Bruna Frascolla
It's curious that a country like Zimbabwe is reconciled with its foundation, while the countries of Ibero-America are considered the product of genocide, invasion, and rape.
Among advocates of the Palestinian cause, it usual to compare the colonialism practiced in Africa to the regime imposed by Israel on the inhabitants of former British Palestine. The practice is pointing out the similarities between the South African Bantustans and the stateless Palestinians in Gaza and in the myriad of enclaves into which the West Bank is crumbling. The West Bank is being eaten away at the edges as Jewish settlers take over more and more land, with the support of the Zionist state.
However, almost no one talks about the role of environmentalism in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; therefore, it is not common at all to point out the similarities between the colonialism practiced there and in Africa. As historian Ilan Pappé reports in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, entire Palestinian villages were transformed into forests of European pine trees protected as environmental reserves. Pappé defends the right of Palestinians to return to their homes, and environmental law prevents the Ottoman properties where the Zionist invaders from Eastern Europe planted their pine trees from being repopulated.
To me, a Brazilian, the story of the Palestinians expelled to make way for a green desert can only recall the "de-intrusions" promoted by unelected environmentalists and anthropologists (but endorsed by President Lula in different terms) in Brazil. Evictions continue this year, but the most drastic and notorious case occurred in 2005, with the creation of the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Land: an area the size of Portugal in the border state of Roraima was emptied so that a tiny number of nomadic Amerindians could roam in Neolithic-style conditions, unassisted by the state, starving and dying early from treatable illnesses. Legal, productive farms were expropriated without compensation. A name which is rarely mentioned when this history is told is the anthropologist Mércio Gomes, president of Funai at the time, who today presents himself as a defender of miscegenation and Brazilian nationality.
A very relevant fact is that Roraima is located on the Guiana Island, an area surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and the Amazon, Negro, and Orinoco rivers. As we read in Green Mafia (Capax Dei, 2001), written by Lorenzo Carrasco, Silvia Palacios, and Geraldo Lino, the area has long been coveted by British colonialism, and this has everything to do with Venezuela's loss of Guiana Essequiba and Brazil's loss of Pirara. The Green Mafia's thesis is that British colonialism in Africa has been replaced by an "invisible colonialism", in which the foreign state is no longer present, but operates through NGOs. WWF was founded with the purpose of creating large environmental reserves ("national parks") in African countries, which are managed by private companies, thus preventing Africans from developing and using the natural resources within their territories. These resources, according to a Malthusian and racist worldview, were to be spared by the Africans for use by neocolonial oligarchs. Later, this apparatus was brought to the Iberian world, and, in the absence of rhinos, lions, etc., Indigenous peoples were used as a pretext to create green deserts with resources unexploited by nation states. Survival International was created to care for Indigenous peoples, just as WWF cares for animals. The authors of Green Mafia had no counterparts in Africa, so they couldn't see how right they were when they were writing the book.
The previous year, the book Voices from the Rocks (2000), by English historian and Africanist Terence Ranger, was released; and the work received a review by anthropologist Peter Fry, born in England and naturalized Brazilian after spending years researching Rhodesia. The review appeared in English in issue 5062 of the Times literary supplement, and in Portuguese in the book A persistência da raça (2005), a collection of the author's writings. Both Englishmen have extensive knowledge of present-day Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, the country where the remains of Cecil Rhodes still rest. It is located on a hilltop that, when transformed into an environmental reserve, ceased to be cultivated. The English turned the area into an environmental reserve and prevented the natives from cultivating their ancestral lands. Today, land theft continues unabated, and the colonizer is treated as a deity.
Through Peter Fry's review (which I quote translating back from Portuguese), we learn that "white colonial environmentalists proclaimed the authority of their science to transform the Hills into a National Park and expel African farmers with their 'wasteful traditional methods.' As Ranger explains, they wanted to 'save the wilderness from African humanity.' Today, it is African environmentalists who want to remove inhabitants from the single area that remained cultivated by Africans. The Matobo Communal Area lies 'above the belt of areas that environmental experts insist on ridding of human inhabitants.'" In other words, Malthusian environmentalism continued during decolonization. It is worth noting, then, that at least in Rhodesia, the creation of environmental reserves was concomitant with classical colonialism: colonial policies "expelled Africans from European Farms and National Parks." From the review, we can even see that the term "sustainable development" emerged as a reaction to environmentalism openly opposed to development: "The book [...] enters a much broader debate, siding with the advocates of 'sustainable development.' And it proposes a certain accommodation with what they define as 'tradition,' in opposition to the more radical advocates of conservation tout court."
Let's then take a simple look at the history of Zimbabwe. Cecil Rhodes owned a chartered company called the British South Africa Company, which held rights to much of Southern Africa. Rhodes and his company drew the borders of the nation states that emerged in the region-among them, Rhodesia, named after Rhodes, which was renamed Zimbabwe after the end of Ian Smith's white supremacist regime. Thus, it is fair to say that Cecil Rhodes is, like it or not, the founder of the nation state that today bears the name of Zimbabwe.
This defense of Rhodes as a founder of Zimbabwe was heard by Peter Fry shortly after visiting the tomb and finding "a group of black schoolchildren, their mothers, and teachers, all in their Sunday best, gathered in reverent attitude around the bronze block, just as the white Rhodesians of the colonial past had done." When he mentioned this similarity to a Zimbabwean shop assistant in the area, he heard the response that Cecil Rhodes was a great man and founded the country.
That this stance prevails is far from obvious. There have been campaigns to have the bones expatriated. However, Rhodes's choice of burial site revealed a knowledge of cultural anthropology. Before Rhodes, the most illustrious tomb in the Matopos Hills was that of Mzikalizi, founder of the Ndebele nation (one of the ethnic groups in Zimbabwe). There were indigenous shrines there. When Christian missions arrived, they established themselves in the Matopos to rival the indigenous cult. Finally, the tomb of Cecil Rhodes was created, overshadowing everything else.
And since we're on the subject of religion, Peter Fry notes that the tombstone bears only the words "Here lie the remains of Cecil John Rhodes," with "no reference to any deity." Rhodes, he explains, was "the son of a rural English priest," but "had long since ceased to revere the God of his ancestors." He then points out the irony of the situation: "Rhodes was the hero of white Rhodesia, a Rhodesia that Ian Smith fought to keep in white hands in the name of what he called 'Civilized Western Christian Standards.'" Things haven't changed much, as today some self-made atheists like Elon Musk are being touted as great exponents of the glorious Western Judeo-Christian civilization.
It's curious that a country like Zimbabwe is reconciled with its foundation, while the countries of Ibero-America, which have a much more beautiful foundation, are considered the product of genocide, invasion, and rape. The most reasonable conclusion is that Cecil Rhodes represents a model of civilization they want to impose on us: a world of racial apartheid, Malthusianism, and aimed at depriving non-chosen peoples of their land. The story of Zimbabwe and Cecil Rhodes's tomb-an ecological sanctuary of a man-god-should be better known to the rest of the world.