Reimagining Robert Mugabe

Author's note: This article was written in December of 2013.

Reimagining Robert Mugabe

With the saddening death of Nelson Mandela recently announced, I thought it might be interesting to profile a man for most of his life was one of Mandela’s staunchest allies. It was not so long ago that both Mandela and Mugabe were celebrated for their extended campaigns to establish independent African states. In both cases, they were eventually successful after a long and violent struggle. In 1980, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. In 94, the apartheid regime finally conceded power. Since that time, both Zimbabwe and South Africa have remained exclusively under the control of the political parties that had won them independence. For Mandela's South Africa, that was the ANC. In Zimbabwe, it has been Mugabe's ZANU-PF government that has increasingly become the zeitgeist for what is commonly seen as the 'African' problems that seem to predictably accompany democracy on the continent. Mandela is one of the great icons of freedom and justice both on the continent and abroad. Across the border, Mugabe has become an icon of corruption and abuse of power. Understanding the origins of these perspectives is a lesson both in the path taken by post-colonial Zimbabwe and the way that many in the west seem to insist on interpreting these actions.

Over the last few months of 2013, an interesting situation had been brewing in Zimbabwe. Mugabe, long considered one of the most reviled leaders of the modern era, was heading into an election at the helm of his ZANU-PF party. Leading the opposition MDC party was long-time political opponent Morgan Tsvangirai, who has long enjoyed the support of many western governments.

Going into this election, western media made concentrated efforts to criticize Mugabe for his record of rule in the country. In his Weekly Standard article, David Aikman described the situation from his perspective:

“With desperate hyperinflation, a drop in male life expectancy from 62 in 1990 to 44 today, widespread cholera, and desperate malnutrition, Zimbabwe is a dying state presided over by an 87-year-old Mafioso”.

Other critics looked at Mugabe’s past performances in elections. In 2008, Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party had won 47.8% of the vote to Mugabe’s 43.2%, triggering a run-off vote. Tsvangirai’s party withdrew from the second round of elections, citing violence and intimidation by ZANU-PF supporters that had left over 200 dead throughout the country. Mugabe went on to comfortably win the run-off vote and stay in power. Western governments and media were quick to characterise this victory as a fraud. A Washington Post editorial summarized the cynicism with which many outsiders viewed the Zimbabwean election process:

“Western governments took a strong stand against Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe in 2008 when he employed massive violence and fraud to perpetuate himself in power through a presidential election. Five years later, the 89-year-old strongman is at it again. Flouting agreements with the opposition and pledges to foreign mediators, he has scheduled an election for this month without allowing the reforms necessary to make it free and fair. Opposition leaders once again are being hunted and persecuted.”

It was widely imagined that Mugabe was incapable of winning the 2013 election in a free and fair way. On August the third a surprising narrative began to emerge. With the polls counted, Mugabe had won a landslide victory with 61% of the vote. While the circumstances of the election were predictably violent and murky, there have been no proven accusations of electoral fraud thus far. It would appear that Robert Mugabe comfortably won the support of 61% of his population.

While the jury is still out on accusations of electoral fraud, a commonly accepted opinion has emerged that Mugabe attained office if not by direct fraud, then through democracy by intimidation. After all, ZANU-PF has a long and proven history of using militias to intimidate the opposition and its supporters. Many of you might remember western favorite Morgan Tsvangirai recounting the savage beating he received in the run-up to the 2008 election.

The situation as it is commonly imagined allows you to make an uncomplicated judgment of Mugabe’s culpability. The reality is somewhat more complex.

A few months before the election, Tsvangirai was secretly recorded in meeting with Canadian political brokerage firm Dickens and Madsen. Tsvangirai, to put it bluntly, is recorded organizing the assassination of Robert Mugabe and speculating on seizing power in the subsequent coup d’etat. I’ll save you a transcript (and provide the link to the video), but Tsvangirai expresses his willingness to ignore the constitution and declare a state of emergency when he takes power. In certain circumstances, the removal of a proven despot through assassination could be considered morally permissible. In this situation, however, it would appear that Tsvangirai was planning to kill Mugabe simply because he was afraid he would lose the upcoming election. The subsequent result appears to have proven his concerns accurate.

