Horace Campbell’s is a timely and necessary call on the African person to seriously reflect the Zimbabwean condition in the light of the so-called neocolonial/neo-imperialist politics.

While we do not deny the horrors of these 'neo-influences', we sadly underline the tendency to over-emphasise them and the failure to see Mugabe & Co.'s ugliness. I was participant in the CODESSRIA Conference, and, yes, the argument by Mamdani, Shivji... (lead proponents of the Statement) about Zimbabwe seemed intellectually so strained (a colleague saw it as vacuous!).

Of course to talk of military intervention in Zimbabwe is naive, but to continue praising Mugabe's banal conceptualisation of 'independent Zimbabwe' is surely a madness.