Thread by @victoriacharlz

PART TWO THREAD OF A STORY BY THULA BOPELA

[Combatant of Umkhonto We Sizwe's Luthuli Detachment]

CONTINUED:
the African should not be in a position to rule his newly-found country without taking his cue from us.

We should continue to rule, even after political power has been snatched from us, Mr Bopela.’

‘How did you plan to do that my dear Superintendent,’ I mocked.

‘Very simple, Mr. Bopela, very simple,’ Peters told me
‘We started by changing the country we took from you to a country

that you will find, many centuries later, when you gain political power. It would be totally unlike the country your ancestors lived in; it would be a new country. Let us start with agriculture. We introduced methods of farming that were not known in Africa, where people dug

a hole in the ground, covered it up with soil and went to sleep under a tree in the shade. We made agriculture a science. To farm our way, an African needed to understand soil types, the fertilisers that type of soil required, and which crops to plant on what type of soil.

We kept this knowledge from the African, how to farm scientifically and on a scale big enough to contribute strongly to the national economy. We did this so that when the African demands and gets his land back, he should not be able to farm it like we do.

He would then be obliged to beg us to teach him how. Is that not power,

‘We industrialised the country, factories, mines, together with agricultural output, became the mainstay of the new economy, but controlled and understood only by us.

We kept the knowledge of all this from you people, the skills required to run such a country successfully. It is not because Africans are stupid because they do not know what to do with an industrialised country.

We just excluded the African from this knowledge and kept him in the dark. This exercise can be compared to that of a man whose house was taken away from him by a stronger person. The stronger person would then change all the locks so that when the real owner returned,

he would not know how to enter his own house.’

We then introduced a financial system – money (currency), banks, the stock market and linked it with other stock markets in the world. We are aware that your country may have valuable minerals, which you may be able to extract but

where would you sell them? We would push their value to next-to-nothing in our stock markets.

You may have diamonds or oil in your country Mr Bopela, but we are in possession of the formulas how they may be refined and made into a product ready for sale on the stock markets,

which we control. You cannot eat diamonds and drink oil even if you have these valuable commodities. You have to bring them to our stock markets.’

‘We control technology and communications. You fellows cannot even fly an aeroplane, let alone make one.

This is the knowledge we kept from you, deliberately. Now that you have won, as you claim Mr Bopela, how do you plan to run all these things you were prevented from learning? You will be His Excellency this, and the Honorable this and wear gold chains on your necks as mayors,

but you will have no power. Parliament, after all, is just a talking house; it does not run the economy; we do. We do not need to be in parliament to rule your Zimbabwe. We have the power of knowledge and vital skills, needed to run the economy and create jobs. Without us,

your Zimbabwe will collapse. You see now what I mean when I say you have won nothing? I know what I am talking about. We could even sabotage your economy and you would not know what had happened.’

We were both silents for some time,

I try not to show how devastating this information was to me; Ron Peters may be gloating. It was so true, yet so painful. In South Africa they had not only kept this information from us, they had also destroyed our education so that when we won, we would still not have the skills

we needed because we had been forbidden to become scientists and engineers. I did not feel any anger towards the man sitting opposite me, sipping a whisky. He was right.

‘Even the Africans who had the skills we tried to prevent you from having would be too few to have an impact

on our plan. The few who would perhaps have acquired the vital skills would earn very high salaries, and become a black elite grouping, a class apart from fellow suffering Africans,’ Ron Peters persisted. ‘If you understand this Thula, you will probably succeed in making your

fellow blacks understand the difference between ‘being in office’ and ‘being in power’. Your leaders will be in office, but not in power. This means that your parliamentary majority will not enable you to run the country without us, that is.’

I asked Ron to call a taxi for me;

I needed to leave. The taxi arrived, not quickly enough for me, who was aching to depart with my sorrow. Ron then delivered the coup de grace:

‘What we are waiting to watch happening, after your attainment of political power, is to see you fighting over it. Africans fight over

power, which is why you have seen so many coups d’etat and civil wars in post-independent Africa

We whites consolidate power, which means we share it, to stay strong. We may have different political ideologies and parties, but we do not kill each other over political differences

not since Hitler was defeated in 1945.
Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe will not stay friends for long. In your free South Africa, you will do the same. There will be so many African political parties opposing the ANC, parties that are too afraid to come into existence

during apartheid, that we whites will not need to join in the fray. Inside whichever ruling party will come power, be it ZANU or the ANC, there will be power struggles even inside the parties themselves.

You see Mr Bopela, after the struggle against the white man, a new struggle will arise among yourselves, the struggle for power. Those who hold power in Africa come within grabbing distance of wealth. That is what the new struggle will be about, the struggle for power.

Go well Mr Bopela; I trust our meeting was a fruitful one, as they say in politics.’
I shook hands with the Superintendent and boarded my taxi. I spent that night in Bulawayo at the YMCA, 9th Avenue. I slept deeply; I was mentally exhausted and spiritually devastated.

I only had one consolation, a hope, however remote. I hoped that when the ANC came into power in South Africa, we would not do the things Ron Peters had said we would do.