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Americans Outraged Over Killing of Cecil the Lion Handed Harsh Dose of Reality by Doctoral Student Who Knows a Thing or Two About Wildlife in Zimbabwe
Aug. 5, 2015 5:42pm
Dave Urbanski
THE BLAZE
Goodwell Nzou can claim a number of critical statuses that most Americans — even almost au naturale thespians in PETA ads — cannot.
First off, he’s from Zimbabwe.
Second, he’s a doctoral student in molecular and cellular biosciences at Wake Forest University.
Third, he knows all about lions — and not the kind you see on YouTube or even at the zoo.
Rachel Augusta leads the protest of the killing of Cecil the lion in the parking lot of hunter Dr. Walter Palmer’s River Bluff Dental Clinic on July 29, 2015 in Bloomington, Minnesota. (Image source: Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)
Rachel Augusta leads the protest of the killing of Cecil the lion in the parking lot of hunter Dr. Walter Palmer’s River Bluff Dental Clinic, July 29, 2015 in Bloomington, Minn. (Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)
Nzou’s Wednesday op-ed in the New York Times is turning some heads — and perhaps generating just a little bit of cognitive dissonance — because he’s decidedly unsympathetic toward those outraged at Cecil the Lion’s demise.
In fact, when Nzou heard the news about Cecil, he said “the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.”
Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?
In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.
Nzou went on to tell how a prowling lion made life hell for him and his family, how one injured his uncle in an attack, how the predator “sucked the life out of the village: No one socialized by fires at night; no one dared stroll over to a neighbor’s homestead.”
He also couldn’t believe Cecil’s killer has been painted as a villain, which amounted to “the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years studying in the United States.”
Recalling the point at which the lion that menaced his loved ones finally was killed, Nzou didn’t hold back. “[N]o one cared whether its murderer was a local person or a white trophy hunter, whether it was poached or killed legally,” Nzou wrote. “We danced and sang about the vanquishing of the fearsome beast and our escape from serious harm.”
Protesters place signs on the doors of Dr. Walter Palmer’s River Bluff Dental Clinic to call attention to the alleged poaching of Cecil the lion on July 29, 2015 in Bloomington, Minnesota.
He backed up his point of view by explaining from personal experience the damage that dangerous creatures in his country can dole out: Nzou lost his right leg from a snakebite when he was 11.
And while he acknowledged wild animals garner near-mystical significance from Zimbabweans, it’s never kept his people from hunting them or letting others do so. Not that it matters to Americans who habitually “jump onto a hashtag train” and transform what’s a normal — and necessary part of life — into an “absurdist circus,” he wrote.
Nzou concluded his devastating column in this way
We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.
Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States. Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.
And please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren, by political violence [SEE ARTICLE BELOW ON ROBERT MUGABE], or by hunger.
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Robert Mugabe
Robert Mugabe, Jesuit Educated President of Zimbabwe for thirty-five years, since 1980 !!
THE HISTORY CHANNEL
[emphasis by Abyssum in red type]
The leader of Zimbabwe since its independence in 1980, Robert Mugabe (1924-) is one of the longest-serving and, in the latter years of his reign, most infamous African rulers. Trained as a teacher, he spent 11 years as a political prisoner under Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government. He rose to lead the Zimbabwe African National Union movement and was one of the key negotiators in the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, which led to the creation of a fully democratic Zimbabwe. Elected prime minister and later president, he
embraced conciliation with the country’s white minority but sidelined his rivals through politics and force. Beginning in 2000, he encouraged the takeovers of white-owned commercial farms, leading to economic collapse and runaway inflation. After a disputed election in 2009 he reluctantly agreed to share some power with the rival Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Robert Mugabe: From Teacher to Freedom Fighter
Robert Gabriel Mugabe was born February 21, 1924, in Katuma, a Jesuit mission station 50 miles west of the Southern Rhodesian capital. His father, Gabriel Matibili, was a carpenter from Nyasaland (later Malawi). His mother, Bona, belonged to the prominent Shona ethnic group.
Mugabe graduated from Katuma’s St. Francis Xavier College in 1945. For the next 15 years he taught in Rhodesia and Ghana and pursued further education at Fort Hare University in South Africa. In Ghana he met and married his first wife, Sally Hayfron.
In 1960 Mugabe joined the pro-independence National Democratic Party, becoming its publicity secretary. In 1961 the NDP was banned and reformed as the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU). Two years later Mugabe left ZAPU for the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU, later ZANU-PF), his present political home.
Robert Mugabe: Prison and Exile
In 1964 ZANU was banned by Rhodesia’s colonial government and Mugabe was imprisoned. A year later, premier Ian Smith issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence to create the white-ruled state of Rhodesia, short-circuiting Britain’s plans for majority rule and triggering international condemnation.
In prison Mugabe taught English to his fellow prisoners and earned multiple graduate degrees by correspondence from the University of London. Freed in 1974, Mugabe went into exile in Zambia and Mozambique, and in 1977 he gained full control of ZANU’s political and military fronts. He adopted Marxist and Maoist views and received arms and training from Asia and Eastern Europe, but he still maintained good relations with Western donors.
Robert Mugabe: The Creation of Zimbabwe
In 1982 Mugabe sent his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade to the ZAPU stronghold of Matabeleland to smash dissent. Over five years, 20,000 Ndebele civilians were killed as part of a campaign of alleged political genocide. In 1987 Mugabe switched tactics, inviting ZAPU to be merged with the ruling ZANU-PF and creating a de facto one-party authoritarian state with himself as the ruling president.
Robert Mugabe: The Road to Tyranny
During the 1990s Mugabe was reelected twice, became a widower and remarried. In 1998 he sent Zimbabwean troops to intervene in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s civil war—a move many viewed as a grab for the country’s diamonds and valuable minerals.
In 2000 Mugabe organized a referendum on a new Zimbabwean constitution that would expand the powers of the presidency and allow the government to seize white-owned land. Groups opposed to the constitution formed the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which successfully campaigned for a “no” vote in the referendum.
That same year, groups of individuals calling themselves “war veterans”—though many were not old enough to have been part of Zimbabwe’s independence struggle—began invading white-owned farms. Violence caused many of Zimbabwe’s whites to flee the country. Zimbabwe’s commercial farming collapsed, triggering years of hyperinflation and food shortages that created a nation of impoverished billionaires.
Robert Mugabe: Recent Years
After a 2008 election marred by ZANU-PF-sponsored violence, Mugabe was pressured by his regional allies to form an inclusive government with MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai as vice president. Even while implementing the accord, Mugabe kept up the pressure, subjecting MDC parliamentarians to arrest, imprisonment and torture.
Mugabe has no obvious anointed successor, making it unclear what direction the country will take after its only post-independence leader dies or finally loses an election.
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
Couldn’t agree more about Cecil the Lion or this travesty of justice here. I know I was born and bred in Zimbabwe.