This book is great fun. Whereas Martin Meredith regards the history of Zimbabwe as a tragedy and loads every page with doleful hand-wringing, Rogers thinks it’s a hilarious farce.
Rather than thinking of every speech and law as a further nail in the coffin of 1960s dreams of African independence, Rogers is a child of the 1980s, carefree, at home in the modern world, all dark glasses and retro cars, smart phones, snapchat and WhatsApp.
This being the 21st century, you don’t kick a man when he’s down – you tweet insults at him. (p.155)
For Rogers, Harare isn’t the site of crushed dreams of a socialist dream, huge shanty towns and an impoverished populace, no, he’s interested in the upmarket suburb of Borrowdale where the Zanu-PF elite have their lavish mansions, complete with swimming pools, golf courses, fleets of sports cars, yeah baby.
Rogers’s characters aren’t boring old human rights lawyers and grim-faced opposition activists, but flashy international businessmen, like Ameerh Naran, a young Indian-Zimbabwean entrepreneur who owns a private charter jet firm, is a racing driver in his spare time, and holds the licence to import sex toys into Zimbabwe, a man at home in the jet set of Monaco or Miami or Aspen.
Again and again Rogers has his characters refer to ‘the game’ of high politics, intrigues and espionage which may, in the end, actually be the most realistic way of thinking about it.
- The game they were playing had reached the highest levels and it made the heart race. (p.165)
- It was a turning point in the great game. (p.176)
- Such is life in the death game of Zimbabwean politics. (p.210)
- And so the final stages of the great game began. (p.217)
- Jacob Zuma was the most powerful and influential figure in the game at this point. (p.221)
- Such was the surreal nature of the game. (p.235)
- What it meant was that the game had to play itself out. (p.255)
History as thriller
The whole book is written as a tongue-in-cheek homage to airport thrillers:
On a bright afternoon in the spring of 2015, driving past the mall near his suburban Johannesburg home, Tom Ellis spotted his assassins. (p.37)
Right down to the classic American thriller’s obsession with precisely detailing and enumerating every piece of branded clothing which every character is wearing:
Ellis, wearing slim-fit jeans, short-sleeved checked cotton shirt and the trademark Veldskoens common to white Zimbabweans of his generation, led the way. (p.39)
His favourite adjective is the American ‘upscale’ meaning ‘expensive and designed to appeal to affluent consumers.’ It’s contemporary history in the style of ‘Miami Vice’.
Origin of the book
In November 2017, Robert Mugabe, decrepit ruler of Zimbabwe for 37 long, brutal, corrupt years, aged 93, was finally toppled from his position in an army coup. Rogers was a travel writer and had drafted half a book about the his latest African journey when he heard the news. A native Zimbabwean he had, like so many well-off whites: a) fled the country (to settle in Virginia, USA, in his case) and b) given up any hopes for reform or change to his country.
So he promptly returned to Harare and sniffed about a bit i.e. spoke to various contacts and, as he did so, an amazing story began to unfold. He was put in touch with people who put him in touch with more people who unfurled the nature of the complicated, multi-party coup which had overthrown the old dictator. At which point he rang up his publishers and told them he had something much hotter than another middle-aged road trip to write about and they graciously agreed to wait while he embarked on entirely new book, this book, a detailed exposé of the complex plot to overthrow Robert Mugabe.
And, because he clearly has a terrific sense of humour, and an ironic, detached approach to politics, Rogers has cast the story in the style of an airport thriller. It’s full of facts and figures and explanations of Zimbabwe’s history, Mugabe’s career, Zimbabwe’s steady decline under his management, the failed attempts to oust him by democratic means etc etc. But all told in a bright and cheerful, lollzy manner.
Above all, he zeroes in on the key players in the drama, giving us descriptions of them, their houses, spouses, children, roles in Mugabe’s administration or the Zimbabwe or South African spy agencies and so on, then describes secret meetings at restaurants, late-night flights, smuggling people across the border, clandestine meetings and all the rest of it, exactly as in a poolside spy thriller.
