Among most British people, Robert Mugabe inspires much more anger than
Saddam Hussein. Iraq`s leader murders his enemies out of sight. Whatever
horrors he is brewing in his secret laboratories and factories, they have
not been unleashed upon the world at large. Mugabe, by contrast, terrorises
his white subjects under floodlights. Farmers are driven from land they have
tilled for decades.

Casual brutality is the nation's staple diet, and heaven knows there is
little else to eat. Zimbabwe is sinking into a slough of corruption,
starvation and bankruptcy to satisfy the megalomania of one man.

If Tony Blair announced tomorrow that Britain intended to invade Zimbabwe
and remove Mugabe from power, I suspect that the news would be far more
enthusiastically received than a declaration of war on Saddam Hussein.

Yet, of course, neither Britain nor the United Nations will depose Mugabe.
Many miles and the colonial legacy divide us from his crumbling country. His
tyranny poses no threat to the outside world. His victims are his own
people.

For all the sentiment expended upon Zimbabwe`s white farmers, most people in
Britain recognise that their fate was sealed more than two decades ago when
black majority rule came to the former Rhodesia. Since 1980 it has merely
been a question of how long the dwindling number of Rhodesians could stick
it.

After the bitterness of the civil war there never seemed a realistic
prospect that a multi-racial society would survive for long. For 100 years,
the white man lorded it in old Rhodesia. Now a black tyranny does so.

The remaining whites will be driven out of Mugabes`s Zimbabwe. The wise ones
will leave while they still have the skin on their backs. Just or unjust,
that is reality.

I would go further and suggest that the game is up for the white man
throughout Africa. It does not matter whether this is a good or bad thing -
it represents the tide of history.

For four centuries, white immigrants and their decendants have pitched camp
in Africa. "We belong here. We are as much Africans as any of Mugabe`s war
veterans" a Zimbabwean farmer will say.

Yet, in the eyes of Africa this is not true. The white man is always the
alien, the outsider, the former ruler whose very competence is a painful
embarrassment even to the most educated black Africans. However much those
Zimbabweans, or their South African counterparts, love the countries in
which they live, few black Africans will today acknowledge that the white
man belongs among them. He is perceived as a leftover from the past, flotsam
drifting on the beach of history.

The remaining whites will not be driven out in a single dramatic purge. Over
the next 30 years, they will simply be prodded, frightened and squeezed
until they slip away piecemeal, as the children of a good many friends of
mine has already done.

In a succession of lurches and surges, Africa is reverting to a dark
continent. Over the past 40 years, since the colonial powers began to
depart, all the world's efforts to provide advice and aid have been
frustrated by cultural resistance, lack of education, population explosion
and above all, corruption on a vast scale.

Many Western nations suffer from political corruption. But they are rich
enough, and the corruption modest enough, for their economies and political
systems to co-exist with it. Across Africa, however, rulers have
systematically stripped national treasuries of their wealth. It was recently
estimated that 95 billion Pounds has been illegally removed from the
continent by national rulers since the colonial powers departed. No society
can prosper amid corruption on this scale.

We take for granted the honesty of our judges, accountants - yes even after
Enron - banks and bureaucrats. Honesty is not only the best policy, it is
indespensable if any economic system is to prosper. In Africa, the only
wholly successful modern industry is the theft of cash from businesses, aid
funds, government coffers, utilities, mines, wildlife charities etc.

In the days when I travelled in Africa a lot, an old hand in Nairobi
explained a few home truths to me. "In this society, if you don`t use power
to enrich yourself and your family you are not merely behaving foolishly,
you are thought to be acting wickedly" he said. "There is absolutely no
understanding here of the ideal of the community, of people at large. There
is only the family, the tribe and yourself."

There are a few exceptions such as Nelson Mandela. But for most of the
continent, that cynical piece of wisdom is as true today as it was 20 years
ago.

Almost every African state is governed solely in the interest of its ruling
clique. National bankruptcy does nothing to diminish a bottomless appetite
for first-class travel and absurdly pretentious embassies abroad. Look at
the roll call in London alone - some of the most expensive real estate in
the capital is occupied by the diplomatic missions of some of the poorest
countries of the world: Malawi in Grovener Street, Tanzania in Hartford
Street, Zambia in Palace Gate, Zimbabwe in the Strand.

