Robert Mugabe
Femi
Olugbile asks if the end has finally come for Robert Mugabe or not as
he hails the Zimbabwean president as the most resilient African alive.
It is a quaint title – yes.
Ten years ago, almost, you wrote something you titled ‘Robert Gabriel Mugabe – the end game.‘
This was at a time when the redoubtable President of Zimbabwe had
just bulldozed his way to another election ‘victory’ over his opponent –
Morgan Tzvangirai, a victory achieved by hounding opponents out of
living space, ‘bashing’ their heads in, and generally deploying all the
forces of ‘law and order’ against real or perceived enemies.
This was a man you knew very well, almost like a favourite Uncle at
a pivotal moment of your life. He was a man who had won a ‘democratic’
election while everyone, including you – his once-smitten adulator,
knew, sadly, he did not have a drop of ‘democratic’ blood in his veins.
And so ten years on, Robert Gabriel Mugabe is still alive, still in office – even if they call him ‘the walking dead’.
Here you are, putting pen to paper, to write about the bizarre end
game of a man you once admired more than any other man, again.
And your mind goes back to Heroes’ Acre. It is 1981. Heroes Acre at
this time is a dusty plain on the outskirts of Harare, a city still
known at the time by its ‘colonial’ name – ‘Salisbury’. You have given
yourself a holiday from your studies into the dark recesses of the human
mind in Edinburgh, and you are in a place that used to be called
Rhodesia, and is now Zimbabwe. In your mind, it is not really a holiday.
It is an emotional journey to experiencethe new frontier of the African
Liberation struggle, to thumb your nose at the last bastion of ‘white’
rule in Africa further south, and to proclaim to them – ‘We’re coming to
get you!’
It is a journey so emotional you could not keep from crying at some
points. You have stood on CecilRhodes’ grave, on the undulating grey of
the Matopos Hills, and you have felt angry – very angry.
Cecil Rhodes had stood this spot, which he called ‘The View of the
World’, and he had looked up into the mist over the rolling hills far
ahead, where the hills disappear into the skies.
‘Your hinterland is there’ he had proclaimed to his fellow white
men, pointing to the interior of your continent, telling them that the
black man’s land and heritage were theirs for the taking – by force of
arms if necessary.
‘No’ you have felt compelled to tell Cecil Rhodes, standing on his
grave, in the Matopos, in Matableleland, in newly independent Zimbabwe.
‘Your hinterland is there, under the ground, rotten and mouldy.’
You have sat on the cold stone and meditated for what would seem
like an eternity, and you have felt you understand the world better in
that moment, and your place in it.
1981! Mandela is in prison, on Robben Island. The Liberation
Struggle in South Africa is looking as fractured as it could possibly
be. While the ANC stalwarts that are not dead or in prison are making
threatening noises about a final day of reckoning, theprominent Zulu
leader Gatshua Buthelezi is ridiculing the struggle, saying they are
merely ‘blowing up dustbins’.
Africa needs hope, and needs cheer, at this time. That cheer is the ascendancy of Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
On this day, on Heroes Acre, a place that is designated for the
burial of the heroes of the Liberation Struggle, a crowd of dignitaries,
and a large crowd of excited ordinary citizens of the new nation are
gathered for the reburial of Herbert Chitepo, one of the nation’s war
heroes. On the podium, in the centre of it all, is Mugabe, dark suit,
red tie, grim face – as usual. The crowd cheer as various dignitaries
arrive and are ushered to their seats. A loud cheer goes up when Oliver
Tambo, head of the African National Congress in exile, disembarks from
his limousine. It is clear that, in everyone’s mind, victory in Zimbabwe
is important, but in the larger scheme of things, Zimbabwe would be a
staging post for the final war to free the South of Africa from racist
oppression. And what a war that would be. Nobody –nobody on this day,
applauding Mugabe and Tambo on Heroes Acre, celebrating the hero of the
newly- won struggle and the struggle that is yet to come, could
anticipate Mandela, or conceive of the possibility of the Rainbow
Nation.
Mugabe! The revolutionary hero, the avowed ‘Marxist-Leninist’ who
would tone down his label and rhetoric and become merely ‘socialist’ as
the dominoes of the ‘communist’ world begin to tumble, one after
another. But that is jumping ahead of the story.
You are aware of the in-built fault lines of the new nation. The
Shona-speaking people – Mugabe’s ethnic stock, are the majority of the
population, and form the bulk of his party – the ZANU-PF. Their
antecedents include the creation of a great city whose ruins are still
evident in the stone structures of ‘Great Zimbabwe’, from which the
nation takes its name. Much of the rest of Shona history is shrouded in
mythology.
There was a great ‘Witch’ Nyanda who was a leader of her people.
She mobilized them for ‘the first Chimurenga’ – a liberation war against
the first white people who were making incursions into their land. They
were roundly trounced by the foreigners, and their heroes were
butchered. But even as they licked their wounds, the people saying it in
their minds, and telling their children, that there would be a second
Chimurenga, and the outcome would be different.
The “Second Chimurenga’ would the liberation war, led – yes, by
Robert Mugabe. The first incursion of the army of ‘one hundred thousand’
from Mozambique would be led by Herbert Chitepo, who is being buried
on this day in 1981 at Heroes Acre.
