ACAS Press Release: Zimbabwe Crisis
Press Release: Zimbabwe Crisis
June 24, 2008
4pm EST
The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS), has published a special issue on Zimbabwe in the ACAS Bulletin. It introduces the issues surrounding Zimbabwe’s March 29 elections and the current political violence leading up to the June 27th Presidential run-off.
The aim of this special Zimbabwe issue is to provide details and analysis often left out of mainstream news sources. The reader will find a variety of articles from different perspectives, by Zimbabwe experts from the fields of political science, sociology, history, and theology, as well as from seasoned Zimbabwe journalists and an NGO worker reporting from the field. The special issue concludes with a historically-inflected editorial on Zimbabwe’s politics of violence, an open letter to Thabo Mbeki, and provides a listing of on-line resources for further research and information.
The issue was edited by Tim Scarnecchia and Wendy Urban-Mead, and contains articles by (among others): Norma Kriger, Jimmy G Dube, Augustine Hungwe, Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni, David Moore, Amy Ansell, and Peta Thornycroft.
Contact:
Tim Scarneccia
Kent State University
(330) 672-8904
[email protected]
Wendy Urban-Mead
Bard College
(845) 264-1805
[email protected]
Read the issue here | PDF version: http://concernedafricascholars.org/docs/acasbulletin79.pdf
By Timothy Scarnecchia
In previous elections paramilitary violence came before the actual polling, usually slowing down in the week or so before polling when international election observers and the world press arrived. This has not been the case in the present elections, as violence since the beginning of May has been reported by numerous and diverse sources to be perpetrated by the police, military, and the militias under ZANU-PF control. The intention of this political violence is to terrorize, destroy, and break the will of the MDC and their supporters leading up to the June 27th run-off for the presidential election. What makes the political violence feel like such an excessively brutal betrayal this time around is that it had appeared, for a brief period in April, as if the impressive showing of the MDC in the election and the wide support it had gained would have insulated it from further reprisals from the ZANU-PF before the run-off. After all, wasn’t the world watching this time? This hope for a peaceful campaign was not to happen. As a number of the contributions to this special issue have suggested, violence is the only language ZANU-PF knows, and it has once again unleashed its complete arsenal, resulting in the killing of 50 MDC members as of May 25th, 2008, and the displacement of hundreds of people, including rural villagers, teachers, and activists.
As Kriger and Moore suggest in this volume, the innovation of posting the polling results immediately outside the polling stations should have made it easier for the MDC to prove to officials and the world that they had won-the hoped for “orange” revolution result where a corrupt regime is forced from office after stealing yet another election. Instead, this innovation has only served to become the record keeping apparatus of violence for the military, police, and militias. Soldiers, police, and the party youth were sent to the rural districts and villages where the MDC did well, sent out to “re-educate” the rural population by using tactics developed during the liberation war to punish villagers who were accused of working with the Rhodesian forces. The American Ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGee, along with his British, Australian, and Tanzanian counterparts, toured the military camps set up for reeducation and visited victims of torture and violence. Ambassador McGee reported being shown ledgers with names of villagers alleged to have supported the MDC in the March 29th elections, lists of names of people to bring in for interrogation and re-education.1 The reports from early May also included collective punishment of those rural villages where records showed the citizens had voted against the ruling party. Public torture has been reported, resorting to the gouging out of eyes and the cutting off of ears. Women have been raped, others have been beaten on their buttocks with plastic pipes and forced to sit on their wounds all day in the sun. A number of villagers died of these injuries or were beaten to death.2
In addition to collective punishment and harassment of rural voters, there have been direct attacks against MDC organizers and candidates. On Monday, May 26th, reports indicated that the body of MDC candidate Shepard Jani was found dumped on a farm near Goromonzi. Jani had lost in the election to ZANU-PF’s Tendai Bright Makunde, but it is believed ZANU-PF is targeting the MDC in Murehwa “…because they are very effective at organizing and had produced very good results for the MDC in the province.”3
Peta Thornycroft provides an account in this issue of the disappearance, murder, and funeral of MDC activist Tonderai Ndira. Thornycroft’s piece shows that the ruling party and its close associates are going after key MDC activists with a greater vengeance and desperation than in the past. Ndira, aged 33, had reportedly been arrested 35 times previously by the state. This time, the way he was taken from his home, tortured, his body mutilated and then dumped at the central hospital morgue shows the extreme forms of violence the ruling party has decided to use.4
While those who carry out these acts do so with a sense of impunity, the leaders hope they have timed the violence to avoid having the world pay attention and actually do something about it. They have worked out this timing fairly well in the past. The world only tunes into Zimbabwe for a brief time and then moves on to the next “crisis”. The xenophobic attacks in South Africa, as clearly as they implicated Thabo Mbeki’s “quiet diplomacy” with Zimbabwe over the past 8 years, also turned the world press’s gaze away from the political violence in Zimbabwe. Concerned scholars need to think of ways to keep the focus on Zimbabwe, and to help disseminate the stories written by so many brave journalists inside Zimbabwe, in South Africa, and elsewhere.
The funeral of Tonderai Ndira may turn out to be a turning point in the history of the opposition. As Peta Thornycroft and others who participated have written, the event symbolized the “war” in Zimbabwe. Just as Zimbabwean nationalism has had a host of martyred heroes, just as the funerals of Steven Biko and so many others in South Africa represented the “no turning back” attitude of the militants in the ANC and PAC, the public display of the MDC burying a hero of the ongoing Zimbabwean struggle against totalitarianism (once again) will likely become a major event in Zimbabwean history. The challenge for those who care about the future of Zimbabwe is not to let this orchestrated campaign of terror and political violence continue without protest.
As David Moore, Augustine Hungwe and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni have shown in this issue, the reliance on the “sell-out” and “anti-imperialist” rhetoric by the ruling clique continues to gain support from the old guard in the region, but even this tired language has reached its limits.5 How long will it take the region to finally bury the idea that any opposition is a “sell-out” and the only “true” leader is a liberation war hero? The words of the South African leader Pallo Jordan, a member of the ANC National Executive Committee, taken from a speech he gave to parliament in 2003, were recently reprinted in the ANC Today. It is worth reflecting on Jordan’s question to those who blindly defended ZANU-PF because of its liberation war legacy:
“It is an undisputed historical fact that colonialism denied the colonised precisely these protections, subjecting them to the tyranny, not only of imperialist governments, but often to the whims of colonialist settlers and officials. All liberation movements, including both ZANU (PF) and ZAPU, deliberately advocated the institution of democratic governance with the protections they afford the citizen.
All liberation movements held that national self-determination would be realised, in the first instance, by the colonised people choosing their government in democratic elections. Hence Kwame Nkrumah: “Seek ye first the political kingdom!” The content of anti-imperialism was precisely the struggle to attain these democratic rights. In the case of Zimbabwe, democratic rights arrived that night when the Union Jack was lowered and was replaced by the flag of an independent Zimbabwe.”
“The questions we should be asking are: What has gone so radically wrong that the
movement and the leaders who brought democracy to Zimbabwe today appear to be its ferocious violators. What has gone so wrong that they appear to be most fearful of it?”6
The next few weeks before the June 27th run-off election will offer opportunities for the beginning of a new political opening in Zimbabwe. On the other hand, given the history of politics in Zimbabwe it would be naïve and overly romanticized to think the MDC will be able to match the “war” now being launched against it. When the MDC activists do respond to violence with violence, the State will only use this as further rationale for their repression and attacks. As Norma Kriger asked in this volume, is it realistic to think that it is possible to vote Mugabe out of office? What will it take? Will there be any interventions from South Africa, from SADC, from the African Union, the United Nations, or any combination of these? By doing nothing, the regional powers are only prolonging the suffering of the Zimbabwean people and exposing the brave opposition politicians and their activists to a one-sided war, a David and Goliath struggle. By staying on the sidelines, these organizations also feed Mugabe’s rhetoric that it is “the West”, the Americans, the British, and the Australians, who are against him. It is time for some immediate action on the part of those in power in Africa and international organizations. The lack of any concerted and meaningful response from the ANC-controlled South African government, SADC, the AU and the UN has been disgraceful; one can only hope and pray that something will spark them into action before more MDC activists and leaders meet the fate of those 50 already killed since the first election round.
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Timothy Scarnecchia, Kent State University, [email protected].
Notes
1. Robert Dixon, “The not-so-diplomatic ambassador to Zimbabwe”, LA Times, May 23, 2008 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-diplomats23-2008may23,0,3957643.story
2. Jong Kandemiri and Blessing Zulu, “Politically Motivated Attack on Zimbabwean Villagers Said to Leave 11 Dead” VOA News, 6 May 2008, http://www.voanews.com/english/africa/zimbabwe/2008-05-06-voa55.cfm?rss=war%20and%20conflict
3. Tererai Karimakwenda, “Abducted MDC candidate Jani found dead” (May 26, 2008) SWRaidio.com http://www.swradioafrica.com/news260508/jani260508.htm
4. See Farai Sevenzo very thought provoking account of Ndira’s death for the BBC News “Death of a Zimbabwean Activist” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7416933.stm
5. See also, T. Scarnecchia, “The ‘Fascist Cycle’ in Zimbabwe, 2000-2005”, Journal of Southern African Studies. 32(2) 2006:221-237.
6. Pallo Jordan, “Democracy is Not a Privilege” ANC Today Volume 8, No. 19. 16-22 May 2008 http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2008/at19.htm#art1
By Wendy Urban-Mead
The motivation behind this issue originates in our dismay at the growing urgency of the situation in Zimbabwe. Human rights are being violated with increasing frequency. See, for one example, a report recently published by the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR). Please read it; a link to the report appears at the end of this issue. We also have personal friends in Zimbabwe who have confirmed that such violations are indeed taking place, and at the hands of people acting in the name of the state. Such a development is in direct violation of all that the liberation struggles against colonialism in southern Africa stood for. We call for all speed and urgency from every agency acting to influence the government of Zimbabwe to allow for the run-off election to be free and fair. Additionally, we insist upon a halt to the intimidation, murder, and beating of persons deemed opposition supporters.
What has Mugabe’s rhetoric wrought, that the call to protect human rights is cast as a
neo-imperialistic impulse? It was from studying the human rights abuses committed against colonized people in Africa, Jews in Nazi Germany, and enslaved Africans in America, that led many of us here in the United States to realize how important human rights are. We became teachers of African history in the interest of, among other things, making Americans aware of the evils of colonial rule as seen in the Smith and Apartheid regimes of the 20th Century. We want to see no more such atrocities committed, such as those suffered by Biko and countless thousands of others, by anyone in power against anyone, anywhere, no matter the race or religion or economic condition of the persons involved at either end of the power scale.
How is it that President Mugabe and his supporters can take the desire for a free Zimbabwe and from that somehow twist it to accuse people like us of neo-imperialism – we who cry out against the beating of grandmothers, children, pregnant and nursing women, beautiful and irreplaceable sons and fathers? The people of Zimbabwe sacrificed their lives and their well-being in the 1970s so that they could be free to express their views, to choose their own leaders, and to chart their own way forward to a prosperity that they could build for themselves. Zimbabwe’s people did NOT make the sacrifices of the liberation war so that Mugabe’s government could send militias out to beat, brutalize, and terrorize them. Haven’t southern Africans had enough of that under the previous regimes that were defeated at such cost and after such long struggle? The world looks to South Africa, the UN, and the SADC, to take courage and convincingly call upon Mugabe and his government to act in protection of its people, immediately, before another precious human life is damaged or lost.
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Wendy Urban-Mead, Bard College, [email protected].
Link to the May 9, 2008 Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) Report, available at kubatana.net: http://www.kubatana.net/html/archive/hr/080509zadhr.asp?sector=HR.
See also the statement in support of the ZADHR by the Physicians for Human Rights:
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/news-2008-04-30.html.
By Anonymous
The following letter was sent out May 8, 2008 from an NGO worker living in Zimbabwe, who offers an eyewitness account from the capital city of Harare as news of political violence began to be heard from individuals, news sources, and rumor. The letter captures well the anger ex-patriates often feel as they hear from their Zimbabwean colleagues of political killings and torture and realize how implicated so many of the “big chefs” are in this violence, how the police and military along with their paramilitary “green bombers” and “war veterans” operate with impunity. Such a realization is jarring and disturbing, scary and depressing. Zimbabweans have no need to be told of this, but those of us outside the country may want to consider the costs such a state and society exact from its people. Zimbabweans have learned to cope with a now-familiar cycle of periods of calm followed by a brutal reaction from a state controlled by forces who know they have everything to lose should they be forced to concede power. TS.
“Letter from Harare – 8 May 2008”
Since the elections on 29 March, I have been trying, without success, to find suitable words with which to convey to those outside the country the experience of being here in this dreadful moment.
Some of my inability to construct a lucid account is surely attributable to the ever-changing rush of events that seems to shift the terrain of what is happening - or what I think may be happening, or what is reported to be happening, or what an army of experts believe to be happening, or what is rumoured to be happening - from hour to hour. The election results will be released tomorrow, or next week or not at all. The Chinese arms ship will dock in Durban, in Beira, in Luanda, or return to China and the weapons will be trucked, or flown to Harare or not. Sixty white-owned farms have just been seized, or 160 farms, or no farm invasion shave occurred. Morgan has won two-thirds of the vote, or a bare majority of the vote or a mere plurality of ballots. Bogus ballot boxes stuffed with phony ZANU-PF votes are seen delivered to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to steal the election, the ZEC has been seized by security forces, the police are arresting ZEC personnel. Mugabe and wife have flown to Malaysia or are happily relaxing in their Harare mansion. Mbeki has secretly arranged for Mugabe to step down, or share power or maintain control. There was almost a military coup, or there will be a coup or there has already been a coup and we are under military rule but don’t know it. There will or won’t be a run-off. It will happen in thee weeks, in three months, in a year, not at all. We will be saved by Jacob Zuma, by SADC, by the African Union, by the EU, by no one. On and on and on it goes, baffling, impossible, and we are left dazed, disheartened, flabbergasted.
The Government propaganda machine is in overdrive. “Farmers Attack War Veterans” was Tuesday’s headline. The story told the tale of a white farmer attacking with pepper spray, a band of war vets who happened to “visit” his farm and of three white farmers driving a truck with an improper licence plate. Such lawlessness by whites won’t be tolerated a police official is quoted. The ZBC radio news tells us that MDC thugs are attacking innocent villagers, that MDC leaders are trying forgo the proper legal process and to delay the run-off, that MDC agents have been aiding the return of deposed white farmers to retake the land and restore the old colonial master. I must confess that I find a certain morbid fascination in these ludicrous accounts, brazenly inverting reality, openly reversing victim and perpetrator, mobilizing the rhetoric of sovereignty, rule-of-law, racial-solidarity and patriotism to justify brutal oppression.
Make no mistake: at its core, the story of post-election Zimbabwe is all about violence. Overwhelming, intimidating, sadistic violence unleashed upon the rural black population; anyone – children and the elderly, women and men – perceived to have voted for the MDC, or to be a relative, friend or acquaintance of someone who may have voted for the MDC or to reside in an area that supported MDC. From our Harare island of relative calm and safety, we sit by, helplessly, as their stories trickle and then flood in from the countryside.
Here are some of the accounts that I have heard directly from local sources in the past few days:
• On Sunday evening, one of our local staff described his just-completed visit to his family in the rural Eastern Highlands. When he arrived the village Headman was in hiding, threatened by a roving gang of ZANU-PF youth led by the so-called war veterans. Many young people, he said, had been dragged from their homes, beaten and forced to chant ZANU-PF slogans. They were then told that they were now recruited into the ruling party and were forced to become part of the youth patrol terrorizing the district each night. If they refused they were beaten. The bus on which he traveled back to Harare on Sunday was stopped several times at impromptu ZANU-PF roadblocks. Youth and War Vets clambered on board beating those suspected of supporting the opposition and demanding that everyone chant ZANU-PF slogans and sing “patriotic songs.” Those who resisted were dragged out and beaten, as the police calmly watched from the sidelines.
• On Tuesday a colleague at work came into my office to show me a text message she had just received on her cell-phone. It announced that Monday night the younger brother of her recently diseased fiancé, suspected of being an MDC supporter, had been beaten to death by a group of naked ZANU-PF militants. Naked! Apparently, many others in the village had been beaten and terrorized.
• A friends’ daughter who broke her arm in a playground accident on Monday afternoon was scheduled to have a pin inserted and the bone set on early Tuesday. The parents told us that the operation had to be repeatedly delayed, as the medical staff rushed to attend to numerous seriously-injured victims of ZANU-PF violence who continuously streamed into the private clinic.
• Yesterday an NGO colleague reported seeing thousands of people on the Mazoe road – just north of Harare – carrying what possessions they could and apparently fleeing towards the city. Today VOA reported that eleven people had been murdered and at least twenty more seriously injured in Mazoe North, all victims of ruling-party assault.
• Here is a widely-published account from about two weeks ago, confirmed by several sources. While not directly reported to me, I have found particularly disheartening, as I have a professional link to the key perpetrator, David Parirenyatwa, M.D., the national Minister of Health and Child Welfare and a ZANU-PF Member of Parliament. Together with two other ruling-party politicians, the good doctor, brandishing an AK-47, is said to have invaded a peaceful MDC meeting, threatening and intimidating those in attendance and demanding that they attend a ZANU-PF rally instead. “There is no place in this district where MDC supports will be safe”, he reportedly told the crowd. This from the senior most Government official charged with safeguarding the public health and the well-being of Zimbabwe’s children.
Since my arrival in Zimbabwe fourteen months ago, numerous people here have referred to the apocryphal tale of the frog blissfully swimming in a pot of water as the temperature gradually increases to the boiling point, as perhaps a fit analogy descriptive of our own adaptability to an ever-worsening scene, an ever more menacing and manifest evil. We are well and still quite safe, but we can definitely detect the heat of the water.
By Peta Thornycroft
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.
They came at night, about 10 of them, and in front of his children, Raphael 9 and Linette 6, and his wife Plaxedes, beat him up and then dragged him screaming into a white double cab.
Tonderai Ndira, 33, was certainly Zimbabwe’s most renowned street activist who had been arrested and beaten up and hospitalised scores of times since he began campaigning for democracy in late 1999.
His decomposing, naked body was found in the bush near the old commercial farming district Goromonzi, about 40 km south east of Harare, close to the torture centre run by the security forces, usually the Zimbabwe National Army, where so many Zimbabweans have been worked over since independence.
Hours after his brothers identified the body - it was so decomposed and mutilated that his own father was not sure whether the long, slender remains on the slab was his oldest son - the police began harrassing the family saying they could not have the body for burial.
His brother Cosmos Ndira said yesterday: “He was in the mortuary where they keep the unknown people, the street kids. He was naked. The bangle was given to him by his wife.
“I think Tonde was arrested 35 times, but maybe more, we lost count. We were all so happy after the elections, thinking that the eight years was now over and we could begin new lives.
“We often talked about dying, and Tonde often used to tell us that he would be killed by Zanu PF because he was arrested and beaten up so often.”
Ndira was head of the Movement for Democratic Change’s provincial security department in Harare.
