Kingdom. It depicts Prime Minister Ian

Smith and has the text:

Rhodesian Independence – 11 November1965

The back depicts Rhodesian symbols and the message:

We stand behind you

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In December 1962 the Rhodesian Front party was elected to power. The party was committed to

the concept of white supremacy without the involvement of a United Kingdom that was seen as

particularly liberal with the election of a Labor Party Government in 1964. The leader of the

Rhodesian Front, Ian Douglas Smith, was elected Prime Minister on 14 April 1964. On

Armistice Day, 11 November 1965, the British colony of Southern Rhodesia declared its

independence.

The British government had adopted a policy known as No Independence before Majority

African Rule (NIBMAR). This policy dictated that those colonies with a substantial population

of white settlers would not receive independence except under conditions of universal suffrage

and majority rule. The timing of Smith’s telegram announcing the Unilateral Declaration of

Independence (UDI) to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is significant. It was sent precisely

at 11 a.m. in London on November 11, at the precise moment that the UK started its traditional

one minute of silence to mark the end of World War I and honor its war dead. The message was

a reminder that Southern Rhodesia had helped the Britain during World War I and World War II

and was owed a debt.

Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian discuss the British philosophy in Counterinsurgency in

Modern Warfare, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2008:

In 1964 the new British Labor Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, stonewalled Ian Smith, refusing

to contemplate anything less than a transfer of power to the African majority. After 18 months of

frustration and insecurity, denied British money owed from the breakup of the Federation,

excluded from Commonwealth conferences and committees, enduring an unofficial arms

embargo, humiliated and blocked at every turn while Rhodesia’s economy stalled and people

began to emigrate, Ian Smith acted, declaring Rhodesia unilaterally independent.

There is reason to believe that the British government planned and studied a possible military

intervention against the Rhodesian government during the years up to 1965. By the time of the

Unilateral Declaration of Independence, the British had decided that a military response was out

of the question. No British politician wanted to deploy British troops against white Rhodesian

forces. However, there is evidence that plans were made for a “contested reinforcement,” (an

interesting neutral term that translates to “invasion”). There were two major problems. The first

was the loyalty of white British troops that would be asked to fight and possibly kill white

Rhodesian soldiers, many of whom had been trained by British instructors or served in the

British military. The second and greater problem was the politician’s desire for a limited,

sanitary surgical strike on Rhodesia. The generals pointed out that any British invasion would be

preceded by air attacks to eliminate the Royal Rhodesian Air Force. This bombing of Rhodesian

airfields would lead to a loss of life, both military and civilian. There would be no return to

normalcy after such an attack. It would be considered a “stab in the back” by the European

Rhodesians. The political results of such an attack were considered so disastrous that no real

discussion of invading Rhodesia took place after the declaration of independence.

Both leaflets and posters were prepared and distributed in Great Britain to protest the Rhodesian

declaration of independence. The poster above accuses the British Government of selling out the

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blacks in Rhodesia and demands, “No independence before majority rule. Support the struggle of

the Zimbabwe people.”

Prime Minister Ian Douglas Smith signs

the Unilateral Declaration of Independence

The Unilateral Declaration of Independence was internationally condemned, and at the behest of

Britain, Rhodesia was placed under a United Nations Security Council sanction beginning in

1965 and lasting until the restoration of British rule in December 1979. The sanctions forbade

most forms of trade or financial exchange with Rhodesia. South Africa, Portugal, Israel and

some Arab states did continue to trade with Rhodesia. Rhodesia maintained its loyalty to Queen

Elizabeth but on March 2, 1970 formally severed links with the British Crown.

The Daily Mail of 1 January 1996 reported that Harold Wilson considered dropping leaflets over

Rhodesia with a message from the Queen to persuade the country not to rebel against Britain:

It was one of the most extravagant measures contemplated after Ian Smith’s racist regime issued

its Unilateral Declaration of Independence on 11 November 1965. The move was branded as

“treason” by Harold Wilson, whose Government swiftly responded with economic sanctions.

The idea of a leaflet drop aimed at the colony’s 200,000 whites came from the Governor of

Rhodesia, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, whose authority was ignored after the Unilateral Declaration of

Independence. But Wilson turned down the plan, saying it would not be “proper” for him to

advise the Queen to intervene and that the leaflet drop would be “quite a formidable

undertaking.”

But less than a fortnight later, the Prime Minister was under pressure from his own Foreign

Secretary to take far more drastic action. The Government, said Michael Stewart, could either

wash its hands of Rhodesia altogether and let the United Nations sort it out, or send in troops.

The consequences of abandoning Rhodesia would be disastrous, he warned.

The Afro-Asian world as a whole would be embittered by the spectacle of a Western country

leaving four million colored people to “the tender mercies of 200,000 white overlords.”

