IT is David Coltart who brought the International Republican Institute evil into Zimbabwe. 

And he did so under black US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Edward G. Lanpher’s watch.

It has already been established that black US Ambassador to Zimbabwe in 1992, Lanpher, who was born on December 8 1942 was the same age mates with President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Both were born during the Second World War which became the Shakespearean ‘mirror up to nature’ regarding Anglo-American acceptance of the idea of the equality of men as self-evident.

It is the generation of their parents that fought in the Second World War in which both black-Americans and black ‘Rhodesians’ enlisted to fight NAZI Germans in defence of universal human rights and democracy.

Both believed their supreme contribution and the inevitable triumph of ‘universal human rights and democracy’ would make those values inalienable to black people too.

But they were wrong.

The treatment black fighters received even during the fighting showed that the human rights and democracy they were championing for everyone would exclude them on the basis of skin colour.

The Jim Crow discrimination characterising black American civilian lives turned out to be more emphatic in the military. 

Every aspect of their military lives emphasised racial segregation.

Both black-Americans and black ‘Rhodesians’ were subjected to continuous harassment by their white ‘comrades-in-arms’. 

They trained in different bases with inferior facilities. 

They wore different uniform, they had lower wages, they ate different food and they were treated in different hospitals with separate blood banks, wards and medical staff. 

They were mostly deployed as labourers, loading and unloading supplies, digging trenches, clearing roads and more critically, as cannon fodder shielding white units from the worst of enemy fire power.

Black-American women who joined the services were equally abused and the care of wounded enemy prisoners of war was made their responsibility.

At the end of the war, black-Americans returned not to a hero’s welcome, but worse segregation translating to unemployment and lynchings.

The black Rhodesian war veteran returned to more confiscation of land and livestock that was then used to pension-off white Rhodesian soldiers as well as British soldiers who wanted to settle in Africa.

Chitepo emphasised it in his speech in Australia:

“The white people who are in Zimbabwe are very largely of the post Second World War sort of generation. 

They left England after it had been war-torn. 

They left Europe after the war, to seek greater opportunities, to seek more fortunes, more money, more status in society which they couldn’t even have got in their own country. 

In short, what they were seeking is comfort, big homes, servants, large salaries, an economy that made life easy for them.”

It had seemed good luck that the human values that had rallied literally all humanity to war against NAZI Germany found expression in the UN Universal Human Rights Charter of 1948.

But the beneficiaries turned out to be exclusively white and Jewish.

The Jewish state of Israel was promptly carved out of Arab states by Anglo-American champions of human rights and democracy. 

But no black people immediately got their civil rights or independence in compliance with the dictates of the UN Universal Human Rights Charter. 

For black people, the Charter turned out to be just empty philanthropist rhetoric.

In the US, Ambassador Lanpher’s parents had to fight for him to start school in the first desegregated school in the US after almost 200 years following the 1776 declaration that ‘all men were born equal’.

In Rhodesia, President Mnangagwa’s family was having their cattle confiscated under the 1952 Land and Livestock Husbandry Act. 

The confiscated livestock was used to stock the farms awarded to white Second World War veterans.

The 1960s turned out to be troubled times for black people in both Rhodesia and the US. 

Both President Mnangagwa and Ambassador Lanpher were in their 20s – the cutting edge in all revolutions.

By the time they both turned 24 in 1966, their paths had been cast in stone but in opposite directions. 

Lanpher had joined the US Foreign Service to represent exclusive white interests in the world. 

The ‘poor devil’ was preaching democracy and universal human rights abroad, while back in his own home country, his own black people were entrenched in violent fights for civil rights enshrined in the founding document of the US almost 200 years back.

Two outstanding leaders of the black-American civil rights movements were Malcom X and Martin Luther King. 

At the time Lanpher joined the US Foreign Service to represent exclusive white interests, Malcom X had already been assassinated for challenging the exclusion of black-Americans from national interests. 

In another two years (1968), Martin Luther King would also be assassinated for the same reason.

… to be continued