He was detained for five months last year in the pitiful prison cells, unfit for human occupation, and was suing home affairs minister Kembo Mohadi and police commissioner Augustine Chihuri for wrongful arrest.
Despite all the arrests since the MDC was launched Ndira was never brought to trial. All charges, including a two year period when he was remanded every two months, were dropped for lack of evidence.
The police have failed to convict a single MDC activist among the tens of thousands detained in the last eight years.
Ndira was one of the activists who was, occasionally openly critical of the MDC when he believed it had gone wrong.
He didn’t believe in “my party right or wrong” but was a founding member of the party and destined for high office one day although he always saw himself as a background activist.
“I do this for my children. I want them to have a better life than me,” he told journalists who asked him why he kept on going.
His death came on a day when two more MDC activists were buried at the Warren Park cemetery west of Harare. One of their friends was buried last Sunday.
Those three were beaten to death in a rural area about 65 km north east of Harare where most, but certainly not all of the violence has taken place since the March 29 elections.
No one is sure how many people have died since Zanu PF and President Robert Mugabe were defeated in parliamentary and presidential elections. So far 42 victims have been identified by relatives, but many people believe the real toll is much higher especially in remote parts of northern Zimbabwe. If there are any Zanu PF victims, police and the party have failed to provide details.
At least 600 terrified people including dozens of nursing mothers and babies are sheltering at the MDC’S Harare headquarters, Harvest House.
They have no blankets nor food, and the ablution facilities are blocked, and the conditions are inhuman as the building is an office block.
So far neither the International Committee of the Red Cross nor the United Nations has even been to inspect or assist the internally displaced, “It is an appalling crisis,” said MDC lawyer Alec Muchadahama yesterday.
“The people are supposed to go to a neutral area so they can get international assistance. Where is a neutral area? Where should they go?” he said.
“This is Zimbabwe’s darkest hour. Will anything or anyone rescue us? Can there be an end to this? We can’t keep up with it,” he said, and admitted he was exhausted.
Scores are in detention including two recently elected MDC MP’s, Iain Kay, Amos Chibaya and Dr Alois Mudzingwa, MDC executive member and close friend of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Kay was one of the first white farmers to be assaulted by Mugabe’s “war veterans” in 2000, and he was later forced off his farm. He won his seat on March 29 with support from people from his old farming area, around Marondera, 70 km south east of Harare.
He and Chibaya are being charged with incitement to public violence, according to Muchadahama and were due to appear in their local magistrate’s court yesterday.
No one has been arrested in connection with any of the MDC murders, nor in connection with tens of thousands who have been assaulted. No one has been arrested for arson of village after village in the last three weeks either.
“We can’t really keep up with all the deaths and arrests. I have to go and attend to someone else from the national executive who has been arrested.” Mchadahama said.
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Peta Thornycroft, Harare, May 22, 2008
By Amy E. Ansell
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.
Background
At the time of Independence in 1980, Robert Mugabe was credited with being magnanimous toward the white farming community, calling for coexistence and reconciliation between blacks and whites: “If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself. If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you.”1 Yet from the beginning there were those who believed liberation would not be complete until all the whites were off the land. These hawks were constrained for decades by a variety of factors, chief amongst them a Constitutional provision that required a ten year period where land would be acquired only through a “willing-seller, willing-buyer” system. When this period came to an end, the Land Acquisition Act was amended in 1992, making it easier for Government to compulsory acquire land, albeit with due compensation. Throughout the decade, land reform was pursued in fits and starts, with changing targets and a series of botched donor initiatives. 2
The situation altered radically in 2000 in the immediate aftermath of Government’s defeat on a referendum for a new constitution. The defeat owed in large part to the emergent political muscle of the newly formed opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which much of the white farming community supported openly. Days after the defeat, invasions of white-owned farms began in an operation labeled “Get Up and Leave”. A central if unofficial component of the Government’s Fast Track Land Reform Program (2000-2002), this Operation led to the displacement of the overwhelming majority of the white commercial farmer population, estimated to be 4,500 in 2000. Two recent surveys of displaced white farmers reveal widespread human rights violations against them perpetrated by farm invaders, financial losses estimated in the amount of US$8.4 billion, and a range of devastating human impacts.3 These human impacts – on health, livelihood, family/gender, and identity – are the subject of a separate research paper. 4
An uneasy truce set in after the worst of the violence receded, although contests between white farmers and Government continued through the Courts. As the extreme bias of the Zanu-PF packed Courts became clear, and as domestic legal remedies became exhausted by 2007, 5 one white farmer – William Michael Campbell, of Chegutu – took Zimbabwe’s land reform program to an international court: the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal. Campbell leveled three charges: that the land reform program was racist (against whites), that it was unconstitutional since Amendment 17 passed in 2005 prevented white farmers’ right to judicial appeal, and that due compensation has not been paid as required by law. In a hearing before the Tribunal in late March 2008, 73 other white farmers were successfully joined to the case, and all became covered by an interim relief order. The order required that the Zimbabwean Government halt the evictions and take no steps to interfere with peaceful residence and the beneficial use of the farms pending the outcome of a mass hearing set for May 28. During this period of uneasy truce, fissures surfaced in the ruling party over whether or not to allow the remaining white farmers keep their land, and the media reported coalitions of traditional leaders, new settlers and other members of local black rural communities petitioning Government to allow their white farmer neighbors to remain.
The Post-Election Period
This terrain imploded in the aftermath of the March 29, 2008 harmonized election. After a dizzying period when the public and media had little idea what was going on behind the scenes, it soon became evident that Zanu-PF hardliners had gained the upper hand. The upshot for the land question was that what had been a minority view to cleanse the country of all remaining white farmers became more salient. It was in this context that reference to a “final solution” began to be aired. In an address before a trade fair on April 25, Mugabe said: “Let the colonists know this is the final solution”. “The land reform programme under which thousands of Zimbabweans were allocated land taken from the white minority is the final solution to the land question and will never be reversed . . . We are simply claiming our birthright, defending our hard won sovereignty . . . Better all those who shake and quiver at every word of our colonial masters please know Zimbabwe will never be for sale . . . and will never be a colony again.”6
The fresh round of farm invasions intensified, justified in the state media by the spectre of former white farmers reported to be returning en masse from self-imposed exile to re-possess their farm properties in anticipation of an MDC victory that would restore the colonial order. Some reports went so far as to claim that white settlers were intimidating and inflicting violence against “visiting” and “innocent” war veterans.7 An intercepted radio message from PROPOL (police) aired on April 16 stated:
“It has come to the attention of this headquarters that there has been an influx of former white farmers in the country. These former white farmers are visiting farms and challenging current farm owners to return their property which they allege was unlawfully taken away from them. The former white farmers are also conducting meetings clandestinely with the intention of disrupting farming activities . . . Once seen, they should be arrested and detained forthwith for disrupting farming activities.”8
This communication is quite possibly connected to the subsequent arrest of Wayne Munro and three other white farmers in early May. Munro was arrested for shooting at and pepper spraying the crowd during the violent attack against him. Three other white farmers were arrested “after they were seen driving around” in a vehicle with allegedly “fake” registration plates and for weapons’ possession (i.e. violating the Firearms Act). The Herald reported that the “police would not allow any attempts to subvert the law in any part of the country” and quoted Didymus Mutasa, the Minister of State for National Security, Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, as warning that “by harassing new farmers, the white former commercial farmers were ‘playing with the tail of a lion.”9
Despite such blatant attempts to reverse victim and perpetrator, the reality is that Operation “Final Solution” has involved a violent war of attrition against much of the remaining white farming sector. As in the past, the focus of the campaign has been to make life intolerable for white farmers in order to get them to pack up and leave. Tactics have involved: the sadistic maiming of pets, farm animals and wildlife; death threats; theft or destruction of crops and equipment; and jambanja where the farm family is barricaded on the farm by a noisy and threatening group surrounding the perimeter for days, weeks, and in the case of Digby Nesbitt and his family, for four months. Although the overwhelming majority of victims of violent assault in the post-election period have been black farmer workers, new settlers, and communal dwellers,10 at least two white farmers have landed up in hospital as a result of assault at the hands of invaders. Both the intention and effect of this campaign has been to humiliate farmers and cause trauma, fear, and psychological stress.
Below are synopses of the stories of three white farmers who have endured disruptions in the post election period. 11
• John Borland, a white commercial farmer in Masvingo, has from early April been subject to severe intimidation and verbal abuse by a group of war veterans and youth militia. The invaders announced that they had come to take “their” land, cattle and equipment. Borland and his family were ordered to leave with one suitcase and “go back to the UK” (this despite the fact that Borland is a Zimbabwean citizen, as are 75% of displaced white farmers).12 They accused him of returning evicted white farmers to their farm. His horses have gone missing, the whole of the farm has been pegged, fencing stolen, gates left opened, and cattle from communal land brought in. Pungwes (political reorientation by the Youth Brigade and war veterans) are held nearly every night at a camp set up about 150 meters from the homestead, sometimes “attended” by as many as three hundred farm workers and communal dwellers. The farm staff was ordered not to do any more work for Borland, and eventually became so intimidated that, given the lack of police protection, they all resigned. Borland was then forced to provide his former staff with retrenchment packages, even though they had not been fired but had resigned under duress. The nightly pungwes continue and Borland is constantly hassled by the youth base commander for donations of meat, milk, firewood, even donations to Zanu-PF for t-shirts for the upcoming run-off election.
• Louis Fick, a white farmer in Chinhoyi, had all the locks to his farm removed and new ones replaced by the would-be beneficiary, Edward Mashiringwani, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank. His case has been widely publicized in the independent media, no doubt in large part due to justifiable concern over the cruelty on the part of the beneficiary in preventing the feeding of penned livestock (8,000 pigs, 14,000 crocodiles, and 2,000 cattle). For over a month, Fick has had access to his farm and livestock constantly blocked. Since the required daily feeding of livestock has been impossible, the Zimbabwe Society for the Protection against Cruelty to Animals (ZNSPCA) has attempted to intervene, to no avail.13 To date, 82 pigs and 28 crocodiles (as well as 42 crocodile hatchlings) have been found dead. Reports have been issued about terrible squeals being heard as mother pigs denied food for up to six days ate their piglets. When Mashiringwani gave Fick a three-day ultimatum to put in writing what he is prepared to give him, it became apparent that the starving of livestock was being used to gain leverage in negotiations to broker a deal to take over the farm.
• Paul Stidolph, a white farmer in Karoi, has been under siege since April 16th, when his farmhouse was invaded by armed and uniformed soldiers, acting on behalf of the would-be beneficiary, Major General Nick Dube. Although soldiers had been resident on the farm since October 2007, the Stidolph family was allowed to continue living in the farmhouse and operate a registered dairy. This accommodation ended after the election when, on April 8, Dube visited the farm and gave soldiers the order to evict. The Stidolphs were barricaded in their house by an angry crowd of about 100 people, and their son was beaten up. They were given 24 hours to vacate. Since the property is covered under the SADC interim relief order, Stidolph refused. At this point the situation deteriorated and the soldiers threatened to shoot their dogs. Stidolph and his wife retreated to the house with their dogs and locked themselves inside. The soldiers then brought hosepipes from the garden and starting pumping water under the doors in an effort to flood them out. The soldiers only retreated when Mrs. Stidolph put a pistol to her head and threatened to shoot herself dead before she would leave her home alive or see her dogs killed. The soldiers returned later to apologize, insisting they were ordered to do what they did and feared losing their jobs if they failed to carry out their orders. A few weeks later, on May 8, the Stidolph home was invaded again. They were forced to pack their belongings at gunpoint while much of their property was thrown out of the house and destroyed. One soldier told Stidolph that they were being evicted because General Dube and Minister Mutasa were angry they had taken their case to the SADC court.
The major new development this month has been farm disturbances and violence in the Chegutu district, with twenty farms reportedly seized in the province of Mashonaland West.14 Chegutu was quiet the previous month, certainly in part due to the fact that it is the area most closely associated with the SADC Tribunal case. Michael William Campbell’s farm is located there and a group known as the “Chegutu 13” was active in moving the case forward in 2007 before being joined by others in late March. In early May, groups of youth militia moved into the area. On instructions from the local Zanu-PF MP, they moved from door to door of all the farms to evict the farmers, despite the fact that they all enjoy interim relief from SADC. Local police have refused to take action, saying the matter is either “political” or “civil”, suggesting that reports of orders from “high up” that no farmers should receive police assistance in the present wave of farm evictions and violence are in all likelihood are true. When one farmer presented a copy of his interdict in order to stave off eviction, invaders retorted that they were not interested in “any paperwork”.15 It remains to be seen how the SADC Tribunal will respond to such open defiance of its orders by the Zimbabwean Government.
Conclusion
Renewed attacks on white commercial farmers are part and parcel of the more generalized campaign of intimidation and violence spearheaded by Mugabe’s regime in the aftermath of its electoral defeat in the first round. The US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGee, has called the situation a “humanitarian disaster” and released data that there are more than 30,000 displaced persons, 1,300 victims of violence, and 30 confirmed dead.16
In this context, there is some potential, although unlikely, that a turn toward racial violence will occur. A repeated theme in white Zimbabwean discourse is that race relations were on a good footing before the land invasions occurred. True or not, the actions of Government are intent on sowing conflict between white farmers and black settlers/workers. Propaganda is targeted to this purpose, one extreme case being a farm near Bulawayo where new farmers have been warned by Government that the white farmer is involved in an opposition plot to poison their livestock in order to push them off their newly acquired land. Various other mechanisms are employed, too, such as provoking farm workers to demand steep retrenchment packages or prohibiting them from working for white farmers under threat that their huts will be burnt down. There is always the potential that such stoking of racial conflict from above for political gain can take on a life of its own. If it does, it will be but one more aspect of the tragedy that is Zimbabwe under Mugabe’s rule.
_________
Amy E. Ansell, Bard College, [email protected]
Notes
1. International Crisis Group, Blood and Soil: Land, Politics and Conflict Prevention in Zimbabwe and South Africa, Africa Report No. 85, September 17, 2004, p. 31.
2 Ibid.
3 Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum and the Justice for Agriculture Trust [JAG] in Zimbabwe, “Adding Insult to Injury: A Preliminary Report on Human Rights Violations on Commercial Farms, 2000 to 2005”, June 2007; and Justice for Agriculture Trust [JAG] and the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe [GAPWUZ], “True Sons of the Spoil: Political Purge and Plunder on Zimbabwe’s Commercial Farms”, February 2008.
4 Amy E. Ansell, “Human Impacts: Case Studies of Displaced White Farmers in Contemporary Zimbabwe” (forthcoming).
5 These two claims are the subject of another paper of mine, “The State of Justice on Race and Land in Zimbabwe”, (forthcoming).
6 “No going back on land: President”, The Herald, April 26, p. 1.
7 “War veterans attacked, three farmers arrested”, The Herald, May 5, 2008, p. 1.
8 CFU, “Report on Post Election Farm Invasions and Disruptions”, May 2008, p. 10-11.
9 “War veterans attacked, three farmers arrested”, The Herald, May 5, 2008, p. 1.
10 The terrible violence being inflicted on black rural communities is both more severe and generalized than in the past. For a good treatment, see: The Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights, “Statement Concerning Escalating Cases of Organized Violence and Torture and of Intimidation of Medical Personnel”, May 8, 2008.
11 This information is taken from the April and May 2008 reports on post election farm invasions and disruptions compiled by the CFU.
12 Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, “Adding Insult to Injury: A Preliminary Report on Human Rights Violations on Commercial Farms, 2000 to 2005), June 2007, p. 1.
13 The former director of the ZNSPCA, Meryl Harrison, is credited with saving scores of animals from the invaded farms in the past and has a forthcoming book coming out on the subject.
14 Bernard Mpofu, “20 farms seized in Mash West”, Zimbabwe Independent, May 9, p. 1.
15 CFU, Report on Post Election Farm Invasions and Disruptions”, May 2008, p. 14.
16 These figures were announced at a USAID Partners Meeting in Harare on May 19, 2008.
By David Moore
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.
More importantly, it’s very difficult to stop pontificating from the public intellectual’s secular pulpit, and to cease from hoping against hope that something positively progressive might emerge from the rendering of Zimbabwe’s vicious rent-seeking élites (or ‘bureaucratic bourgeois’, to put a leftist slant on essentially the same process) nightmare. In the end, in response to many colleague’s criticism that I am much too optimistic about the Movement for Democratic Change’s capacity to pull the social democratic rabbit from the evil magician’s hat, I decided to call myself an ‘optimum pessimist’ in an attempt to marry Gramsci’s epigrammatic utterance about the modalities of combining intellect (pessimistic – or simply rigorously realistic) and will (optimistic – people can and do create positive change together). Ultimately, Marx’s ambiguities about people making history only amidst the conditions of historical context they didn’t choose are the only truths. Zimbabwe’s primitive accumulation with its racial twist creates hell for those in the left-leaning pews in the MDC’s and civil society’s broad churches.2 What will emerge from its purgatory is uncertain – and may well be decided outside it borders – but not inevitable. One can only chronicle the positive sides of agency alongside their more successful negative parallels.
To be true to the intent of this project rather than alter the articles in line with retrospective theoretical or narrative rectitude they are reproduced in their entirety. The odd mistake of the moment and an inclination to insert bracketed comments on what I now think I really meant to say to clear up analytical presumptions or what historical changes flowed from that moment, or to insert what the zealous editors spiked, will be kept to a minimum of footnotes. I think the articles tend to capture the moments and their historical context. A few words explaining the context of the articles will preface each selection.
The first piece, ‘Todays’ “imperialists were those who nurtured Mugabe’, tries to present some historical context to the hysterical debates raging now (inspired to a great degree by South Africa’s president’s attempts to invoke pan-Africanism to justify his malign neglect and ‘quiet diplomacy’ vis a vis his neighbour) about whether or not politics in Zimbabwe is driven by an ‘imperialist’ agenda. The hidden agenda in this piece, which was instigated as a response to ZANU-PF’s 2004 effort to deny all NGOs in Zimbabwe any foreign funding, is to say to the strident anti-imperialists: ‘so what if the MDC is partially funded by the Brits and the Yanks: so was Mugabe!’ The point is, the party must have a strategy for the use of these resources so, as Mugabe put it in the early sixties ‘you don’t end up inside the tiger’ of foreign funding (Tim Scarnecchia picked up that wonderful line, from the State Department’s record of its Salisbury representative’s interview with Robert Mugabe, in which he said, in response to a question about the need for foreign help, that it was necessary3). A couple of versions of this article, changing as the evidence accumulated year by year as the 30 year rule unfolds in the Kew Gardens archives, were published in the Zimbabwe Independent. A longer version of the 2004 article appeared in the Review of African Political Economy.4
‘Todays’ “imperialists” were those who nurtured Mugabe’
Sunday Independent (Johannesburg, South Africa) January 20, 2008Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe claims to have been locked in conflict with all things British for a long time. Celebrating the EU’s decision to welcome him to the Lisbon summit with African heads of state late last year, he gloated at the “disintegration” of Britain’s “sinister campaign … to isolate us”. At the September 2007 UN General Assembly meeting, he declared Zimbabwe “won its independence … after a protracted war against British colonial imperialism which denied us human rights and democracy”. Mugabe said that British colonialism was – and is – “the most visible form of [Western] control” over southern Africa, the negation of “our sovereignties”. He decried Messrs Bush, Blair and Brown’s “sense of human rights [which] precludes our people’s right to their God-given resources”.