The reason that you might not have heard of this is that it was not widely reported. Indeed, you would think such a sensational example of international intrigue would gather media attention quickly. Not so; information on this plot is not easy to find, and it certainly did not make the front page of any domestic newspapers. Another thing that the domestic media has failed to report on is the real nature of political violence in the country. Human Rights Watch’s recent report on the situation in Zimbabwe as of 2012 stated:

“Groups allied to ZANU-PF continue to beat and intimidate citizens in the high-density suburbs of Harare with impunity, while MDC activists accused of violence are disproportionately arrested. In March police raided the MDC party headquarters and arrested three MDC officials and seven MDC youth on assault charges. Three days later they were all released. Several MDC parliamentarians and officials are facing various criminal charges, including inciting and participating in violence. In contrast, there have been few arrests or charges laid against ZANU-PF supporters implicated in violence.”

It is clear to me that the violence between the MDC and ZANU-PF is more of a war than a genocide. Admittedly, it is a war that the MDC appears to be losing. However, the tendency of the western press to characterise Mugabe as the perpetrator and Tsvangirai as the victim would appear to be a gross simplification of the situation. The recent assassination plot complicates matters further. It would appear that the moral high ground has been abandoned by Tsvangirai’s MDC, and the west’s support of his party must be reconsidered. The media black-out on this topic may be evidence of our unwillingness to imagine any complexity beyond that which we are presented with.

What then, is the source of the incessant demonization of Mugabe? Admittedly, his human-rights record is abysmal and he has destroyed a once-vibrant economy at the expense of his people. OECD measures are equally troubling, with bottom-tier results in infant mortality and literacy.

However, these very real issues have not constituted the basis of most of the criticism. According to the west, Mugabe’s greatest crime appears to be his land reforms. In the early 2000s, nightly news reports were crowded with images of white farmers being evicted from their land. The press were quick to describe this as a key part of Mugabe’s vandalism of the economy:

“In the early 2000s, Zimbabwe's liberation president, Robert Mugabe, encouraged bloody takeovers of large commercial white-owned farms as part of his campaign to redistribute the country's fertile industrial agricultural land to previously disenfranchised blacks. The land grabs crippled the economy, decimating the agricultural sector, as the number of white-owned commercial farms diminished to about 250 from 4,500.”

(Drew F. Cohen, World Report. October 9, 2013)

It seems that the idea of colonial subjects redistributing the allotments of their former rulers was one that caused a huge amount of discomfort among western governments. I would argue that it is these land reforms are at the heart of most of the western criticism of Mugabe’s government. It is worth asking what claim these white farmers had to the land of Zimbabwe. To answer that question, we must take a look at history.

The origins of Zimbabwe’s current political problems belong to Rhodesia. The white farmers’ history of power and influence stretches back to Cecil Rhodes’ expansion of the British empire. Without reciting the entire history of Rhodesia, it is worth remembering that the expansion of British influence in Africa was undertaken for commercial benefit. Cecil Rhodes negotiated a series of exploitative charters with the local African tribes. When bribery and deception did not achieve his aims, he turned to violence. The first and second Matabele wars were short-lived conflicts of resistance that were both brutally suppressed. White settlers never exceeded 3% of the population in Zimbabwe, but it was Rhodes’ legacy to leave them holding the majority of the wealth and power in the country.

Even more troubling was the racist rhetoric that accompanied this expansionism. In the days before Hitler, Rhodes was the chief espouser of theories of international white supremacy.

"I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence.”

The fact remains that the white farmers of Zimbabwe were never more than a few short generations away from this conflict. Whether we recognize their accountability in the sins of their fathers is a complex matter. What might be worth considering here is whether you think that the sons of thieves have a right to what their fathers have stolen.

Our culture would suggest that in this sort of situation there is no inter-generational claim to stolen goods. An interesting example of this commonly accepted opinion is the collection of pilfered art that was recently found in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich flat. Cornelius was the son of Dr Hildebrand Gurlitt, a notorious Nazi war criminal who was in charge of confiscating ‘degenerate’ art. When this considerable collection of stolen paintings was recently discovered, it was immediately confiscated by German authorities. Cornelius had never attempted to sell or profit on the paintings in any way, and expressed a deep personal connection to the works he had hidden away for so many years. Despite this, unanimous popular opinion stated that he had absolutely no claim to these stolen goods.