The plot
By the later 2010s the political party Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), which had ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years, led by the wizened old dictator Mugabe, had split into two warring factions. Very simple reason – the issue of who was going to replace the old brute.
On one side his vice-president and long-time colleague at the top of Zanu, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa – also known as ‘The Crocodile’, supposedly because he moved slowly but was deadly, but in fact due to his involvement with the so-called Crocodile Gang during the war of independence (p.131). Also known as ED. His supporters were nicknamed ‘the Lacoste faction’ after the stylish brand of polo shirts they sported (p.21). Note that, although Mugabe was a senile 93, ED was no spring chicken himself, at 75.
On the other side was Mugabe’s second wife, Grace Mugabe, forty-one years younger than him, a typist who he began an affair with while his first wife was still alive (though dying of cancer), who he’d married in 1996 and had three children with (p.66). For ten years or more she’d been widely mocked as interested only in bling and shopping and had acquired a series of nicknames including the First Shopper, Gucci Grace and Lady Gaga.
But at the turn of the 2010s, Grace began to show a more active interest in politics and by 2016/17 she was using public appearances to attack the opposing faction in the party, thus positioning herself to inherit Mugabe’s mantle. Her supporters became known as Generation 40 (G40) because they were the new, younger generation. Prominent in her clique were Jonathan Moyo (former Information Minister), and Saviour Kasukewere (ZANU-PF political commissar).
The two weeks in November 2017 began when Mugabe announced, obviously under pressure from his wife, that he was dismissing his long-time deputy, ED, with the threat that he would immediately be arrested, and the narrative proper gets started with the panic-stricken meeting of ED and his sons who spend a feverish evening figuring out escape routes to smuggle their dad out of the country.
It was one of these plans which ropes in Ameerh Naran who I mentioned above. Naran helps them get a doctor’s certificate vouching that ED is ill, which would allow him to be flown to South Africa on a medical flight (seeing as the airports are, by now, all being watched by Zimbabwe’s security service to ensure that ED doesn’t catch a normal flight leaving the country).
In the event, the panic-stricken conspirators ditch that plan half way through and instead drive in a convoy bearing ED, his wife Auxillia, sons (Junior, Sean and Collins), cousin Tarirai, a friend Hosea Manzunzu (aka Limping Jack), Jenfan Muswere andWise Jasi, along the highway east to cross the border into Mozambique.
At which point the narrative cuts back in time and to South Africa, where builder and fixed Tom Ellis (55) has for years helped out a network of anti-Mugabe people. He confronts two agents from Zimbabwe’s secret police who are tailing him, Kasper and Magic (p.57).
Backstory describing Zimbabwe’s decline. Between 2000 and 2010 4 million Zimbabweans left the country, most to go and live in South Africa. Ellis was an emigre but he wanted to heal his home country. At first he worked with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), founded in 1999 and which provided a viable opposition in the later 2000s, and actually won the 2013 election, but had itself splintered into factions and lost his drive.
It was then that the rivalry in Zanu-PF began to emerge and Ellis began to make approaches to the people around ED. No doubt his phone was bugged and this explains why he found himself being tailed by Zim secret service agents.
Thumbnail sketch of Kasper, real name Charles Wezhira, who had risen from a dirt poor background with the help of his policeman father, to become a secret service operative. He had fought in the Zimbabwean forces sent to intervene in the Great War of Africa in 1997, which is when he thinks the rot set in with Mugabe’s regime, triggering inflation for ordinary people while Mugabe and the elite made fortunes on military contracts and/or corrupt mineral concessions from Zaire’s short-lived president, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Then in the early 2000s came the campaigns to dispossess white farmers and give their land to veterans of the liberation war, 1964 to 1979.
In response to increased opposition, which crystallised in the MDC, Mugabe expanded the operations of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) to create a ‘Securocrat State’, until an estimated one fifth of the population were spying on the rest (cf the Stasi in East Germany) (p.54).