Yet investigation of Mr Mugabe’s history with the British ‘colonialists’ shows he was eager to co-operate with them. He embraced their notions of human rights and justice. Archival evidence shows he was close to these ‘sinister’ forces, in 1970 writing personal letters and telegrams from Salisbury’s gaol to Prime Minister Harold Wilson to support his wife’s stay in England. The British also helped him eliminate a group of radical young guerrilla soldiers threatening his precarious hold on the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) later in that decade.
In 1967 Mugabe’s wife Sarah, often called Sally, received a scholarship to study secretarial science in London whilst her husband was imprisoned. The Ariel Foundation was her sponsor. Founded by Kenneth Kaunda’s one-time advisor Dennis Grennan and funded largely by the tobacco enriched Ditchley Foundation, Ariel was devoted to introducing African nationalists to western politicians and capitalists. Mrs. Mugabe needed special authorisation from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office for her studies. The FCO telegram to Accra (where she, a Ghanaian, was residing whilst her husband was in jail) authorising her entry permit says Ariel “is well-known to us”. In scribbles, it asks: “would you wish to have this on your files? If not, it can be destroyed.”
Mrs. Mugabe studied for the next two years, while also working as the director’s personal assistant and a dress-making teacher at the Africa Centre, in Covent Garden [IMAGE 3]. However, by the end of 1969 Home Secretary Mervyn Rees wanted her out. Mrs. Mugabe’s marriage to Robert did not allow her citizenship in the illegally independent state; thus the British owed her none of the protection due to the pariah’s residents. The Home Secretary told her to return home to Ghana. Grennan, in whose home Mrs. Mugabe resided – ‘”she was like a sister to my children”, he said in an August 2007 interview – mounted a petition campaign for her to stay. Colin Legum’s Observer articles helped too: to examples of white Rhodesians in England with dubious legality, Legum suggested things might have been different if Mrs. Mugabe had shared Mr. Smith’s race. The petition garnered nearly 400 parliamentarians’ signatures. Victory ensued. Legalities notwithstanding Mrs Mugabe could stay.
Perhaps Robert Mugabe’s telegram and letter to the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson helped too. His and Sally’s entreaties to various ‘imperialists’ indicated their willingness to utilise empire’s services. Hoping humanitarian suasion would dissolve legalities, they employed the moral imperative of human rights discourse.
On 23 February 1970 Mrs. Mugabe wrote to Royal African Society director Maurice Foley, who had been importuned by Ariel Foundation’s executive secretary Anthony Hughes to take up her case. Sally Mugabe wanted Foley’s advice on how to “touch the hearts of the decision makers”. Hughes had opined to Foley that Mrs. Mugabe’s case was “exceptional” due to “human and political factors”: her trials and tribulations had brought her to a “breakdown”. In any case the British state should take on responsibility for the residents of a rogue state. “Surely”, he wrote, “Britain has a moral duty to alleviate, not worsen, her unhappiness”. In a letter to MP Bernard Braine, Hughes refers to “Robert” as if they were mutual friends. He reminds Braine that “for … personal reasons” the Ariel Foundation thought it “appropriate to bring Mrs. Mugabe to Britain in order to help her obtain further skills …”
Robert Mugabe’s June 8 1970 telegram, addressed directly to Harold Wilson at 10 Downing Street “appeal[s that] you recognise her status and grant residence permit till my release from political detention”. A three page letter follows a day later, documenting the case’s history. Mugabe pleas on legal grounds, but ends with “more than that”: i.e. the British state’s “moral responsibilities towards […] persons in my circumstances [and] their wives […]”.He closes with a request, “Sir, that you personally exercise your mind on the case … so that justice is done to my wife and myself”. The postscript follows: “I regret that the consequences of my writing this letter will inevitably be a surcharge on you, Sir …”
Mugabe’s and his interlocutors’ language is laden with the human rights discourse so derided in his speeches of today and used with such slipperiness by the ‘west’. Mugabe’s words are Victorian and moralistic, pleading yet almost secure in assuming idealistic yet rational and middle class action. His appeal to justice goes beyond the letter of the law and the strictures of sovereignty. It’s no wonder that his London friends lauded his cool intellect and asceticism (in contrast to Joshua Nkomo spending all their money on women and drink, Grennan said).
Six years later, in the aftermath of national chairman Herbert Chitepo’s assassination and ZANU’s leadership vacuum, Robert Mugabe’s climb to the top of the party’s hierarchy seemed threatened by a group of young and radical guerrilla soldiers. The Zimbabwean People’s Army (ZIPA) had taken the liberation struggle back from the hands of those who had engineered a ‘détente’ process intended to create a pliant state to replace Ian Smith’s, and had come close to uniting Zimbabwe’s rival nationalist parties to boot. Archival evidence suggests the British helped Mugabe win this battle against Zimbabwe’s youthful soldiers. ZIPA was resisting going to Henry Kissinger’s Geneva conference behind one leader alone. They supported a united front.
As arrangements were being made for the conference, on September 29 1976 Minister of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Ted Rowlands telegrammed home from his Gaborone meeting with Joshua Nkomo, leader of Zimbabwe’s ‘other’ liberation movement, that “Mugabe was … controlled by the young men … in Mozambique.” The British were worried that they were a bit too radical for a conference designed to usher in a Zimbabwe compatible with their hopes for their last colony. It would be essential to convince the “young men” controlling Mugabe – who could, as the British ambassador in Maputo put it “turn out to be African Palestinians” to lay down their arms and go to the conference. One way to do this would be to offer their host – Samora Machel of Mozamibique – some assistance if he co-operated. Sure enough, an interest-free loan of £15 million (in two parts) was arranged and Machel told ZIPA’s leaders to go to Geneva. On their return, he agreed with Mugabe’s request to jail them. Mugabe was no longer under their control, and went on to consolidate his leadership of ZANU. The rest, as they say, is history – a history for which Mugabe has much to thank the British, who managed to create their own form of ‘blowback’.
Unlike a real journalist, it was impossible for me to marshal the intellectual energy to write during the election period. What I could notice when I had time to talk to Zimbabweans not caught up in political parties, the charade of election observation missions and the politically parallel processes of ‘civil society’ organizations was the intense faith – indeed certainty – held by 95% of the people I spoke to that Mugabe would go this time. There were scores of examples of the will to see ‘change’. A woman police officer told me that “God will help us to democracy; he does not work for only one man”. On the voting day a soldier on leave in Mbare refused a call-up to the Casspir base because he “hadn’t voted yet”. It was a good thing the colonel on the other end of the cell-phone couldn’t see his red finger; and I wondered, had he voted once in the barracks and once in his household’s ward? A peasant Headlands trekking to Security Secretary Didymus Mutasa’s rally, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of the man who once said Zimbabwe only needs six million people told us, when asked if he would vote for Mutasa, “what’s on my T-shirt is not in my heart: my vote is my secret!”
Within a day of the March 29 election Stephen Chan’s young and older friends emanating from his association with the country since 1980 text-messaged and telephoned him what are probably the most accurate results: a 56% victory for the MDC in the parliamentary race.5 The following article was conceived in the glory of that moment, when a few days after Chan’s poll the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission announced the official results of the parliamentary elections. The third article arrived at the Toronto Globe and Mail about a week after the Movement for Democratic Change announced – inaccurately – its 50.3% victory. The day after that announcement, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network estimated a tally of around 48-43 in favour of Tsvangirai. Away back in third place was the reluctant of-but-not-quite-in ZANU-PF Simba Makoni. He was often named ‘Chicken’ or ‘Henry Albert’ by his colleagues to highlight his extreme reticence to help the South Africans challenge the ruling party from any source except the working class rooted MDC, and to contrast with his lionic nomenclature. Whilst his former colleagues in ZANU-PF are establishing military rule by terror Makoni’s silence makes him seem complicit.
Make Mugabe an offer he can’t refuse: The country’s civil society groups need help from South Africa if civil war is to be averted
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada) April 9 2008The text message was brief, yet it summed up years of struggle: “WE HV WON.” It was sent to me last Wednesday by Tamuka Chirimambowa, the battered and exiled University of Zimbabwe student leader, probably the youngest man to contest a Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) primary. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission had recognized the parliamentary victory of his MDC-Tsvangirai party - something the commission’s predecessors should have done eight years ago.
Nothing, in my 30 years of fascination with Zimbabwean politics, has moved me more than that moment.
With the 99 seats - fewer than what we believe to be the real total, but not bad for a corrupt commission - it seemed as if a decade of hard work had finally paid off. Robert Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, was awarded an inflated 97 seats in the legislature, but the commission clearly felt it could not manufacture more than that without negative reactions in the streets and around the world. Even the seasoned vote-riggers and crafty counters could no longer stem the tide of a people’s victory over an economically disastrous and twisted form of crony capitalism.
What the commission was able to do was manipulate the vote tally close enough to the wire to make it look as if ZANU-PF would come close to a majority of votes cast, rather than a minority of single-member constituency seats, to prepare the way for a presidential runoff in 21 days.
In all likelihood, the opposition really won these votes, as it has in elections since 2000, but with ZANU-PF, elections are run on alternative grounds.
Now everything hinges on the presidential runoff and the trade-offs preceding it.
Zimbabweans still had reason to be happy: A decade of stolen elections appeared to be overturned and the corrupted counters had to admit it. By the weekend, however, pessimism returned as ZANU-PF threatened to postpone the runoff for up to 90 days and announced a recounting of the presidential poll.
The MDC’s efforts to get the courts to declare a real count were refused. Displays of authoritarian force - arresting foreign journalists, raiding the MDC’s media headquarters, invading more white-owned commercial farms - by the president’s special troops and the easily hired “war vets” did not bode well.
In 2005, even though Mr. Mugabe won the parliamentary elections, the government carried out Operation Murambatsvina, (meaning Drive Out the Trash), a clearing of urban slums where many people had voted for the opposition. More than two million people were uprooted and the livelihoods of more than 700,000 destroyed. No one wants to see this repeated, especially since this time, the violence would spread beyond the cities to the country, because even there Mr. Mugabe has been rejected.
The ZANU-PF core is not only rotten: It is split. If the BBC can web-cast images of last Friday’s politburo meeting, it’s clear that those pretending loyalty to the president are fickle. They are selling views of the Last Supper for a pittance. With the top layers of its military and security forces split down the middle, and a majority of the junior ranks opposing a crackdown on the opposition, Zimbabwe could easily fall into civil war.
Historically, when ZANU-PF has been confronted with a leadership vacuum, it has taken months of bloodshed, combined with regional and international action, to find a new leader. Anyone familiar with the party’s mid-seventies crisis will know there is little hope of peaceful accommodation now. Then, national chairman Herbert Chitepo was assassinated, a group of militant young leftist unifiers and their supporters were eliminated and a threatening subtribal clique was later tucked away in pits and Mozambique’s prison camps. That paved the way for Robert Mugabe’s pedestal of power. Once in control, he wiped out the remnants of Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African Peoples Union, a group allied with Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.
Only one thing stands in the way of this happening again: Zimbabwe’s vigorous civil society movements. From the workers’ unions in the MDC to the intellectuals in the National Constitutional Assembly and the vast array of human-rights organizations, these people deserve credit for the push for democratization. In their own way, they match the youthful zeal and analytical acumen of the young guerrillas who led ZANU-PF in the mid-1970s. And they are not as vulnerable as their predecessors, because they can escape Mr. Mugabe’s reach in global civil society and they man crucial spaces in the Zimbabwean political economy.
But what they need now is for the regional power, South Africa, to wield its influence and help them finish the job. It did so in the 1970s, when the apartheid regime of John Vorster pushed out Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, and more recently, when the ANC provided succour to Mr. Mugabe and stymied the MDC.
Yet South Africa appears to be backing off from the straw that could break the straining ZANU-PF’s back. Does it worry about African politicians’ worship of sovereignty, that fig leaf for naked emperors who have been in power too long? Does it not see the way of new leaders such as Tanzanian and AU President Jakaya Kikwete, who worked so effectively in Kenya a few weeks ago?
Why cajole the worst of the Mugabe mafioso? Why not simply use one finger - or one breath - to topple this wavering regime? All it would take would be an offer that could not be refused.
Mr. Mugabe, Reserve Bank chairman Gideon Gono, recalcitrant military leaders and backers such as arms-dealer John Bredenkamp could be given one-way tickets to the Bahamas, where some spent Christmas holidays.6 This was done with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a much nicer man who moved from Haiti to Pretoria, and it could be completed with much less bloodshed.
The possibilities are boundless at this moment - but if it passes, if this possibility for progressive and democratic governance does not happen, many will view the South African state as driven more by sympathy with dictators who abuse the discourse of pan-Africanism than by the true democrats who seek to lead the people.
As the above words indicate, the joy was short-lived. ZEC took nearly a month to massage the presidential poll to its 47.9% for the MDC, 43.2% for Mugabe, necessitating a runoff to reach a 50%+1 winner. This was subsequently set for June 27: already, at the time of writing (May 21, 2008), thousands have been run out of their homes, tortured, and nearly forty MDC supporters killed. In the meantime the Zimbabwe Liberator’s Forum, a group of war veterans whose aims are diametrically apposed to those who have appropriated that label in the service of ZANU-PF, whose leadership is composed of the young men who so spooked Mugabe in 1977 (as discussed parenthetically above in ‘Todays’ “imperialists” were those who nurtured Mugabe’7) held a press conference advising the parliamentarians to take control. The made the front page of the Cape Times thanks to journalist Peta Thornycroft’s efforts.
David Sanders, a Zimbabwean medical doctor who in the seventies joined ZANU-PF’s refugee camps in Mozambique and now works in Cape Town directing the University of the Western Cape’s public health programme, wrote asking me to help him write an article remembering Mugabe’s history vis a vis the ‘left’ in Zimbabwe and as an entrenched authoritarian. I was half way there in my attempts to persuade the Mail and Guardian, South Africa’s intellectuals’ spreadsheet, to publish something to this effect. One hour late for editor Ferial Haffajee’s deadline, it went to the Cape Times. I also sent it to the Toronto Globe and Mail, where it ended up on the online edition. This resulted in an online discussion later that week, in which I had to respond to questions and comments such as ‘Mugabe was always a commie/thug’, ‘don’t many Africans wish they were still under colonial rule?’ and ‘how long will it take South Africa to reach Zimbabwe’s condition?’ Many of these questions made me wonder about the fate of the Canadian educational system in my absence.
History lessons for Zimbabwe’s opposition: Talk of vote rigging, international intervention and governments-in-exile merely buys time for the dictatorship
DAVID MOORE AND DAVID SANDERS
Special to Globe and Mail Update April 17, 2008 at 7:18 PM EDTOnly Robert Mugabe and his cronies benefit if Zimbabwe’s deepening, desperate impasse remains. The concatenation of vote rigging, international intervention and talk of governments-in-exile merely buys time for the dictatorship.
As the regime’s sell-by date lingers, Zimbabwe rots. Its whirling decline and rocketing repression bring more brutality, nastiness and pestilence to all but the parasitic elite. Any government of “national unity” – the South African and international community’s mutual mirage – will fail unless it encompasses the popular will demonstrated by the Movement for Democratic Change’s fourth victory since real electoral races began in 2000.
A unity government will only consolidate Zimbabwe’s exchange-rate-rich bourgeoisie. Progressive elements of the MDC and civil society can either accept this blight or halt Mugabeism by other means. Some historical lessons might enable the means and ends to a better prospect.
Zimbabwe’s political past tells us that Mr. Mugabe has answered challenges with repression for 32 years now. Back then, he was opposed by constellations resembling today’s democratic impulses and radical projects. There were elements of civil society, younger generations, party-building efforts, radical democracy, pushes to national unity – even factions of the military. If the democrats against him now forget this history, they’re myopic. If they remember its ideological and political elements but ignore the military, they are utopian. Coercion, consent and negotiation were wrapped up in the war of liberation. The Zimbabwean state’s current heavy securitization means the military role still cannot be ignored.
In 1975, efforts by South Africa and Zambia to create a government-in-waiting of national unity among factions of Zimbabwe’s national liberation movement (for which Mr. Mugabe was released from Rhodesia’s prisons) failed. Zimbabwean African National Union national chairman Herbert Chitepo was assassinated and the party disintegrated.
A group of young Marxists filled the vacuum, restarting the liberation war. Resembling some of today’s civil-society activists, they tried to unify liberation armies, establish innovative educational structures and work with progressive regional power-brokers. However, in 1976, Mr. Mugabe travelled to Mozambique to join the eastern flank of the liberation struggle. His move to the top culminated in his alliance with British and U.S. foreign-policy makers who sought to stem the rise of Zimbabwean radicalism. By early 1977, those attempting to unify the armies of ZANU and ZAPU – the Zimbabwean African People’s Union, led by Joshua Nkomo – were dumped in Mozambique’s prisons at Mr. Mugabe’s instigation. Hundreds of young supporters were brutally incarcerated in ZANU training camps.
Although these militarily and ideologically savvy young Turks trained thousands of recruits in the Tanzanian and Mozambican camps, they failed to make strong alliances with the core of their army’s security forces. Mr. Mugabe brought the leaders of the military’s old guard to his side after their release from Zambia’s prisons, where they were held under suspicion of having murdered Mr. Chitepo. This was the undoing of the new united army, ZIPA. In 1978, more “dissident” cadres were tortured and imprisoned in Mozambique. After independence, an assault on ZAPU in Matabeleland by ZANU’s notorious 5th Brigade logically followed. As many as 20,000 were killed between 1982 and 1986.
In 2000, ZIPA’s core reappeared in the Zimbabwe Liberators’ Platform, genuine war veterans countering the many posers enrolled in ZANU-PF’s land-invasion strategy against the MDC. The veterans’ initial activist inclinations were resurrected as they joined the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, which was temporarily paralyzed by secret police infiltrators.
Now back in action, it urged last week that parliament be immediately sworn in to oversee the electoral process’s next stage. It called for genuine liberation war fighters and security commanders to “uphold their constitutional duty to respect the outcome of the election as the genuine sovereign expression of the popular will of Zimbabweans. To act otherwise would be a treasonable offence for which they will stand accountable and answerable jointly and severally.”
This statement echoes ZIPA’s recognition of the importance of the fusion of military, civil and political fronts. Now, civil society and party activists must look to the soldiers and police, most of whom are from the working and middle classes. They suffer along with their families, and most do not support Mr. Mugabe – the forces meting out the current repression are paramilitary and ragged “war vets,” not regular troops.
It may be that peace-loving people, including intellectuals, will find it necessary to resist by force the violence of the Mugabe thugs. In any event, the task at hand is to persuade the fusion of progressive fronts to take forward the process begun in 1975.
Progressive Zimbabweans must make strategic alliances and maintain the mobilization. The next stage is just over the horizon.
