I refer to Dean Johns' article Democracy with a difference . While it is excellent with its usual delightful cheekiness we have come to expect of his style, I detect a lack of contextual depth in one of his examples of racism.

I am talking about Zimbabwe or what it was originally called, Southern Rhodesia, a land that was aggressively appropriated by European settlers from their amaNdebele owners near the end of the 19th Century and named after, fittingly it would seem, Cecil Rhodes, an extreme British imperialist and Anglo-Saxon supremacist. It was reported that Rhodes orchestrated every step of the British South Africa Company's invasive usurpation of that indigenous land.

The racist discrimination perpetrated today by Robert Mugabe is in reality no different to that perpetrated by the colonial white settlers and their elected (white) representatives, with one exception - the ruling black Africans are a tad more crude, but no more bigoted, rapacious and disgustingly shameful than their white predecessors.

In Southern Rhodesia, the whites were never more than 5% of the country population, yet, until independence in 1980, enjoyed never less than 95% of the total vote in national elections. So Johns' very clever use of the term 'dermocracy', or what we Malaysians term 'kulit-fication', is correct but certainly not a Mugabe original. The dubious honour of that original sin in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe must go to the rapacious racist repressive white settlers.

Johns has also been absolutely spot on in his comment on Rhodesia-Zimbabwe that 'a system in which opportunities for achievement of power, wealth and status depend on the colour of peoples' skins'. In that unfortunate part of the world, it was then starkly white, and now black, not quite the accommodating flux of yang-yin harmony that Taoists have in mind, but pure unadulterated 'kulit-fication'.

Yes, pre-1980 and Mugabe, you have to be white, and preferably Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic white to enjoy those 'opportunities' that Johns mentioned.

But mind you, post 1980 and even with Mugabe, the whites have not been cut off completely from those 'opportunities' even until today, many who have adapted to the current political environment are still enjoying prosperity and have become multi-millionaires like Nicholas van Hoogstraten, who, now get this, described Robert Mugabe as '100 percent decent and incorruptible' and 'a true English gentleman'.

Doesn't van Hoogstraten painfully remind us of some people we are more familiar with? Everywhere in the world those who can adapt to the political environment like white Zimbabweans Hoogstraten, Billy Rautenbach, Charles Davy, and here in Malaysia, some members of the non-Umno component parties of the Barisan Nasional, can survive and indeed survive well.

A 'jolly good' example of Johns' 'dermocracy' at work!