Donna St. Hill

Founder of Africa Without Borders (AWB), Pan Africanist and always working for a more just and humane world

[Donna St. Hill @donnasthill]

Father of African cinema 🇸🇳 Ousmane Sembène on why narrative filmmaking is better than any other media for rapidly raising the critical consciousness of the masses

Only Chinese drama rn is consistently demonstrating this transformational power of art and the artist - antithesis

[✝️🇺🇸Chet Ozmun🇨🇳☭ @OzmunC]

"We're just scientists. Is having faith in Communism really that essential?"

These are kinds of deep themes being explored in Chinese TV dramas:

[Chetuya Chinagolum @Chetuyachinago]

This is a spectacularly careless statement and a dangerously counterproductive commentary, especially coming from a veteran journalist and a former presidential spokesperson like Reuben Abati.

I am not even watching the World Cup right now for the sake of basic human dignity, so I do not have the luxurious privilege of blindly supporting any team to win. But rallying the entire population of Nigeria to unilaterally boycott South Africa is incredibly foolish and a massive, resounding slap in the face of African unity.

Yes, it is absolutely true that what is currently happening in South Africa is a horrific human rights crisis. The rounding up of foreigners by violent mobs, the brazen looting of immigrant-owned shops, the senseless torching of properties, the broad daylight lynchings, and the targeted assassination of African migrants are all deeply sickening. But you absolutely cannot advocate for the blanket boycott of an entire sovereign country on these shaky grounds because you are indirectly advocating for the exact same collective punishment, blind bigotry, and xenophobic division that you are supposedly criticizing. Also, we cannot just comfortably pretend that all South Africans are mindlessly uprooting foreigners from their homes to brutalize them. There are millions of ordinary South Africans, heavily active civil society organizations, brave human rights activists, and community leaders who actively condemn this senseless violence and put their lives on the line to protect foreign nationals.

And let us completely stop pretending as if this violent bigotry is strictly a South African monopoly. Right here in Nigeria, for example, the Igbo people have been viciously harassed, unapologetically ethnically profiled, aggressively disenfranchised during elections, their bustling markets deliberately torched, their private businesses looted to the absolute ground, and their fundamental rights as citizens repeatedly trampled upon, all while they are supposedly living peacefully inside the very place they recognize as their own country. And even as all of this state-sanctioned madness is happening, the police are either conveniently nowhere to be found, merely standing by, or actively assisting the political hoodlums. The billionaire class and high-profile chieftains in those communities are always predictably quiet, aggressively looking the other way, or making deeply disparaging remarks on national television to justify the violence. The federal government is either absolutely silent or deliberately dragging its feet to prosecute the known thugs behind these crimes. The very next thing we hear in these ridiculous circumstances is that they have set up a symbolic committee to magically resolve the ethnic grievances. This useless committee will then aggressively drag the issue for years until absolutely nobody is interested in whatever meaningless, heavily doctored reports they eventually publish.

This is the exact, predictable pattern that the parasitic capitalist class uses to expertly deflect blame and violently redirect public anger onto convenient, defenseless scapegoats. In the streets of South Africa right now, the political propaganda is dialed to the absolute maximum. The glaring fact that the white minority still comfortably controls over 70 percent of the prime land and corporate wealth is all of a sudden the fault of the poor immigrants. The fact that the brutal Apartheid system was never fully dismantled to balance the economy and allow black citizens to climb the social ladder is magically the fault of the Ghanaians. The fact that violent crime rates are skyrocketing is no longer recognized as a catastrophic state failure that should warrant a complete overhaul of the corrupt security chiefs, but is instead entirely blamed on the Nigerians. The crippling unemployment rate is conveniently blamed on the Somalis, the crumbling public infrastructure is attributed to the Zimbabweans, and the gross incompetence of the ruling elite is miraculously dumped on the shoulders of undocumented migrants. This was the exact same toxic, fabricated storyline they ruthlessly cooked up in Northern Nigeria explicitly against the Igbos. The ruling elites perfectly orchestrate this bloody theater to deflect from their own monumental failures and permanently shield themselves from righteous public aggression.

Reuben Abati should not be making these reckless, highly inflammatory statements on live television. Xenophobia will only end when other African nations aggressively force the political government of South Africa, the mining cartels, and the massive corporations controlling their resources to absolute order. It will certainly not stop by making reactionary xenophobic remarks, throwing media tantrums, and calling for the lazy boycott of an entire group of people. The last thing we need right now is more border friction and manufactured hatred in Africa. Genuine African unity is utterly integral to any serious conversation about total decolonization.

