‘Africa for Africans’
‘In Africa, the African is supreme’ (p.230)
(Mugabe slogans)
‘This is not about correcting a colonial imbalance. This is about punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. This is about staying in power no matter what the damage is to your country or its economy.’
(Philemon Matibe, MDC i.e. Zimbabwe opposition candidate, whose farm and assets were confiscated by war veterans, quoted page 221)
I must stop reading out-of-date books about current affairs. When I picked this book up second-hand I didn’t realise that it was first published in 2007, and breaks off as Mugabe is gearing up for the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections; in other words that it doesn’t cover the last 10 years of Mugabe’s long, horrible career (he was only, finally, ousted by the army in 2017).
Meredith is a wonderfully fluent writer. I often struggle to read factual books but I found his 700-page history of post-independence Africa flew by, like eating ice cream. He has a real knack for relaying lots of factual information in an extremely accessible, readable way.
Then again, like any good journalist, he recycles his copy and so I recognised lots of the content here from the chapters about Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in his 2005 book, ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence’. Clearly he sub-edited the content from that book down to create the relevant chapters here; but I recognised hundreds of the same sentences. Given how out of date this book is, I’d recommend buying the ‘State of Africa’, for the wider context.
Learnings
The long shadow of colonialism
Colonialism was the fundamental crime from which no African country is ever likely to recover.
In this respect, the most interesting passage of the book is the one which describes the white conquest of the territories which were to be amalgamated into what became Rhodesia and the blatant, flagrant theft of land from the indigenous populations. Everything follows from that primal crime. It’s like Original Sin in Christian theology; nobody can escape from its consequences.
The land issue
This is why the land issue, treated at length in chapter 7, was so central. Whites stole the land from its African owner. But restoring it to its African owners proved to be very tricky indeed, and ended up being a rhetorical catchcry to cover Mugabe’s growing nepotism and corruption.
Independence war
The Rhodesian Bush War, also called the Second Chimurenga as well as the Zimbabwean War of Liberation, was a civil conflict from July 1964 to December 1979. It:
- habituated all sides to violence as a way of getting their way
- habituated the state to behaving illegally, to deploying illegal detention, detention without trial, ignoring the courts and due process
These were all traits Mugabe saw being deployed by the white government of Ian Smith and was himself to copy.
Rivals
There were rival political and guerrilla forces combatting white supremacism, namely:
- the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), militantly socialist, which was formed as a split from
- the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU)
As in so many African countries (Angola and Mozambique spring to mind), the division between African parties fighting the coloniser for independence continued on after independence, not as a constitutionally contained political divide, but as an armed struggle between seasoned guerrillas used to deploying brutal tactics. Rival independence / nationalist forces sowed the seeds of civil war.
In fact Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF (Patriotic Front) has been in power continuously in Zimbabwe since the first free elections of 1980.
Negotiated peace
The long story by which Ian Smith’s UDI Rhodesia was forced to the conference table. All sides were surprised at the mildness of Mugabe’s political demands in the peace conference held in London. In ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent’ Meredith says it only later became clear that Mugabe came over as moderate and forgiving to the whites because he had a very clear idea that his first task was to eliminate opposition among the Black population i.e. the rival political party ZAPU.
Which is why he made honey-tongued promises to Britain and everyone else about his commitment to democracy, the rule of law, freedom of the press, and a 2 or 3 year honeymoon after full Black independence was achieved in 1980.
Repression
Then:
- establish one-party rule
- eliminate rivals
- siphon off aid
- loot the state budget
- land redistribution becomes a political weapon
Land redistribution in particular was a long, drawn-out business with Mugabe ranting against white farmers. So he illegally seized their land and redistributed it to…his political cronies, many of whom proceeded to asset strip them and run them into the ground. Notoriously, Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of southern Africa, began to rely more and more heavily on imports and then on foreign aid.
Systematic mismanagement of the economy by Marxist ideologues or corrupt cronies led to famously high inflation.
