I am no expert in military tactics, but some of the other commentators are. Maybe one of them will answer you.

Just noticed you quoted Mao ? Another blog advised that the three dictators who killed the most people in the 20th Centuary were Mao, Stalin and Hitler(with Hitler trailing at third place) !

And this is your hero?

That is why they needed the South African’s help, which officially they got (as told to the SA public ) but privately they threatened to withdraw to force Ian Smith to Lancaster (not told to the SA public). Pik Botha was under the delusion that if they sacrified Zim, SA would be left alone.

And, by the way, Caborra Bassa was built at about this time, under the supervision of the SA army, to protect against “rebels” – in Mocambique!

Not all were failures. Malaya, singapore, hong kong were resounding successes. They were successes as they were non-liberal and very hierarchical. Everyone knew their place. The white man is still welocme there.

In addition, there is the hardworking high IQ Asian who didnt just blame the white man. They learnt and took over.

The biggest failures were the Portuguese colonies, where race mixing was the norm.

Look at it another way. Without colonialism those african messes would have been even worse off. They all got their infrastructure and education from colonialism. When most of africa was colonised in the late 1800s it was going nowhere and was 1000s of years behind europe.

But looking at the xenophobia, its looks like like have a wish to go back to the ‘good old days’.

What on earth had Portugal pulling out of Africa to do with it? It was South Africa threatening to pull out its support (specifically Pik Botha) that forced Ian Smith into Lancaster house which sold all the OTHER blacks in Zim down the river as well. See the results now?

In the “guerilla” war thousands of blacks were killed in black on black violence, mainly by Mugabe’s thugs – but only a few hundred whites.

Cuito was not guerilla war! It was a massive coventional battle between the Cubans and the South Africans, after which South Africa and the Russian backed Cubans settled by BOTH withdrawing out of Angola.

Swapo did not win a guerilla war either. TEN YEARS AFTER Cuito, Unita and Swapo reached a negotiated settlement.

It is this kind of feeding of fake history to people which helps to lead to the violence we are seeing in the townships now! Tell them their “freedom” is from bush wars and “necklacing” opponents and what do you expect!

Interesting as ever, but Chad was a French colony.

Keep up the good work

I’m not sure that Oosthuisen is white but I doubt we’ll be having any President with a White sounding surname for a while yet…

Thackeray (an English name) is making big strides in Mumbai in India but on the anti-colonial ticket. 55 years on, some rabble rousers are still blaming the British. Strange how many politicians from ex-British colonies expect to improve their countries while focussing on the past in their rear-view mirrors rather than looking forward through the windscreen. South africa need to model our decolonisation on the Eastern Tigers, South Korea in particular. The 1952 UN Year Book spoke of Chad’s bright future but despaired for the poorer South Korea. South Korea they said had nothing to offer, few natural resources and a totally uneducated population. The soon to be independent Chad on the other hand had everything an emergent nation needed to succeed spectacularly. Straight after this, Korea had a devastating civil war. By 1997 or 45 years later, the average South Korean earned more than 20 times as much as the average Chadian. These days, South Korea provides Chad with foreign aid and Chad remains a typical African mess…

An interesting thought – It is acknowledged that the British colonies were the most liberal yet, the independent states these produced have generally been monumental failures, often taking two or three generations to recover. India, Chad, Ireland, Burma, Zimbabwe, Swaziland… (dare I say Australia )