Imperialism in the Zimbabwean context: Ian Beddowes
Transcript of the episode with Ian Beddowes on Zim Left Radio, recorded October 2022.
Listen to audio here
Valentine 0:00:00 Hello everyone and welcome to Zim Left Radio, a channel dedicated to left-wing analysis of Zimbabwe’s economy and society. In this, our first episode, I’m speaking with the controversies of a veteran, Comrade Ian Beddows. Comrade Beddows is the political commissar and acting International Secretary of the Zimbabwe Communist Party. Comrade Beddows, welcome to Zim Left Radio. Thank you. Welcome to everybody listening. And thank you. Our discussion today is on imperialism in the Zimbabwean context. But before we dive deep into the topic, could you please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Ian Beddowes 0:00:41 Well, I’ve got something of an unusual background for someone who’s a senior member of an African Communist Party. I’m born in Britain, 1948. I’m 74 years old now. To cut a long story short, I was involved in politics from a very early age. And I come from a working class background in the Midlands, in the Birmingham area of Britain. And I’m a builder by trade. I’m actually a bricklayer. I took part in the 1972 13-week building workers strike. I was in London by that time. I was a member of the London Building Workers Joint Sites Committee. I was a shop steward. And after that strike in 1972, I joined the Communist Party in Britain. And as I was reasonably big and willing, if necessary, to use muscle, I was used by the party to steward meetings where people like Oliver Tamble was speaking, Joshua Gormo and other foreign leaders. And I became very friendly with members of both the African National Congress and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, ZAPU. I had an association from them. And as it happened a bit later on, my Communist Party branch with which I was chair was Westham North in the east end of London. And we had a house there belonging to ZAPU comrades. So I developed a very close relationship. And then later on, in 1985, I was recruited by Comrade Ronnie Casseroles to work for M’Konto Eisiswe. I was on the London recruits. What the African National Congress and MK did at that time was because there’s a problem of a party that used the party against itself. So they recruited white communists, especially from the British Communist Party, because we could move in places where the black comrades couldn’t move. And I went to Zimbabwe first time in 1985 on my way to training in Angola. And it was there, by the way, for the first time I met my current wife, we’ve been together since since then, I went to Angola for training. I trained with not only with ANC, I trained with KGB as well because I was under I worked I was working for MK Intelligence under Ronnie Casseroles, who was chief of intelligence for MK at that time and later became the minister of state security, I think it was called in South Africa. So after doing training there, I was sent to Swaziland. And I stayed in Swaziland and the difficult conditions were moving stuff across the borders. And then in 1987, just before the unity accord, I was sent to Zimbabwe because I already had contacts there, former ZAPU members. So the unity accord between ZAPU and ZANU was just about happening. And I was sent to Harare where I met my wife again, we came together, we were married in 1989. So thereafter, I stayed in Zimbabwe from work, I went to Botswana. So my wife is Zimbabwean, and the former Zangla ex-combatant, and my three children are born in Zimbabwe. So that is my connection with with Zimbabwe. So as I was working actually originally for intelligence, I asked, should I join ZANU-PF during the time of the unity accord? And I was told yes. And although I dropped out at some stage, because I was very unhappy about the the ESAP program, I re-joined ZANU-PF in 1998, because I supported Mugabe on the Congo war. And I found also that Comrade Dumiso Dabengwa, who was ex-ZAPU as you know, and who I had great respect for, also, despite his dislike for being within ZANU-PF, also supported Mugabe on the question of the Congo war, because it was an anti-imperialist war. The Congo war was an American war, where they used the Rwandans and the Ugandans to, as it was a proxy war, because they didn’t like what Lauren Kabila did in challenging the big international companies and told them, we must renegotiate all your contracts so that money comes back in the Congo. And that’s when the invasion happened. It was organized by Bill Clinton, and the biggest war ever in Africa. So I re-joined ZANU-PF at that stage. And then it became increasingly clear that despite the fact of sanctions, which were put on, by the way, in 1999, when the IMF and World Bank withdrew funding from Zimbabwe over the Congo war, but continued to fund the aggressor nations, Rwanda and Uganda. So that’s when sanctions really started. And then in 2000, the war veterans then went on the land and claimed the land which they’d been waiting for for 20 years. So then the Siderio, the Zimbabwe so-called democracy and economic recovery program of the US legislature was put forward. Then, obviously, I supported the anti-imperialist struggle against