The role of Christopher Mutsvangwa, chair of the Zimbabwe National Liberation Veterans Association. After a long and distinguished career serving Zanu-PF (as cabinet minister, ambassador to China), by 2016 Mutsvangwa had had enough. In July he meets with Ellis the fixer, who introduces him to leading MDC members and exiles in South Africa. He made a big speech denouncing the cult of personality around Mugabe, announcing that the war veterans no longer supported him, and was promptly sacked.
The spy element comes in when Ellis’s CIO contact, Kasper, points out that one of the Zimbabwe exiles they’ve just met with in an SA pub is in fact a CIO spy, indeed took a pally, matey photo of the group with Mutsvangwa which he immediately sent back to the CIO for use in Zanu propaganda against him.
Cut to the scene where human rights activist and Zimbabwean exile in South Africa, Gabriel Shumba, is approached by Kasper and Magic who he initially assumes are going to assassinate him. Having been arrested, beaten up, tortured, arrested again and forced into exile, Gabriel isn’t surprised by anything. In fact, Kasper introduces himself as a CIO operative who is, however, working against Grace and G40, and for the replacement of the Old Man by the Crocodile.
Kasper has names for the phases of his operations: 1) The Move 2) Shock Tactics 3) The Final Push 4) Full Scale.
It’s only when, in February 2017, Kasper takes him to the hospital room of the dying MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who tells him to trust Kasper, that Gabriel signs up for the project. And learns that Ellis had already been signed up for 6 months.
Kasper turns his own assistant, Magic, and introduces a third CIO operative, Horse. He takes to guarding Mutsvangwa in SA, while making regular trips back to Harare to sound out colleagues and contacts. With Gabriel and Ellis working the Zim exiles in SA, they slowly build up a network of important contacts committed to blocking G40 and working for an ED succession. On a particular night after yet another meeting in a bar, Kasper and Tom make a formal agreement which they jokingly title the Northgate Declaration, because that’s the name they can see on a sign from the car park.
On 12 August someone tried to poison ED at a party rally in Gwanda. He was flown to hospital in South Africa and survived. When Kasper heard he knew the conspiracy had entered a new phase. Time to take it to the next level.
And so the narrative returns to where it broke off, with the exciting all night three-car convoy carrying ED and family towards the Mutari crossing into Mozambique. Twenty of more pages are devoted to the Hollywood thriller events which followed: the cars are stopped at the border, there’s a delay, it becomes clear their cover is rumbled and the border guards have called for reinforcements; at which point ED’s sons and cousins cause distractions, get into a brawl with the guards, just long enough for ED to jump into one of the cars and be driven away at high speed. They drive up to the hills and hide out in a village which remembers him from liberation war days. Via cell phones the three groups establish they all escaped.
They then enact an extremely complicated plan: they rustle up some dissident army men who drive them up to an illegal border crossing into Mozambique,,m some way north, but which involves crossing a minefield, which they’re able to do with the help of a local guide. Or so they hope. Then a long arduous trek through sweaty jungle top the nearest two-bit town, where they hole up in a flea-bitten hotel, while waiting for Mozambique contacts to meet them. Then they’re driven to an airfield where there is an immense delay which, in their paranoia, they think must be because the cops are being called but turns out to be because it’s late, there were no more scheduled flights, and all the computers had been turned off!
A private charter plane flies in from South Africa, loads up ED and Junior, and flies them into SA. Even here there are security guards who they think must be setting a trap, but no, they’re waiting for someone else. And, finally, after a 72-hour harem-scarem chase, ED and Collins are driven in black SUVs to a safe house belonging to Zimbabwe millionaire Justice Maphosa, where they join hands (and with the security guards) to pray, before tucking into a meal of chicken and salad.
