THERE is nothing surprising about Mr Mugabe's victory. What is surprising is that he bothers about elections at all. There must be easier ways of holding on to power than beating up voters, stuffing ballot boxes with fake papers and losing them or setting them on fire and generally rigging the result.

And for all the shock, horror and distress among Western liberal thinkers, there is nothing surprising about the African countries' support for him. The quarrel in Zimbabwe, as in all of Africa, is between the white man and the black man. The black man, as Mugabe knows and the white thinker denies, would like to get rid of the white man and all his laws and institutions that linger on so confusingly from colonial times and irritate Mugabe and his fellow potentates by getting in the way.

There is an obvious remedy. Let the black man get rid of the white man's democratic eletions, his parliaments and woolsacks and judges' wigs, his military uniforms, his weapons and other ingenious devices, his science and technology, his money and financial arrangements, his motor cars and aircraft, his computers, radio and television, not to speak of his hospitals and medical services.

No longer ensnared by the white man's overpowering gifts, the Africans could return to African ways of doing things.

The African chief would summon his tribal council and dispense African justice. Wars would be fought with sticks and stones. Cattle would be currency. Witchdoctors would flourish with their spells and potions. The people would dance and sing and celebrate birth and death and the procession of the seasons. The fat man, reclining in the shade, would have the thin men scurrying about to do his bidding, as from time immemorial.

No news, good or bad, would come out of Africa any more to fill our "media" with worry and soul-searching. Experts and liberal thinkers, deprived of conscience-fodder and obsessive guilt, would have to find other ways of passing their time. And Africa, free of mad, white, alien dreams of progress and modernity, would be itself again.  

Peter Simple - The Weekly Telegraph (UK)