David Moore teaches politics and development studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and has been researching and writing on Zimbabwean politics since 1984. David Sanders, a Zimbabwean, heads the School of Public Health University of the Western Cape.
Finally, as the ‘results’ of the presidential poll were about to be announced – when, as someone rather close to the process told me, the ZEC counters told the generals “we just can’t rig any more” – the acting news editor of Durban’s Sunday Tribune asked me to write 900 words on ‘what might happen if (or was it ‘when’?) the MDC wins?’ The following words spilled out whilst waiting for a plane that was three hours later than expected because South Africa’s flagship airline had forgotten to process my online ticket. They may be too optimistic about the party that has been in waiting for nearly a decade, and they are in retrospect, too pessimistic about the role of the trade unionist left in the party, which actually has an impressive calculation by which the MDC will be measured if it ever gains the state: let us hope, though, that they blend to merge the extremes of hope and scepticism (and that they don’t justify the maltreatment of the Welshman Ncube faction just because it consists of ‘right-wingers). The next weeks and months will forge a new Zimbabwe; let us anticipate it won’t tumble to depths from which it will be impossible to reach a new surface.
‘Zimbabwe offers a lesson on the perils of hero worship’
Sunday Tribune, (Durban, South Africa), May 4 2008
If Robert Mugabe’s legacy has performed any service to humanity it’s this lesson: never hero-worship a politician or party. How many people – especially in and around Zimbabwe – are wondering ‘why did we ever support Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union?’, much as with many fellow-travellers through history: why Stalin, why Mao, why Pol Pot? How could we have ever aided and abetted these tyrants? In Africa, the broad churches of liberation movements ask the same questions as their heroes fade into normalcy. So too for those with high hopes of liberal democratisation: what happened to Zambia’s (Fredrick) Chiluba? Kenya’s (Mwai) Kibaki? Ethiopia’s (Meles) Zenawi? These truths and the questions they raise need application to the prospect of Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change in power as much as to any political party anywhere.
Then as now, the complex contradictions of Africa’s political economy transmogrified to the political scene will keep observers bemused. Civil society’s struggles to maintain both liberal and socio-economic justice agendas will continue. Social movements will luta continua against looting continua as many freedom-loving political preachers turn into an ostentatious – potentially brutal – predatory elite. This much is certain in Zimbabwe’s new dispensation.
Yet an MDC victory – if not directly with the 50.3% tally it claims, but with a run-off, a Government of National Unity, or both – will mean a real shift in Zimbabwean and regional politics. If the Southern African Development Community, the African Union, and/or the United Nations meet Tsvangirai’s demand to observe a presidential run-off in minute detail across all phases (with armed monitors – the ZANU-PF hawks in the Joint Operations Command know no other language) MDC victory is certain. Already, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has told the hawks that the ballots can be rigged no further than 47.9% for the MDC to 43.2% for ZANU-PF. The victory of ballots-on-the-polling stations’ walls – Thabo Mbeki’s legacy to regional democracy – has guaranteed that. The next step? Stop the already rampant pre-run-off repression. Could Mbeki cease that fire and save his reputation?
If this victory transpires without dilution through a South African cloned government of national unity, it will be the culmination of nearly a decade of struggle: a long time for a free and fair election. Even a GNU on the real victor’s terms, rather than a watered-down Pretoria model, will be a triumph for a party that has suffered three and a half stolen elections, hundreds of murders and beatings, and treason trials. During this vicious interregnum it has avoided the excesses of internal fracturing scarring Zimbabwe’s political history. Its reconciliatory ethos will be sorely tested against the desire for retribution in the days to come.
Yet critical democrats and what’s left of the ‘left’ won’t forget a long list: too eager collaboration with white commercial farmers’ chequebooks, the ‘imperialist’s’ diplomacy, and Orange revolutionists; dithering to boycott elections past; a too-slack security apparatus rampant with Central Intelligence Organisation goons; the constitutionally flawed and violence-prone split with the Welshman Ncube group, ostensibly over entering the late 2005 Senatorial elections, but with ominous ethnic overtones; the too-powerful ‘kitchen-cabinet’; the running to economic libertarian think-tanks for policy approval; and too much faith in SADC, the AU, and other international bodies while civil society and party mobilisation withered on their vines. Memories will linger of MDC inaction during mid-2005’s Operation Murambvatsina, when hundreds of thousands of urban dwellers were bulldozed homeless.
However, they can’t ignore the MDC’s union and radical human rights roots, the vigorous and continuing debate on social democratic vs. liberal economic policies, a slow but sure move to account for rural Zimbabwe, and the precipice facing any move from relying on international peace negotiators to taking to the streets. The former means too much reliance on outside help while the latter meant facing ZANU-PF’s guns and torture chambers. The MDC has acted with remarkable care on all these political and economic fronts. Furthermore, the reunification with once student-firebrand Arthur Mutambara, who in 2006 took up leadership of the departed Ncube faction, with Tsvangirai is a portent of good things to come. If Simba Makoni would move there too, more hope would kindle. The MDC’s fracturing has proved to be much less horrible than similar moments in ZANU’s history: remember the 1975 Lusaka assassination of National Chairman, Herbert Chitepo and the subsequent elimination of leftist and, later, more ethnically oriented, ‘dissidents’. Tsvangirai has never threatened an axe against the disharmonious, as did Mugabe on his rise to power.
Much will swing, however, on how the MDC negotiates as the run-off looms. Will it make a GNU deal with ‘doves’ in ZANU-PF’s cracked army-party-state: will the Gukurahundi veterans heading the JOC persuade the MDC of new-found virtue and avoid the Hague? Will the MDC’s moral purity – “no deal with the bloodied crony-capitalists!” – result in another vicious expression of lost ZANU-PF legitimacy? Will its hurried flights to Addis, New York, Accra, and Dar es Salaam – the latter where, ironically, ZANU-PF and Mugabe gained their historical succour – pay off or will global realpolitik leave Zimbabwe’s aspirations for smooth democracy foundering where they started in 1998? Following Kenya’s election aftermath – will its 1,500 dead reduce the Zimbabwean toll? – and Mbeki’s increasing isolation whilst the democrats begin to outnumber the sovereigntists continent-wide, modest optimism is not misplaced. Speed is essential, though: remember the glacial global crawl that left millions of Rwandan (Tutsis in Rwanda first, Hutus in Zaire later) to genocide? The next few weeks will be delicate: a compromised GNU for ‘peace’ versus a full pursuit of democracy; meaningful international intervention or fiddling while Zimbabweans die.
If the MDC can pull off a real victory amidst these tensions the new transition will start with a lot in its favour. Civil society can then push agendas beyond the travails of economic and political ‘adjustments’, to a world with alternatives. Much hinges on the next few days.
__________
David Moore, Economic History and Development Studies
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Durban
South Africa
Notes
1. My most relevant articles and chapters are: ‘The Ideological Formation of the Zimbabwean Ruling Class,’ Journal of Southern African Studies, 17, 3 (September 1991), 472-95; ‘Is the Land the Economy and the Economy the Land? Primitive Accumulation in Zimbabwe,’ Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 19, 2 (July 2001), 253-66; ‘Zimbabwe’s Triple Crisis: Primitive Accumulation, Nation-State Formation and Democratisation in the Age of Neo-Liberal Globalisation,’ African Studies Quarterly, 7, 2-3 (Winter 2003), 35-47; ‘Marxism and Marxist Intellectuals in Schizophrenic Zimbabwe: How Many Rights for Zimbabwe’s Left? A Comment,’ Historical Materialism, 12, 4 (December 2004), 405-25; ‘“When I am a Century Old:” Why Robert Mugabe Won’t Go,’ Roger Southall & Henning Melber, eds., Legacies of Power: Leadership Change and Former Presidents in Africa. Cape Town and Uppsala, HSRC Press and Nordic Africa Institute, 2005, 120-150; “‘Intellectuals” Interpreting Zimbabwe’s Primitive Accumulation: Progress to Market Civilisation?’ Safundi, 8, 2 (April 2007), 199-222; and ‘Coercion, Consent, Context: Operation Murambatsvina and ZANU-PF’s Illusory Quest for Hegemony’, Maurice Vambe, ed., Zimbabwe: the Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina, Harare: Weaver Press, 2008.
2. To clear up the contradictions of war-torn Africa Christopher Cramer’s Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries, London: Hurst & Company, 2006 (the queasier American publishers have called it Violence in Developing Countries: War, Memory, Progress, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007) is highly recommended. Therein he changes Gramsci’s notion of ‘war of position’ to see class struggle in action through war: it is re-invented to mean not only the battle for ideas in bourgeois civil society but fighting for places amidst the shifting hierarchies of accumulation processes in violently transforming social structures. In Zimbabwe and South Africa these processes are linked, more than Cramer might admit, to efforts for the nascent ruling classes to misuse the legitimating narratives of successful wars of liberation to bolster their causes: thus the ideological dimension remains a component key at least for these rulers’ and their ‘organic’ intellectuals.
3. Timothy Scarnecchia, The Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence in Zimbabwe: Harare and Highfield, 1940-1964 (University of Rochester Press, 2008), 112.
4. ‘Unmasking ZANU-PF Hypocrisy about NGOs,’ Zimbabwe Independent, October 29, 2004; ‘Exposing Mugabe of the Past’, Zimbabwe Independent ,December 14, 2007; ‘ZANU-PF and the Ghosts of Foreign Funding,’ Review of African Political Economy, 103 (March 2005), 156-6.2
5. Stephen Chan, ‘Zimbabwe’s tense countdown’, New Statesman, April 3 2008; Chan, ‘Exit Mugabe’, Prospect Magazine, 145, April 2008. Chan is very well informed of the inner workings of the diplomatic world.
6. Bredenkamp, once captain of Rhodesia’s rugby team and sanctions buster for Ian Smith, now holds a number of farms in Zimbabwe among other economic activities. He tracked down my email address and sent me a letter denying he was a Mugabe ‘backer’. He said in 2006 he had tried to broker a deal between the MDC and ZANU-PF, and recommended I call a journalist and a Zimbabwean politician to verify his claims. Neither person could back him up.
7 ZIPA’s history is discussed in my ‘Democracy, Violence and Identity in the Zimbabwean War of National Liberation: Reflections from the Realms of Dissent,’ Canadian Journal of African Studies, 29, 3 (Dec. 1995), 375-402 and ‘The Zimbabwe People’s Army: Strategic Innovation or More of the Same?’ Soldiers and the Zimbabwean Liberation War, Ngwabi Bhebe & Terence Ranger, eds., London: James Currey, 1995, 73-86.
By Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Down with Tsvangirai
Down with his wife and children
Down with his dogs
Down with his cups!
(Robert Mugabe)1
Introduction
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.
Zimbabwe is suffering from a chronic disease which John Saul correctly diagnosed as that of ‘liberation without democracy’ and Sipho Seepe described as a disease of ‘legitimacy without morality.’2 Understood more broadly, this is a problem of disconnection of the ‘democratic question’ from the ‘national question’ in post-liberation societies. The situation is further compounded by what Richard Werbner termed ‘anthropology of memory and the making of political subjectivities.’3 This relates to what Henning Melber terms ‘the mystification of liberators’ that has given birth to the problem of ‘liberation war credentials’ as the sole criteria for legitimate participation in politics and qualification for the highest political office in Zimbabwe.4 The roots of the current political stalemate in Zimbabwe that deepened following the elections of the 29th of March 2008 are to be found in this complex politics. Addressing the nation on the eve of the country’s 28th independence anniversary Robert Mugabe still had the audacity to state that:
We, not the British, established democracy based on one person one vote, democracy which rejected racial or gender discrimination and upheld human rights and religious freedom.5
This statement was ironic because Mugabe was claiming to have introduced democracy in Zimbabwe amidst a political stalemate in which an unprecedented delay in realising the results of presidential poll of the 29th of March 2008 were was plunging the country into further crisis and national despair. The government’s commitment to the principles of one person one vote as the basis of political legitimacy was also being questioned. Mugabe also claimed that the democracy they introduced rejected racial discrimination amidst an environment in which nationalism was being rendered in an openly racist manner since 1997.
This article deploys a combination of historical analysis of the tradition of liberation and discourse analysis of post-29th March 2008 political statements, press releases and messages on the 28th anniversary of independence in its endeavour reveal how the liberation has bequeathed an undemocratic culture on Zimbabwe. The current stalemate reveals how ZANU-PF remains entrenched within the traditional ‘nationalist-continuist’ paradigm that has never been amenable to the imperatives of democracy, human rights, constitutionalism and legalism. On the other hand, the MDC is claiming to be fighting for the restoration of the democratic culture that has been removed by ZANU-PF from the national agenda. The situation becomes even more complex when both ZANU-PF and MDC continue to struggle over agency revolving over who represents the authentic progressive agenda in the country. Within this competition, democracy, human rights and the national liberation struggle provide the ideological resources for the major political actors to attack each other and to solicit for political support.
The national and democracy questions in the liberation struggle
Frantz Fanon in his widely read book The Wretched of the Earth analysed what he termed the pitfalls of national consciousness and revealed internal contradictions and structural limits to emancipation inherent in anti-colonial resistance and organised liberation movements. He went further to argue that:
The national government, if it wants to be national, ought to govern by the people and for the people, for the outcasts and by outcasts. No leader, however valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because consciousness and sovereign men dwell therein.6
With specific reference to Zimbabwe, it took a long time for scholars to abandon celebratory analysis of the liberation struggle that included hagiographies and the popular studies of peasant consciousness.7 Even in the midst of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by ZANU-PF and Mugabe in the 1980s, scholars and the international community remained silent and continued to pile praises on the Zimbabwe government as a successful transition story. Just two years into independence, the Zimbabwe government under Mugabe deployed the Fifth Brigade, a North Korean trained military outfit that was answerable to the prime minister and operated outside the normal national military structures. This army was highly politicised and tribally aligned to the majority Shona group. The violent behaviour of this army in Matabeleland and the Midlands regions left over twenty-thousand civilians dead and many others disappeared. This was the first instance that indicated that the pre-independence tradition of violence was being carried over to the postcolonial era.8 The state-orchestrated violence that enveloped the country between 2000 and today is not different from that which took place in Matabeleland and is even better than what happened to the Ndebele in the period between 1980 and 1987.9
At the forefront of the departure from celebratory approaches to the liberation struggle was Norma Kriger’s breaking work on Zimbabwean national liberation war that emphasised differentiation within the peasantry along the lines lineage, age, gender and wealth as determinants in engagement with guerrilla war. More importantly, Kriger exploded the traditional approaches that created the impression of monolithic, shared cultural nationalist ideology that was popular among peasant and introduced the neglected issues of violence and coercion rather than persuasion.10 At the time of its publication, Kriger’s book did not receive many positive reviews as it was considered too harsh on the nationalist struggle and for ignoring issues of persuasion, compliance, and voluntary participation in the nationalist struggle.11 Notwithstanding the fact that Kriger might have generalised a particular district (Mutoko) experience of nationalism and guerrilla war for the whole country, her work was the earliest that rang the bell about the authoritarian, militaristic and violent strand of Zimbabwean nationalism that is today creating the crisis the country finds itself. Many other critical studies have emerged since the 1990s that are very critical of some aspects of the conduct of the national liberation struggle including bad treatment of women, macho-masculinities the bred predatory sexualities, nationalist patriarchy, and intra-party violence that led Masipula Sithole to describe the nationalist struggle as ‘a revolution that even ate its own children.’12 Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi revealed how some of the most revered heroes of the liberation struggle like General Josiah Magama Tongogara were sexual predators in the rear bases in Mozambique. She explained how nationalist ideology was a bizarre mixture of modernity and tradition, with women’s emancipation stalled within these poles.13
Terence Ranger in search for the reasons why there was a ‘democracy and human rights crisis’ argued that:
Perhaps post-independence authoritarianism was the result of liberation wars themselves, when disagreement could mean death. It was difficult to escape the legacy of such a war. Maybe it sprang from the adoption by so many nationalists and especially liberation movements, of Marxist-Leninist ideologies. These implied ‘democratic centralism,’ the domination of civil society by the state and to-down modernising ‘development.’