In 2008, hyperinflation in Zimbabwe peaked at an estimated 500 billion percent. It currently stands at around 176%, while all forecasts for the country paint a picture of doom and gloom with no real prospects of a turnaround on the horizon.
(In Zimbabwe, hyperinflation meets its match on the streets)
Leading to:
- economic crisis
- strikes, riots
Overthrow
The complex manoeuvring which led to Mugabe’s overthrow are described in my next blog post, a summary of ‘Two Weeks in November’ by Douglas Rogers (2019). Wikipedia:
On 6 November 2017, Mugabe sacked his first vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. This fueled speculation that he intended to name his wife, Grace Mugabe, his successor. Grace was very unpopular with the ZANU–PF old guard. On 15 November 2017, the Zimbabwe National Army placed Mugabe under house arrest at his Blue Roof mansion as part of what it described as an action against ‘criminals’ in Mugabe’s circle.
Repeat
The new regime found all the institutions of law and order and security, of a free society, civic society, had been hollowed out. It inherited the universal corruption and complex matrix of networks of patronage from the previous 30, 40, 50 years. It saw that this was what worked –this is what Zimbabwe had become – and copied it. Meredith ends his account by quoting the Catholic bishops of Zimbabwe who, in their Easter 2007 pastoral letter, warned of the effect the Mugabe regime would have on the next generation:
‘If our young people see their leaders habitually engaging in acts and words which are hateful, disrespectful, racist, corrupt, lawless, unjust, greedy, dishonest and violent in order to cling to the privileges of power and wealth, it is highly likely that any of them will behave in exactly the same manner.’ (quoted page 244)
Biography
I think the weakness of both ‘The State of Africa’ and this book is that, although Meredith gives an outstandingly readable, brisk authoritative account of what happened, he rarely delves below the surface to consider why.
Only in the final, four-page chapter does he attempt a fairly simple psychological explanation of Mugabe’s psychopathology. It reminded me of the lines in W.H. Auden’s poem:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Mugabe grew up, a sensitive, intelligent young man in a country where he and everyone with black skin was treated like second class citizens, mocked and slighted and belittled and deprived of life chances by the profoundly racist white colonial regime. ‘We feared the white man. He was power. He had guns.’ And so young Robert determined that he would never rest till he had the guns, he had the power, and he was feared.
Mugabe had planned a career as a teacher but when he went as a teacher to Ghana in 1958 he was intoxicated by the atmosphere of freedom and liberation and joy and the inspiring rhetoric of the country’s first Black Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, about building a socialist paradise. Returning to Rhodesia in 1960 Mugabe threw himself into the liberation struggle, soaking himself in the rhetoric of revolution and liberation and, above all, committing himself to the Leninist idea of a radical one-party state.
He was arrested for making inflammatory statements, tried and imprisoned from 1963 to 1975.
Although he acquiesced in the Lancaster House agreement of 1980 and let democratic elections take place, he always regarded these as a stepping stone to his ultimate goal of a one-party state run with an iron fist.
But, like all dictators, the rhetoric of revolution and liberty concealed the unrelenting accumulation of power for its own sake. He never showed any evidence of caring for the weak and powerless, in fact he victimised:
- the tribal backers of the rival Zapu party
- backers of the MDC party
- the urban poor who he set about removing from shanty towns in the Operation murambatsvina (‘Move the Rubbish’) campaign
Instead, Mugabe’s fiery rhetoric concealed the extraordinary rise of a corrupt elite prepared to use any means, go any lengths of violence, torture and intimidation, to stay in power. Meredith cites hundreds of examples. Appalled, you end up thinking, why does the West give any aid money to regimes which rob their own nations, steal money from their own treasuries, impoverish their own countries, lock up and kill anyone who disagrees with them?
Notable names
- Blessing Chebundo
- Justice Maphosa
- Saviour Kasukuwere
- Strive Masiyiwa
- Welshman Ncube
Credit
An early version of this book, ‘Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe’ by Martin Meredith, was published by Public Affairs in 2003. The paperback of this revised version, Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe, was published in 2007.
Books & Boots 