Joice Mujuru
Zanu-PF’s attempts to ridicule, threaten, sack and hound ED and the long vitriolic ad hominem attacks made by Lady Gucci, were in fact identical tactics used to ruin and disgrace the previous vice-president, Joice Mujuru 2014 when she, too, looked like she was shaping up to be Mugabe’s successor. In other words, it was a repeat of a well worked-out playbook. Mujuru was disgraced and retired from politics. The differences this time were a) ED refused to take it lying down and b) Agent Kasper had for two years been working to create a support network for him, among friendly factions within Zimbabwe, and among the emigre community in SA, which was able to swing into action to support him.
What that means in practice is the Zim exiles call a press conference at a Sandton hotel, in which Mutsvangwa, former leading light of the Mugabe regime, sits next to Gabriel, high profile torture victim of the Mugabe regime, and they jointly declare the Mugabe regime must be overthrown, to a small audience of the world’s press (Times, BBC, CNN etc). More than that, though, it represented a very high official within Zanu-PF (ED), Christopher (head of the war veterans) joining forces with the MDC exile diaspora (represented by Gabriel and Ellis). In other words, a message to ordinary Zimbabweans that a broad front was now united in overthrowing the president.
Rogers then lets slip a lot of information he had been witholding about the scale of the military contacts Kasper had made; about a series of meetings Gabriel, as a lawyer, was invited to with an Zimbabwe army general and brigadier, who probed him about legal means of overthrowing Mugabe.
The team now adopt the Holiday Inn Johannesburg airport at their base. A lot of spooks had been hanging round the press conference; someone tried to assassinate Gabriel earlier in 2017; the rhetoric coming out of Harare about traitors and running dogs etc is hair-raising. The Holiday Inn has only one entrance and exit, through gated doors. Perfect.
Kasper commissions two emigre Zimbabwe commentators (Acie Lumumba and Tino Mambeu) to appear all over SA media saying Mugabe’s time was up. The team is given tasks, with some reaching out to contacts in America to gauge the US response if Mugabe were overthrown. The head of the army had only recently been sent to China; this overlapped with Muntsvabwa’s time as ambassador to China; he made calls to sound out the country which had become the biggest foreign investor in Zimbabwe.
But it’s the army that does it, confirming the reader’s suspicion that, although he has met and interviewed and noted exactly the interactions between Kasper, Ellis and Shumba, there’s a big hole at the centre of Rogers’ narrative, which is the actual planning and carrying out of the military coup.
What he pieces together is that General Chiwenga flew back into Harare airport where his forces, with perfect timing, disarmed the civilian police and the Police Support Unit, their paramilitary wing. Within minutes he is greeted off the plane, greeted by senior officers and whisked off to the main barracks in Harare.
Next day at 3pm, the General gives an unprecedented press conference saying the army will protect itself from insults and abuse, and ‘the revolution’ from counter-revolutionary elements. There is no coverage of all this on that evening’s national news. Next day, Tuesday 14, there is a response of sorts from the young head of Zanu’s Youth League, hardly adequate. Army units begin to leave their barracks.
That evening army units surround and disarm their most serious potential opponents, the PSU, then move to seize Parliament, State House, the Supreme Court, ZANU-PF headquarters and police headquarters. Meanwhile, back in Jo’burg, Gabriel is summoned by his military contacts and spends the next 8 hours giving legal advice, via the general and brigadier, to the forces on the ground in Harare. He has one massage: don’t shoot anyone.
Soldiers seize the headquarters of the state broadcaster. Gabriel is insistent in Jo’berg that the journalists must be treated well, and allowed to leave at the end of their shifts. Miraculously, this comes to pass and the soldiers let the broadcast staff simply walk away and go home. The army units then turn to trundle up the hill to the president’s mansion, known as the Blue Roof. Gabriel’s guys are radioing commanders on the ground to tell them to surround the presidential mansion but to let Mugabe et al come and go as they please. They are trying to avoid the appearance of a coup.