Prime Minister Ian Douglas Smith believed that his Rhodesian Front Party could hold power by

force for the white minority group it represented. Fifteen years later on 18 April 1980, Zimbabwe

emerged as an independent country under majority rule with international recognition.

Zimbabwe was once the center of the Munhumutapa Empire, a great trading dynasty and

producer of gold, sometimes believed to be the home of the legendary King Solomon’s mines.

recruitment and training of the Black Nationalist army went into high gear about 1963. Both the

Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU)

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were created and this led directly to combat with the white controlled Rhodesian Security Forces.

War was waged for 15 years with the Black Nationalist armies slowly beating back the much

better equipped armed forces of Rhodesia. The British had won wars against native insurgents in

Kenya and Malaya in recent years and the Rhodesians had every reason to believe that they

could do the same thing using similar tactics. It was not to be. The tactics that had worked earlier

for the British did not work against the insurgents in Rhodesia.

http://www.psywarrior.com/RhodesiaPSYOP.html

Rebels dropped burning plastic over the body of this 23-year-old man because he was unable to pay them.

http://www.psywarrior.com/RhodesiaPSYOP.html

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A mineworker panning for diamonds in Sierra Leone.

Prisoner-laborers in one of Sierra Leone’s open-pit diamond mines. Many of them end up being executed

because of suspected stealing, being non productive, or to be made examples of.

Conflict Diamonds

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, or so the saying goes. However, for the civilians of Sierra

Leone, Liberia, and Angola, West Africa, they represent greed, violence, and blood. The

majority of young lovers wooing one another with diamond rings or necklaces don’t realize the

real price that is paid for that precious gem to adorn their fingers or necklines. According to the

DiamondFacts.org website, diamonds that are mined in the war zones of West Africa in order to

finance an insurgent’s war efforts are referred to as “conflict diamonds”, or “blood diamonds”,

http://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/ssphoto-1.jpg

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because of the human sacrifice that is paid for the sale of the gems (1). The Amnesty

International USA website explains that the sale of these diamonds have funded the efforts of the

National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) rebel group in Angola, the

Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel group in Sierra Leone, and even the Al Qaeda terrorist

network (2). Tens of thousands of civilians are forced to mine for the gems under the most

inhuman conditions, and many of them are murdered for their lack of production, for stealing, or

just to be made examples of (7).

Between 1991 and 2000, four percent of the diamonds that made it to the U.S. were conflict

diamonds, according to the DiamondFacts.org website (2). The images in this essay depict the

innocent who are caught in the middle of the conflicts that raged in the areas of Sierra Leone and

Angola; from the women to the young children, either forced to dig in the pits, or recruited by

the rebel groups. The image of the young boy whose hands have been hacked off is just one of

some 20,000 innocent people who the RUF tortured as protest to a 1996 plea for a peace

movement. The majority of the women have been raped before being tortured, as proof is shown

in the image of the 45-year-old woman with burn scares on her bare back. The images of young

boys wielding AK-47 assault rifles is a shocking testimony that these rebel groups are recruiting

soldiers at a very young age in order to brainwash them to help support their bloodthirsty cause.

Conflict diamonds, also know as blood diamonds, have financed wars for the National Union for the

Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) rebels in Angola, and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF)

rebels in Sierra Leone, Africa.

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Workers dig in a diamond pit in Sierra Leone.

The images in this essay are intended to educate, and hopefully shock those who had no idea that

the diamond industry has helped to fund extremely violent conflicts a world away. While the

majority of the photos show the horror of the conflicts, some could be taken as photos depicting

productivity or development, if viewed out of context. For example, if nothing was known about

this topic, the image at the top of the third page could represent job productivity in a third world

country to anyone looking at it for the first time. However, because the reader has been informed

of the purpose of the diggers on page one, and what a conflict diamond is on page two, the reader

understands the real purpose of the workers shown on page three.

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This 17-year-old diamond pit worker lost both of his hands to rebels’ machetes.

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The release of the film, Blood Diamond intrigued me to learn more about this subject. Before

researching this topic, I had never heard the term “conflict diamond”, nor do I suspect that many

others knew about this topic as well. We have been taught so much about the hunger and AIDS

epidemics in Africa, but left oblivious to the violence and aftermath generated by the illegal

diamond trade. Perhaps if more people were educated about this matter, they’ll appreciate even

more, the precious gem they wear on their finger or around their neck.

An 11-year-old boy recruited as a soldier in the rebel group, the National Union for the Total

Independence of Angola (UNITA).

Rebels raped and tortured this 45-year-old woman by dumping burning charcoal all over her body.

Works Cited: Campbell, Greg. “Blood Diamonds.” Amnesty Magazine. Amnesty International USA. 30 Nov. 2006.

“Conflict Diamonds.” Diamond Facts.org. 2 Dec. 2006.

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cecil rhodes and de beers genocide diamonds

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