'My Zimbabwe'

How did Mugabe become such a monster'

by Nick Greenslade

In These Times magazine, January 2003

In The Past Is Another Country, his history of Rhodesia in the 90 years before it became Zimbabwe, Martin Meredith describes the preferred modus operandi of premier lan Smith in the late '60s: "White opponents were vilified as appeasers; they were branded as being part of the conspiracy to oust the white man in Rhodesia. Smith was unforgiving to his enemies, attacking them with personal abuse which obscured the real content of their argument. Foreign critics were scorned in the same way."

Spin forward to the present day, replace the word white with black, and lan Smith with Robert Mugabe, and the picture is no less accurate.

How did we arrive at this sorry state of affairs? How is it that the man who once served as the poster boy of African nationalism for Western radicals became the mirror image of the reactionary bigot he ousted?

However much of a mess Mugabe made of the country, however many North Korean military advisers he brought in, however many opponents he eliminated, surely, it used to be said, he was still an improvement on what had come before. Not anymore.

For all his unpleasant rhetoric, Smith would never have starved hospitals of finances so that they must hold on to corpses until bereaved families settle the medical bills of their departed loved ones. I'm fairly certain Smith would not have prevented an opposition party from importing grain to ease chronic food shortages, as Mugabe is doing.

What prompted his transformation into this monster? In retrospect, one sees in Mugabe the same character flaws as many a revolutionary leader: an uncompromising determination to establish himself alone as the custodian of the revolutionary torch, a desire to subjugate the peasantry to his own predetermined dogma, an inability to tolerate dissent, especially from former colleagues.

When he warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the September summit on development in Johannesburg not to meddle in "my Zimbabwe," it was final confirmation of what everyone had long suspected: that Mugabe regards the state as his own personal fiefdom (his no less megalomaniac wife also speaks of "my people"). With the leaders of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) permanently bound up in legal shackles, and the last Western journalist now having left the courts to keep her passport. the '70s, she says, turn out to good practice for now."

In the '80s, Mugabe declared his fellow freedom fighter Joshua Nkomo an enemy of the state. These days, it is anyone and everyone. Garfield Todd was the (white) prime minister of Southern Rhodesia in the '50s. Together with his daughter Judith, he resisted Smith's disastrous racialist policies in the '60s. As a result, both experienced harassment and imprisonment, and, in Judith Todd's case, forced exile during the '70s. When Mugabe came to power in 1980, Garfield Todd was among the first senators he appointed.

Yet both Todds became personae non gratae. Garfield Todd was denied his right to vote at age 95 (he died in early October), while Judith Todd had to fight the government all the way through the courts to keep her passport. The battles they went through in have been nothing more than "just
good practice for now."

Judith Todd also has come under the spotlight as a director and shareholder of the dissident Daily News. In 2001, when the newspaper serialized Animal Farm, Orwell's classic fable about encroaching tyranny, the allegorical message was lost on no one-least not on Mugabe's henchmen, who arrested the newspaper's editor and blew up its printing presses. Mugabe himself had already delivered an eerie echo of the book back in 1995 when he called for the "indigenization of the economy"-which entailed land confiscation-adding that some were "more indigenous than others." This "land reform" has indeed become the most symbolic policy of indigenization, or black control of the economy, despite the fact that many white farmers had been on the land for generations.

About 4,400 whites own and farm 32 percent of Zimbabwe's agricultural land, which the government is in the process of repossessing. Another 30 to 35 percent of the land is owned and farmed by about 1 million black peasants; the rest remains in the hands of the government and its cronies. This is a depressing legacy of colonial rule, and much of the Western press coverage has conveniently overlooked it, preferring to resort to racial stereotypes about feral African savages threatening civilized white folks. Equally, one cannot simply view the current maelstrom as the white settlers finally reaping "blowback" for generations of a minority rule.

So what is it really about? Corruption, for a start. The policy of land reform has been characterized by nepotism. The heads of the police, the army and the more sinister Central Intelligence Organization have all secured prime real estate for themselves. Naturally, Grace Mugabe, the leader's second wife, has her greedy eye on a new ranch. At a lower level, development funds are quietly pilfered by officials of the Zanu-PF, Mugabe's party.