But perhaps there was something inherent in nationalism itself, even before the wars and the adoption of socialism, which gave rise to authoritarianism. Maybe nationalism’s emphasis on unity at all costs—its subordination of trade unions and churches and all other African organisations to its imperatives—gave rise to an intolerance of pluralism. Maybe nationalism’s glorification of the leader gave rise to a post-colonial cult of personality. Maybe nationalism’s commitment to modernisation, whether socialist or not, inevitably implied a ‘commandist’ state.14
Ranger witnessed nationalist historiography to which he contributed so much being channelled into a narrower, partisan and highly politicised ‘patriotic history’ as Zimbabwean nationalism further degenerated into Afro-radicalism and nativism.15 The propensity for violence in ZANU-PF politics and Mugabe’s political behaviour continue to puzzle many analysts. I tried to explain it this way in 2002:
The post-colonial Zimbabwean state under ZANU-PF failed dismally to make a break with the tradition of nationalist authoritarianism and guerrilla violence as well as colonial settler repression. The ruling party itself, having been a militarised liberation movement, failed to de-militarise itself, not only in practice, but also in attitude and style of management of civil institutions and the state at large. The new ZANU-PF government readily assumed the resilient colonial and military oriented structures left by the retreating Rhodesian settler state, with serious implications for democracy, human rights and human security.16
Brian Raftopoulos critiqued left-leaning analysis crafted within the political economy paradigm’s sometimes blind and simplistic celebration of current nationalist political and economic initiatives as part of resolution of the national question via continuation of national democratic revolution. Raftopoulos made it clear that:
Unfortunately much of the anger of this embattled nationalism is channelled against the citizens of our states, and the nationalism that presents itself as the nation’s shield is often the suffocating embrace of murderous regimes. We need to find new collective discourses that build on a broad participation, and a deep commitment to critical discussion and debate. For Zimbabweans, this challenge is more urgent than ever as divisions over democratic questions continue to deepen.17
Indeed Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros who were choosing to ignore democracy and human rights issues in their analysis. For instance, to Moyo and Yeros what took root in Zimbabwe in 2000 was a revolution in which ‘two political questions that historically have galvanised peripheral capitalism—the agrarian and the national—were returned to the forefront of political life.’ They added that: ‘We argue that the revolutionary situation resulted neither in a revolution, nor in mediocre reformism, nor in restoration. It resulted in an interrupted revolution, marked by a radical agrarian reform and a radicalised state—the first on the continent since the end of the Cold War.’18 While Moyo and Yeros struggled to counter the equally problematic rendering of the situation on Zimbabwe in terms of ‘crisis, chaos and tyranny—a seemingly incurable African pathology,’ they ended up ignoring apparent democratic and human deficits in the country that explain the current stalemate.19
Unique historical features of political evolution of Zimbabwe and ZANU-PF
The way ZANU-PF evolved as a nationalist movement and a political party has a direct impact on how it understood issues of power and governance. ZANU was formed in 1963 after a major split in ZAPU under Joshua Nkomo. The split was followed by extended period of inter-party violence in which supporters of ZANU and ZAPU fought each other in the cities of Harare, Gweru and Bulawayo. This meant that ZANU emerged within a terrain marked by violence. The intransigence and bellicosity of the Rhodesia settler state also forced both ZAPU and ZANU into militancy and to embrace violence as a legitimate tool of liberation. On this development John Makumbe, a political scientist at the University of Zimbabwe wrote that ‘supposedly democratic political parties, formed for the twin purposes of putting an end to colonialism and creating a democratic dispensation in Zimbabwe, were forced to become militant and militaristic liberation movements.’20 Both ZAPU and ZANU received military support from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba and China on top of the support from fellows Africans on the continent. Thus the Socialist bloc had a lasting impact on the liberation movements to the extent that: ‘The political organisation of ZANU…assumed the eastern bloc format, complete with a central committee and politburo.’21
The conduct of the armed struggle against a belligerent settler colonial state implied a number of developments that left a lasting impression on ZANU. The first was militarisation of the liberation movement together with commandist and regimentalist attributes. The second was prominence of the party leader within the movement that became seeds for development cult of personality. The third was that the militarist approach tended to brook no dissent. The fourth was the building of a nationalist-military alliance that has remained up to today in which top commanders of the army are ZANU-PF members.22 The final aspect was the development of a culture of violence as a legitimate tool of achieving political goals (examples: ‘the ZANU axe must continue to fall upon the necks of rebels when we find it no longer possible to persuade them into the harmony that binds us all’ and ‘degrees in violence’ speech).23
Makumbe argues that these developments implied that ZANU ‘would become vulnerable to tendencies of authoritarianism and personalised rule.’24 Under the influence of Eastern bloc countries that had one-party political systems, ZANU’s pronouncements and propaganda throughout the liberation period into the 1980s and beginning of 1990s, emphasised their need to create a one-party socialist state in Zimbabwe.25 Even today the way ZANU-PF conducts itself is as though Zimbabwe is under a one party-state political system. Makumbe has further argued that ‘the party’s adherence to socialist party organisational structures and systems of operational management have resulted in its failure to transform itself into a democratic political party.’26 He concluded that:
The genesis of a political party seems to have a bearing on that party’s future development. The Zimbabwe case seems to illustrate that liberation movements struggle to transform themselves into democratic political parties when their countries become liberated or independent. Indeed, whenever they are threatened with loss of political power, former liberation movements tend to resuscitate their original achievements as liberators as a license to continued tenure of office. They also harness their wartime tactics of instilling fear in the electorate to win elections.27
The timing of Zimbabwe’s independence also impacted on future politics in the country. Zimbabwe joined the community of nations as the fiftieth independent African state on the 18th of April 1980. It was neither an ‘early decoloniser’ of the 1960s nor a ‘late decoloniser’ of the 1990s. It was a ‘mid-decolonised,’ achieving independence in the middle of ‘early’ and ‘late’ de-colonisers. This meant that it stood astride uneasily the fading socialist world and the emerging neo-liberal world. It was therefore was forced to dream in both socialist and liberal terms, and its political ideology was captive to these antagonistic worlds. It is also important to note that the transfer of political power from white settler to the black nationalist elite that had spearheaded the liberation struggle was negotiated at Lancaster House in Britain under the tutelage, refereeing and supervision of Britain and America, that made sure that radical Marxist ideologies that had been imbibed by the liberation forces and that advocated for the total smashing of the colonially constructed state and the building of a new socialist republic did not materialize. At the end of decolonisation, Zimbabwe was born as a successor to the Rhodesia colonial state rather than a new alternative to it.
The current political stalmate in Zimbabwe
The harmonised senatorial, parliamentary and presidential elections held on the 29th of March 2008, that were for the first time in postcolonial history of Zimbabwe, not characterised by violence has culminated in a terrible stalemate in which ZANU-PF has vowed not to leave power even if it was defeated in the lections. Post-election violence indicates how ZANU-PF is trying to force the electorate to vote for Mugabe in the planned presidential run-off. This is the latest manifestation of what Horace Campbell termed ‘executive lawlessness.’28 Since 1997, Zimbabwe has witnessed a process in which the executive arm of government represented by President Robert Mugabe consistently undermined existing legal frameworks and constitutionalism as it inaugurated the Third Chimurenga dubbed ‘war for economic liberation.’29 Since that time, the Zimbabwean government took many controversial decisions, beginning with sending of troops to the DRC without parliamentary consultation, awarding war veterans lump sums of pension outside parameters of the budget, endorsing and supporting invasion of white owned commercial farms, governing through military-style operations that included the widely condemned Operation Murambatsvina, arbitrary cutting of prices of basic goods without considerations of market realities up to the current barring of release of the results of presidential elections.30
The current stalemate is furthered compounded by the increasing intervention of the military into civil and political affairs. This emerged poignantly on the 9th of January 2002 during a tight contest for the presidency of Zimbabwe between Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC and Robert Mugabe of ZANU-PF. In a startling televised statement the then Commander of Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) General Vitalis Zvinavashe, flanked by all service military and security chiefs including the directors of prisons and the feared spy organisation (the Central Intelligence Organisation-CIO), declared that the country’s military and security institutions would only render support to leaders who ‘pursue Zimbabwean values, traditions and beliefs for which thousands of lives were lost in pursuit of Zimbabwe’s hard-won independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and national interests.’ Without blinking at all, the commander of ZDF continued to state that:
To this end, let it be known that the highest office on the land is a straightjacket whose occupant is expected to observe the objectives of the liberation struggle. We will, therefore, not accept, let alone support or salute anyone with a different agenda that threatens the very existence of our sovereignty, our country and our people.31
This threat has been repeated by the current commander of ZDF Constantine Chiwenga. This behaviour of the military generals reveals their attempt to act as ‘king-makers’ in Zimbabwe in subversion of even the people’s will.32 On the 24th of April 2008, Tendai Biti, the Secretary-General of MDC-Tsvangirai wrote another letter to General Constantine Chiwenga in which the Commander of ZDF was reminded of Section 96 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe which allows deployment of the military forces in defence of Zimbabwe not against Zimbabweans. Biti added that:
The conduct of the defence forces against their own innocent fathers and mothers is a callous and contemptuous disregard for their democratic right to choose a leader of their choice and clear breach of your constitutional office. As Commander of Zimbabwe Defence Forces, you are personally and constitutionally liable for the mayhem occasioned by t5he unlawful deployment.33
The MDC is continuing to try and salvage democracy and human rights from the jaws of ZANU-PF authoritarianism and militarism. In the midst of all the evidence to the contrary ZANU-PF insists that the national liberation struggle installed democracy and human rights that were denied under colonialism. At the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of Nations Annual Summit, held in Maputo in Mozambique in June 2004, he stated that:
Eleven years I spent in prison fighting for democracy, for one man, one vote and for us now to hear a voice from London saying there is no democracy, no freedom, no human rights observed in Zimbabwe is very offensive and repulsive…We will not allow erstwhile imperialists to come and judge our election… [they] must be supervised only by people of our region, people of Africa, people in the Third World.34
What is apparent in all Mugabe’s references to democracy and human rights, he has failed to cite current evidence to prove that he was a democrat, practising democracy and respecting human rights save for the land reform that was marred by violence and loss of life and constant reference to the ideals of the liberation struggle which he is undermining everyday in practice. The MDC is therefore justified in its claims that ZANU-PF has been the undertaker of democracy and human rights in its twenty-eight year rule and they cite numerous examples to substantiate their claims. The result has been a fierce ideological contest (battle for ideas) that includes a ‘nationalist-continuist’ discourse represented by ZANU-PF weeded in traditional anti-colonial rhetoric, liberation war commandism, intolerance of dissenting voices, adherence to notions of monolithic unity and notions of patriotism together with the rhetoric of defending national sovereignty and land as priceless African heritage. In this discourse, politics is channelled and reduced into a form of memory of the national liberation struggle. The second is the recent counter-discourse represented by the MDC with its mantra of a ‘new Zimbabwe’ founded on the global principles of democracy, human rights, good governance and acceptance of neo-liberal micro-economic policies. It is within these two discourses that current politics in Zimbabwe are playing themselves and spilling over to the SADC region and the international terrain as ZANU-PF and MDC compete to mobilise friends and allies across the world. The people of Zimbabwe are caught in between and they bear the humanitarian costs of this struggle that has taken global proportions.
The MDC has tried to make its politics very different from that of ZANU-PF tradition with Morgan Tsvangirai stating that ‘MDC politics are not nationalist inspired, because they focus more on empowerment and participation of the people. ZANU’s thinking has always been top-down, centralized, always trapped in a time warp.35 The MDC has also fought to claim the liberation struggle as for workers arguing that:
The political struggle in Zimbabwe, historically led by the working class, has always been for dignity and sovereignty of the people. In the first Chimurenga, workers fought against exploitation in the mines, farms and industry, and peasants against the expropriation of their land. The nationalist movement that led the second Chimurenga was born from and built on struggles of the working people. The current nationalist elite hijacked this struggle for its own ends, betraying the people’s hopes and aspirations.36
The MDC has made ceaseless attempts to connect with liberation history via the avenue of social justice, democracy and human rights which ZANU-PF is said to have discarded. In a 2003 document, MDC’s core values, goals and policy principles recognized ‘the struggle of the Zimbabwean people throughout our history for economic, social and political justice’ and acknowledged ‘the continuing liberation struggle for social, economic and political rights and freedoms.’37 Similarly, in a 2008 policy document, the MDC stated that it ‘pursues social liberation policies aimed at completing the unfinished business of the national liberation struggle and shall strive for the democratic structural economic liberation, rehabilitation and transformation of Zimbabwe.’38
Recent post-election speeches by both ZANU-PF and MDC indicate how the issue of memory of liberation, democracy and human rights has come to the core of party politics. This politics is intertwined with the issue of land, food and jobs, with ZANU-PF emphasizing land and MDC jobs and food. Thus following the victory of his party in the parliamentary elections, Tsvangirai issued a press statement which partly read:
The challenge of giving birth to a new Zimbabwe founded on restoration and not on retribution; on equality and not discrimination; on love, not war; on tolerance, not hate. After Saturday 29th of March 2008, Zimbabwe will never be the same again; the people have spoken with one vote….In those minutes inside the polling booth, each one of us re-wrote the history of Zimbabwe. For that particular moment, we each held the destiny of our country in the pen we used to cast the vote. The votes cast on Saturday were for change and a new beginning. It was a vote for jobs; it was a vote for food, for dignity, for respect, for decency and equality, for tolerance, for love, and for trust.39
It is clear from this statement that Tsvangirai was seeing a ‘New Zimbabwe’ as one different from that constructed by ZANU-PF where there was retribution, discrimination, violence, hate, coupled with lack of food, jobs, human dignity, decency, equality, respect, love, trust and equality. ZANU-PF plunged the country into all this by severing the democratic question from national question.
The battle for ideas and imaginations of a ‘New Zimbabwe’
On the eve of the 28th anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence Mugabe and ZANU-PF took advantage of the day to remind the nation of the liberation struggle and the strategic role Mugabe played in this struggle. Ignatius Chombo reminded the people that:
Our leader, His Excellency Cde Mugabe spent eleven years in jail and many more at the forefront of the liberation struggle with other luminaries like Cde Chitepo, Cde Joshua Nkomo and Cde Muzenda among others….Cde Mugabe’s tenacious defence of the dignity of the people of this land and 28 years later he is still standing strong in defending our heritage.40
What was even unique about the celebrations is that during Mugabe’s inspection of the Guard of Honour, the military detachment made another political statement—‘Zimbabwe is a sovereign state, we shall defend it with our blood.’41 Every member of Zimbabwe’s military forces takes an oath of allegiance to the state, and why they had to repeat that oath at a stadium as a collective military detachment is pointing to something beyond military professionalism. Did Mugabe need this assurance at that moment and why? When Mugabe’s turn came to deliver his national address, he tied to claim democracy and human rights as property of ZANU-PF just like the liberation struggle by stating that:
We, not the British, established democracy based on one person one vote, democracy which rejected racial or gender discrimination and upheld human rights and religious freedom….In short, the advent of an independent Zimbabwe restored dignity to our people. That, comrades and friends, is the essence of our celebrations here, indeed, the very core of it. No challenge or hardship can ever overcome the sense of being independent. For that reason, let us take pride as we renew our independence joy in loudly proclaiming that Zimbabwe, this our Zimbabwe, shall never be a colony again (my emphasis).42
Mugabe emphasised on the significance of rekindling the memory of the liberation struggle as the main way through which Zimbabweans should form unity of purpose of guarding a threatened national sovereignty. He second also claimed that ZANU-PF through prosecution of the liberation movement brought about democracy and human rights in Zimbabwe including one person one vote.
On the 7th of March 2008, Tsvangirai continued to hammer home the issue of lack of democracy in Zimbabwe and how his party was committed to restore it. He stated that:
But democracy is an orphan in Zimbabwe. Since the infamous Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 made by the white government of Ian Smith in what was then Rhodesia—in an effort to block the extension of suffrage to the country’s black majority—the cry for democracy has been ignored. Mugabe’s 28-year rule has similarly undermined the development of institutional democracy….
How can global leaders espouse the values of democracy, yet when they are being challenge fail to open their mouth? Why is it that a supposed ‘war on terror’ ignores very real terror of broken minds and mangled bodies that lie along the trail left by Mugabe?….The new leadership is committed to nurturing democracy in Zimbabwe and to begin rebuilding our shattered country. It is time to make a stand.43
Arthur Mutambara the leader of the other faction of the MDC has continued to articulate a combination of the national and democratic issues including encouraging political actors to put national interest first in his Independence Day message:
This particular 28th commemoration is like none of the previous ones. We are in uniquely invidious circumstances. Our economy has virtually collapsed and industries have grinded to a halt. Our society is calibrated by fear, terror and outright brutality. Our national institutions of governance have been rendered dysfunctional and impotent. We have had harmonised general elections, and twenty days later the results of the presidential polls are not yet released. One of the key objectives of the liberation struggle was attainment of the one person one vote dispensation. Twenty eight years after independence our people are denied this basic right. Our country is characterised by extreme illegitimacy where we have an abrasive caretaker president and an illegally constituted cabinet in cahoots with an imbecilic and cynical military junta, running the affairs of the country.44
Turning to the future direction that Zimbabwe must take since the elections of the 29th of March 2008, Mutambara stated that:
In the history of every nation, there comes a time when a generation has a unique opportunity to break with the past and define a new direction. Such a momentous occasion currently presents itself in our country. We need to seize the time and deliver change. This requires putting national interest before partisan, sectoral and personal interests. It demands that we apply our minds and outthink the regime. What Mugabe has lost in the electoral battle, he cannot legitimately regain in any election remotely described as free and fair. He is fatally and mortally wounded. The veil of invincibility has been pierced. On the 29th of March 2008, the people voted for change, and that democratic choice must be defended. Our independence will be meaningless without the sanctity and integrity of the one person one vote principle. Those that rule our country must do so with the consent of the governed.45
In an endeavour to facilitate democratic change Tsvangirai has embarked on a diplomatic offensive to cut Mugabe’s umbilical cord with Africa.
Mugabe and Tsvangirai’s diplomatic offensives
Faced with expulsion from the Commonwealth and being slapped with smart sanctions Mugabe embarked on a diplomatic offensive that included placing ‘the Zimbabwe problem at the centre of a larger anti-imperialist and Pan-African position.’46 Mugabe cleverly located the land question within a discourse of legitimate redress for colonial injustice a language that had resonance on the African continent and the Third World due the memories of colonial domination.47 At the same time the MDC put the Zimbabwe crisis on the international scene as a case of crisis of governance punctuated by serious violation of human rights on an unprecedented scale. The MDC readily embraced post-Cold War politics of global morality within its human rights, democracy and good governance discourse.
Mugabe reacted to these developments by digging deploying memories of liberation struggle and trying to renew Third World nationalism, and in the process casting issues of good governance, democracy and human rights as cover-up for latter-day liberal imperialism. This won him some sympathies in the SADC region, the African continent and some pockets of the Third World.48 At home this was articulated through such slogans as ‘Zimbabwe Will Never Be a Colony Again’ and ‘Land is the Economy, Economy is Land’ that was attended by the illegitimating of the MDC as a ‘running dog of imperialism.’49 Mugabe channelled nationalism into Afro-radicalism and nativism.50 This was clearly manifested in what Ezra Chitando terms ‘sacralisation’ of land and mythologizing of ZANU-PF and ritualisation of Mugabe.51 In this religio-political interface, ZANU-PF is the only party with the historic mission in Zimbabwe and is an heir to the First Chimurenga and Mugabe is the obedient first born son taking orders from oracular shrines and fulfilling oracular prophesises of Nehanda and Chaminuka.52
Mugabe’s diplomatic offensive has also included adoption of the ‘Look East Policy’ that has seen mainly Chinese gaining a foothold in Zimbabwe, building on the liberation war relations in which China supplied ZANU-PF with arms and ideological resources including Maoism.53 In all this South Africa evolved a complex policy of ‘quiet diplomacy’ that has been heavily criticised by those fighting for democracy in Zimbabwe. It has been seen as part of collusion if not support of a dictatorial regime based on liberation-war solidarities.54 Phimister and Raftopoulos have argued that Mbeki’s policy toward Mugabe has shallow historical roots and is ‘more contingent on domestic political forces and events’ including ‘the potentially unsettling precedent that would be established by an MDC government in Harare, and of the apparently widespread support for Mugabe by black South Africans.’55 Recently, the Africa Confidential’s lead article entitled ‘Zimbabwe: The Sick Man of the South’ outlined how Mugabe as the ‘eminence grise’ of the SADC region managed to ‘shield himself from criticism with a series of concentric ring of support.’ It added that the inner circle of regional allies included Angola, Mozambique and Namibia—with a common history of waging liberation wars.56
Since the 29th of March 2008, Tsvangirai has vowed to cit Mugabe’s umbilical cord with Africa as they had dome with the West. Three recent developments seem to indicate that this diplomatic offensive is working. The first is the emergency meeting (12th April 2008) of SADC leaders with the sole aim to discuss the crisis in Zimbabwe held in Lusaka in which both Mugabe and Tsvangirai were invited. For the first time, Mugabe who normally uses such occasions to push his image of a revolutionary dedicated to Africa’s total liberation and to lambast the West, abstained from the meeting which Tsvangirai attended. The second is the politics that attended the Chinese ship carrying arms to Zimbabwe that failed to offload its goods and President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia and Chairperson of SADC urging member states not to allow the ship to offload its goods at it ports. Labour unions have also called its members not to offload the ship. This is one indication of some change of attitude among SADC states, though still more need to be done to force Mugabe to adhere to principles of democracy. The third development is the ANC under Jacob Zuma’s open criticism of what Mugabe is doing and putting pressure on him to release presidential polls’ results.57 Perhaps the SADC is growing out of being a solidarity organisation into a guardian of democracy in the region.
