It is an infamous historical irony that the post-independence
Congolese leader Mobutu Sese Seko’s Riviera palace was located next
to that of the exploitative founder of the colonial Congo Free
State, King Leopold II of Belgium. This coincidence speaks to a
broader theme — the rift between African colonial authorities and
their strongman successors has often proven illusory.
As Zimbabwe’s political, social, and economic crisis builds to a
crescendo in light of the contested March 29 presidential
elections, policymakers and commentators outside the former
breadbasket of Africa continue to labor under the assumption that
Robert Mugabe is a genuine post-colonial hero, albeit one who has,
through his isolationist anti-Western policies, brought subsequent
ruin to his nation. This narrative, which assumes a considerable
amount of legitimacy with respect to Mugabe’s post-independence
policies, continues to distort global diplomacy concerning
Zimbabwe, and is direly in need of correction. After all, the
Mugabe regime has far more in common with its colonial predecessors
than is typically acknowledged.
At the time of the 1979 Lancaster House conference, which
brought an end to the apartheid state of Rhodesia and gave birth to
modern Zimbabwe, Lord Carrington expressed his qualms about the
rise of Robert Mugabe: “I viewed it with the greatest possible
horror. One felt he was a Marxist and one wondered how awful he was
going to be.”
Mugabe surprised many observers in his March 4, 1980 election
night broadcast when he proclaimed the virtues of reconciliation.
“I urge you, whether you are black or white, to join me in a new
pledge to forget out grim past, forgive others and forget, join
hands in a new amity and together, as Zimbabweans, trample on
racism.”
This rhetoric marked Mugabe as a tolerant, progressive hero of
the African independence movement, but only served to mask the
ensuing enormities that were to prove Lord Carrington entirely
correct.
A PARTICULAR CHILLING example is provided by Mugabe’s early
crackdown in Matabeleland. Having consolidated power in the
aftermath of his electoral landslide, Mugabe in August of 1981
endeavored to import 106 North Korean military advisors to aid in
the formation of the so-called Fifth Brigade, which was unleashed
against the residents of Matabeleland in a series of massacres
known in the Shona language as Gukurahundi, or “wind that
sweeps away the chaff before the rains.”
The Fifth Brigade is known to have killed around 3,750 civilians
(though the number could well be higher). Far more were tortured,
and innumerable starvations resulted from the military chaos.
Though Mugabe insisted that “you can travel the whole length and
breadth of Matabeleland and you won’t find a single mass grave,”
the British journalist David Blair notes in his chilling account of
Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Degrees in Violence, that “hundreds of
mass graves have been found all over Matabeleland. There is barely
a village without one.”
The crimes of the Fifth Brigade, committed so early in
Zimbabwe’s post-independence history, it must be noted, are not
wholly dissimilar to the actions of the Smith regime’s
counter-insurgent commandoes, and could even be said to be even
more brutal.
Further enormities with colonial echoes were committed only a
year after the Gukurahundi, in the aftermath of the
passage of the Communal Land Act of 1982. Despite the very real
grievances of the black population stemming from the Rhodesian
Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951, the Land Tenure Act of 1969, and
the Tribal Trust Act of 1979, the Zimbabwean Communal Land Act
continued colonial policies by perpetuating the concept of state
control of communal land and providing district councils with the
authority to allocate and authorize the use of land.
The Communal Land Act paved the way for forced dispossession
from land, the demarcation of linear villages (often far from
reliable water sources or transportation routes), and the burning
of prior habitations — all based on the recommendations of
district authorities or the central government. In the colonial
era, rural farmers had asked, “How can we stay with our ways? The
Europeans came and forced us into lines. We used to live here,
there, over there, way over there, scattered all about. Now we’re
all crowded together, and have to give up our customs.”
Post-independence, the depredations became even harsher. In the
fertile Kaerezi region of Zimbabwe, for instance, the Resettlement
Scheme sites are now known as maline, “the lines,” the
same punning term that was used for the colonial settlements.
THE RHODESIAN AUTHORITIES had based their land allocation policies
on a myth propagated by colonial anthropologists who blithely
reported that, as J.F. Holleman put it, in Zimbabwe “land is not
property (cinhu), it is something you use for a time and
then abandon.”
When land disputes arose, British courts ruled according to this
received wisdom. In Re: Southern Rhodesia, the English
Privy Council found that a contract between Cecil Rhodes and the
Matebele Chief Lobengula could not have been valid.
After all, the Court reasoned, “some tribes are so low in the
scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of
rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or
legal ideas of civilized society… Such a gulf cannot be bridged.
It would be idle to impute to such people some shadow of the rights
known to our law and then to transmute it into the substance of
transferable rights of property as we know them.” It is a cruel
irony that these outdated policies continue to be put into practice
by the supposed champion of Zimbabwean independence and African
autonomy, Robert Mugabe.
Equally tragico-ironic is that these communal land policies,
which have led to the ruination of significant parts of Zimbabwe’s
society and economy (indeed the parts which were not otherwise
affected by the more recent white farmer land seizure policy), are
based on a fundamental mischaracterization of Zimbabwean culture
generally. Holleman himself observed that in Buhera, cash
compensation was often paid from those inheriting a plot of land to
those abandoning it, undermining his own influential thesis of the
non-commodity (and thereby central control) of land in
Zimbabwe.
Furthermore, as the modern anthropologist Angela Cheater has
noted, “the Shona language has long identified, as
huruudza, a large-scale agricultural entrepreneur,
representatives of which category had, by the turn of the twentieth
century, expanded and ‘mechanised’ their production, selling the
output to white and Indian traders, farmers and miners.”
Pre-colonial Zimbabwe was in fact a land of international trade and
extensive accumulation of private wealth, enabled by flourishing
commerce in grain, tobacco, and livestock.
This wealth is what attracted white settlers in the first place,
with grave consequences for the autochthonous population. Yet the
policies of the Mugabe regime have only perpetuated, and in many
instances exacerbated, colonial iniquities.
ALTHOUGH INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION has tended to focus on the Mugabe
regime’s perversion of law and justice on display in the white
farmland seizures of recent years, which have obliterated the
economy of what was once the “jewel of Africa,” many of Mugabe’s
depredations can in no wise be described as part of a post-colonial
struggle (however misguided).
The massacres in Matabeleland, the maline, the more
recent urban land seizures and daily socio-political repression,
are all legacies of colonialism, but not in the way that is usually
represented. In these respects, the real Mugabe has more in common
with apartheid Rhodesia’s Ian Smith than with Mugabe’s own
post-colonial ignis fatuus.
We are told by, for example, the BBC’s Peter Greste that every
statement from London or Washington on the present crisis in
Zimbabwe “confirms a view of the West as one that still cannot
accept the idea that Africans should be allowed to shape their own
destinies.” We are told by newly-elected UN Human Rights Council
member Jean Ziegler (he of the Muammar Qaddafi human rights prize)
that Mugabe has “history and morality with him.” We are told that
in the Security Council, China and Libya (those nonpareils of the
non-aligned movement) resent any attempt by former colonial powers
to decide Zimbabwe’s future.
What we are seldom given any sense of, however, is the extent to
which Mugabe’s most ruthless policies represent continuations of
Rhodesian antecedents. Had this been better understood, Mugabe’s
misleading anti-colonial narrative would have had a far less
prophylactic effect, and the world community (and perhaps more
importantly, key regional players) might have heretofore done more
than, in the words of the South Africa’s Sunday Times,
“cosset Mugabe while he raped his country.”