But here's the nub of the matter. While the Western media have focused on the plight of the white farmers, those whom Mugabe calls his own people are destined to be the real victims. None of the benefits of this "indigenization of the economy" are filtering down to the lower rungs of Zimbabwean society.

Africa has witnessed famine before, but usually as a result of a deadly combination of ignorance, corruption and climate shocks. What distinguishes the Zimbabwean predicament is that here it is being deliberately engineered and employed as an instrument of political oppression. Those profitable farms that still remain in the hands of the white population are illegally occupied by Mugabe's free-roaming militia, with the black labor force told not to return. Only those who subsequently "get with the program" can hope to see any of the outside food aid that Mugabe is controlling. Those blacks who try to continue to serve whites, those who do not cooperate with the government's program of forced labor on the badly run farms of government cronies, or those who are known to associate with the MDC are left to fend for themselves.

Unemployment is now pushing 70 percent, and hyperinflation is the norm. According to conservative government estimates, 18 percent of children have been withdrawn from school because parents can no longer afford the fees. Lawlessness has greatly hampered the country's ability to attract tourists, while hunger is leading many Zimbabweans to resort to game-poaching, further undermining the draw of the safari industry. A vicious circle continues. All this in a country whose HIV rate currently stands at 25 percent.

The reluctance of Mugabe's African neighbors to take ~ strong action against him is depressing. Following the fixed general elections in March, the British Commonwealth put Zimbabwe on a 12-month suspension. At the end of September, the leaders of Australia, South Africa and Nigeria met to deliver their midterm report. Nothing had improved. Mugabe had continued to willfully ignore the rule of law. If anything, he had now turned his venom on the judiciary for having the temerity to remain independent. On September 13, retired High Court Judge Fergus Blackie was arrested on trumped-up charges of having an affair with a woman whose appeal he had upheld. Everyone knew that his real crime was ordering the imprisonment of government minister Patrick Chinamasa for contempt of court. Despite these examples of blatant malfeasance, Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo refused to endorse Australian Prime Minister John Howard's call for Zimbabwe's official expulsion from the alliance.

In the same week, local elections were scheduled. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network had taken the bold step of producing ads in the independent press to highlight examples of political chicanery-ballot locations transferred at the last moment, candidates suddenly asked to produced birth certificates-and some plain, old-fashioned thuggery. Opposition MP Roy Bennett spotted assorted "war veterans"- they call themselves that, though most of them were scarcely out of diapers when the real conflict raged-hanging around ballot booths, offering maize to starving peasants in exchange for votes for Zanu-PF. Roy even managed to capture the evidence on tape.

Within hours, he was hauled into the local police station. After two days and a couple of beatings ("I see nothing," said the local superintendent), Roy was released on bail, which is more than can be said for some of the farm laborers with whom he shared a cell. No charges had been brought against these homeless individuals. They had been discovered in a deserted farmhouse where they were working on its electrical fittings to make the place inhabitable. Clearly, it had been set aside for one of Mugabe's cronies. Dragged out and thrown behind bars, they had been denied food and water for four days.

John Makumbe, a political analyst and chairman of Transparency International, which highlights the numerous instances of corruption here, believes that the time has finally come for the United Nations to intervene and, if necessary, expel Zimbabwe from that body, officially putting it beyond the pale of the international community. But the reluctance of African nations to kick one another and the distraction of the United States and Britain with Iraq makes this unlikely. Makumbe calls Mbeki and Obasanjo "cowardly." He says: "They've effectively bought him another six months to further establish his dictatorship and cronyism."

According to Father Tim Neil, a full-scale famine has now descended. Neil runs a charity offering jobless farmhands a patch of land to cultivate, somewhere to draw water from. It doesn't sound like much, but it represents the difference between subsistence and starvation. Even this assistance has been frowned upon: Volunteers who have gone into the city to help the ever-growing mass of street children have been scattered by the cops. Neil himself has been detained on several occasions.

It was hardly surprising, then, that my plane from Harare to London seemed to be full of young black Zimbabweans who, after a careful glance over their shoulder, would tell you sotto voce that everyone just wanted to get the hell out of there. Or rather, everyone just wanted to get out of that hell.

Zeroes page

Index of Website

Home Page