the imposition of sanctions on Zimbabwe. However, under sanctions, the political elite continued to loot, put money in their own pockets, despite the work on this within ZANU-PF, although they weren’t an organized force. We said, but what are you doing? We need to reorganize the economy. And they didn’t. They just continued looting. By 2008, end of 2008, it was obvious that Mugabe thought that Zimbabwe was his personal fiefdom. He didn’t want to stand down. And in the end, we revived ZAPU. However, that was unsuccessful, to be very honest, because the fiction, which started as a fiction at the beginning, that ZAPU was an Ndebele party, took hold both amongst Ndebele and Shonas. So ZAPU never took off as truly a national party. And during the process, some of us in ZAPU formed the Zimbabwe Communist League. In the meantime, some others in the movement for democratic change, which had started off as a workers party, then opposed the fact that MDC was now starting to take on a pro-Western approach. And they also formed the Zimbabwe Communist Group. In the end, we came together and we formed the Zimbabwe Communist Party in 2017. I’m now living in South Africa because things became impossible in 2008. I now am living in a military house given to me by the South African government as a former MK cadre. And so that’s where it’s at now. And I’m also national political commissar for the Zimbabwe Communist Party, as well as being the acting international secretary.
Valentine 0:11:26 Thank you very much, comrade. Let me play part of the late former President Robert Mugabe’s speech at the Trans-Pacific summit in 2002:
“Your Excellencies, we must examine why 10 years after Rio, the poor remained very much with us, poorer and far more exposed and vulnerable than ever before. Our children suffer from malnutrition, hunger and diseases compounded now by the deadly HIV-AIDS pandemic. The betrayal of the collective agenda we set ourselves at Rio is a compelling manifestation of bad global governance, lack of real political will by the North and a total absence of a just rule of law in international affairs. The poor should be able to use their sovereignty to fight poverty and preserve their heritage in their corner of the earth without interference. That is why we in Zimbabwe understand only too well that sustainable development is not possible without agrarian reforms that acknowledge in our case that land comes first before all else and that all else grows from and off the land. This is the one asset that not only defines the Zimbabwean personality and democates sovereignty, but also an asset that has a direct bearing on the fortunes of the poor and prospects for their immediate empowerment and sustainable development. Indeed ours is an agrarian economy, an imperative that renders the issue of access to land paramount. In our situation, Mr President, this fundamental question has pitted the black majority, who are the right holders and therefore primary stakeholders to our land, against an obdurate and internationally well-connected racial minority, largely of British descent and brought in and sustained by British colonialism, now being supported and manipulated by the Blair government. Let no one who is negative want to spoil what we are doing for ourselves in order to unite Africa. We belong to this continent. We don’t mind having and bearing sanctions banning us from Europe. We are not Europeans. We have not asked for any inch of Europe, any square inch of that territory. So Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe. Mr Chairman, having said that, may I say, people must always come first in any process of sustainable…”
Okay, the reason I played part of Robert Mugabe’s speech is because Mugabe was widely regarded, at least among most Africans, as the champion against imperialism. But what is imperialism? Why is it important? How can we understand imperialism both historically and in present times? I would like to ask you, Comrade Ian, to address us on these three questions.
Ian Beddowes 0:14:30 This is a very interesting one because we’ve got a lot of twists in the way that Zimbabwean history panned out. First of all, if we want to understand imperialism in Africa, especially since the Second World War, we should note that in the early 1950s in Algeria, which was a major war against the French, the first major armed conflict, anti-imperialist conflict was in Algeria. At almost the same time in Kenya, we had the Land and Freedom Army, commonly known as Mau Mau, we had an uprising which maybe, I think, 36 settlers somewhere around that were killed. And the response by the British was horrific. Over 1,000 Kenyans were hanged. Many more were just killed summarily. Many others were tortured. But one thing that the British and the French learned from that process was that it was not possible to carry on with direct colonialism in the same way. And they came up with a neo-colonial project. In other words, they would grant Africans, their presidents, their national flag, their national anthem, but the economy would remain in the hands of the imperialists. And this is called neo-colonialism. And this is what we have in most of Africa today. We have neo-colonialism.