Troops do mount an armed assault on the luxury homes of Finance Minister Ignatius Chombo and of G40 leaders Moyo and Saviour. they phone Grace who sends a car which arrives just after the armed assault is, inexplicably, called off, and which takes the wives and children to the Blue Roof. Saviour and Moyo follow in the footsteps of ED eight short days earlier, and drive to the Mozambique border, crossing into exile.
At 4am on Wednesday 15 November Major General SB Moyo (who hadn’t hitherto appeared in the narrative) makes a broadcast assuring the country the president is safe and free to come and go and assuring viewers abroad that this is not a coup.
Rogers explains why this was so important. During the 1990s the Southern Africa Development Community set up a task force to prevent coups taking place and even overturning them (in Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, in Gabon).
Therefore, it’s interesting to read that former ambassador Muntsvangwa’s role was to talk to South African president Jacob Zuma – well, Zuma’s people, anyway – and establish a clear narrative; that a coup had already taken place, Grace and G40’s seizure of power from Mugabe. What he and the military were doing was reversing that coup. Aha! He plays on their common background as military men who fought in liberation struggles, and points up the difference with Grace and the G40 faction who are unrepentant consumer capitalists.
Another ZDF had just been dispatched to the African Union in Ethiopia where he tells AU officials – also pledged to prevent or undo coups – that this is not a coup it is the reversal of a coup.
But a key element of a change of government is the approval of the people. Rogers gives a fascinating account of how the disparate members of the Core Group reached out to all their contacts and organisations in order to organise a million person march in support of the new regime in just 36 hours.
Rogers devotes a chapter to describing how he and his mates drive back into Zimbabwe and into Harare and took part in the massive march themselves, eyewitnesses to history. He shares some trite tripe about how people are emotional beings:
We like to believe that we are rational, sober-minded people, but we are all driven by emotion, and great political moments appeal to the irrational in us – the heart. (p.246)
So felt the crowds during the French revolution, the Russian revolution, the Iranian revolution, the Arab Springs, all of which led to even worse state terror and repression. Rogers’s lack of policy and reliance on emotion is identical to Mugabe’s reliance on revolutionary fervour and militant rhetoric instead of practical, workable policies. Heart and feeling aren’t enough, nowhere near enough. Then again, I can appreciate it must feel delirious to be in at the end of such a long repressive regime and full of hope for the future.
The real work is being done within ZANU-PF itself, with activists liaising with all its regional offices to send in requests for Mugabe to step down as president and Grace and the G40 to be expelled. A big live TV speech was set up, with cameras showing Mugabe surrounded by the military, looking old and frail. But to everyone’s absolute astonishment he refused to reign, just told the country they were going through a sticky patch, to all pull together, then he got up, shook a few generals’ hands and tottered off.
Mugabe rang political leaders, such as South Africa’s Jacob Zuma and Zambian president Edgar Lungi, but nobody would intervene to prop him up, a fact Mugabe would later bitterly criticise.
Having been let down, the authorities then commenced impeachment hearings against Mugabe on Tuesday 21 November. The proceedings are packed and complicated by last minute negotiations between ZANU-PF and the MDC and also about reluctance to be the individual to launch the impeachment as, if it failed, that person would be guilty of treason.
But proceedings had hardly got under way when a message was brought in that Mugabe had, at long last, officially resigned. Wild partying in all the cities till dawn the next day.
However, a dark note is cast over everything when Kasper and Magic, Horse and Gabriel are driving out to the latter’s farm and stop for refreshments when two carloads of intelligence people pull over and abduct Kasper and Magic, submitting them to a week of beatings and kickings before Gabriel, who escapes back across the border to South Africa, uses all his MDC and NGO and human rights contacts to have them tracked down and released.
Then it’s Friday 24 November and ED is sworn in as new president. And then Rogers tells us, as if it’s a big surprise, that when you overthrow a dictator, you unleash all kinds of forces, rivalries, political bitternesses which had been kept under wraps. Well spotted. I think the people of former Yugoslavia could explain this a bit more. Or Iraq. Or Libya.
