Zimbabwe Will Never be a Colony Again!

This is a thought-provoking original book,
based on a wealth of empirical case studies of how Zimbabwe experienced
illegal economic sanctions. It is a study of how the humanly constructed
obstructions – from external remittances/finance flows into the country
to finance embargos or total financial blockages – are deliberately
created by so-called ‘powerful’ governments to deal with an ‘errand’
country. The infamous Zimbabwe Democracy Economic Recovery Act of 2001
(ZDERA) is part of a raft of punitive measures and discourses that the
USA, UK and Europe used to make the economy, in the words of US’s
Chester Crooker “scream”. It is the same ‘powerful’ countries who allow
their Multinational Corporations to loot while they impose sanctions
against African governments and their peoples to make them scream.

The
book is an insightful contribution on Africa’s contemporary
post-colonial liberation politics of development economics. It focuses
on Zimbabwe as a synthesis of microcosmic study that provides accessible
in-depth analysis of key aspects of sanctions as a weapon of control
wielded by the so-called ‘powerful’ governments of the Global North.
Zimbabwe was clobbered with post-independence economic sanctions after
its land reform programme, which benefitted its mostly colonially
dispossessed African citizens. The land reform was intended as a
reversal of colonial injustice and a counter restitutive measure against
imperialism.

The book invites the reader to see power
differently: as compassion and the capacity to right past wrongs by
protecting all and sundry from inequality and poverty. Sanctions, even
when called targeted, are non-discriminatory as they affect ordinary
citizens with the same ferocity and savagery as against intended target,
albeit often missing the target. Sanctions are lethal. Sanctions are a
graveyard for the poor, weak and vulnerable. This is an idea of power
that the Global North failed to grasp when they decided to punish the
Mugabe government for daring to contemplate justice and restitution.