Conclusion and the way forward
ZANU-PF and Mugabe are doing everything to block a democratic transition in Zimbabwe. Their strategy has included telling Zimbabweans that they will never allow the MDC to rule over Zimbabwe even if it wins both parliamentary and presidential elections. Even more disturbing is the continued interference of the military in civil and political affairs of the country together with the rising post-election violence targeting MDC supporters. One wonders how a presidential run-off would be possible with a militarised terrain and what is the purpose of the run-off if ZANU-PF and Mugabe would not accept change? This is all the culmination of the growing executive lawlessness within which ‘the political kingdom’ was privileged over and above constitutionalism and legalism. One just hopes that sanity would return to Mugabe and ZANU-PF and they allow and respect the will of the people to prevail. For this to happen, the region and the international community must intervene to ensure an enabling environment for presidential run-off.
_________
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Lecturer in African Studies at The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom.
Notes
1. R. Mugabe’s declaration at a campaign rally in Masvingo for the June 2000 parliamentary elections. This declaration is also quoted in E. Chitando, ‘Down with the Devil, Forward with Christ! A Study of the Interface between Religious and Political Discourses in Zimbabwe,’ in African Sociological Review, 6, (1), (2002), p. 165.
2. J. Saul, ‘Liberation without Democracy? Rethinking the experiences of the Southern African Liberation Movements,’ in J. Hyslop (ed.), African Democracy in the Era of Globalisation, (Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 1999), pp. 167-178 and S. Seepe, ‘Legitimacy without Morality Subverts Democracy,’ in Mail & Guardian, 25-31 January 2002.
3. W. Werbner, ‘Beyond Oblivion: Confronting Memory Crisis,’ in R. Werbner (ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, (Zed Books, London & New York, 1998), p. 2.
4. H. Melber, ‘From Liberation Movements to Governments: On Political Culture in Southern Africa,’ in African Sociological Review, 6, (1), (2002), p. 3. For a recent analysis of ‘liberation war credentials’ and elections see S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Robert Mugabe’s Liberation War Credentials: ZANU-PF’s Winning Card?’ in A. K. Nord & D. Spiker (eds.), Elections in Zimbabwe: Analysis and Commentary on the 2008 Zimbabwe Presidential and Parliamentary Elections, (Heinrich Boll Stiftung, Cape Town, March 2008.
5. Excerpt from President Robert Mugabe’s national address on the occasion of the 28th Independence Anniversary in The Herald, 19 April 2008.
6. F. Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth: Reprint from Original French, (Penguin, London, 2001), p. 165.
7. On hagiographies in Zimbabwe see D. Martin and P. Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War, (Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare, 1981) and C. S. Banana (ed.), Turmoil and Tenacity: Zimbabwe 1890-1990, (The College Press, Harare, 1989). For studies of peasant consciousness see T. O Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe, (Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare, 1988); D. Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, (Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare, 1988); K. D. Manungo, The Role Peasants Played in the Zimbabwe War of Liberation With Special Reference to the Chiweshe District,’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, Ohio University, 1991); For a comprehensive historiography of nationalism in Zimbabwe see B. Raftopoulos, ‘Problematising Nationalism in Zimbabwe: A Historiographical Review,’ in Zambezia: University of Zimbabwe Journal of Humanities, XXVI, (ii), (1999), pp. 115-134.
8. The atrocities committed are detailed in Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace & Legal Resources Foundation Report, Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980-1988, (CCJP & LRF, Harare, 1997). See also J. Alexander, J. McGregor & T. Ranger, Violence & Memory: One hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland, (Weaver Press, Harare, 2000).
9. S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘The Post-Colonial State and Matabeleland: Regional Perceptions of Civil-Military Relations, 1980-2002,’ in R. Williams, G. Cawthra & D. Abrahams (eds.), Ourselves to Know: Civil-Military Relations and Defence Transformation in Southern Africa, (Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria, 2003), pp. 17-38.
10. N. J. Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992), pp. 200-240.
11. S. Robins, ‘Heroes, Heretics and Historians of the Zimbabwe Revolution: A Review Article of Norma Kriger’s Peasant Voices,’ in Zambezia, XXIII, (i), (1996), p. 86.
12. M. Sithole, Zimbabwe: Struggle Within the Struggle: Second Edition, (Rujeko Publishers, Harare, 1999)
13. J. Nhongo-Simanegavi, For Better or Worse? Women and ZANLA in Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle, (Weaver Press, Harare, 2000); J. P. Parpart, ‘Masculinities, Race and Violence in the Making of Zimbabwe,’ in K. Muchemwa and R. Muponde (eds.), Manning the Nation: Father Figures in Zimbabwean Literature and Society, (Weaver Press, Harare, 2007), pp. 89-101.
14. T. Ranger, ‘Introduction to Volume Two,’ in T. Ranger (ed.), The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe: Volume Two: Nationalism, Democracy and Human Rights, (University of Zimbabwe Publications, Harare, 2003), pp. 1-2
15. T. Ranger, ‘Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle Over the Past in Zimbabwe,’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, 30, (2), (June 2004), pp. 215-234. on Afro-radicalism and nativism see A. Mbembe, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing,’ in Public Culture, 14, (1), (2002).
16. S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Dynamics of the Zimbabwe Crisis in the 21st Century,’ in African Journal on Conflict Resolution, p. 111.
17. B. Raftopoulos, ‘The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left,’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, 32, (2), (June 2006), p. 219.
18. S. Moyo & P. Yeros, ‘The Radicalised State: Zimbabwe’s Interrupted Revolution,’ in Review of African Political Economy, 111, (2007), p. 103.
19. Ibid.
20. J. Makumbe, ‘ZANU-PF: A Party in Transition?’ in R. Cornwell (ed.), Zimbabwe’s Turmoil: Problems and Prospects, (Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria, 2003), p. 34.
21. Ibid.
22. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Nationalist-Military Alliance and the Fate of Democracy, pp. 80-96.
23. D. Blair, Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in Zimbabwe, (Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2000); M. Meredith, Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe, (Public Affairs, New York, 2002) and S. Chan, Robert Mugabe: Life of Power and Violence, (Michigan University Press, New York, 2003)
24. Makumbe, ‘ZANU-PF,’ p. 34.
25. I. Mandaza & L. Sachikonye (eds.), The One Party State and Democracy: The Zimbabwe Debate, (Sapes Books, Harare, 1991).
26. Makumbe, ‘ZANU-PF,’ p. 35.
27. Ibid, p. 38
28. H. Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of Patriarchal Model of Liberation, (African World Press, Asmara, 2003).
29. R. Mugabe, Inside the Third Chimurenga, (Ministry of Information and Publicity, Harare, 2001).
30. S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Conflict, Violence & Crisis in Zimbabwe,’ in K. Matlosa, J. Elklit and B. Chiroro (eds.), Challenges of Conflict, Democracy and Development, (Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, Johannesburg, 2007), pp. 306-329.
31. This statement that was not only unconstitutional but that signalled a threat of a military take over in case of a win by a candidate without liberation credentials. For details on nationalist-military alliance in Zimbabwe sees S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Nationalist-Military Alliance in Zimbabwe and the Fate of Democracy,’ in African Journal on Conflict Resolution, 6, (1), (2006), pp. 49-80.
32. Letter written by Morgan Tsvangirai to President Robert Mugabe, 28th of December 2005.
33. T. Biti, ‘Unlawful Deployment of Units of Zimbabwe Defence Forces: Letter to General Constantine Chiwenga, 24th of April 2008,
34. Mail & Guardian, 25 June 2004.
35. Quoted in Southern Africa Report, June 2000. For more details on the labour movement and the MDC see B. Raftopoulos & T. Yoshikuni (eds.), Sites of Struggle: Essays in Zimbabwe’s Urban History, (Weaver Press, Harare, 1999); B. Raftopoulos, ‘The Labour Movement and the Emergence of Opposition Politics in Zimbabwe,’ in B. Raftopoulos & L. Sachikonye (eds.), Striking Back: The Labour Movement and the Post-Colonial State in Zimbabwe, 1980-2000, (Weaver Press, Harare, 2001); B. Raftopoulos & I. Phimister (eds.), Keep On Knocking: A History of the Labour Movement in Zimbabwe, 1900-97, (Baobab Books, Harare, 1997).
36. MDC Election Manifesto, 2000, p. 2. See also R. Saunders, Never the Same Again: Zimbabwe’s Growth Towards Democracy, (Edwina Spicer Productions, Harare, 2000).
37. MDC Policy Document, 2003.
38. MDC Manifesto, 2008.
39. Morgan Tsvangirai, Press Conference Statement, 1 April 2008.
40. Herald, 19 April 2008.
41. Ibid.
42. The Herald, 19 April 2008.
43. The Guardian, 7 April 2008.
44. A. G. O. Mutambara, ‘A Shameful Betrayal of National Independence: The Case for Out-thinking ZANU-PF and Putting National Interest First,’ in www.sokwanele.com
45. Ibid.
46. I. Phimister & B. Raftopoulos, ‘Mugabe, Mbeki & the Politics of Anti-Imperialism,’ in Review of African Political Economy, 101, (2004), p. 385.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid, pp.386-399.
49. D. Moore, ‘Is the Land the Economy and Economy the Land? Primitive Accumulation in Zimbabwe,’ in Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 19, (2), (2001), pp. 253-66.
50. S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘The Nativist Revolution and Development Conundrums in Zimbabwe,’ in ACCORD Occasional Paper Series, 1, (4), (2006), pp. 1-40.
51. E. Chitando, ‘In the Beginning Was the Land’: The Appropriation of Religious Themes in Political Discourse in Zimbabwe,’ in Africa, 75, (2), (2005), pp.220-239.
52. Shona mythology has it that Nehanda and Chaminuka (revered Shona religious figures) prophesised that their bones were going to rise up to fight for the liberation of Zimbabwe from colonialism. Mugabe presents himself as those ‘bones’ that are fighting a Third Chimurenga. See F. Chung, Reliving the Second Chimurenga: Memoirs from the Liberation Struggle, (Nordic Africa Institute and Weaver Press, Uppsala and Harare, 2006), p. 82.
53. P. Chigora, ‘Zimbabwe’s Look East Policy: A Critical Appraisal of Zimbabwe’s Foreign Policy in the New Millennium,’ in OSSREA Bulletin, (March 2007), pp. 9-13.
54. J-A van Wyk, ‘The Zimbabwe Crisis: Reluctance, Inadequacy or Another Rubicon to Cross?’ in New Zealand International Review, 28, (2003), pp. 30-50.
55. Phimister & Raftopoulos, ‘Mugabe, Mbeki & the Politics of Anti-Imperialism,’ p. 390.
56. Zimbabwe: The Sick Man of the South,’ in Africa Confidential, 49, (7), 28 March 2008).
57. ANC, ‘Zimbabwe Elections: The Will of the People Must be Heard’ in ANC Today, 8, (15), (18-24 April 2008).
By Augustine Hungwe
Introduction
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.
Parallels between ZCTU-MDC and COSATU’s relationship to ANC
Almost 10 years after the electoral success of the MMD in neighboring Zambia, the puissant Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Union also mutated into the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by the mercurial Morgan Tsvangirai (former Secretary General of the ZCTU-Zimbabwe)-the parallels between former labor leaders Chiluba and Tsvangirai are obvious-as well as the institutional transition of ZCTU (Zambia) into MMD and ZCTU (Zimbabwe) into MDC.
In view of these morphological developments over the last two decades in Southern Africa, the next obvious question is whether the labor movement in South Africa, the colossal and truculent Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) will also follow the ZCTU (Zambia) and ZCTU (Zimbabwe) route and transfigure itself into the major opposition political party for South Africa-an alternative to the currently monolithic anti-apartheid ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). It is imperative to note that ANC, UNIP and ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe were the key the liberation struggle movements in South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe respectively and combatants from these three parties shared military bases in Zambia during the wars of liberation against colonial rule in Southern Africa in the 1960s and 1970s-the colonial history of the all the three countries is intimately tied to Perfidious Albion. Zambia, in that sense, is the first instance where a liberation based party has been successfully voted out of office by a labor based opposition party in Southern Africa-Chiluba had crossed the Rubicon. This inspired the MDC in Zimbabwe-and the MDC almost won the crucial albeit controversial 2000 elections in Zimbabwe. There were strong allegations of voter rigging and associated political impishness by ZANU-PF in these contentious elections.
Significantly, the leadership of ZCTU/MDC is very close to the COSATU leadership-this has resulted in the 1.8 million-member COSATU holding demonstrations against the autocratic Zimbabwean government in South Africa.COSATU leaders have also been variously deported from Zimbabwe during some of their activist incursions into seemingly pariah Zimbabwe to confront the deeply praetorian Government of Robert Mugabe. Thabo Mbeki is a close ally of Mugabe because of their long historical nexus. In that sense, the belligerent Mugabe and the enigmatic Mbeki view COSATU and MDC as contentious organizations in their quest to ensure that only liberation based political parties in Southern Africa remain in power-hence Mbeki’s controversial ‘Quiet Diplomacy’ position on obtrusively kleptocratic Zimbabwe.
It is thus the contention of this paper that the only serious opposition to the ANC will have to come from within the ANC ruling alliance, with the possibility of COSATU breaking away from the alliance and forming South Africa’s first labor based opposition political party - there is a mosaic historical precedence to this in Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The Epic ANC ‘Battle Royal’- Jacob Zuma vs. Thabo Mbeki
The ubiquitous ruling tripartite alliance in South Africa is made up of the leviathan ANC, the pugnacious COSATU and the brambly South African Communist Party (SACP). The hitherto compact institutional troika that has ruled South Africa since 1994 is faced with its ultimate litmus test, especially over the last two years. Much of the attrition is arising from the circumstances surrounding the corruption and fraud allegations around the aberrant newly elected ANC President, Jacob ‘Msholozi’ Zuma- a larger than life idiosyncratic and charismatic politician. Zuma is also known for energetically dancing and singing to his controversial signature tune, ‘Aluweth’ umshini wami’ (‘Bring me my machine gun’)! Since 2005, Zuma has been engaged in a ‘battle royal’ of Ralph Ellison proportions with South African President, Thabo Mbeki. It is this political duel that is at the epi-centre of the increasingly acrimonious relations between certain sections of the ANC cabal and COSATU on the other hand. This asperity is at the heart of the unfolding political topography in South Africa-daggers have been drawn. 2008 is pivotal for the ruling alliance because Zuma is due to face trial in August-Zuma supporters, especially COSATU, argue that Zuma has no case to answer-rather he is a political victim of Mbeki’s political conspiracy to politically sideline Zuma and even push for a third term. COSATU, the SACP and Zuma supporters in ANC allege that the ostensibly frosty Platonic ‘Philosopher King’ Mbeki is using the elite investigative unit, the Scorpions, to settle political scores-a charge that Mbeki has denied. Sensationally, the now Zuma-dominated ANC leadership is pushing for the disbandment of Zuma’s nemesis, the Scorpions by June this year-however, Thabo Mbeki is fighting back, curiously with the support of the white dominated official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. Since the Zuma camp won the crucial ANC elections in Limpopo in December 2007, the dreaded ‘two centers of power’ have emerged-Thabo Mbeki, the lame duck President of South Africa dominating the government turf (Union building)while the controversial, openly polygamous Jacob Zuma dominates the ANC turf (Luthuli house). This has created a serious operational crisis for the ANC because historically the president of ANC has normally also been the president of South Africa because of the traditional electoral dominance of the ANC in South Africa since independence in 1994. It will be interesting to see how the ANC and COSATU eventually cut this Gordian knot. Indeed, even if Zuma escapes conviction in August, that might just turn out be a Pyrrhic victory.
As the Roman Emperor, Caesar famously exclaimed, ‘Alea iacta est!’(The die has been cast!)- the die has indeed been cast and its political high noon in South Africa - will this be a ‘Year of Wonders’(annus mirabilis) or a ‘Horrible Year’(annus horribilis) or a ‘Dreadful Year’(annus terribilis) for South Africa? Or perhaps greater danger awaits! (graviora manent!)…
The relationship between ANC and COSATU is most likely to become more complex in the near future- tellingly, the fiery COSATU Secretary General, Zwelinzima Vavi, broke tradition and refused to be ‘deployed’ to the ANC’s powerful National Executive Council(NEC), despite being the Grey Cardinal behind spectacular Zuma’s ascendancy to the ANC presidency. Ostensibly, Vavi suggested that he is more effective in COSATU than in the ANC executive structures. It is imperative to note that historically, COSATU Secretary Generals have become key members of the ANC executive- for example the millionaire business mogul, Cyril Ramaphosa and the current ANC deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe. Infact, if Zuma is convicted in August, the balmy and highly respected Motlanthe is most likely to become the next president of South Africa. Already, the Zuma camp is pushing for Motlanthe to be ‘deployed’ to Cabinet or Parliament in anticipation of such a possibility-for doves in the Zuma camp, this is the silver bullet to the current cantankerous byzantine tripartite alliance politics. But such maneuvers have created serious fissures in the Zuma camp-especially among the more hawkish Zuma supporters who are of the view that it is too early to put plan B (Motlanthe) into action even before Zuma has stood for trial. Matthew Phosa, the ANC treasurer has been singled out for censure in this regard. Apparently, Phosa is aiming for a deputy presidency in a Motlanthe-run ANC government in 2009. This could be the Saigon moment for Zuma and a Sputnik moment for Motlanthe! The Zuma case is proving to be the Achilles’ heel for the ruling alliance while the Scorpions are the albatross around Zuma’s neck…
A Prognostic Analysis of the ANC-COSATU-SACP Ruling Alliance
As John F. Kennedy poignantly observed ‘Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names’, I see a widespread purging of pro-Mbeki elements in the alliance-the ‘lex talionis’ (laws of revenge) will be extensively applied- already there have been significant purges-Willie Madisha, a close Mbeki ally recently lost his position as president of COSATU. There have also been several strategic changes in parliament as the Zuma camp positions itself for the 2009 national elections in South Africa. The Day of Wrath (Dies Irae) has started in earnest in alliance politics. Indeed, as the wily Machiavelli aptly notes in The Prince, ‘Although power is shared, it is never shared equally’ so it will be with the power configuration in the post-Polokwane alliance. A Zuma-led ANC and possibly government will be confronted by the ‘crisis of rising expectations’, they have promised so much when they have limited policy autonomy to change the economic conservatism course that Mbeki has defined for South Africa. But perhaps, as the French Emperor, Napoleon pointed out, ‘If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything and deliver nothing’!
Within the ruling alliance, the SACP and COSATU ties have been exceptionally close-COSATU boss, Vavi and the SACP Secretary, Blade Nzimande, are among some of the staunchest supporters of Zuma and the latter has been rewarded handsomely for his efforts with a coveted membership in the ANC National Executive Committee. This was part of the COSATU and SACP strategy to ‘flood’ the key ANC structures and to push ANC policies towards the left and Zuma was their point man in ANC giving resonance to the English poet, William Blake’s incisive anecdote, ‘No bird soars too high if he soars on his own wings’.
