The world's stolen generation

This is not a critique of the apology to the Stolen Generation. It was long overdue and it is to John Howard's ongoing shame that he was too small-minded to do it years ago. But one of my Australian friends expressed some angst at, and I quote: "when he sought to validate aboriginal culture by comparing their '1000 generations' of habitation in Australia with other Aussies as those who arrived 'only yesterday'. An unnecessary and distorting over-simplification. My ancestors included several 'stolen generations' who were exiled from England to Australia with little prospect of return for 'crimes' like stealing a loaf of bread or a pair of boots to survive the winter. Five or six generations later, if this land is not my home, where is?" His distaste at being considered "yesterday's arrival" hit a nerve for me as being a second generation born and bred African I feel very much that African soil is my homeland but that we (Zimbabweans/Rhodesians) were dispossessed by the British and Australian (aka Commonwealth) policies of the 1960s and 1970s that handed power to the megalomaniac Mugabe in a rigged election in 1980. Perhaps we were too polite. Perhaps the history of southern Africa would have looked very different if the colonial invaders had followed the Australian lead and committed genocide on the indigenous population to subjugate them. Instead we did our business by contract that was eventually over ruled by the political expediency of the po-faced Windsors and their cohorts in London, Canberra and elsewhere. It is particularly galling that the very thing we fought against has now happened, as we said it would. Many good friends of mine (both black and white) shed blood and were killed in the fight against the Eastern-bloc sponsored insurgents. Now people who were raised as brothers to me are dead because of Zimbabwe’s AIDS pandemic. And while there is some little bit of hand-wringing about the Mugabe situation there is no real political will to actually go and redress the wrongs. Where are all the pompous, self-righteous, but very ignorant bleeding hearts who persisted on the downfall of Rhodesia in 1980 to apologise to the many millions of refugees from that once very prosperous country who have had to "bomb-shell" all over the world but still love and hanker after a home-land that is no more?So as one of the very many educated Diaspora of Rhodesians/Zimbabweans I have a high level of empathy for what it must have meant to the aborigines to receive official recognition of the wrongs and injustices of the past (and the present). We Zimbabweans are similarly dispossessed, but worse our land has been handed to rack and ruin and seemingly no one but us cares. I won’t be expecting a similar apology to that received by the stolen generation in my lifetime and it makes me sad and angry at the same time. We, the Zimbabwean Diaspora, are the world's stolen generation, and the Western world will not do anything about it because they can't afford to lose us.