By almost every economic measure Africa has gone backwards, not forwards,
since the 1960`s. Three years ago Bill Clinton toured the continent and
delivered a series of supremely cynical speeches, proclaiming that the West
would henceforward be coming to Africa`s aid. It sounded like rubbish then
and it is rubbish now. The West has no intention of bailing out Africa, even
if Blair has surges of compassion for the place.

Donors are tired of giving cash of which only a smidgen reaches the people
for whom it is intended. Food deliveries to starving people will continue,
but these do nothing to salvage collapsing economies.----The end of the Cold
War means that no great power feels a need to buy influence there. For many
years, African leaders bitterly denounced "imperialist interference" in
their countries. Today, they are learning that international indifference is
far more painful.

For most of Africa`s people the future looks even grimmer than the past.
Aids is ravaging populations. The statisticians expect its consequences to
grow much worse before they get better. The influential American academic
Phillip Bobbitt, in his recent book Shield of the Achilles, observed that he
sees only misery ahead for Africans in the 21st century, as disease, famine
and corruption relentlessly assail them.

There was a vivid moment a couple of years ago during the first stage of the
British intervention to support the struggling government of Sierra Leone.
Its prime minister asked a visiting British politician, in the presence of
journalists, if it might be possible for his country to become part of the
British Empire again. Most of those present believed that the Leonese leader
was serious. The problems of African societies are so huge, so deep- rooted,
that the few honest and decent politicians despair. They grasp at any straw
to rescue their countries. It is a tragic spectacle and few experts see a
way out.

When the West does intervene in any African society, it is essential to stay
for at least 10 years or more to have any hope of making lasting progress.
The Americans failed miserably in Somalia a decade ago, because they treated
it as a short term problem. The British Army training team in Sierra Leone
has done a good job, but the lasting need is for civil assistance - to teach
people to collect taxes, administer courts and run infrastructure projects.
We are talking, of course, about something embarrassingly close to
neo-colonialism. Many Africans would be delighted if there was more of it
about. But political obstacles remain overwhelming, the imperial memory too
fresh.

Almost every Western attempt to help Africa founders, sooner or later, amid
the morass of political prejudice and cultural division. Zimbabwe`s
remaining whites farm the land incomparably more efficiently than their
black counterparts. But this makes their presence more intolerable, not less
so, to the likes of Mugabe.

The big fib, propagated at the time of African independence, was that local
people wanted the right to vote. Not so. They scarcely cared a fig for
ballots, most of which were soon rigged anyway. They wanted the land, cars,
houses, swimming pools of their erstwhile white rulers. They still want
these things, in Zimbabwe and South Africa generally.

Sooner or later, most African leaders find it expedient to hand over the
white men`s toys to their own people, without all the bother of explaining
that these things should be won through education, skills, enterprise, and
hard labour over generations.

I was never a supporter of Ian Smith`s Rhodesia, which was founded on a huge
injustice to the blacks, and sustained by cruelties as horrible as those of
Mugabe today. White minority rule in South Africa was a loathsome thing.
Thank God it has gone. But it remains a tragedy to see black-ruled Africa
sinking into the swamp of history.

Outsiders can do little to save it from itself as long as it remains a
continent of tyrants, and democracy is making no headway at all. There is
one striking oddity about Africa`s misery today: passions remain entirely
internally directed. Whereas in the Middle East resentment of the rich West
spawns terrorism and active hostility, above all towards the USA, even
Mugabe`s denunciations of Blair lack conviction.

Africa`s rulers are overwhelmingly preoccupied with their personal cravings
for wealth. Their subjects merely struggle to survive. Some observers
believe that this may change as the power of Islam grows across the
continent. The influence of the Moslem religion may generate a new
assertiveness, even aggression, a decade or two onwards.

For now however, African passion focuses exclusively upon their own
societies, and upon futile thrashings to make some brand of authoritarian
Socialism blossom amid the failling crops.

You may have noticed that even as more and more whites are obliged to quit
Africa, growing numbers of black Africans seek to migrate to Europe and the
United States - refugees from the economic catastrophies their own rulers
have created at home. On every plane that bears sorrowing whites away from
the continent of their birth into exile in Europe or Australia, there are
also many seats occupied by departing blacks who are just as much victims.
It is a bitter historic irony.

I believe that the remaining whites will continue to trickle away from
Africa until there are only a handful of communities left between Cairo and
The Cape. Then the white outside world may notice less, and care less, what
happens to the continent because we shall perceive no kin there. Africa`s
story will have become an exclusive black disaster.

Well there you have it.

It is sad but true, history repeats itself.