Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  With the people of the capital Harare showing the first signs of disillusionment with their leader, his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) had opted for a meeting at Norton, some thirty miles out of town. It was a classic Big Man election do. Thousands of 'supporters', mainly children and party hacks, had been bussed in to the local football stadium, all with their Mugabe T-shirts and flags. Dapper policemen in colonial-era khaki shorts and solar topees marshalled them into rows. All sat patiently in the fierce African sun several hours before the speeches were due to begin, waiting until their leader graced them with his presence. Then a cry went up from the master of ceremonies and the crowd hushed. The hum of Mugabe's helicopter could be heard. And suddenly there he was, striding confidently into view, flanked by dozens of commandos.

  When Mugabe reached the podium, a screen of elite soldiers with automatic rifles lined up between him and the people. So lacklustre was the crowd that their response to the master of ceremony's vigorous 'Long live comrade Mugabe' could hardly be heard. But this detail was clearly lost on the president. He launched into his standard lecture, blending attacks on the 'misdeeds' and 'malevolence' of Zimbabwe's 75,000-strong white minority, with grandiose promises of the Utopia that was just around the corner.

  Every district was to have a hospital, he insisted. There would be a three-year development plan, and then a five-year development plan to make the dreams come true. As for the whites, they were of course to blame. The message was clear: a vote for the opposition is a vote for the old white colonial, racist oppressors, I am the father of the nation, I led you to independence, vote for me.

  A month or so on from his seventy-first birthday Mugabe was in cracking form. Sporting his familiar Mao suit and wide rimmed glasses he almost skipped out of the stadium. By chance we were squeezed out through the main gate just as he emerged from the throng. Rather than ignore us, as we expected - and as his heavy-handed aides intended - he gave us a jaunty smile. Was it a free and fair election? Of course it was.

  'The people are going to vote. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in any direction. So, yes, it will be democracy. Why not?' And the danger of his party having too much power? 'We are a mammoth party, but don't forget the people know us for the revolution we waged in the country. They became part of that struggle and they cannot entertain another party without an equivalent record.'

  For Zimbabwe's human rights groups there was a mild cause for sharing his joie de vivre. It had been the quietest campaign since the independence elections in 1980, and it was a far cry from the previous poll in 1990 when bombs were thrown, houses were set alight and candidates were killed to ensure that Zanu-PF stayed in power. But such an empirical assessment was missing the point. Mugabe's talk of democracy was typical weasel wording. Officially, Mugabe had abandoned the idea of creating a one-party state, but fifteen years after independence that was effectively what Zimbabwe was: the opposition was a splintered shambles; there was widespread voter apathy; and there was a welter of laws favouring the ruling party. Out of the 120 constituencies only 65 were being contested, and in only one of these did the opposition stand any real chance of winning.

  At independence Joshua Nkomo, the portly and loquacious leader of the Zimbabwe African People's Union, had been a pugnacious opponent to Mugabe. But in the brutally simple mathematics of Africa's tribes the numbers had been against him. His support was among the minority Ndebele tribe while Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) was rooted in the Shonas, the majority tribe. During the guerrilla war against white rule they fought on different fronts in a fraught alliance. After independence they had an uneasy cohabitation, with Nkomo serving as Home Affairs Minister in Mugabe's first government. But Mugabe was clearly waiting for his moment to strike at his most potent rival. After a spate of government clashes with Zapu supporters in Matabeleland, the homeland of the Ndebele, in January 1983 Mugabe sent in the elite North Korean trained Fifth Brigade. Two months later Nkomo fled to Botswana and from there to exile in Britain as Mugabe's forces conducted a merciless campaign of rural terror in Matabeleland. According to the most authoritative report 1 on the atrocities, 3,750 people were killed, including many women and children. Other reports put the figures far higher. Zapu maintained its identity a while longer but after murderous political violence and intimidation of its supporters it lost a quarter of its seats in the 1985 election. The following year Nkomo merged his party with Mugabe's and Zimbabwe became effectively a one-party state.