Anyway, as he writes his text in February 2019, there have been ruptures within both the MDC (under new leadership since Morgan Tsvangirai died of cancer in February 2018) and ZANU-PF and the army and security forces, not all of whom were happy with the coup that wasn’t a coup.
Then when there were protests which turned to riots, the army shot at protesters, killing a number, and any international businesses or western donors will have thought that Zimbabwe was back to its old ways.
Timeline: November 2017
Sunday 5 – at a Presidential Youth Interfaith rally Grace Mugabwe makes a speech attacking the vice-president, talking about ‘crushing the head’ of the snake of opposition within the Zanu-PF party i.e. Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa (ED).
Monday 6 – ED receives a letter announcing the termination of his position as vice president, a fact announced on the national broadcaster, ZBC
Tuesday 7 – in the early hours ED, his sons and close friends escape down highway, but are stopped in a confusing fracas at the border
Wednesday 8 – having hidden out in the hills, they make another crossing on foot guided through minefields through local dissident soldiers into Mozambique
Thursday 9 – arrive at Beira airport and take charter flight to SA
Sunday 12 – General Chiwenga flies back to Harare from China
Monday 13 – General Chiwenga gives a press conference threatening counter-revolutionary elements in the party i.e. G40
Tuesday 14 – army units leave their barracks and seize key locations around Harare
Thursday 16 – decision taken to organise a people’s march; fake news flashes over social media that Mugabe has resigned
Friday 17 – Muntsvangwa decides they will relocate the SA team to a hotel in Harare, where his veterans have been assembling
Saturday 18 – vast peaceful protest march through the middle of Harare
Friday 24 – ED is sworn in as second president of Zimbabwe
Thoughts
Vivid
I assume the details of Rogers’s narrative are correct, although you can tell that he’s taking liberties inventing characters’ conversations and thoughts. But, despite any misgivings about the semi-fictional format he’s cast his story in, it felt much better at giving you a feel for life in contemporary Zimbabwe than the documentary books by Martin Meredith I’ve read. It gives you a real feel for the depth of corruption, the details of the high life lived by the elite, and the scariness of the secret security state which Mugabe created.
Meredith is on the outside, disapproving, while Rogers is on the inside, marvelling.
No policies
In chapter 12 there’s a lot of soppy maudlin stuff about long-time campaigners for a better Zimbabwe imagining that the way their motley coalition (the military, secret service, army veterans who had displaced white farmers, white farmers in the exile union etc etc) had all gotten together and created a rainbow alliance was somehow a model for a new reborn Zimbabwe.
What this sentimental horseshit shows is a) a complete lack of understanding of what a state is, the depths of corruption which authoritarian rule creates and how it takes generations to overcome and reform; and b) that nobody in the entire book at any stage mentions a single actual policy. The entire narrative and, apparently, all the players in it, see things solely as a political powerplay. Nobody has a clue what to do about reviving the agricultural sector, running state companies effectively, making the country attractive to western investors, restoring an independent legislature and freedom of the press.
The reverse: all the army’s statements continue with the hackneyed dusty old clichés about saving ‘the revolution’ from ‘counter-revolutionary elements’, of saving the Party etc. In other words, the key players in the coup are all operating within the fake-revolutionary ideology and rhetoric which Mugabe used to conceal his corruption and authoritarianism, can’t get out of that controlling mindset.
What happened next?
Even though Mugabe’s gone, his successors will inherit his security apparatus, the webs of surveillance, arrest and torture, and will be tempted to use it. I see from recent news stories that a) Emmerson Mnangagwa is still president of Zimbabwe and that b) he is deploying standard Mugabe-type laws to stifle free speech and opposition.
Plus ça change, plus c’est l’Afrique. Or, as Rogers’ mother tells him when news of the coup first breaks out, whoever takes over, it’ll be ‘same bus, different driver’.
Credit
Two Weeks in November by Douglas Rogers was published by Short Books in 2019.
Books & Boots 