Valentine 0:16:26 Let me stop you there, comrade. Not to disturb your train of thought, but yes, you’ve now referred to these imperialists. What do we mean when we say imperialism? Because Mugabe used to say they are defending the country against imperialism, and many communists and many people from the left, at least even in Zimbabwe and in many parts of Africa, they always talk of this imperialism thing, but it’s not very clear to me what really it is.
Ian Beddowes 0:16:58 Well, imperialism in the modern world is the highest form of capitalism. Now, anciently we had Roman imperialism, we had the Roman Empire and others, we had the Persian Empire and things like that. But modern imperialism grew out of the growth of capitalism in Europe, in which Britain was the first capitalist country. Industrial capitalism. What is capitalism as a mode of production? It’s a mode of production in which the capitalist owns the means of production, the machinery, the factories and so on. And the worker only has his labor power to sell to the capitalist, and the capitalist then pays the worker as little as he can manage in order just enough to make the worker come back to work. And then he sells the product at its value, and the gap between belongs to the capitalist. So roughly half the day the worker is working for himself, and half the day he’s working for the capitalist, unless many workers give money to the capitalist in that way, so their money builds up now. Industrial capitalism really started in Britain around about 1760, and it grew and it grew, and by the middle of the 19th century they needed new markets in order to keep making money. They needed to export their capital, they needed more raw materials as capitalism was growing, and it wasn’t only Britain, because by the end of the 19th century, Germany, USA, France were also developing capitalism, and so you had this inter-imperialist rivalry. Now the interesting thing is that before 1885, you had pre-industrial capitalism, you had mercantile capitalism, which included by the way the slave trade, but European countries had only got ports around the coast of Africa. South Africa is looked upon as one of the very strong countries in Africa with a big white population as well, but South Africa only started as a European colony, it was started in 1562 when Van Riebeck, a Dutch trader, decided that they needed somewhere where the Dutch ships would stop on the way to what’s now Indonesia, the Dutch East Indies, where they were buying spices, so in days of sailing ships they needed somewhere where they could get fresh water, they put a few farmers to grow crops and so on. There was no intention to make South Africa what it is today, it was just a port which was a stopping off place on the way to where the main trade was. So all around the coast of Africa you had these ports owned by different countries, France, Germany, Britain, and in 1885, at the time of the Berlin Conference, around about 11% of African land was under control of Europeans. Ten years later, it was 90 or more percent of the land of Africa was under European control, because in 1885 the European powers met in Berlin and they drew lines on the map, most of them had never been to Africa, said, right, this is your bit because it’s based on your trading port, this is your bit because it’s based on your trading port, and so that was how they carved up Africa. So imperialism in Africa has got a specific kind of problem, because when they drew those lines, they didn’t worry which ethnic groups were involved, so some lines went through the territory of one ethnic group, which could be divided into two or even three sections, and then on the other hand, some ethnic groups which had been historically in conflict with each other, were put in the same country, so that partially explains some of the problems we have in Africa today. So imperialism in Africa was there because they need to export capital, and also they needed raw materials, especially minerals and some agricultural products as well, so that was the beginning. So when we get to neo-colonialism, like I said, which really started in the late 1950s with Britain and France, you had a problem when you came to Southern Africa. First of all, the Portuguese, which had a very right-wing government, didn’t want to adhere to the neo-colonial program at all, ending up with major wars in Angola and Mozambique, and by the way, the liberation movements there were strongly influenced by communist parties and were backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba. And now, in Zimbabwe, or what was then Rhodesia and South Africa, you also had entrenched white settler governments which were not interested in following the neo-colonial program, and this is one of the problems where Mugabe had it very wrong, because the interests of the settlers were not the same as the interests of the real imperialists. The real imperialists wanted black governments, but they didn’t want communist-oriented black governments, they didn’t want socialism, they wanted black governments which they could control and would assist them to keep profiting from the resources of Africa.
