I’ll be going to Africa in a month (I think), which always gets me excited. There is nothing I know of that compares with the thrill of being in the bush amidst the African wildlife, and I have so many friends now in central and southern Africa that it is really a third home for me (second home is Italy). So many wonderful people, living in such awful misery, in such a fabulous landscape.

The “civilized world” doesn’t give a hoot for Africa or Africans. Every now and then there is an emotional embrace for some worthy cause or other, such as Darfur, but for the most part those campaigns are conducted by the feel-gooders, who shy away from the simple, straightforward methods that will actually work. Darfur can be saved quite simply, by destroying the helicopters and small fixed-wing planes used by the northerners for their attacks.

And then there’s Zimbabwe, the most obvious candidate for regime change I think I’ve ever seen. A crazed dictator openly destroying his country and his people, but nobody gives a damn. The South Africans haven’t assumed the leadership role that history and geography dealt to them, another bitter inheritance from the failed presidency of St Nelson Mandela. His heir, Thabo Mbeke, has been utterly pathetic as a “statesman.”

And so the Zimbabweans are running away. What else can they do? Lots of them go south, causing Mbeke to fret. Instapundit puts it perfectly:

…the Mbeki government deserves these problems for its shameful complicity in Mugabe’s disastrous dictatorship. South Africa could have done good here, but chose a see-no-evil approach. Now the problems are crossing its border.

Which is only just.