Sub-Saharan Africa

[Kirkhill]

Thanks BBJ.

Rhodesia? Was that round about 1980?   Elections monitoring, disarmament or training?

As for the S10 Vikings, sorry for the error.   I was trying to describe them easily. I knew they were different beasts than the Bv206Ss - the armour plated version of the 206 but tried to keep things simple and in the end was simply wrong.

 

[big bad john]

No problem.  Rhodesia, 1978-80 monitoring and enforcing the settlement.  It was "fun" watching the Noth Koreans work...

 

[Kirkhill]

What was the name of that chap that led ZAPU?  Russia's competition to Mugabe.  I was wondering where he had got to recently and how ZAPU related to MDC.  If I remember correctly ZANU and Mugabe represent the Shona while ZAPU represented the Matabele, the same tribes that Mugabe is still targeting.  It was Joshua something wasn't it?

 

[big bad john]

Nkomo

 

[pbi]

What was the name of that chap that led ZAPU?   Russia's competition to Mugabe.   I was wondering where he had got to recently and how ZAPU related to MDC.   If I remember correctly ZANU and Mugabe represent the Shona while ZAPU represented the Matabele, the same tribes that Mugabe is still targeting.   It was Joshua something wasn't it?

Big bad John is right: It was Joshua Nkomo, leader of the Ndbele-based ZAPU, who had most of their strength in the western portion of Zimbabwe. IIRC, shortly after winning power from the UDI government of Ian Smith, Mugabe sent a brigade task force of Shona into the Ndbele/ZAPU region to execute a punitive campaign of massacre against his political rivals. This was IMHO fairly effective because when I was in Zim in 93, pretty well all important positions were held by Shona (IIRC many of them friends and relatives of Uncle Bob...). While the rather short-sighted lefties in the West were falling all over themselves about "black liberation", Bob and the boys were doing the dirties on the folks they didn't like, just as he continues to do today, with the complicity of the same "colonial guilt" crowd as well as his peers in sub-Saharan Africa who until very recently were quite happy to look the other way rather than admit that one of the "heroes of liberation" is a murdering nepotistic criminal who has dragged a once-productive country into the shitter.

Cheers

 

[big bad john]

Big bad John is right: It was Joshua Nkomo, leader of the Ndbele-based ZAPU, who had most of their strength in the western portion of Zimbabwe. IIRC, shortly after winning power from the UDI government of Ian Smith, Mugabe sent a brigade task force of Shona into the Ndbele/ZAPU region to execute a punitive campaign of massacre against his political rivals. This was IMHO fairly effective because when I was in Zim in 93, pretty well all important positions were held by Shona (IIRC many of them friends and relatives of Uncle Bob...). While the rather shotr-sighted lefties in the West were falling all over themselves abuot "black liberation", Bob and the boys were doing the dirties on the folks they didn't like (just as he continues to do today, with the complicity of the same "colonial guilt" crowd as well as his peers in sub-Saharan Africa who until very recently were quite happy to look the other way rather than admit that one of the "heroes of liberation" is a murdering nepotistic criminal who has dragged a once-productive country into the shitter.

Cheers

101 Brigade trained by North Korean Cadres was the unit fielded.  Rhodesian units such as Selous Scouts had their members perscribed and hunted down with their families by the same unit.  Thus started the exodus south.

 

[pbi]

I had the great pleasure to get to know a senior member of the Scouts who fought against ZANU/ZAPU (including in Mozambique's border territory) and then left for SA after the war. He and his family later moved to Mozambique, where I met them running a very successful business. My fellow Canadians and I spent a number of very enjoyable (and well-watered...) evenings at dinner with him and his family. An interesting comment that he made (and that I later found to be true...) was that the reason that Zimbabwe under Mugabe was much moere successful than Mozambique was that Mugabe (in the beginning...) was shrewd enough not to chase all the whites out of Zim. He allowed and encouraged them to stay, thus preventing the sudden massive loss of managerial, technical and civil service expertise that crippled Mozambique under Samora Machel's  FRELIMO government, that was still struggling ten years after independence. Crossing the border from dirty, depressed backward Mozambique into tidy, functional and generally friendly Zim was literally like stepping from one planet to another.

Cheers

 

[big bad john]

Mugabe had a hate on for the 2 scout units, selous and Greys'.  they hate the horses Greys' used patrolling the railway.

 

[Kirkhill]

I wonder if the Ndebele fall under PM Martin's "Responsibility to Protect".  If so they can take hope.  Presumably Canada is on its way to the rescue.  Now if they can just hold on for another 10 years or so......  By the way will we have to protect those nasty white farmers as well? 

 

[Scoobie Newbie]

Perhaps you too should form a new thread.

 

[Kirkhill]

Good point.