Valentine 0:24:17 So is it fair to say then on that point that the imperialist governments or the imperialist powers were not interested in the actual development of countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe, but they were just interested in exploiting the resources of that country, whereas in these settler interests that you have mentioned now would have been interested at least in developing the local economy to become self-sufficient?
Ian Beddowes 0:24:42 Yes. In fact, rather the opposite, because in some ways there was a certain degree of independence from external control, the white settler governments for all their racism had actually created economies which were to some degree independent of the imperialist center. The West was very concerned about what was going to happen in Southern Africa. Now, the twist in Zimbabwe is, and in the whole of Southern Africa, the West actually backed dissident liberation groups because those like the African National Congress within which was the South African Communist Party, MPLA of Angola, FRELIMO of Mozambique, SWAPO of Namibia, were not racist, they were not anti-white, they were against race racism, but they were not specifically anti-white, but they were linked to the trade union movement and they had some kind of class understanding, some kind of class content and Marxist-Leninist ideas to a greater or lesser extent were current in those countries because at the end of the day, Marxist-Leninists within the liberation movement said we want to have economies which are independent of external control or at least, well you can’t be totally independent, but are autonomous, I think is a better word, where the people decide what is going to happen. We call those pre-socialist economies where you will even encourage local productive capitalism, we call those national democratic economies. Now in Rhodesia in particular, the Rhodesians refused to accept one man one vote and Britain put them under sanctions. However, under sanctions they built up a very strong internalised economy and we inherited that economy in 1980 but they’d also done something else much earlier. Like I said, the real imperialists had recognised or some of them anyway had recognised that the white settler governments were not going to last. They recognised that the move for African independence was going to be very strong and so even in 1949, David Stirling, who by the way was the founder of the British SAS, Special Air Services, British Special Forces, and also after the war became a mercenary leader, instituted an organisation which would infiltrate the trade union movement especially to try and destroy the strength of the communists and the British trade union movement. That man set up the Capricorn Africa Society in Southern Africa in 1949 and the job of the Capricorn Africa Society was to train young Africans to work for monopoly capitalism and the imperialist interest and this is very important in Zimbabwe because Zimbabwe or the Rhodesian working class was very strong. In 1948 there was a general strike which had nationalist overtones as well as being a general strike of the workers against capitalism. In 1957 the workers took over what had been there since 1912 but on and off which was the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress. They took it over and they put the president of the biggest union at the Railway African Workers Union who was Joshua Nkomo as their president and so then they launched a serious nationalist organisation because previous to that the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress was a sort of middle class aspiring Africans. It wasn’t based on the working class but it’s the working class which started the real revolutionary movement. The SRANC was banned and then the following year the National Democratic Party was established which was even more militant, basically the same people and in 1961 the National Democratic Party was banned and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union was formed under that name a few days later and it was a truly national party. But in 1962 Joshua Nkomo started to organise with the Soviets for the arms struggle he’d already got arms from Nasser by the way, from Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, which were the first arms brought into the country and in fact even earlier as early as 1959 the first six men went to Ghana for training so we need to look at the liberation struggle because there’s a lot of lies talked about liberation struggle. The armed struggle that Joshua Nkomo was not interested - it started in 1966 - it’s a complete lie. If we really trace it started much earlier than that but when Nkomo went to get arms from the Soviet Union and agreed for people to go to the Soviet Union for training from 1963 the members of ZAPU who belonged to the Capricorn Africa Society remember ZAPU was a very broad organisation were horrified and broke away Leopold Takawira Leopold Takawira was working full time for the Capricorn Africa Society and David Stirling at that time and another prominent person was Herbert Chitepo so it’s then that they broke away from ZANU and they started and before that by the way the disunity between Shona and Ndebele wasn’t there. But then Takawira is on record as saying we cannot be led by this huge Ndebele man who doesn’t want to fight and so that’s a this whole thing started so British imperialism was responsible for the split for ZANU splitting away. However we must say there were genuine nationalists in ZANU and not everybody understood the politics behind it and the ZANU story was we must get rid of the whites now we saw in Mugabe’s speech that he’s talking about colour and nationality only he’s not talking about the class issue because what we saw was what we’ve seen in Zimbabwe is that the black elite is hiding behind the finger of imperialism in order to loot for their own personal benefit. We don’t want those white imperialists but we must be the guys to take the benefits from the people because and I wrote a short biography a biography of Robert Mugabe myself called ‘Robert Mugabe and the disempowerment of the Zimbabweans’. I’m now living in South Africa as many skilled Zimbabweans are and it’s because when the black elite took over business they started saying woah we’re paying you guys too much and effectively the most skilled workers and