Association of Concerned Africa Scholars
Analysis and Action on Policies Impacting Africa

The crash of the Berlin Wall — stripping the apartheid government of the primary pretext sustaining apartheid — and implicit US support, would see Prime Minister de Klerk dismantling the regime’s nuclear programme, employing Dr Wynand Mouton, then-rector of the University of the Free State and retired nuclear physicist, to destroy the body of evidence related to the nuclear programme. No amnesty was required for the estimated 1000 specialists involved in the industry.

This illegality will be explained away and accepted. There is a second illegality. The first, as mentioned, is the breach of constitutional requirement in terms of age; and the second is the manner in which the former president, Marc Ravalomanana, was removed. It is hard to think of what happened in Antananarivo as anything less than a coup. This was a coup – a coup undertaken on behalf of a group that’s yet to make itself public. As unstable as Madagascar is, it is almost unimaginable to have things play out as they have.

The new U.S. Military Command for Africa threatens to escalate the militarization of all aspects of U.S. policy towards Africa. Come learn what the Africa Command is all about, what’s at stake, and how we can stop it.

Further readings from ACAS Bulletin 82 (Summer 2009): Reflections on Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’

Most of the responses to Mahmood Mamdani’s article in this issue have challenged his interpretations of several areas in the political debate on the Zimbabwe crisis, including: the land question and the role of the war veterans; the benign position on state violence and underestimation of the enormous levels of displacement that have taken place under Mugabe’s rule; the misreading of the history of the labour movement; the dismissive characterization of the MDC and the civic movement; the mistaken assessment of the contribution of sanctions to the crisis; the brutal closure of democratic spaces; and perhaps most astonishingly the evasion of the enormous loss of legitimacy of Zanu PF and its increasing recourse to coercion, particularly as evidenced in the 2008 elections, to remain in power. Together these responses should, at the very least, cause readers to pause for further thought in reading Mamdani’s analysis of the situation in Zimbabwe, based as it is largely on the work of Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros. In addition to many others I have, in several interventions, offered alternative readings of these events and will this year attempt to consolidate those positions within the context of a new History of Zimbabwe currently being completed by a group of Zimbabwean historians.

The contribution by Mahmood Mamdani to the London Review of Books on the situation in Zimbabwe would make good comical reading had the situation in Zimbabwe not been so tragic. The poverty and subjectivity of his analysis is nothing short of a mockery of intellectual discourse, and not befitting of a submission to the reputable review. To the broad masses of the people of Zimbabwe and to an objective and dispassionate observer, Zimbabwe is a tale of a man-made human tragedy that exceeds the atrocities and heinous crimes afflicted on the people of Zimbabwe by colonialism. In all fairness, it would be a tall order finding any redeeming feature of Mugabe’s ruinous policies – other than the beneficiaries of his patronage.

Cape Town is 2182 kilometers south of Harare. At the Iziko Gallery, just beside the houses into which much of Zimbabwe’s sovereignty has been deposited, one of philosopher-artist William Kentridge’s stupendous works is on display. The filmic I Am Not Me: the Horse is Not Mine (‘a Russian peasant expression’, Kentridge explains, for denying guilt) is a combination of Kentridge’s take on Gogol’s The Nose with a disturbing rendition of Nikolai Bukharin’s 1937 trials. As Kentridge puts it in his textual accompaniment to the shadows on the walls, the tale of Bukharin’s last gasps exemplifies the ‘comedy of a world at odds with itself … of inversion … where logical argument is a sure sign of duplicity and lying is explained away as strategy’. The trial’s transcripts are ‘as if a mordant comedy is writing itself out’. The shadows of dancing, searching, marching, climbing and exegesis were reminiscent of the academic and activist discourse around Zimbabwe. Harare’s and New York’s renditions of Zimbabwe’s crisis bore uncanny resemblance to Kentridge’s rendition of the end of the Stalinist — nay, even the Leninist/Bolshevik — dream. And Professor Mamdani may have lost his nose as the dreams of African ‘difference’ evaporated: only to find it with a higher rank than he.

By way of introduction, I would suggest that whatever Mamdani writes he is always brilliant and provocative. But he also tends to indulge in false generalizations and analogies, particularly when he compares his native Uganda with another African country which is not comparable.

The most useful aspect of Mahmood Mamdani’s article “Lessons from Zimbabwe” (London Review of Books, 4 Dec 2008) is his challenge to influential stereotypes of land reform commonly found in the media and elsewhere. Citing Ian Scoones’ note on five myths of land reform in Zimbabwe, Mamdani points out that the massive redistribution of farms since 2000 has not resulted in complete agricultural failure. Provisional research findings from the Zimbabwe component of our three-country study of the impacts of land redistribution, which form the basis for Scoones’ article, do indeed show that some of the new occupants of former commercial farms in Masvingo Province have produced good crop harvests in years of reasonable rainfall (such as the 2005/6 season).

Judging by the passionate and wide-ranging responses to Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’ (London Review of Books, 4 December 2008), he has struck a deep chord amongst scholars of and from Zimbabwe – as well as others concerned more broadly with questions of African politics – both with the particular issues he has raised and those left starkly absent from his analysis. The present ACAS Bulletin is doing us all a valuable service by usefully bringing together the different responses evoked by Mamdani’s original piece and his subsequent response to his critics (London Review of Books, 1 January 2009). Although in disagreement with much of what he has written in these two pieces, I nonetheless express my appreciation for his efforts to stimulate serious public debate about Zimbabwe beyond partisan rhetoric (even if he himself has not entirely avoided such rhetoric). This is certainly welcome.