[A Political Economist @politicaleconZA]

Nothing is more fake middle class intellectualism than making an 'agency' argument to cover up foreign governments and right-wing white billionaires using billionaire-owned social media to manipulate black people into fighting each other 🥱

[Ahmed Kaballo @AhmedKaballo]

Let’s not fall for the lies about the North of Ireland.

These racist pogroms are taking place largely in loyalist areas and are being driven by reactionary elements of the British settler community. They have inherited the same racist and reactionary politics that have long been used to divide working people.

The ruling class has always needed immigration to keep the economy functioning, while simultaneously demonising migrants to create competition and resentment within the working class. The goal is simple: ensure that people’s anger is directed downwards or sideways at those with less power, rather than upwards at those who hold it.

Even these numbwits are not dumb enough to blame a whole community for the actions of one man. They are just using it as an excuse to act out all of their racist fantasies that are inherent in all settler colonial communities.

[Donna St. Hill @donnasthill]

Just realised Twitter removed the accompanying video I had saved in drafts from the tweet below

[Brian Berletic @BrianJBerletic]

🇺🇸🇮🇱NEW VIDEO: Who Really Controls US Foreign Policy & What They Gain By Convincing You Otherwise...

On YouTube: https://t.co/nqUQSYe8m5

▪️The US is controlled by US-based corporations Americans themselves fund daily by buying their goods and services;

▪️These corporations are lead, chaired, and owned by majority white nominally "Christian" men, or in other words, Westerners - not ethnic or religious minorities like "Jews;"

▪️These corporations also make up the vast majority of lobbying money spent annually in the United States with organizations like AIPAC making up LESS than 1% of all US lobbying;

▪️It is stated US policy to scapegoat Israel amid the US war on Iran, a policy that has been promoted by the mainstream media, the algorithms of US-based social media platforms, and even the US administration itself;

[Donna St. Hill @donnasthill]

These days they’re not even trying but still the brains of the targeted population simply can’t discern - for the 7 millionth time

[Quibble @JonDohNumbers]

@BigYash_609 I have to wonder how stupid anyone believing this idiot is. Like blind leading the blind, but idiots leading idiots.

[Iran Embassy in Indonesia @IraninIndonesia]

As the Persian proverb says: ‘A thief believes everybody steals.’
The worst World Cup host ever.

[Rogue Kite @RogueKite]

Pay attention to these narratives because they are not serving the interest of any kind of "left" or "anti-imperialist" movement. They are essentially doing what the Trotskyists did attacking every actually existing left-wing government... They are just doing it from a different angle. It's no less insidious.

When the CIA is infiltrating your country and murdering how many politicians in the past few election cycles with cartels what are your options exactly? Now policies they pass for their own people don't matter? They have to physically confront US military blockades and mercenary armies in the middle of having their governments sabotaged and that's the new criteria? Nonsense. The only people responsible for what's happening to Cuba or Venezuela is the United States criminal fucking Empire. Of course these other governments are scared. Have you watched what the US has been doing? Do you understand the level of infiltration in Mexico? Do you actually think they have the ability to confront the US war machine?

These anti-Imperialists who keep attacking the victims of US imperialism right when the Trump Administration and right-wing are doing the exact same thing from a different angle are really selling themselves out. The alignment with the Larouche fake left ACP narratives is very noticeable. These people are doing the bidding of the Trump Administration. This is exactly in line with the Trump agenda and the New York Times running hit pieces on Shinebaum from every angle. Pretending to attack them from a farther left position doesn't make the objective any different or the interests it serves.

[DEVINE MAFA @divinemafa]

WHEN THE VULTURES CAME
Chapter Two — The Deal That Was Made
Robert Gabriel Mugabe

---

Let me tell you how liberation really works.

Not the version they teach in schools. Not the version I gave in speeches for thirty seven years. The real version. The one that begins not in the bush with guns and courage but in comfortable houses in London with men in suits drinking tea and deciding which African leader they could manage and which one they needed to destroy.

I was in Ghana when they came to me.

I was teaching. I was reading. I was becoming the man Father O'Hea had pointed me toward. And men arrived — not announcing themselves as what they were — and began explaining the world to me as if I were a student who needed the geography of power simplified.

They explained the Cold War.

The Soviets were moving through Africa like water finding cracks in stone. Angola. Mozambique. Ethiopia. Every liberation movement that leaned toward Moscow received weapons and training and ideological support. And every one of those movements became a problem for the West's investments and strategic interests on the continent.

Joshua Nkomo was the problem they needed solved in Zimbabwe.

Nkomo had been the first. Before me. Before ZANU. He was ZAPU — the Zimbabwe African People's Union — and he had the Ndebele behind him and the Soviets supporting him and a vision for Zimbabwe that included taking land from white farmers immediately and redistributing it to the people who had worked that land for generations under colonial dispossession.