  Initially this was welcomed by all but the Ndebele and the whites. In his early years Mugabe could do no wrong among his supporters. When the first cases of government corruption and incompetence came to light, they were excused: after all this was the man who had ended long years of white rule. However, as memories of the war faded and Zanu-PF's venality and inefficiency started to take its toll, so the clamour for an alternative voice grew. By the mid-Nineties, even in his Shona heartland, people were becoming fed up with the status quo. On the eve of Mugabe's Norton rally, hundreds of residents gathered for a far livelier affair in a scruffy square on the edge of Harare. Margaret Dongo, a veteran of the liberation war against white rule, was holding the latest in a series of meetings in her bid to run as an independent MP. She had joined the guerrilla movement aged fifteen and had been a close friend of Mugabe's first wife, Sally, a vivacious Ghanaian, who died in 1992. But now she had become a Zanu-PF rebel - a rare breed indeed. Her intemperate calls for reform of the party had led to her suspension, and she had decided to take her fight to the people and stand for Harare South constituency.

  There was an infectious mood in the air as the feisty 35-year old emerged from her campaign bus, a battered Mini Clubman, to deliver a confident challenge to the patriarchal assumptions of Zimbabwean society with a resounding condemnation of Mugabe's rule. 'At the end of the day Zanu-PF is betraying the revolution,' she said. 'It doesn't want critics. We fought to remove the evil that was done against blacks. I wouldn't want the situation to emerge where blacks are exploited by blacks.'

  'If you're fighting a bull, it's not easy,' she concluded to loud roars of support from the crowd. 'I'm not scared of talking. I'm not scared of anything.' The supporters, mainly young people who were children at the time of the revolution, chattered with excitement. 'When she goes to parliament, she's always speak ing the truth,' said one youth. 'Most of the others go there just to snooze.'

  It came as no surprise that Ms Dongo could not quite bring herself to call for an end to Zanu-PF rule: Zanu-PF was after all the party of liberation. She limited herself to calling for its reform. But the message was clear. While I did not appreciate it fully at the time, this was one of the first signs of a viable opposition movement in Zimbabwe's short life.

  In the intolerant context of the rest of Africa the state's intimidation of Dongo's fledgling movement was fairly low-key. Dongo's principal complaint was that Zanu-PF goons were confiscating her supporters' T-shirts and tearing down posters. Moreover, while she was beaten by a Zanu-PF candidate, five months later she did take up the seat after she successfully appealed against the result, citing malpractice, and she won a by-election.

  But unfortunately for Zimbabwe - or, as Mugabe's opponents would say, inevitably - the more he was challenged, the more dangerous he became. From his early career in the liberation fight he had been known for his ruthless stance to anyone who challenged what he saw as his absolute right to rule. Corrupt like Mobutu, despotic like Banda, and tribalist like Moi, as the years passed, he had many of the standard Big Man traits, yet he was intelligent enough to avoid the more preposterous or self-destructive practices. With the Ndebele threat crushed, he was unchallenged and free to play the international statesman. His trump card, which few of his peers needed to play, was to victimize the white man. This he kept until he really needed it in the late Nineties, as the logic of Big Man rule reached its grim conclusion.

  *

  Raised by missionaries, inspired by Marxists and jailed by wh
ite colonists, Robert Gabriel Mugabe has the classic curriculum vitae of a Big Man. Born on 21 February, 1924, at Kutama Mission north west of Harare, he learned to play up his 'herd boy-to-president' routine, like Moi and others, later in life. As it was, his father, a carpenter, and his mother, a staunch Roman Catholic, appreciated his academic potential early on and des patched him to the local Jesuit mission station in the Zvimba area, north of Harare. There he gained a first-class education and a reputation, which he never lost, for delivering long winded lectures on morality.

