But that's the thing: the Zimbabweans I was talking about aren't the white ones. All the white Zimbabweans I know are fine - they all went to good private schools in South Africa. It's primarily black Zimbabweans that got utterly fucked and are having to eke out a living doing menial work here while frequently being victims of xenophobic violence, due to the narrative that they're "stealing work from locals" (sound familiar?)

And here, during our very strict lockdown, the worst a white, middle class person could typically expect to deal with from the police was being asked firmly to go back inside if they got caught walking a dog, while black people were getting dragged out of their homes and beaten to death in the townships for supposedly having illegal alcohol. Sure the cops are black now, and the political and corporate interests they protect are largely black-owned, but they're still enforcing oppression of the black poor. Obviously that doesn't make the ANC equivalent to the apartheid government, or Mugabe's Zimbabwe equivalent to colonial Rhodesia, but I still don't think they deserve anything beyond the most critical support from the left. I also don't think it's class-essentialist to demand that decolonial movements work to free people from the material oppression of colonialism, rather than just changing who the small elite is that benefits from it.