The West could not allow that.

Not because they cared about white farmers specifically. But because £800 million in British investment sat in Zimbabwe. Because the Lancaster House agreement — the negotiated settlement that brought independence — had guaranteed white property rights for ten years. Because Rhodesia becoming another Angola would destabilise the entire southern African region at the height of the Cold War.

Nkomo had to be contained.

I understood what was being asked of me. I was not naive. I had read enough history to know exactly what I was being offered and exactly what it would cost.

They would support ZANU. They would support me. They would ensure that when independence came it came through a negotiated process that protected enough white interests to keep the West comfortable. And in return I would manage Nkomo. I would keep Zimbabwe stable. I would be the reasonable African leader they could do business with.

I told myself I was being clever. I told myself I was using them the way they were using me. That I would take their support and their recognition and their investment and then build something genuinely independent once I had enough power to do so.

That calculation was the first great mistake of my political life.

Because you cannot make a deal with people who are better at making deals than you are and expect to come out ahead.

Herbert Chitepo understood this.

Chitepo was our leader before me. Chairman of ZANU. A brilliant lawyer. A man of genuine principle who believed that ZANU and ZAPU should find a way to work together — that African unity was more important than factional victory. He kept talking about reconciliation between ZANU and ZAPU. He kept refusing to fully commit to the dismantling of Nkomo that the architecture required.

In March 1975 he was killed by a car bomb in Lusaka, Zambia.

They blamed internal ZANU rivalries. They blamed ZAPU agents. The investigations went nowhere and the conclusions satisfied nobody who was paying attention.

Fay Chung — one of our own ZANU militants, a woman who was there, who saw everything — said years later that Ken Flower ordered that assassination.

Ken Flower. The Rhodesian intelligence chief. The man who ran the CIO — the Central Intelligence Organisation — for Ian Smith's white minority government. The man who maintained connections to British intelligence throughout the Bush War. The man who I kept as head of the CIO after independence in 1980.

I kept him. Deliberately. Consciously. Because he was the connection. The line that ran from Harare back to London back to everything that kept Zimbabwe from being strangled in its cradle by sanctions and isolation before it had learned to breathe.

Mnangagwa — my intelligence minister from 1980 — worked directly with Flower. He asked Flower to stay. He left the professional control of the CIO entirely in Flower's hands while providing the political link to government. A white Rhodesian intelligence chief running Zimbabwe's security apparatus with my blessing and Mnangagwa's active cooperation in the first years of independence.

That is the deal.

That is what liberation actually looked like from the inside.

After Chitepo died I rose. And the architecture that needed Nkomo contained had its man in place.

I want to be precise about something here because history deserves precision.

I did not invent the Cold War. I did not create the conditions that made these calculations necessary. I inherited a continent that had been divided and colonised and exploited for centuries and was now being used as a chess board by two superpowers who cared nothing for the people living on it.

I made choices within that reality.

But the choices I made had consequences I must own.

I chose the West over genuine Pan-African unity. I chose stability over justice in the short term believing I would deliver justice later. I chose to keep white intelligence structures intact believing I could control them.

I was wrong on every count.

The West used my stability to protect their investments and then abandoned me the moment I finally moved on land redistribution in 2000. The white intelligence structures I kept fed information about me to London for decades. And the justice I kept postponing — for the Ndebele, for the dispossessed, for everyone I told to wait — never fully arrived.

And Nkomo.

Joshua Nkomo.

We called him Father Zimbabwe once. Before I destroyed him. Before I drove him into exile. Before I sent the Fifth Brigade into his people's land with orders that I will describe in the next chapter with the full honesty this book demands.

He sat with me in government. He was my Minister of Home Affairs after independence. I watched him every day. A big man. A genuine man. A man who had actually loved Zimbabwe longer and more completely than I had because he had never made the deals I had made. He had stayed clean in ways I had not.

I fired him in 1982.

I accused him of plotting a coup. I found arms on his farms — arms that were there, that were real, though the question of who put them there and why has never been fully answered to my satisfaction even now.

I used those arms as my door.

Behind that door was everything the architecture had always required.

Nkomo broken. ZAPU destroyed. The Ndebele brought to heel. Zimbabwe made safe for the investments and the agreements and the careful international relationships that kept the lights on and the economy functioning.

I walked through that door.

And what happened next in Matabeleland I will tell you in the next chapter. Not with political language. Not with the careful framing of a leader managing a difficult situation.

With the truth.

The plain, cold, unforgiveable truth.