  Again like Moi, he qualified as a primary school teacher, aged seventeen, and taught in mission schools before he won a place at South Africa's Fort Hare University, then the premier destination for black students in southern Africa, and indeed the alma mater of many a would-be African revolutionary, including Mandela. There Mugabe obtained a degree in English and history. He also grew acquainted with Marx and became a committed Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, imbued with the determination to take power 'for the people's good'.

  The final acts in his political apprenticeship came in the heady years of Africa's decolonization. He reached political maturity just as African nationalism was starting to sweep through the continent. After teaching in Salisbury, as Harare was then called, and Ghana, he returned in 1960 to what was then Southern Rhodesia with his wife Sally and became actively involved in nationalist politics. After working for a number of fledgling nationalist parties he joined Zanu and became secretary general in exile in Tanzania in 1963. But in Southern Rhodesia the 'wind of change' had come up against an obstacle in the form of Ian Smith. Mugabe was forty-one when the former World War Two fighter pilot turned politician tried to turn back the clock and led Rhodesia through his unilateral declaration of independence in 1965, entrenching white minority rule and paving the way for the bloody war of black liberation in the Seventies.

  In his early career the quiet and bespectacled Mugabe was eclipsed by the more flamboyant personalities of the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole and Nkomo. But he soon proved that his ruthless political ambition easily outmatched theirs, in, of all places, Ian Smith's prison. After returning home from exile in 1964 he was jailed for over ten years. There he took three more degrees by correspondence course. He also, to the stupefaction of African nationalists all over the continent, seized the leader ship of Zanu from Sithole. On his release from prison in 1974 he left for Mozambique, from where his banned party had started to launch guerrilla attacks against Rhodesia. He swiftly followed up his internal party coup by sidelining rivals and critics within Zanu and then the wider liberation movement. Yet even then he was still underestimated, in particular in Whitehall as it frantically tried to negotiate a solution for its former colony.

  As the Lancaster House peace talks ground on for fourteen weeks in 1979, there was a catchphrase among British civil servants - 'ABM', meaning 'Anyone but Mugabe'. With his North Korean connections, he was seen as the great bogeyman. In the countdown to the 1980 election the diplomats thought they had found his match in the improbable form of Bishop Abel Muzorewa. The conservative black cleric had been Prime Minister in the short-lived Zimbabwe-Rhodesia government between June and December 1979. The hope was that he could beat Mugabe in Mashonaland and then form a coalition independence government with Nkomo, who was sure to sweep the board in Matabeleland. But not for the first time a former colonial power proved itself utterly out of touch with the mood on the ground. The population had been radicalized and did not want Ian Smith's lackey. They wanted the great liberation leader from exile. Mugabe swept home to a comfortable victory with 57 out of the 100 seats. Nkomo won only 20 seats with 24 per cent of the votes. Muzorewa, 'the great white hope', won just three seats.

  As the election results came through, Mugabe startled the watching world with the magnanimity and pragmatism of his acceptance speech. He eschewed his Marxist rhetoric, donned a suit and tie instead of his usual Maoist tunic and called for reconciliation. Promising 'fair and just' rule he insisted there was 'a place for everybody in this country' and appointed a white minister of commerce and industry, and agriculture. He also publicly thanked his old adversary, Smith, for handing over intact 'this jewel of Africa'. Despite international sanctions over the UDI years, and the despatch of Royal Navy frigates to blockade the ports of neighbouring Mozambique, Zimbabwe's economy flourished, and even at the end of the war when it was starting to suffer from the combined effect of the embargoes and the fighting, it was still the envy of sub-Saharan Africa.

  Optimists and fellow-travellers hailed his inauguration as a new beginning. Sceptics were less confident. Could Zimbabwe buck Africa's post-independence trend? Or was this going to be another case of an economy and infrastructure falling prey to one man's greed?