The other major ethnic group – the Matabele, are relatives of the
Zulus and have a much more organized history as a war-like people. From
all accounts, they did not think much of their neighbours, the Shona,
and showed them hardly any respect. They had colourful kings such
asMzilikazi and Lobengula who carried out great exploits of courage and
viciousness, such as throwing some of their own chiefs off a tall cliff
in full view of all. Lobengula actually held negotiations with Cecil
Rhodes. What deals they reached of course would fail in the end, and
inevitable war would result. Lobengula’s body would never be found by
the victorious white man, and so could not be put on display to
humiliate his people.
Joshua Nkomo – ‘Father Zimbabwe’ to his ardent supporters, is from Matabele stock, as are many in his ZAPU-PF.
Inherent in the combination of the great nation on the cusp of the
liberation struggle already is the seed of doom all too common in the
failed modern states of the African continent.
You would come back to Zimbabwe two years later, after the
emotional roller-coaster of your holiday, at the completion of your
studies, to work, and live on the front-line of African liberation.
Things would be different from now on.
You were assigned to work at Ingutsheni, the government mental health facility in Bulawayo.
The atmosphere of excitement and change you had soaked up a mere
two years past had changed palpably. Mugabe had tightened his grip on
power. Living in Bulawayo, you sensedresentment from people around you.
You also sensed the fear. Mugabe, you heard,was a friend of Kim Il Sung,
the dictator of North Korea. As evidence, he had a gang in the army –
‘The Fifth Brigade’ – trained in the most ruthless warfare by the North
Koreans. There was talk of an insurgency in Matabeleland led by
loyalists of Joshua Nkomo who felt he had been hard done by.
Mugabe unleashed the Fifth Brigade on the whole of Matabeleland.
They embarked on arson, public executions and massacres of people
accused of being sympathetic to ‘rebels’ in an operation tagged
‘Gukurahundi’ – a Shona word for ‘Wind that sweeps away the chaff before
the rains’.
It was said that more than ten thousand people were killed and
several more tortured in a display that seemed at once a tyrant’s
brutality and a settling of primordial scores. It certainly was not
designed to achieve ‘national unity’, not to talk of ‘integration’.
You would leave Zimbabwe eventually with a sour taste in your
mouth. Mugabe, the highly cerebral revolutionary who had advanced the
frontiers of the freedom struggle in Africa was a man temperamentally
unsuited to the nuanced task of leading a complex modern society and
taking his people into a bright new future. He would fight with
everyone, and agree with nobody. Through it all he would be supported
and sustained by the sheer numbers of his grassroots ethnic base, in
whose eyes he could do no wrong, and a solid phalanx of ‘war heroes’ who
seem to operate on the assumption that the post-liberation state is
‘booty’ for the ‘liberationists’.
Every criticism from every source – the local intelligentsia, the
labour unions, the Church, foreign leaders, even the press, local and
foreign, merely served to stoke the passion and adulation of his base,
and merely served to increase his self-righteousness and the impunity
with which he carried out his actions.
He was a man out to right wrongs, ancient and recent. Granted that
many of the whites in pre-Independence Zimbabwe had some of the worst
racist behavior on earth, it wasstill hard to conceive of
nation-building based on a revenge mission – ‘an eye for an eye’. Land
redistribution became a fiasco in which ultimately expropriated land was
booty for government officials and ‘war heroes’ rather than land to be
put to productive use by the masses to create wealth for the nation.
The nation went bankrupt, and could not feed itself.
Watching and hearing Mugabe over the past thirty years brings a
feeling of sadness to the heart. It is like watching your favourite
Uncle undergo inexorable decline and public ridicule while you are
powerless to stop the ‘show’, or drive the watching public away. This
was the man who had hosted Oliver Tambo on Heroes’ Acre. This was an
acknowledged and well-respected contemporary of the great Madiba, who
midwifed ‘The Rainbow Nation’. This was the man who was going to build
the great African state and continental food basket – as evidence to
all Africans of what their energies could attain.
Instead, almost half of the young and able-bodied among his people
are in self-exile abroad, seeking livable space away from their
‘liberated’ nation.
In 2008, nine years ago, the issue that led to prediction that the
end game was at hand was the pyrrhic victory – ‘by fire by force’ – of
ZANU over the opposition MDC in shabby ‘national elections’.
This time, the issue at hand is Grace – his erstwhile typist turned
Frist Lady who is manoeuvring, like Eva Peron, to become the ‘EVITA’ of
Africa.
What is happening to dear old Zimbabwe? Mugabe has clearly read the
script of his old friend Kim Il Sung, and the ‘success stories’ of the
succeeding ‘Kims’, including the present one who has his finger on the
nuclear trigger and is facing up with America.
Perhaps his wife will follow him as President, and then their son, and succeeding generations of Mugabes ad infinitum.
Have Africans truly sunk so low that such a ‘feat’ is possible, and liable to become a reference point?
Perhaps MrsMuseveni will follow as “President Museveni” in Uganda.
What is the name of the fellow in Equitorial Guinea – is his wife
interested?
It may be the end, mercifully, for ‘Uncle Robert’, this time.
But perhaps it is not. He has that solid ethnic rural base, remember? And he is the most resilient African alive.
Author of the Second Chimurenga. Great Revolutionary and Pan-Africanist. Tyrant extraordinaire.
All rise for Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
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Written by Femi Olugbile
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