Vavi even went further and prophetically proclaimed that ‘Zuma is like a tsunami, he is unstoppable’. Mbeki learnt the full meaning of this statement after a humiliating defeat for the ANC presidency at the hands of Zuma at the watershed ANC Conference in Limpopo December 2007. Indeed, as the erudite African proverb observes, ‘When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers’! ANC has suffered deeply from the Mbeki-Zuma political duel. Never has such hostility been seen in ANC since it was formed over 95 years ago- possibly the oldest political party in Africa. Even party elders like the revered Nelson ‘Madiba’ Mandela have expressed public concern about the state of institutional attrition and personal acrimony within the ANC. The respected Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, has also expressed deep concern with the state of affairs in the ANC. Voices of concern have also come from unlikely sources- Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the leader of the Inkhata Freedom Party has also added his voice to the events in ANC. A doyen of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Winnie Madikizela Mandela also expressed her concerns on the unprecedented chaos within the ANC leadership ranks. The official opposition, the Democratic Alliance has held meetings with Mbeki on this issue and is due to also engage Zuma. So there is national concern on the state of the ruling alliance in South Africa. Because of the political dominance of the ANC, if there are problems in the ANC, the effects are felt immediately across the whole socio-economic fabric of South Africa-ANC is a national institution. This, coupled with rising crime, AIDS, unemployment, poverty and power cuts in South Africa reverberate with the Ashanti proverb, ‘The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people’. My own assessment is that ANC will probably retain this hegemonic status for another five years-after that, because of the increasing tensions within the alliance, I envisage a possible scenario in which COSATU will pull out of the tripartite alliance and create a viable opposition party to ANC within the next few years-the foundation is being laid down now by history. This reechoes the Ethiopian proverb, ‘A loose tooth will not rest until it is pulled out’!
United States foreign policy on South Africa and Africa in general
In the meantime, South Africa will also need to grapple with its important economic and political relationship with the United States. In terms of strategic interests, South Africa (gold) and Nigeria (oil) are two of the most important countries for United States in Africa. American investment in Africa thus tend to be concentrated in these two countries, especially South Africa, where there is a strong American corporate presence. Significantly, both Nigeria and South Africa have over the last few years deepened their trade with China, raising a lot of concern from the United States and the European Union.
Partly in response to the phenomenal expansion of Chinese business interest in Africa, the United States is planning to set up military bases in Africa in the near future as part of the US Africa Command ‘Africom’ project. US President George Bush issued out a directive to the US Defense Secretary in February 2007 to begin the process of setting up the American military bases. The bases were planned to be fully operational in Africa by August 2008. The operational cluster of ‘Africom’ is currently housed in Germany and a US General Ward has already been appointed as the commander of the Africom. However, it has since emerged that despite President Bush’s recent goodwill visit to Africa, Africom is struggling to find hosts-only Liberia has so far committed itself to host the base. There is a lot of concern among African countries that Africom will result in the extensive militarization of Africa-a charge that General Ward has denied. In view of the apparent lack of hosts, the Africom implementation plan in Africa has been deferred to any unspecified date in the future by Pentagon. So in the meantime, Africom will continue operating from its Germany base until the relevant hosts have committed themselves in Africa.
The official reason for the setting up of Africom is that the US now believes that Africa is the new frontier on the US ‘War on Terror’, especially the Horn of Africa and North Africa- Darfur, Mogadishu and Algiers being the flash points. Ideally, United States seeks to set up five military bases, covering all the major regions of Africa, namely North Africa (possibly in Egypt); West Africa (Liberia); East Africa (possibly Ethiopia); Central Africa (possibly Democratic Republic of Congo) and Southern Africa (possibly Mozambique or Botswana). South Africa could have been ideal, but United States-South Africa relations have been rather frosty over, inter alia, South Africa’s controversial ‘quiet diplomacy’ position on the Zimbabwean crisis-revealingly, President Bush avoided South Africa on what might be his last visit to Africa before he steps down from office. The last time he was in Africa, almost 2 years ago he visited South Africa with a lot of enthusiasm and even declared that South African president Mbeki was the US’ ‘point man’ on the Zimbabwean crisis but there has been no break through to the Zimbabwean crisis despite the official reassurances from the South African government to the US.
United States is also keen to encourage African countries to sign up for the controversial International Criminal Court (ICC)- which, again is another key feature to the American ‘War on Terror’ initiative in Africa. United States is also wishes to increase its uptake level of oil from Africa and to reduce dependence on the generally volatile Middle East region. Significantly, Ghana, Zambia and Uganda recently ‘discovered’ oil! It is also imperative to note that Nigeria is the 5th largest supplier of oil to the US. From an African perspective US strategy appears to be centered on focusing more on African oil and then combining African sources with the sugar cane ethanol from Brazil and corn ethanol from Iowa. This could be a long term strategic focus of the Africom project in Africa. US also import other minerals like copper (from Zambia) and other precious minerals from Democratic Republic of Congo, inter alia.
Because of the expanding Chinese business presence, Africa is now witnessing the ‘Second Scramble’ for Africa by global powers-complete with elements of what I will call the ‘New Cold War’ between United States and China in Sudan. The European Union has increased its focus on Africa- French president has been to Africa three times since he assumed office and is very keen to maintain French military bases in former key French colonies like Senegal, Ivory Coast and the Central African Republic. The British also have a technical military training base in Mozambique. It is not only the European Union (EU) and the US who are responding decisively to the Chinese economic expansion in Africa-Taiwan has renewed its ‘dollar diplomacy’ war with China, with the recent serious fall out between China and Taiwan over diplomatic relations with Malawi. Infact, most African countries, especially Zimbabwe are actively pursuing what is now the buzz word in Africa, ‘The Look East’ policy, which basically means reducing trade and economic dependence on the traditional Western partners and focusing instead on China. The first major Sino-Africa business conference took place in China about two years and virtually all the African leaders attended. This was at a time when the second African Union-European Union ran into serious policy difficulties particularly over the Zimbabwean crisis- African countries had rallied around Zimbabwe and refused to participate in the Conference if Zimbabwe was not admitted. This stand-off had taken place collectively over a period of 7 years and the Conference only took place in Lisbon late last year after the European Union gave in to the demands of the African Union (AU)-the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown kept its promise and boycotted this crucial AU-EU Conference because the Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, was in attendance. This whole diplomatic drama was unprecedented in EU-AU relations. The actual meeting was largely acrimonious and most African countries criticized European countries fro their colonial role in Africa and most refused to renew some of the long standing trade agreements with Europe.
The source of this unprecedented confidence of African countries is easy to identify-China. The latter is offering African countries a very flexible alternative to Western countries and this trend is bound to deepen this decade with China’s increased consumption of natural resources to sustain its phenomenal economic growth of 12% over the last five years. For good measure, China is constructing the new $130 million AU headquarters in Addis Ababa for free-it’s a Chinese donation to the African people!
The implications of these developments on US-South Africa relations are immense- China is now the largest producer of gold in the world but is also the largest importer of gold and the impact of this is already starting to show in the trade relations between South Africa, US and China.
Some concluding remarks
Within the next few months, the increasingly complex South African relations with US and China will not be the only issues on South African President Thabo Mbeki’s mind-depending with how things turn out, he might just perform his ultimate volte-face by pushing for a third term in office. South Africa’s constitution does not currently allow a president to run for more than two terms-thus Mbeki is ineligible for a third term under the current constitution but he has hinted over the years that he is available for a third term, if the people see it fit! Infact, his recent unsuccessful attempt to hold on to the ANC presidency might have been part of that broader strategy for cultivating the ‘third term’ idea. A number of key ANC constituencies in the Eastern Cape appear to be behind this initiative. The ‘third term’ project might explain why Mbeki’s condemnation of Robert Mugabe has been rather lukewarm- because, perhaps, he wanted to eventually go the ‘Robert Mugabe way’ in South Africa! Already, there is a serious fall out between white commercial farmers and the South African government over land…and cases of racism are on the increase.
But for the time being Mbeki has to confront his ANC demons-there are currently attempts by the Zuma camp to re-open the highly controversial arms deal case that might swallow Mbeki in its vortex. This issue is now in the public domain following a very revealing book on the arms deal scandal by a former ANC member of parliament who is now based in London. The Zuma camp also appears to be planning to investigate ANC business dealings and investments concluded during Mbeki’s watch, including the Chancellor House file, ANC business interest in the giant telecommunication business concern, Telkom and Mbeki’s allies business interest in the oil giant, Sasol. This is consistent with the perennial position from the Zuma camp that although economic growth have been high under Mbeki, it has largely benefited a small group of black elite, the so-called ‘black diamonds’ who are highly connected to the Mbeki camp. Most of them have benefited from the controversial affirmative action policy, the ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ Act (BEE Act). It is this small core group of the super rich black middle class created by Mbeki’s BEE policy that has attracted the ire of the populist Zuma camp in ANC. Most of the members of this black elite are active participants at the contentious intellectual forum initiated by Mbeki called the ‘Native Club’. The central discussions at this Club are dominated by Thabo Mbeki’s pet project for Africa-‘The African Renaissance’ vision, which inspired his famous speech, ‘I am an African’.
Mbeki also has to worry about the small matter of Jackie Selebi, the currently suspended National Police Commissioner, the unsettled issue of the Scorpions boss, the spy case in Cape Town, the Eskom power cuts which are now threatening the critical gold industry in South Africa, the regular ‘service delivery’ demonstrations in poor black neighborhoods, the Dr. Ginwala’s Commission, the future of the Scorpions and the forthcoming trial of Jacob Zuma in August…then the unsettled matters of ‘Manto’Tshabalala,the controversial Health Minister, ‘Travel gate’ scandal and the ‘media wars’. The recent biography of Thabo Mbeki by the seasoned South African journalist, perhaps paints the most detailed picture of the highly complex personality of the enigmatic Thabo Mbeki, known in his inner circles simply as ‘The Chief’.
Which ever direction South Africa eventually takes, 2008 will be the defining moment for the ‘Rainbow Nation’ and the country might live in the shadow of those events for a while.
Succinctly, I will conclude that all these fundamental political, social and economic events are ultimately laying the foundation for the collapse of the ruling alliance and the possible emergence of COSATU as a labor based political party in South Africa in the near future. Perhaps, the precedence was set in Zambia and Zimbabwe a decade ago…
__________
Augustine Hungwe, Visiting Assistant Professor, Bard College, New York.
By Jimmy G. Dube, PhD. United Theological College, Harare, Zimbabwe
[email protected]
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Are there no doctors there?
Why, then, have my people not been healed? (Jeremiah 8:22)
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.
The Reign of Chaos
The Day of the Lord—Sunday, February 13, 2000 will be carved in the memory of most Zimbabweans as a day when all pretext of democratic governance came collapsing like a deck of cards. Two days before, the Robert Mugabe regime had conducted a referendum on a new constitution that was government sponsored. The government expected that the people were going to vote Yes to this proposed constitution. The government, which had never lost an election since the granting of political independence in 1980, was sure of victory and hoped to use this plebiscite as a litmus test of what would happen few months down the line when the parliamentary elections scheduled for June the same year took place.
On February 13 the voting ended and the counting of the ballot boxes took place. The humiliating defeat of the regime1 was announced on Tuesday February 15. This was the genesis of a nightmare that has gripped most Zimbabweans to the present day. From then on, many left the motherland and became sojourners in foreign lands where they continue to live as immigrants and outlaws. Others have lost their lives trying to confront the dictatorship. The theology proposed in this presentation is born out of a socio-political context that is characterized by immense suffering, pain and hopelessness on the part of the ordinary citizens and oppression perpetrated by the ruling elite. Most of the population is unemployed; a large percentage of the population is now living in the Diaspora. Those who remain spend most of the time searching for food, the shops are empty, the butcheries have no meat, petrol is scarce, and electricity and water come intermittently. Zimbabweans live in a polarized context desperately in need of justice, truth telling and healing. I propose a theology that empowers ordinary citizens in general and ordinary Christians in particular to engage in the fight for a life that is lived in its fullness.
The Crushing of Dissenting Voices
While other forms of resistance to the undemocratic forces have been crushed, the church as a mass organization remains with some space that can be used to forge a strong resistance movement. The sad truth is that the church has dismally failed to capitalize on this provision and instead has used its freedom to proclaim a theology that is heavenly oriented. The Methodist Church in Zimbabwe, like other mainline churches, has stressed that it will not offer any public official statement concerning the “political situation” in the country.2 According the presiding bishop of the Methodist Church, what is going on is not a justice issue but “just a political one,” and to criticize the trampling of human rights and the rampant oppression is synonymous with criticizing the government.3 As a solution the church decided only to “speak out when necessary” through the Zimbabwe Council of Churches. The consequence of this stance has been a conspicuous silence by the ZCC on the current crisis in Zimbabwe save its participation in a government sponsored Church initiative on the Zimbabwe We Want document. 4 Besides that document, only the Roman Catholic Church has spoken prophetically on the situation prevailing in the country.5
The Church’s Response to the Zimbabwean Crisis
The silence of the Methodist Church has been so deafening and so systematic that even those who try to speak out at conferences and synods have their voices muzzled by the leadership or they have been marginalized in various ways.6 Two ministers who dared to become involved in the struggle for human rights and justice were the Rev. Graham Shaw and Bishop Levee Kadenge, who confronted this dictatorship without moral support from the church. The Rev. Graham Shaw, a missionary to Zimbabwe, was born and raised in Zimbabwe but immigrated to the United Kingdom to avoid conscription to the Rhodesian forces that were fighting against majority rule. He returned after his studies and was subsequently stationed in Harare where he distinguished himself as a good administrator and ecumenist. He was superintendent for Trinity circuit during the time of transition when more middle class Africans were moving into former white neighborhoods and churches. Graham handled this transition well and was posted to Bulawayo to where he became the superintendent and served at Hillside Methodist Church from 1994-2003. It is during this period in Bulawayo that the regime began stripping those with double citizenship of their rights to vote and to hold dual citizenship. The farmers were also persecuted at this time and Graham Shaw spoke out against the regime, and spearheaded the Bulawayo chapter of Zimbabwe National Pastor’s Conference. Together with other pastors from across denominational divides in Bulawayo, Shaw worked to mount resistance against the removal of the poor people and the demolition of their homes by the regime during Operation Murambatsvina in 2005. Operation Murambatsvina was condemned as a violation of human rights and a crime against humanity by many international organizations. The bishop of the Methodist church decided to move Shaw against his will out of Bulawayo to Harare. But Shaw chose to remain and struggle among the people of Bulawayo. He took the less popular route, and stepped down from circuit ministry, later moving back to the United Kingdom where he continues to serve God and humanity.
Bishop Levee Kadenge, a former lecturer at the United Theological College, decided to confront the regime when it became clear that the abuses against ordinary citizens were becoming extreme. He participated in the formation of the Christian Alliance (CA), in February 2006 in Bulawayo, an ecumenical body of church leaders and Christians who were disillusioned with the weak protest and the cozy relationship between the regime and the mainline church leaders.7 Kadenge was elected leader of the Alliance. The Alliance scored a major breakthrough in the Zimbabwean political landscape when it sponsored a conference that brought together all the opposition forces in Zimbabwe under the banner of a “Save Zimbabwe” National Convention.8 Politicians and civil organizations that had never worked together before met and agreed to join forces to end the dictatorship. At the convention, Kadenge stated, “Our message to the President of Zimbabwe is that as a child of God, who professes to be a Christian, we love him. He and the ruling Zanu PF party, which he leads, should now stop treating fellow Zimbabweans, of all colours, as enemies to be destroyed.”9 The regime countered this major success by sponsoring its own initiative through the mainline churches; the regime intelligence played a major role in the drafting of the document that came out as it later emerged.10 The church leadership became more uncomfortable with Kadenge’s leadership position in an organization that was perceived to be against the government. He was conveniently edged out of full time ministry within the church and given the permission to serve the sectors—a euphemism for engaging in politics outside the church!11
What exactly were the rest of the Methodist congregations preoccupied with country-wide during this intensification of human rights abuses and declining life expectancy? What was the central theme running through the Methodist meetings and what was the prayer focus during and after the bloody elections that took place? What did Methodist leaders say during and after Operation Murambatsvina left hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes, and during the time when farmers were violently chased from their farms leading to the collapse of the agricultural industry? Where was the Methodist church when opposition leaders and judges in were thrashed in public? What was the Methodist Church’s message to the world at large concerning the crisis at hand?
The Methodists have a geographically extensive network of churches that cover all parts of the country; it is quite representative of all the tribes and races of the country, and membership is drawn from across the political divide. Thus during the crackdown on ordinary citizens and on members suspected of even belonging to the opposition political parties, many within the Methodist family country-wide were directly affected.
Toilets, Tithes and Benches
Interestingly, the focus of the Methodist community was not on the life and death issues facing the ordinary Christians and the ordinary citizens of the country. While the country was going through its worst phase as far as justice, peace and human rights are concerned, the Methodist church in Zimbabwe was busy concentrating on praying for the completion of the building of toilets and the intensification of collecting funds through tithe payments.12 The Handbook, or prayer manual, is how all the Methodists circuits compile in a prayer format what they consider to be their achievements and their concerns for the following year.13 A perusal at the prayer manual shows that within the last eight years, the church paid very little attention to the crisis, and when it did so, generally only cautiously worded language that avoided any critique of the government. The prayer manual instead reveals that the revolutionary Christ, who came to be the liberator of the captives and announced good news to the poor, is impotent within the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe.
An analysis of the prayers offered from 2000 to 2007 supports the above conclusion. The year 2000 was the bloodiest in political campaigning, when the regime unleashed a reign of terror on all who were suspected to be supporting the opposition. At this time there were five administrative districts of the Methodist church with a total of 49 circuits with a total number of 1535 churches/preaching points. The Prayer manual for the year 2000 reveals that not even a single circuit both in rural and in urban areas raise any prayer concerns about the evil and repression engulfing the entire country. None expressed thanks for God’s protection during the most difficult times of the country’s history and none record a prayer request for change politically and economically.
Only in the following year, 2001 did a single circuit - Kwekwe - record a prayer of thanks referencing the political situation: “…We thank God for the prevailing peace and the spirit of renewed fellowship among Christians after the June Parliamentary Elections.”14 In 2002 a new development emerged during the height of the farm invasions: Karoi circuit, situated in the district where most farmers suffered most, broke the silence with: “We pray for peace, tolerance, and willingness to forgive one another.”15 Chinhoyi Circuit in the neighboring district recorded: “We pray for peace during the coming presidential elections.”16
By 2003 the Zimbabwe crisis was deepening and more circuits were beginning to voice their concern as shown by the prayer requests. The crisis was now hurting even the direct financial operations of the church. Kadoma circuit offered the most distinct naming of the problem that occurred so far: “thanking God for giving us hope during trying times of political turmoil and the severe food shortages.”17 Kwenda circuit, while “Thank[ing] God for enabling us to work through the difficult times of drought and economic hardship,”18 made no mention of the political impasse gripping the country. Great Zimbabwe circuit, situated in Masvingo province, referred to the crisis in a thanksgiving prayer for “for the gift of life and the support [God] gave us in the economic and political difficulties.”19
By 2004 Karoi circuit was back on record again this time with an unusually explicit, hard hitting prayer. “We pray for those who have been driven from their homes and deprived of their property, those who are hungry and for the rains…”20 Because Karoi was among the most affected by the farm invasions, this prayer suggests their patience was running out with the system. Gwayi circuit, located in one of the economically depressed farming areas of Matebeleland province, whose membership is predominantly Ndebele and votes for the opposition, thanked God for “his wonderful mercies that he continued to care and guide us in the difficult economic situation.”21 This same thanksgiving prayer repeated the following year.