experienced management were expelled from Zimbabwe in real terms and the biggest number came to South Africa. Others went to Botswana, others went overseas but this is because of the class issue in Zimbabwe more than that in the first 11 years of independence we had what we bought in Zimbabwe was made in Zimbabwe because in their own peculiar way the white settler racist had built up an economy which was under their control not under outside control so we had a largely internalized economy until 1991 well 1990-91 ESAP really came the Economic Structural Adjustment Program pushed by the World Bank and the IMF and it was not the white settlers who undermined the economy it was the black government which sold us to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank taking huge loans they were the ones who implemented the destruction of the Zimbabwe economy and deindustrialized Zimbabwe. So the problems of imperialism in Zimbabwe are complex and not simple.
Valentine 0:35:51 The complexity is very clear from what you just said so next question would be who has been the representative of these imperialists in Zimbabwe so I know that there are big companies international capital we know that the British South Africa company initially owned most of the mineral rights and then eventually they ended up in the hands of Anglo-American cooperation who might we say are the main representatives of imperial interests in Zimbabwe both historically and in contemporary times.
Ian Beddowes 0:36:33 That’s quite an interesting one because you see Mugabe became what we call a loose cannon one of the problems with neo-colonialism is you can end up you can end up putting in power someone who is not going to dance your tune at the end of the day so Mugabe started doing his own thing so there is international capital and one of the things that doesn’t have direct control of Zimbabwe who does have control is the international banking system and one of the things that we’ve seen with the neo-liberal agenda which started really with Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was strongly reinforced by Reagan in 1981 is that whereas in the old days we’re looking at imperialism we’re looking more at major companies mining companies car companies with the neo-liberal agenda banks became more important than productive capitalism and this by the way is creating enormous stress in the world at the moment and the downfall of the United States and Europe because if we see for instance if we can just put it in simple terms if we look at the US economy it’s based on money if we look at the economy of China it’s based on production and I think people will find that they’ve not really brought anything recently made in the USA things made in China and that is the difference between the USA and China we can argue somewhere else about how socialist is China and so on now what’s happened in Zimbabwe is although you’ve got various mining companies with interests including by the way, ango-american they’re not dominant as such in the economy local capitalists have taken over but everybody is in debt to the World Bank and the IMF and the countries countries are going to be in debt for many many years to come because of the international debt because the guys who’ve run the economy first of all Bernard Chizero and today we’ve got the their thinking is totally based on textbooks which became obsolete in 2008 with the crash of 2008 so they’ve still got that textbook economics based on money and this idea of you printing money means that Zimbabwe a few years back had the biggest inflation everywhere bank notes and trillions of dollars because the economy was not based on production and the Rhodesians had understood that but our current government doesn’t so although monopoly capitalist companies may not have that much power in Zimbabwe the big the banking system does and we don’t have production and we’re getting loans here and there we’re in terrible debt China has come in Chinese companies have come in and we have problems with the way that Chinese companies are operating and by the way we have been having discussions as the Zimbabwe Communist Party the Chinese Communist Party which is seeing that the ways that Chinese companies are operating is very exploitative and what have we got we have got people coming to power in Zimbabwe who have no idea how to organize the economy because previously whites were running the economy and multinational European based Australian based South African based Chinese companies now China is coming in and what is obvious is even as capitalists we have a black elite which for the most part doesn’t even have the ability of a real capitalist to run a company they’ve become rent seekers only whether it’s for Chinese or whether it’s for other companies they’ve become rent seekers because a real capitalist though he’s exploiting the workers though he’s exploiting the natural resources a real capitalist does organize production and unfortunately in Zimbabwe we have a ruling elite which knows how to stay in power through sort of military means and use of the state has got no idea of how to organize production and most of the Zimbabweans who do know how to organize the production black and white and whatever are now outside the country this is where we have a problem yeah by the way and this is where people don’t often understand communism if you read Lenin left wing childishness and the petty bourgeois mentality in 1918 soon after the revolution when they nationalized almost everything which was within their sphere of influence because they didn’t control the whole of the country but in all those nationalized companies Lenin kept on the old management the so called left communist let’s put our guys in there and he said you’re stupid you’re childish because you have no idea how to organize a company the ownership of the company is now national but the management needs to be professional they don’t have to be our members they can be people from the old elite all we will do is to put one or two of our trusted cadres in each company just to oversee the management board that has not happened in Zimbabwe and we’re seeing similar problems in South Africa we need national ownership but professional management and only by doing that can we overcome the control of imperialism and outside forces one of the things that I’m really interested in.