There are parallels to the situation in Zimbabwe here. Just as Dr Hildebrand Gurlitt confiscated paintings from those he saw as racially inferior, the ancestors of Zimbabwe’s white farmers were part of a system that saw white people as entitled to land because of their purportedly superior race. Just as Cornelius Gurlitt was innocent of any personal exploitation, these acts of confiscation were not performed by the current generation of white farmers. However, in both cases the owners of the confiscated property refuse to admit that it does not belong to them. When you add the context of Rhodes’ racist rhetoric, white farmers claim to the land seems more tenuous than ever.

Why, then, after fighting a savage and costly war for freedom from white minority rule, should Mugabe respect this claim to Zimbabwe’s land? And why should the west feel so uncomfortable about this and consider it so unjust?

There are two answers here, and both of them are uncomfortable:

First, there is a racist subtext in western views of African leaders that imagines Africans culture is incompatible with democracy. They consider Mugabe’s confiscation of land an expression of racially motivated tribalism rather than the righting of a past injustice. Consider the tendency of western media to describe African leaders as ‘strong-men’, as though 'African culture' is always defined by intimidation rather than dialogue. To me, this seems like veiled racism.

Secondly, the comparison between Zimbabwe and other countries is an uncomfortable one. Australia and the US are similar to Zimbabwe in that they are both colonized countries where the balance of power is firmly out of the hands of the original inhabitants. Both have histories of colonization and exploitation just as troubling as Zimbabwe’s. The idea of past injustices being righted and the indigenous population controlling the balance of power is deeply troubling to the western subconscious. Demonizing Mugabe and ZANU-PF is a predictable response to a fair many would be reluctant to articulate.

It is time that we began acknowledging the complexities of the Zimbabwe situation. Tsvangirai’s recent exposure has brought to light the fact that the MDC has resorted to the tools of their oppressors. While Mugabe’s rule is generally viewed as illegitimate, we must not forget the fact that he is a democratically elected head of state. Blaming the violence that so predictably accompanies African elections solely on ZANU-PF is deliberately ignoring the full picture. In the wake of the recent election victory, US Secretary of state John Kerry stated that:

“The United States does not believe that the results announced today represent a credible expression of the will of the Zimbabwean people”

This is a curious statement when you consider the 64% margin of victory and the fact that no solid evidence of electoral fraud accompanies these claims. A fundamental error of the neo-conservative movement to spread democracy across the globe is that it imagines democratic countries have similar interests to those of the United States. When a democratic country elects a popular leader that seeks to upset the status quo (Mugabe, Chavez) then it is their democratic legitimacy that is obediently interrogated by the media. Disobedient foreign presidents become strong-men,despots, and dictators in the lexicon of the west.

Mugabe has never attempted to pander to the interests of the US or Britain. Considering the historical circumstances, this is understandable. It is also part of what has made him so popular across Africa. As he claims:

“We are not going to be dictated to by anybody. Not at all. We took up arms to defeat a regime, British regime here which had oppressed our people for years, and for years denied them their rights. Human rights were never talked about during that time. Democracy never existed here. There wasn't the same freedom as we get today. We fought for it. We brought it and we shall maintain it the way we have always understood it and not the way Britain understands it.”

Admittedly, Mugabe’s history of economic management and human rights abuses is abysmal. However, the same could be easily said for many western countries, especially in the realm of human rights abuses. In the future, I would suggest that we avoid characterising Mugabe as a dictator. Tsvangirai’s recent exposure throws the nature of the conflict in the country into stark relief.

It is also worth understanding that the western outrage generated by Mugabe’s land reforms in some way validates Rhodes’ original claim to the land. It would appear that the west is only willing to tolerate third-world democracy in a form that does not threaten the status quo. Part of this is racism, and part of this is a continuing subtext of colonial superiority that few would openly admit to.

This article is not a defense of Robert Mugabe. He must be held to account for his history of abuse. Equally, I would encourage you to think very carefully before you decide your position on Mugabe’s land reforms. It is too easy to buy into the subtext of a biased media and characterise the man as an insane despot. In considering Mugabe’s legacy, we must divorce ourselves from the colonial subtext and acknowledge the political complexities in the country.