In the article below Lyndall Beddy ask whether Robert Mugabe, destroyed the commercial farms because Black Women were getting birth control help from the farm clinics. The following may provide a big picture perspective to the issue.
In the Radical Honesty SA Amicus (PDF), under Nature & Causes of Apartheid: A Just War for Demographic Survival?, Garret Hardin's argument is quoted as detailed in Stalking the Wild Taboo, where he deals with the concept of competition, a process that is inescapable in societies living in a finite resource world, and the competitive exclusion principle.The meaning of this principle can be easily explained in a strictly biological setting. Suppose one introduces into the same region two different species that inhabit the same “ecological niche”. If, by hypothesis, two species occupy exactly the same ecological niche, then all that one species needs to know to predict the ultimate outcome of their competition is the rates at which they reproduce in this ecological niche.
If one of them reproduces at a rate of 2 percent per year while the other reproduces at a rate of 3 percent, the ratio of the numbers of the faster reproducing species to the numbers of the slower will increase year by year. In fact, since their rates of reproduction, like compound interest, are exponential functions, a little algebra shows that the ratio of the two exponential functions is itself an exponential function.
The ratio of the faster species to the slower species increases without limit. If the environment is finite – and it always is finite – the total number of organisms that can be supported by this environment is also finite. Since the size of the population of a species can never be less than one individual, this means that ultimately the slower breeding species will be completely eliminated from the environment. This will be true no matter how slight the difference in the rate of reproduction of the two species. Only a mathematically exact quality in their rates would ensure their continued coexistence, and such an exact equality is inconceivable in the real world. As a consequence, two species that occupy exactly the same ecological niche cannot coexist indefinitely in the same geographical area.
In Witchcraft and the State in South Africa Johannes Harnischfeger provides a brief glimpse of the ANC's active endorsement for Occult Phallic Slave and Cannon Fodder Breeding Procreation Population Policies. Put differently, the ANC elite actively endorsed “Operation Production” practices; i.e. coercing young girls to produce cannon fodder (babies) for the ANC struggle for hegemony:Especially evening assemblies girls had to attend as well: “They would come into the house and tell us we should go. They didn't ask your mother they just said ‘come let's go.’ You would just have to go with them. They would threaten you with their belts and ultimately you would think that if you refused, they would beat you. Our parents were afraid of them” (quoted by Delius 1996:189).
All those opposing the wishes of the young men were reminded, that it was every woman’s obligation to give birth to new “soldiers”, in order to replace those warriors killed in the liberation struggle. The idiom of the adolescents referred to these patriotic efforts as “operation production”. Because of exactly this reason it was forbidden for the girls to use contraceptives. (Delius 1996:189; Niehaus 1999:250)
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Did Robert Mugabe, the Catholic Convert, destroy the commercial farms because Black Women were getting birth control help from their clinics?
Monday, September 13, 2010
Lyndall Beddy, NewsTime
I am going to give you the facts and let you decide the answer for yourselves. Below is a quote from the book “Mukiwa” by Peter Godwin, the BBC Journalist who broke the Matabeleland massacre story (which no-one wanted to hear – since it did not fit in with either the American Kwanza cult, or the European “Noble Savage” myth). He was a Rhodesian whose father was manager of a Rhodesian Commercial Farm, and whose mother was a doctor who ran the clinic on the farm. Here is the quotation:‘I will not be needing a translator,’ she said, fiddling with her hands on her lap. ‘I can speak to the doctor myself.’
‘But nurse Janet is my assistant, not just a translator,’ said my mother huffily. They could not start taking this kind of strop from patients.
The patient sat in pointed silence. My mother broke first. She caught Janet’s eye and nodded her to the door. Janet departed, sniffing with indignation. I was sitting just outside the bead curtain, pretending to be absorbed with my colouring-in book.
My mother consulted the unhelpful brief case card.
‘Now what seems to be the problem, Mercy’ she asked when they were alone. ‘Remember everything you say to me is confidential. It is a secret. No one else will know.’
The woman hesitated again, and then seemed to come to a decision.
‘Doctor, I am not yet twenty-four years of age and I have six children. My husband has no job and we have no money.’
It sounded like a punt for charity, not an altogether unknown tactic, but the young woman continued:
‘Doctor, children is now enough. No more. You must give me muti to stop more babies’
This was in the early sixties and modern contraception was almost unheard of in rural African communities.
‘I have read about birth control. In a magazine. From town,’ said Mercy. Then, expecting to have her word doubted, she continued, ‘I went to school until standard eight. I wanted to train to be a nurse or a teacher, but my father was poor and he only had enough money for school fees for my brothers. So he married me to another for labola.’
Labola was the Shona bride price and a widely accepted custom. Among ordinary folk it usually amounted to a few head of cattle and goats, and sometimes cash too. Cash was paid on a sort of instalment plan. A down payment followed by regular premiums until the amount was reached.
‘I have had a child every year that I was married,’ said Mercy. ‘Now I want no more.’
My mother outlined the contraceptive possibilities. The condom, the diaphragm, the inter-uterine device –
But Mercy interrupted.
‘It has to be something that my husband will never find out about. If he discovers that I have done this contra…..’
‘Contraception,’ coaxed my mother.
‘If he finds out, then he can divorce me, according to our custom.’
My mother talked to Mercy for a long time. Then and on subsequent occasions. She learnt a lot from Mercy. She learned that if an African woman fails to conceive within the first two years of marriage, this is grounds for divorce. She learnt that many African women, educated for the first generation now, no longer wanted the tyranny of a dozen children, especially when ten were likely to survive, unlike the old days when they were lucky if two or three made it to adulthood.
‘The pill?’ suggested my mother. ‘You could use that without him noticing. Where would you hide it?’
‘In the tea tin,’ replied Mercy confidently. ‘African men will never go to the tea tin. That is only a woman’s job.’
So my mother began her family planning advice service. Mercy evidently had a lot of friends, and within weeks dozens of women were turning up at the clinic with ‘non-specific ailments’-‘NSA’, as Janet now noted it down on the cards in their code. Word got around that Janet too could be trusted, and she soon took over family planning services.”
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