William Mpofu’s misleading article which appeared in the Sowetan newspaper of 22 September titled “the scourge of African tyrants” should not and must not be allowed to go unchallenged because it is a compendium of misinformation and factual errors. It is also misleading and contains historical inaccuracies. Mpofu wrote that, “From Kwame Nkrumah to Robert Mugabe, African dictators have invoked the spirit of African unity and black solidarity against the vampiric Western imperialism with the right hand while with the left subjecting their people to cruel bondage and violence”.
Those who have read Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” will understand that cruel bondage and violence in West Africa were introduced by leaders of Western countries during the Atlantic slave trade. At the time Mpofu’s article was published, the US and some Western countries under the auspices of NATO were on their sixth month of bombing Libya for the sake of accessing that country’s resources so that China should be dependent on the US for oil. Mpofu continued, “another truism of the underdevelopment and impoverishment of Africa is that African despots have looted natural resources, plundered economies for personal enrichment and deployed violence of the worst magnitude to crush opponents”.
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