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

ACAS Bulletin

Zimbabwe: Ndira Body Found

By Peta Thornycroft | June 2008

Tonderai Ndira’s body was identified in the mortuary at Harare’s Parirenyatwa Hospital by a bangle around what had been his wrist. He had been dead a long time, or at least a week as it was on May 14, in the early hours of the morning that this extraordinary activist, probably the most persecuted political personality in Zimbabwe, was snatched from his working class home in Mabvuku township, eastern Harare.

Operation ‘Final Solution’ in Post-Election Zimbabwe

By Amy E. Ansell | June 2008

Two months after the March 29, 2008 election in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s defiant fistful image still leers from election posters hanging along the roadsides, boldly displaying the campaign slogan “Defending Our Land and Sovereignty”. State-run media reinforces these twin themes daily as Mr. Mugabe prepares for the June 27 presidential run-off with the tested tactics of stoking racial hostilities and intimidating his foes. International concern mounts over documented evidence of an on-going campaign of violent retribution by the Mugabe regime for its election setback, a campaign that has included renewed farm invasions targeting the few remaining white commercial farmers. Whilst international attention has rightly focused on ZANU-PF’s brutal post-election assault against Zimbabwe’s rural black population, this essay highlights the fate of white commercial farmers as one aspect of the larger state-sponsored campaign of violence and terror in the country that has a particular symbolic resonance.

An Academic’s Journalism in the Zimbabwean Interregnum

By David Moore | June 2008

The following journalistic efforts are those of a political scientist-political economist who has been following Zimbabwean politics and its history since emerging into political puberty in 1971.1 Mixing scholarship and journalism is not always successful: journalistic deadlines are often missed, our articles get cut with no mercy, teaching and administrative wars at the university intervene, and power and phones are off and on in Zimbabwe so contacts are difficult to reach. Articles are sent out hit and miss to editors unknown (not that careful efforts to cultivate allies always work: if a deadline is missed by even an hour, it’s too late; if a word-count is exceeded the editors would rather spike it than cut it down to size, meaning a look at my correspondence with the Mail and Guardian is a woeful experience!) colleagues across the region help and hinder – and one wonders what political toes are being stepped on too hard. Perhaps worse, the titles are never our own.

Reaping the Bitter Fruits of Stalinist Tendencies in Zimbabwe

By Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni | June 2008

This epigraph captures the level of intolerance and indicates the degeneration of President Robert Mugabe from a respected liberator to a damned dictator. It is one of the most telling signs of the highest ebb of executive lawlessness. The emotional charged and violent slogans of punching the air and crying for the blood of political opponents do not belong to this century. It only indicates that Zimbabwe is under the rule of man and party of yesterday. That is the bane of politics in Zimbabwe and the source of the current crisis.

The parallels between Zimbabwean and South African trade unionism

By Augustine Hungwe | June 2008

The early 1990s in Southern Africa saw the emergence of a exhilarating and esoteric phenomena-the embryonic rise of what I will call ‘trade unions-turned- political parties’, with Zambia providing the inaugural prototype in the successful metamorphosis of aspects of the Zambian Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU-Zambia) into the first labor-based political party in Southern Africa, the gaudy Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD). The MMD was led by the former Secretary General of ZCTU (Zambia), the nebulous Frederick Chiluba. The MMD won the subsequent key 1991 presidential election in Zambia which ended 27 of Kenneth ‘KK’ Kaunda’s increasingly tempestuous presidency in Zambia.Chiluba succeeded the inherently pertinacious Kaunda in this watershed election in Zambia. Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (UNIP) had been in power since Zambia gained its independence from Britain in 1964.

Methodism and Socio-political Action in Zimbabwe: 2000-2007

By Jimmy G. Dube | June 2008

This paper examines the performance of the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe during the past eight years of Robert Mugabe’s regime and proposes a new paradigm for forming a faith community that confronts dictatorship in Zimbabwe. It calls for a responsible theology of involvement by the ordinary Christians that begins with the grounding of new members in a faith that sees the world as the arena of their faith in God and who consequently can stand and be victorious against oppression by the state.

Can Elections End Mugabe’s Dictatorship?

By Norma Kriger | June 2008

Zimbabweans’ experience of elections, especially since 2000 when the MDC first challenged ZANU PF rule, has made them cynical about elections as a mechanism to transfer power. They have learned that ZANU PF will do whatever it takes to win elections. 2007 was rated the worst year in terms of the number of human rights abuses since 2001, most perpetrated by ZANU PF state and paramilitary forces, and aimed at decimating the top and lower level leadership of the opposition in advance of the anticipated 2008 elections.1 Also, there was growing disillusionment with the opposition. The March 29 2008 presidential, parliamentary, and local government elections initially aroused little interest among dejected voters. The MDC had split into two bickering factions in late 2005, the majority faction led by Morgan Tsvangirai (MDC-T) and the minority faction by Arthur Mutambara (MDC-M). The MDC-T was increasingly bedeviled by youth violence, problems of leadership transparency and accountability, and interest in positions for the material rewards they provided. Its political culture had begun to mimic the organization which it sought to remove.

U.S. Military Activities in Kenya

By Jesse Benjamin | December 2007

Once President George Bush’s special envoy to the Kenyan crisis, Jendayi Fraser (US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) has admitted that the elections in Kenya were seriously flawed (a polite way of saying they are fraudulent) and ordered President Mwai Kibaki to meet the opposition leader, Raile Odinga, it was easy for the corporate Western media to forget that the United States Ambassador in Kenya only weeks earlier had declared the elections free and fair. Bush and Fraser’s hands were pushed by the emerging evidence that the elections were illegitimate and that the violence, on both sides, had been orchestrated.1 Maintaining a lopsided alliance with the Kibaki government would not be so easy in the glare of public opinion, now cast briefly on the Kenyan nation, and so we saw a total flip-flop in US policy. But neither position is contradictory as the US is heavily invested in stability in Kenya.

AFRICOM: The U.S. Militarization of Africa

By Olayiwola Abegunrin | December 2007

President George W. Bush approved a Pentagon plan in January 2007 to set up Africa Command Center, to be known as AFRICOM. According to the plan, the Command Center is set to complete and go into service by the end of September 2008. The United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealed the new plans as he addressed the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on the defense spending President Bush proposed in his 2008 budget submitted to the Congress that, “The main purposes of the Africa Command Center would be to fight the war on terror, cooperation, provide humanitarian aid, building partnership capability, oversee security, defense support to non-military missions, and if directed, military training operations designed to help local governments.”

AFRICOM: What Is It and What Will It do?

By Daniel Volman | December 2007

Until the creation of Africom, the administration of U.S.-African military relations was conducted through three different commands. All three were primarily concerned with other regions of the world that were of great importance to the United States on their own and had only a few middle-rank staff members dedicated to Africa. This reflected the fact that Africa was chiefly viewed as a regional theater in the global Cold War, or as an adjunct to U.S.-European relations, or—as in the immediate post-Cold War period—as a region of little concern to the United States. But when the Bush administration declared that access to Africa’s oil supplies would henceforth be defined as a “strategic national interest” of the United States and proclaimed that America was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, Africa’s status in U.S. national security policy and military affairs rose dramatically.