Valentine 0:44:08 If we are no longer as a country producing much why are the imperial nations interested in Zimbabwe so they’ve put in this zidera that you talked about that to me appears as if it’s something to control the government what are their interests in Zimbabwe what are the imperial interests what are they interested in?
Ian Beddowes 0:44:22 Well in the long term they’re interested in they’re not in control at the moment but they’re hoping sooner or later to get back in control because for instance there’s lithium deposits lithium is increasingly important platinum deposits which are being I think Australian companies are involved in platinum deposits so we have mines we have in the east we have major mines mineral resources in Zimbabwe but actual local industry was destroyed by the mid 90s so we’re not producing that we’re producing primary products but the elite doesn’t mind that because they’re getting their cut so if money goes out of the country from these various minerals and we’re not really processing anything inside the country they get their cut they’re living nice bling lifestyles and they’re happy so there’s a long term interest in Africa by other countries and our job now and this is to say that we must control our own economy and we must have a productive economy and we can start at a low level if we look at China for example they built dams using lots in the early days using lots of village labour hand labour so there are low tech possibilities in the early stages and then probably what we would need to do is have 50-50 agreements with foreign countries or foreign companies to build industry elsewhere it doesn’t mean to say we don’t have any international input but we must decide what the input is not other countries we must decide what are the priorities yes we will need assistance here and there but it can’t just be throwing money it has to be practical and it has to be in terms of labour and we still have a lot of unemployment in Zimbabwe and we have many people in South Africa the South Africans are fed up with a number of Zimbabweans and they’re pushing Zimbabweans back so where are those Zimbabweans going to work how are we going to organise the labour because and going back to this thing of land reform if you look at Soviet Union, China, Cuba land reform was not only about ownership of the land it was about production and what happened in Zimbabwe is that the best land went to the black elite who don’t even live there we had said by the way I worked with the war veterans I worked directly with Chanderi Hundry we said one family one farm because most of the white farmers had got more than one farm we did not say we must get rid of the white farmers and we didn’t want no white farmers we wanted white farmers with less land and even if you read the letter written by the great African Marxist from Tanzania A.M. Babel he wrote a letter to Mugabe in 1980 saying look you’ve got a very strong economy there be careful what you do work with the progressive section of the white farmers teach agriculture to others those who don’t want to know yes they can go but you will find progressive whites use those to teach agriculture to the people and then you will have a strong economy no the white farmers had to go by the way Mugabe in his speech said we’re going to let every white farmer he lied in fact had that been maintained had each white farm been allowed one farm the British and the Americans would have found it very difficult to maintain sanctions because the Zimbabwe government would have been able to say look we’re not throwing the white farmers out but we’re taking their excess land and we’re giving it to the whole people and those that have gone went to their own accord we didn’t throw them out they decided they wanted to leave because they didn’t want a black government the British and the Americans would have found it very difficult if we had maintained that position to maintain sanctions against Zimbabwe and in fact I was a member of Zarnabieff I told senior Zarnabieff politicians and even the central intelligence organisation look this is what we should be doing but yeah they didn’t want to listen because it was all about them you’ve got this black elite which referred to as the parasitic bourgeoisie why do we call them parasitic? because a real bourgeoisie a real capitalist class as I said earlier although they’re exploitative and very nasty very often but they do maintain production and they have a finished product these guys do not know how to organise production they closed down industry they’re completely parasitic they played no role in production they’re only looters and that’s why we have the alternative name for them, the looting class.