  The view from the verandah of Lowdale Farm in the Mazoe Valley just north of Harare is about as good as it gets in southern Africa. An ample green lawn stretches down from a colonial style homestead. The bush is held firmly at bay and yet is intoxicatingly close. As a young man Arthur 'Bomber' Harris was the farm manager there before the First World War, when it must have been less manicured and even more magical. It is, in short, the place that Londoners dream of in their long dark winters.

  I spent a leisurely morning there in 1995, sipping fruit juice freshly squeezed from the orchard, with the owner Micky Townsend whose family had farmed there for three generations. They had 2,800 acres, an average-sized farm in Zimbabwe, supporting about one hundred black families. It had always been regarded as a 'model' mixed farm of arable and cattle, one of the props on which Rhodesia's and then Zimbabwe's successful agricultural economy was based. The Townsends had been there since 1903, my host said, and he was quite confident that they would still be there in a hundred years time. As for the latest bout of white-baiting, that was, he reckoned, an election ploy that would soon fade away.

  'When the first election happened, the war was still going on. I was out in the bush. The scare was that Mugabe might win. When he did there was despair. But while there have been hiccups since then, the old tensions have gone. This time round we will have to prod election officials to wake up.

  'Whites are much better off now. If you stop beating your head against the wall it gets much better. In 1980 we were in a war and the outlook was terribly bleak. The comparison between life now and then is incomparable. I've heard that some forty thousand whites want to go back to Zim. I have relations coming back. Their predictions of disaster just did not materialize. In 1980 there was a feeling Mugabe was an evil monster. Now there is a feeling that far from that he is very competent.

  'Materially we are not better off, but that is not because of the government, but because of the weather, the terrible drought. Those in Zanu who have tried to raise the race card have been slapped down. If you have an ESAP (the then structural adjustment programme) you need a climate of confidence. While many people have reservations about some things he does, most would accept he is the best leader we could have in current circumstances. If people work their farms they should feel no threat. You get stuck in, and help, or get out.'

  Townsend was choosing his words carefully, as one would expect. After independence, Zimbabwe's whites had had to adapt fast. It was just about fine to make money as long as it also benefited the state, but to meddle in politics was probably a mistake. As the years passed post-1980, whites had learned to accept that they were the number-one scapegoat. Every election the state media ratcheted up its attacks on whites in the countdown to polling. On the day of my visit to Lowdale the government newspapers had published the latest sinister allegation that whites were setting up 'elitist clubs' and 'secret racist organizations'.

  With hindsight it is easy to deride Mugabe's acceptance speech as specious politicking. Certainly many of Zimbabwe's 220,000 whites did not take his reconciliatory promises at face value. In the two years after independence two thirds of them were to leave. But for those that stayed, a new and even prosperous life in their new country was genuinely possible. In the early years a
s Mugabe sought to implement his socialist vision and fulfil his liberation promises, his welfare policies were hugely popular among the black majority. His comprehensive health and education reforms were hailed in much of Africa. But after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the self-evident failure of communism, Mugabe turned to the free market and accepted the need for that bitterest of pills for an ageing African Marxist, a Western-run structural adjustment programme.

  By the mid-Nineties many of Zimbabwe's remaining whites seemed genuinely content with their lot. Under the new free market policies, the shop shelves were fuller than at any time since UDI. There were all the obvious frustrations of living under a corrupt and inefficient regime. But with the exception of the regular battering from the state media and the odd racially motivated court case, whites had a viable, comfortable if not enviable lot. They dominated the economy, in particular agriculture with some 4,500, mainly white, commercial farmers owning about two thirds of the best arable land. There seemed to be close parallels with Kenya under Moi, where if you stayed clear of politics you could prosper.

  As the years passed, so a new modus vivendi started to emerge with many of the remaining whites referring to them selves with pride as Zimbabweans. They were of good colour, ' adaptable stock and they liked to say that the whiners had gone and the doers had stayed. The old Rhodie claim that they 'got on better with their blacks' than anyone else in Afrilc always seemed to outsiders a little simplistic in the light of the war. But post-1980 that claim seemed increasingly fair.