The petty-bourgeois ruling groupings in 'independent' Africa, besides demonstrating their hostility towards the armed struggle in Zimbabwe - with its inevitable radicalising effects in their own countries - have shown their dismal inability to carry forward the demands of their own masses.
The economic barbarism of the colonial era remains: the superexploitation or workers is now policed by the "Africanised" institutions of the bourgeois state, in the interests of imperialism and the privileged layers - largely the bureaucracy that services mose insutumons, aurempis de agrarian reform are a catalogue of disasters, win we majory or poor peasant still firmly chained to their subsistence poverty, and the remainder forming the rural proletariat on the large, essentially intact, farms and plantations of the Such is the promise of a purely natonal woeramon programme for Zimbabwe. With Joshua Nkomo playing a willing part in the 'detente' strategy hatched by Vorster. colluding in the isolation of his own guerilla militants, and urging Britain to complete her 'historic task' of handing over "independence', can we expect otherwise?
Can we expect him effectively to challenge, in the mining and industrial sectors, the power of such multinationals as Lonrho and Anglo-American, or to pursue vigorously the expropriation and redistribution of the vast farms, ranches and plantations that dominate Rhodesia's tobacco, maize, cattle and sugar industries? In short, can we expect from the accom plices of detente the willingness - let alone the ability - to uncerake me massive task of eliminating a century of oppression and expoan and embaring on the country's transformation towards a socialist Zimbabwe?
The experience throughout neocolonial Africa gives the resounding answer - "No!".
the crude appeal by tese petty bourgeois governments to 'national solidarity' and 'common national interest' in a programme of national reconstruction' is just an attempt to conceal the failure of their narrow and restricted ideologies. And where this guise is transparently exposed, they answer the legitimate impatience of workers and peasants with the same crude oppression - legal devices and physical force - that was the hall-mark of the colonial period.
The idea of a staged progression from colonial barbarism to Utopia is independence stage can only be a cul-de-sac, leaving petty-bourgeois nationalism roundering in une moras.
erere in Tanzania, Kaunda in Zambia, demonstrated. patently defunct. Indeed, the 'national of international capitalist manipulations and crises — as the experience of Nyand many others have so unequivocally The removal of the cruder manifestations of imperialism - racism and colonia! domination - nas laid bare une true, international class character of the struggle. The exploited urban and rural masses are experiencing in the arena of their contemporary struggle the realities of the petty-bourgeois, neo-colonial scenario; and they are refusing to postpone to a later date the anti-imperialist route that their governments can't or won't take.
Thus support for national liberation in Zimbabwe can only be seen in terms of a continuing process in struggle by the Zimbabwean people towards real independence in a genuine socialist democracy. Clearly this requires an unflinching and uncompromising anti-imperialist stance, a vigorous exposure or me conaDoranonst na ure of the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships, a clear understanding of the role of South Africa in imperialism's Africa strategy, and a revolutionany programme or pontical and econ omic aims and objectives.
ine on o seruemen arama 1n Zimbabwe sees the Smith regime butteted between the inexorable logic of a global Nkomo-acomplice of detente imperialist design, the escalating threat of the guerilla offensive, and the blind intransigence of its white electorate. Events will, sooner rather than later. mock Smith's "no majority rule in my lifetime In short, a revolutionary party of workers and peasants must take up the tasks in Zimbabwe - as in all nec colonial states - that petty-bourgeois nationalism is incapable of fulfilling. MATHIAS MURUNGU
On behalf of all women and men volved in the struggle for the liberaRed Weekly 8 April 1976 in the media. and the whole debate is now in the open.