Valentine 0:50:55 Yeah that’s an interesting name let me ask you the last question and here I’m going to take you back to the coup of 2017 do you think that there were some imperialists involved in the defenestration of Robert Mugabe?
Ian Beddowes 0:51:09 Yes most definitely because Robert Mugabe went on far too long he became too old and this is one of the things that created Zapu and others to break away and it was obvious he was under the control of his wife and her family and it became completely it became completely useless to everybody not even to progressives and to reactionaries alike what are we doing we’re being managed by this woman who has no idea of politics she just wants to live a bling lifestyle so it became obvious to both reactionary and progressive forces it couldn’t carry on the same now what was obvious was that Munugawa had already talked to the Chinese and to the British because before even Munugawa had taken power the British have a junior minister responsible for Africa he stayed in Zimbabwe for several days the British were hoping to regain a foothold in the Zimbabwe economy at that stage, let me tell you what we were planning as the Zimbabwe Communist Party we did believe that there would be foreign owned factories set up and we knew that they wouldn’t want trade unions but we said in the situation of Zimbabwe even foreign monopoly capitalism is better than no jobs at all complete close down of the economy so what were we doing we were actually organizing that when the factories were set up we would organize our guys to set up trade unions in the factories a class struggle because we’re not going to just bow down and let the big companies pay what they wanted but it never happened there was no industrialization at all nothing has happened what we’ve seen is that Munugawa is even less able than Mugabe at least in his better days because if you like one of the better things about Mugabe is that as a school teacher he was interested in education and under Mugabe there was a good education system in Zimbabwe established in Zimbabwe that was one of the good things the problem is that Mugabe having been in education all his life didn’t understand what happened when you left school he didn’t understand anything about production but he did understand something about education now we’ve got the situation where teachers in Zimbabwe have been on strike and being persecuted because some are going on strike because they’re not even being paid a living wage they’re being paid salaries below even the poverty datum line so how can we ever expect teachers who are hungry who if they’re going to survive may have other interests having little businesses outside how can we expect them to teach our children properly it can’t be so the education system is now under Munangagua and even now in South Africa it’s recognised that Zimbabweans are better educated or at least trained job wise than South Africans but that has even been destroyed and what we’re seeing is that the elite is no longer interested in the majority at all they send their children to private schools private hospitals they go overseas if they’ve got anything seriously wrong or to South Africa and even their children go outside the country for education so they’re no longer interested in the health and education of the majority so what we’re seeing is retrogression and violence against anybody who wants to stand up so it’s a very sad situation in Zimbabwe present.
Valentine 0:56:22 I couldn’t agree with you more comrade Ian thank you very much for taking us through this very informative talk on imperialism in the Zimbabwean context and really going deep into other topics I’m sure that in future we will discuss class struggles as well as the land reform programme which you’ve already mentioned that you work with some comrades in ZANO-PF if people want to contact you or follow your work where can they find you
Ian Beddowes 0:56:58 I’m on Facebook and I’m on WhatsApp just look for Ian Beddows on Facebook you’ll find me there and you’ll see what I have to write Zimbabwe Communist Party also has a Facebook page so you can look there if you’re interested and we will see what we can do the Zimbabwe Communist Party is small but it’s growing and what I want to say is is that what I want to say is this the working class twice has failed because of lack of political ideology the working class started the liberation movement but lost control because lack of political ideology and the MDC began as a workers movement against the ESAP program but by the time it was formed it had taken up a pro a pro-imperialist position and their first secretary for for the economy was Eddie Cross an out and out neo-liberal who is now supporting Mungagwa so we cannot all afford to throw away ideology and to become a member of the Zimbabwe Communist Party we need you to go through political education you cannot just become a member and woah we’ve got a Communist Party no, you must understand our ideology and most importantly you must understand our program completing the liberation of Zimbabwe.
Thank you very much