Because nobody lives forever and I have nothing left to protect except the historical record of what actually happened in my country and why.

The deal was made before I fully understood what I was agreeing to.

By the time I understood it was too late to unmake it.

That is the honest account of how Robert Gabriel Mugabe — son of a Malawian carpenter, student of an Irish priest, teacher, prisoner, liberator, President — became the man who did what I did to the people of Matabeleland.

It begins in Belgravia.

It ends in mass graves in Lupane.

And the line between those two places runs directly through me.

— Robert Gabriel Mugabe
From the original manuscript, handwritten notes and voice recordings
Published by Nehanda Press

#NehandaPress #NehandaBooks #NehandaPublishing #VoicesOfAfrica
#AfricanPublishing #AfricanAuthors #WhenTheVulturesCame #NewBookRelease
#PoliticalThriller #PoliticalHistory #AfricanPolitics
#PowerAndPolitics #TheVulturesCame #PoliticalNonfiction #Zimbabwe
#ZimbabwePolitics #ZimbabweHistory
#FutureOfZimbabwe #Constitutionalism
#DemocracyInAfrica #AfricanLeadership #BigWednesdayRead #MustRead #BookDiscussion #NowReading #robertmugabe #britishcolonialism
https://t.co/RVjwVltAzB

[Brian Berletic @BrianJBerletic]

🇺🇸🇮🇱NEW VIDEO: Who Really Controls US Foreign Policy & What They Gain By Convincing You Otherwise...

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[Alexander Maslov @SocialistMorde]

The USSR purchased Cuban cigars at 11 times the international price in order to support Cuba and they paid much higher prices for many of its other products while selling Soviet products to them for cheap.

This is not a colonial relationship. The USSR was not Social-Imperialist.

[Ascende Superius🕊💀❤️‍🔥 @Tomfreddie2]

I don’t think people understand just how immense the Soviet Union was to Africa and the Global South in general. Soviet internationalism helped prop up countless people across Africa and the Global South through tertiary education and support for independence struggles. +

[Just.A.Thought 💭 @e_galv]

Do you know how much PROPAGANDA it takes to convince a whole country of people that their military exists solely to keep them safe, and not to keep people around the world under their rule by destroying their homes and infrastructure while stealing their resources?

[Emeka The Proletariat @EMEKA_EMODI]

"In reality the UN is the legal card used by the imperialists interests when the card of brute force has failed." - Frantz Fanon

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

This is how Belfast looks on my femicide map.

Each of the ~1,000 pins is for a woman or girl murdered in Belfast between 1900 - 2025.

Almost all of them murdered by men and mostly by the type of men who were strolling around Belfast tonight wrecking their own city. /1

[Andile Gogoda @AfricaisBlack]

One thing about truth is that it doesn’t care about your feelings; it cuts deep and still remains the truth. We cannot ignore the economic realities facing South Africa. Rhetoric won’t shift fundamentals, smart policy will. 🇿🇦

[John Duncan @Johntheduncan]

This is fascist mobilisation. These are black shirts ready to lynch

[Donna St. Hill @donnasthill]

@CaiStark It was excellent

All the show hosts were up on the material could discuss it in context, competent on current important discourses, and able to seek out the implications for philosophy, praxis and organising the masses

This brought out the best in the guest Rockhill

A must-see

[Donna St. Hill @donnasthill]

Just realised Twitter removed the accompanying video I had saved in drafts from the tweet below

[Donna St. Hill @donnasthill]

Hard to find one clip that best illustrates the quality & critical depth of this convo from both the hosts and the special guest @GabrielRockhill

Identity reductionism is centered but it’s grt to get an in-depth dialectical critique to differentiate it from liberal/rw complaints

[Donna St. Hill @donnasthill]

Just realised Twitter removed the accompanying video I had saved in drafts from the tweet above

[Donna St. Hill @donnasthill]

Hard to find one clip that best illustrates the quality & critical depth of this convo from both the hosts and the special guest @GabrielRockhill

Identity reductionism is centered but it’s grt to get an in-depth dialectical critique to differentiate it from liberal/rw complaints

[New Afrikan❤️🖤💚 @Liberation_Blk]

“We see the emergence of a perverted form of Marxism that is largely the result of class formations within the imperial core & ideological war waged by the imperialists…so you see an academic imperial version of Marxism that purports to be theoretically sophisticated but disconnected from the practical project of transforming the world…it takes authentic Marxism that’s anti-imperialist and makes a perversion of it that’s anti-anti imperialist”- Dr. @GabrielRockhill 🔥 #barz

Check out this latest Black Myths ep:

“All Marxisms are Created Equal”—like I said it’s spicy! 🌶️😬