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By Root 1827 0

the wild Skeleton Coast in the north (vast stretches of foggy beach punctuated by eerie, rusting shipwrecks) to the brilliant red dunes of the Namib Desert to the immense Fish River Canyon in the south. Namibia was colonized by the Germans, who starting in the late 1890s turned the dozen or so major ethnic groups constituting black Namibia into forced labor—almost annihilating the particularly rebellious Herero tribe. Following the Second World War, Namibia was annexed by a belligerent South Africa. The country’s arable land was parceled into some six thousand lavish farms for white settlers. Members of the black majority were relegated to newly demarcated “tribal homelands,” where they received an offensively inferior education. Until the 1990s, 75 percent of Namibian children completed less than five years of schooling.

Today Namibia’s population of about 1.6 million has one of the African continent’s highest GDPs—but also, according to a recent World Bank report, one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. While the great majority of black Namibians engage in communal subsistence farming, a tiny minority of roughly eighty thousand whites own the most productive land and control all the most lucrative and globally-oriented sectors of the economy. A decade after the end of apartheid, Namibia’s business community is still almost entirely white.

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Meanwhile, South Africa’s Oppenheimer family has controlled Namibia’s diamond mines—the richest in the world—since 1908. (De Beers entered into a joint venture with Namibia’s current government in 1994). The Oppenheimers have been called “pioneers of globalization”; De Beers has offices all over the world and currently controls 60 percent of the global trade in rough diamonds. The conglomerate’s latest technological gambit is deep-sea diamond mining. “Special drill bits,” marvels Fortune’s Nicholas Stein, “23 feet in diameter, burrow into the ocean floor, releasing a mix of diamond and ore that is sucked through 300 feet of tubing to the surface, where machines separate the diamonds from the surrounding material and pack them, like chunky soup, into aluminum cans.”

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In 2000, De Beers recovered roughly 570,000 carats of high quality diamonds off the Namibian coast. That same year, roughly 60 percent of Namibia’s black majority had no access to sanitary toilets. Namibia also has what may be the world’s largest uranium mine. It, however, is owned by a British company.

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Zimbabwe, too, previously known as Rhodesia, is a country of glorious natural beauty. But you would never know it from our newspapers, which for decades have had nothing to report but human ugliness in Zimbabwe: from Ian Smith’s grotesquely oppressive white rule; to the guerrilla downing of two civilian airplanes in the late seventies, followed by the rape and hacking to death of crash survivors; to the recent confiscations and violence instigated by President Robert Mugabe.

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The British initially colonized Zimbabwe in the late nineteenth century, and whites continued to control the country’s economy and politics until 1980. Unlike South Africa, where Afrikaners own most of the land, the majority of Zimbabwe’s forty-five hundred white farmers are of British and Irish ancestry. Only fifty or so are of Dutch heritage.

For a variety of reasons, outside observers tend to regard the Anglo elite throughout southern Africa with greater sympathy than the descendants of the Boers. In South Africa the Afrikaners are viewed as the chief architects and perpetuators of apartheid, with many Anglo whites belonging to the opposition. In the case of Zimbabwe there is no doubt that Anglo whites were responsible for the worst oppressions. Yet the general impression, it seems, is that Zimbabwe’s white farmers, with their sun-leathered skin and khaki shorts, do not—despite their multiple servants and ownership of the country’s best land—live in the aloof luxury of their Afrikaner counterparts in South Africa. “With Zimbabwe’s whites,” mused a U.S. Justice Department official, “there seems