silence and even complicity—declined to continue its open-ended indulgence
of Robert Mugabe, it becomes possible to envisage a time when Zimbabwe will
be free of the hideous regime of one man and one-party rule. Other
contributing factors, such as Mugabe's age and the inspiring influence of
events at the other end of Africa, can be listed. But the democratic
opposition in Zimbabwe predates the "Arab spring" by several years and must
now count in its own right as one of the world's most stubborn and brave
movements.
Peter Godwin's most recent book, The Fear, updates the continuing story of
popular resistance. In my opinion it's not quite as powerful as his earlier
book, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, but it does convey the awful immediate
reality of a state where official lawlessness and cruelty are the norm. It
also maps the symptoms of regime-decay: If only for nakedly opportunist
reasons, there are increasing numbers of people among Mugabe's own clientele
who are looking to a future when the near-nonagenarian (he is 87) will no
longer be with us.
How did things descend to this nightmare level? Robert Mugabe did not come
to power through a coup. He emerged as the leader of a serious guerrilla
army, who then fought and won a British-supervised election. For his first
several years in office, he practiced a policy of reconciliation (at least
with the white population, if not with his tribal rivals in the Matabeleland
province). During the years of the revolution, I met Mugabe several times
and am still ashamed of how generally favorably I wrote him up. But he was
impressive then, both as soldier and politician and survivor of long-term
political imprisonment, and when I noticed the cold and ruthless side of his
personality I suppose I tended to write it down as a function of his arduous
formation. Also, in those days the reactionary white settlers would console
themselves with a culture of ugly rumors (such as Mugabe's supposed syphilis
and mental degeneration), which I was determined not to gratify.
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The syphilis story can't have been true or Mugabe would not be the
annoyingly long-lived man he has become. But something did go horribly
wrong, and among those who remember those years there is an unending parlor
game about exactly what that something was. Mugabe, some people say, was
never the same after the death of his charming Ghanaian-born wife, Sally.
Not only that, but the second wife was the sort who likes shopping sprees
and private jets and different palaces for summer and winter. (Thank
goodness for this class of women, by the way: They have helped discredit
many a dictator.)
Another early bad symptom was Mugabe's morbid fascination with, and hatred
of, homosexuality. He suddenly decided that Zimbabwe was being honeycombed
with sodomy and began to display symptoms of acute paranoia. Macabre as this
was, it hardly explains his subsequent decision to destroy his country's
agricultural infrastructure by turning it into a spoils system for party
loyalists, or his decision to send Zimbabwean troops on looting expeditions
into Congo.
Writing on all this some years ago, Peter Godwin opted for the view that
Mugabe wasn't explicable by any change in circumstances or personality. He
had had the heart and soul of a tyrant all along, and simply waited until he
could give the tendency an unfettered expression. Even though I have a
quasi-psychological theory of my own—that Mugabe became corroded by jealousy
of the adulation heaped on Nelson Mandela—I now think that this is almost
certainly right. In the Sino-Soviet split that divided African nationalists
in the 1960s and 1970s (with the ANC of South Africa, for example, clearly
favoring the Soviet Union) Mugabe was not just pro-Chinese. He was pro-North
Korean. He enlisted Kim Il Sung to train his notorious Praetorian Guard, the
so-called "Fifth Brigade," and to design the gruesome monument to those who
fell in the war of liberation. Some of his white-liberal apologists used to
argue that Mugabe couldn't really be a believing Stalinist because he was
such a devoted Roman Catholic. But this consideration—while it might help
explain his obsession with sexual deviance—might weigh on the opposite scale
as well. Catholics can be extremely authoritarian, and Mugabe has, in
addition, done very well from his Vatican connection. He broke the ban on
his traveling to Europe by visiting the pope as an honored guest. The church
unfrocked Pius Ncube, the outspokenly anti-Mugabe bishop of Bulawayo, for
apparently having an affair with his (female) secretary. Festooned and
bemerded with far graver sins, Mugabe remains a Roman Catholic in good
standing, and it's impossible to imagine what he would now have to do to
earn himself excommunication.
If you want a catalog of those sins, turn to Godwin's books. But don't read
them just for outrage at the terrible offense to humanity. They also
describe a new sort of Zimbabwean, emancipated from racial and tribal
feeling by a long common struggle against a man who doesn't scruple to
employ racial and tribal demagoguery. In those old days of arguing with the
white settlers, one became used to their endless jeering refrain: "Majority
rule will mean one man, one vote—one time!" They couldn't have been more
wrong. Since gaining independence three decades ago, the Zimbabwean people
have braved every kind of intimidation and repression to go on registering
their votes. They have made dogged use of the courts and the press, which
continue to function in a partial way, to uphold pluralism and dissent.
Mugabe has lost important votes in Parliament and—last time—his electoral
majority in the country at large. Only the undisguised use of force and the
wholesale use of corruption have kept his party in office. One day, the
civic resistance to this, which was often looked-down upon by people
considering themselves revolutionary, will earn the esteem and recognition
it deserves.
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