Bulawayo A. circuit, situated in the second largest city of Zimbabwe, among the Ndebele ethnic group that, like Gwayi, is an opposition politics stronghold, for the first time in 2004 prayed for “God’s intervention in our country’s economic hardship.”22 Gweru circuit covers the urban part of the third largest city in the country located in the Midlands province, and draws its membership from both Ndebele and Karanga ethnic groups. When the opposition 2004 won all of its parliamentary seats, Gweru circuit’s prayers only mentioned their desire for “resilience of the church during these trying times.”23
By 2004 no prayer concerns came out of Harare the capital city, which has the highest concentration of Methodists in any one city. It was only in 2005 with the impending parliamentary elections that Harare’s Mufakose circuit pleaded with God for “peaceful March 2005 General elections.”24 Harare boasts two Methodist administrative districts and is the home of the Connexional office with Connexional staff and bishops serving in various circuits scattered across the breadth of the capital city. Besides Mufakose the whole of Harare was deafeningly silent in 2004 about the whole social, economical and political meltdown gripping the country. Only one out of a total of 19 circuits in the two Harare districts with a record number of 222 churches and preaching points voiced any concern regarding the social and political situation dogging the country as a whole. This lack of mention of the crisis occurred in spite of the fact that the city of Harare itself has been enduring a major water and electricity crisis and is administered by a government-appointed commission. This commission was put in place in order to thwart the democratically elected council, led and dominated by the opposition. The church has remained mum.
In the run-up to the elections of 2005, Buhera circuit in rural Mashonaland East, the home area of the leader of the main opposition party where some gruesome political murders took place during the 2002 elections voiced gratitude for surviving yet another turbulent election campaign time. It was as if they were heaving a sigh of relief when they thanked God “for the spirit of working together enabling us to pass through the time of political disturbances.”25
By 2006 the Methodist church had increased the number of its administrative districts from 5 into 9, thus increasing the number of full time bishops in charge of the geographical areas now covering virtually all the corners of Zimbabwe. These nine bishops sit at the powerful Bishop’s Council, advising the bishop about the welfare of the church, and are automatic members of the only statutory committee in the church, the Standing Committee that has grown so powerfully over the years to usurp even the work of annual Conference.
Judging from the 2006 minutes of both the Bishops Council and the Standing Committee, it is evident that the socio-economic situation prevailing in the country was not a serious cause for concern. Now with more voices and eyes on the ground one might have hoped that the church was going to shake the foundations and make a major difference as far as the aspect of socio-political involvement was concerned, but alas the same preoccupation evident in the circuit prayers characterized the preoccupation of the district leaders as well.
In 2006 the pattern of expression in the recorded prayers that emphasized economic (not political) woes continued. For example, in the eastern province of Manicaland, Mutare circuit gave a prayer of thanks for “the divine enablement and guidance throughout the economic challenges.”26 Chihota circuit nearby also offered a thanksgiving prayer to God for “seeing us through the year during the harsh economic conditions.”27 Chikangwe circuit joined the bandwagon by offering a thanksgiving prayer and thanking God “for sustaining us through the past year amidst serious economic hardships.”28[emphasis mine] This obsession with thanksgiving prayers for the “economic situation” can be interpreted in two ways. First these prayers are a convenient way of facing the crisis without mentioning the dirty word “politics” which the Methodists leaders have done all they could to avoid. It is less harmful to talk of the crisis engulfing the nation as purely an economic one—which is a government propaganda line that blaming the crisis on perceived enemies of the State and on sanctions imposed by some Western countries on the regime for violating human rights.
The second interpretation is slightly different from the above although sharing some of its attributes. These prayers must be seen in light of the deepening crisis that was now affecting mostly the poor to the extent that it was becoming increasingly difficult even for the ministers to raise their salaries from their congregations.29 Since most circuits were by this time having a hard time raising enough to cover their budget, every passing year with books still in black was a cause for celebration. In other words, when they were giving thanks, they were not thanking God for the sake of the people out there who were enduring so much, but for the sole purpose of surviving yet another tough year of raising levies for the district and the Connexional office. The thanksgiving prayers in this regard are selfishly done—they have very little or nothing at all to do with the social and economic crisis hitting the poor out there but everything to do with keeping the circuit alive.
The Methodist Church in Zimbabwe began the year 2007 with double the number of circuits it had in the year 2000 when the country’s political crisis began to crystallize. From a mere 49 Circuits in 2000 now there were 101, with a total of 1616 local churches/ preaching points. What is telling about these innocent statistics is that while dictatorship was on full throttle, the church was growing and more personnel was being deployed around the whole country. The negative aspect of this growth is that even with such an increase in the number of circuits and preaching places, and the number of personnel on the ground very few critical voices have been heard from the Methodist clergy concerning the struggle for life.
Out of a total of these 101 circuits only 7 record prayers that showed concern beyond the preoccupation with administrative and tithing issues. Only two begin really to come out and name the crisis bedeviling the country as a matter of life and death. One can tell from the prayers that these circuits were experiencing a high death rate from within their flock and the ministers were beginning to feel the pinch as they spent more days at the cemeteries than they spent at the hospital welcoming new babies to the world.
Ndolwane circuit, situated right at the border with Botswana, spoke out about their troubles and prayed for “our circuit to remain focused on Jesus irregardless of the high death rate, economic hardship and social instability.”30 The subtext of these prayers tells a tale of the ravaging scourge of Aids and hunger claiming people in this arid region of the country, albeit in language that avoids explicit naming of the problems. It is a prayer of desperation, a prayer of a people who do not know what the future holds and who are at the edges of despair as they seek to keep faith and focus.
Silobela circuit offered a longer than usual prayer, marked by some lamentation as they also faced the prevalence of death and hardship in their doorsteps. Although it is a thanksgiving prayer, it is characterized by the foreboding sense of depression. They thank God for “His guidance, care, and concern which has led us [through] the year, in spite of the very harsh economic conditions in the country to which members of the church are not [exception(sic)] (exempted) and the general chorus of death which has become the order of the day.”31(emphasis mine)
Finally, Highlands Circuit in the city of Mutare broke ranks with the rest of the Methodist community and tackled the taboo subject that has not featured before in these prayers, though it is the number one killer disease of so many Christians. They came face to face with God and their own human frailty and gave thanks to God for enabling them to be “… able to pay school fees for orphans in our circuit, …for effective leadership development of HIV/AIDS programs.”32 What a refreshingly frank prayer in the midst of a dry wilderness!
Searching for a New Paradigm
The foregoing survey of prayer requests from 2000 to 2007 makes it quite evident that the official church leadership has not been prophetic enough regarding the crisis in Zimbabwe new ways of being Christian should be explored. A theology of involvement that prioritizes critical involvement of ordinary Christians over and above the official leaders is preferred. Several approaches can be utilized in an effort to help ordinary Christians engage the socio-economic and political context in which their faith is lived and exercised. Proposed here are just two routes that can help the church recover its prophetic role and in turn empower ordinary Christians to live victoriously against any repressive system. The first route is to make a distinction between the concept of politics and that of justice. Whereas many African Christians are not comfortable with engaging in politics, it would be of tremendous help to articulate the biblical concept of justice as part and parcel of a Christian obligation. God’s requirement that all live justly and walk humbly before the Lord must be emphasized as a central teaching in the lives of ordinary Christians. Justice is not politics but is a central concept in the life of the Christian.
The second route must be a re-interpretation and a recovery in a contextualized form of the core Christian doctrines. The lack of sociopolitical involvement can be better understood through the lack of some strong and vibrant understanding of the basic Christian doctrines.33 At present the liturgies, together with the major doctrines of the Church, are not articulated in such a way that they can challenge and empower the ordinary Christian to employ them to confront, engage, resist and face the injustice in society.34 Most of the doctrines are crafted in such a way that they prepare the Christian to get ready to go to heaven someday when they die. Moreover, these doctrines are not explicit enough on how the Christians should engage the world and its evil forces, especially the type dominant in Zimbabwe, which are not spiritual but tend to have a socio- economic and political character.
Several examples can be cited here of powerful church doctrines that if translated to every day experiences of the people, can goad people into making the reign of God a reality on earth. An anchoring of these church doctrines in the everyday lives of people has the potential to empower ordinary Christians to see the connection between faith and the rough life outside the church. Moreover, the doctrines can help the church to see a strong connection between the inseparability of the will of God in heaven and what takes place daily on earth.
But even before the doctrines are re-interpreted and taught to the Christian community, an emphasis must be laid to all new members joining the Christian community that the arena of their new found faith is the world not Heaven! This means that God’s love for the earth is as intense as God’s love for heaven. The Gospel of John states clearly that God so loved the world, not the heavens! If then, as Jesus taught his disciples to pray for God’s will to be implemented on earth (Mathew 6:10) exactly the same way it is in heaven, then it also means that God’s concern for the earth is too deep to be ignored by Christians while they are here on earth.
What is clear from the prayer of Jesus is that God’s concern is very much on earth where the socio-economic madness is taking place. God is concerned about what the people eat here and how they are governed here. God is very much concerned about what they buy and how much it cost. God is even concerned about the rights and dignity of all human beings—those from the ruling party as much as God is concerned about the lives of those who are in the opposition parties. God’s concern according to the prayer is that both those who govern and the governed must make sure that God’s will happens every day the same way it happens in heaven.
If the will of God is thwarted in this life, then it can be concluded that those who do nothing are fighting God. They have to account for why they failed God in failing to create and cultivate an environment where God’s will happens on earth as it happens in heaven. With this in mind one would have thought the church in Zimbabwe in general and the Methodists in particular will spend most of its energy preparing the Christians to bring about that reign of God here on earth than it spends on toilets and tithes.
The sad reality though is that the church is busy preparing ordinary Christians for departure for heaven. Many of the Christians are not or are very little concerned with the will of God happening here. They just want the religion that will make them feel good about heaven—even though their earthly performance is dismal! It is easy to tell the focus and preoccupation of the ordinary Christians in Zimbabwe. Beyond the scholarly analysis of the Handbook it is not hard to tell what the preoccupation of the Zimbabwean church is. One has to just see the posters and hear the most topical sermons in the church to learn where the church’s heart is.
The topics that feature most in crusades, revival meetings and all night prayer meetings where hundreds and sometimes even thousands of people gather have more to do with tithing, fasting, prayer, giving, the Holy Spirit, healing and speaking in tongues. Rarely does one find topics that address the African crisis issues such as Aids, Justice, Forgiveness, Tribalism, Economic Justice, Rape, Poverty, Human Rights and Political Violence, Hunger, Immigration, Life in the Diaspora, etc.
Had the ordinary Christians understood the moral obligation of preparing the community of faith to be partners with God in making sure God’s will begins to happen in every village and every city in Zimbabwe then the country would not be in such a deep crisis. Even the definition of sin would be different from the one that dominates the Zimbabwean religious landscape. Unfortunately, many Christians in Zimbabwe are still content with the knowledge that soon they will be singing with angels in heaven and doing God’s will in heaven even though they have not engaged socially and politically.
The question then is how can this will of God can be known and done on earth. For Christians the person and life of Jesus as attested in the Scriptures reveal the will of God on earth just as God has it happening in heaven. Our purpose on earth is revealed and fulfilled in Jesus’ short but pregnant life on earth among us. What the church teaches about Christ must not be a spiritualized version of Christ, but teach the life and person of Christ who suffered with the poor, who ate with sinners, who lifted up the lowly, who cared abut those who were hungry and not just prayed for them but gave them real bread and also healed the sick. Such a Christ is the one who attended funerals and also asked tough questions about why people had to go through so much in life.
The fact that we are created in the image of God and yet we are also products of our social and political environments can be a catalyst in helping Christians to learn that they have a critical role to play in shaping their political contexts. Christianity in Zimbabwe is at the present time struggling with the implications of such an understanding that place human beings at the center stage of changing their own political environments. The Christians are yet to understand that for positive change to occur in Zimbabwe, they as human beings have to take center stage—the Christians have to be part and parcel of the change that they pray for. What this means is that the grace of God that brings transformation in their lives and in their communities is not a cheap grace. Instead it is a grace that demands some sacrifices on the part of those who want to see God’s will happening here on earth as it is happening in heaven.
The other doctrine that has a potential of bridging the gap between faith and daily life for ordinary Christians is the doctrine of the reign of God (kingdom of God). It is this doctrine that Christians can employ as the model for our resistance and critique to any ideology and powers that be. With some critical understanding of this doctrine then it becomes clear that when Christians criticize any ideology it is not because they are trying to be politicians but because they are informed by their Christian understanding of God’s reign which is predicated on love and forgiveness. The Christians are to be always suspicious of any powers be on the basis of their understanding God’s intention for governance and leadership. What is especially clear from Christ’s teaching is that power should be exercised for serving others not for domination and self aggrandizement. The doctrine speaks to those Christians who are in influential positions in Zimbabwe and clearly challenges them to govern God’s people not as masters driving slaves at the plantations but as fellow servants of God entrusted by God to shepherd God’s people.
The depth of our common people’s pain and suffering shows that the socio-political and economic situation has reached critical levels and requires each and every citizen with a conscience to act decisively in bringing about change. The churches are therefore called upon by their very reason of existence to act as critical voices of all who are oppressed, marginalized and are brutalized by a system that cares only for the few who are well connected with the ruling class. The present levels of such immoral economic decline can not be sustained long without the people losing patience with the system that destroy their lives.
Jimmy G. Dube, PhD. United Theological College, Harare, Zimbabwe, [email protected]
Notes
1. The No Vote won by a margin of 54.7 % which was unprecedented in Zimbabwe’s 20-year history. For further details and breakdown of votes see, David Blair, Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in Zimbabwe (London: Continuum, 2003)
2. The last official engagement of the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe with justice issues happened at the 1998 Conference after the first foundation to the Zimbabwean crisis was laid when the government disbursed millions of unbudgeted funds to the War Veterans Association leading to the collapse of the Zimbabwean dollar. The Methodist Conference spent some time reflecting on the implications of these payouts to the economic wellbeing of the country from an economic justice perspective. The proceedings in this conference are not only startling but show a church that is not only informed but concerned and engaged with the world: “…The unfair distribution of resources should be an issue for concern in Zimbabwe…As a church, we certainly cannot afford to stand aloof and be passive onlookers…As a Methodist church, we are an affected institution since the economy is not above our heads but a part and parcel of our lives… The state of the country must be the focus of our ministry… We are called upon to make resolutions about the directions we should take as a Church. (Conference Minutes 1998, p.11-12)
3. Bishop Simbarashe Sithole during a Question and Answer Session at the Harare East Synod of the Methodist Church, 11-13 April , 2007 Rest Haven, Harare. The paradox is that the very theme of the Synod was “Called to Serve” which it can be interpreted means serving the Church not the world for Methodists!
4. The Zimbabwe We Want document, though a noble project, was compromised by the process in which it was compiled and the accusation that the State had tampered with it. Before crafting the document the Bishops had an audience with the president who lectured them on what needed to be done to turn the crisis around.
5. For the robust Roman Catholic Church’s response to the crisis see God Hears the Cry of the Oppressed pastoral letter by the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishop’s Conference, issued and read out in Catholic churches on Holy Thursday, 5, April 2007.
6. Serving the sectors is a convenient route for the church to deal with a thorn in the flesh since the minister then is semi-independent and his/ her views are no longer of the church’s views.
7. www.kubatana.net
8 For further details see Christian Alliance Voice: Christian Alliance Newsletter, Issue 2 August 2006.
9 Cited in Pius Wakatema, “Christian Alliance Leads the Save Zimbabwe Campaign,” September 10, 2006. www.kubatana.net.
10. See footnote 4 above.
11. The 2005 Conference proceedings reveal a stormy Ministerial session where Bishop Kadenge was asked to clarify what was his role in this Christian Alliance. Instead of celebrating his elevation to the leadership of the organization the Church was showing signs of discomfort with such a high visibility of its own clergy member among the enemies of the State.
12. An analysis of the proceedings of the Methodist Conferences from the year 2000 to year 2006 reveals a similar pattern of official disengagement from socio-political and economic issues even though the ordinary membership of the church is directly affected and deeply wounded by the crisis.
13. The Handbook is a kind of bragging book where individual ministers record what they consider their achievements for the past year in the circuit in the following form: “we thank God for” prayer and also record the focus for the coming year/s in the form of “we pray for” prayer request.
14. Kwekwe town had experienced one of the worst election disturbances with the house of the opposition candidate petrol bombed…..
15. Methodist Church in Zimbabwe: Handbook 2006.
16. Ibid., 2003.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Op cit., 2004.
21. Methodist Church in Zimbabwe, Handbook 2004.
22. Methodist Church in Zimbabwe: Handbook, 2004.
23. Ibid.
24. Op cit.
25. One is left with question marks concerning the period being referred to because the 2005 Handbook came out before the 2005 March Parliamentary elections. Could it be that the circuit is referring to the disturbances during the campaign period before the elections?
26. Ibid., 2006.
27. Ibid., 2006.
28. Ibid.
29. It was in the 2006 Conference that a new centralized method of remunerating ministers was adopted by Conference to take care of the uneven stipends that ministers were getting especially those in rural circuits hard hit by drought and the economic decline.
30. Handbook 2007.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. No work has been done yet in Zimbabwe to contextualize the major Christian doctrine, thus leaving it locked in sterile non African trappings.
34. A casual look at the Services of Baptism/ Confirmation and Reception into Full Membership reveals a preoccupation with the questions of one becoming a Christian so as to serve God within the church. There is nothing in the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe current liturgies that brings the theology of service to the world close to the ordinary Christians, in a similar level that the United Methodist Church liturgy does on Baptism where it is explicitly required that those who want to become of the Christian faith vow to “renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world,…accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. (The United Methodist Hymnal, The United Methodist Publishing House, Nashville: Tennessee, 2001.)
Bibliography
Blair, David. Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in Zimbabwe. London: Continuum, 2003
Churches in Manicaland. The Truth Will Make You Free: A Compendium of Christian Social Teaching. Churches in Manicaland. September 2006.
Dube, Jimmy G. A Socio-Political Agenda for the 21st century Zimbabwean Church: Empowering the Excluded. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006.
Hatch, Nathan O, and John H. Wigger, eds. Methodism and the Shaping of the American Culture. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001.
Hodgson, Peter C, and Robert H. King, eds. Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.
Kamete, Amin Y. Governing the Poor in Harare, Zimbabwe: Shifting Perceptions and Changing Responses. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2002.
Kriger, Norma. Guerrilla Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe: Symbolic and Violent Politics, 1980-1987. Cambridge: University Press, 2003.
Methodist Literature Dept. Methodist Church in Zimbabwe: Handbook 2000,2001, 2002, 2003, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007.
Schreiter, Robert. Constructing Local Theologies. New York: Orbis Books, 1997.
Thomas, Owen C. Introduction to Theology. Wilton CT: Morehouse Publishing, 1983.
Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.
Documents and Papers
Catholic Bishop’s Conference. God Hears the Cry of the Oppressed: Pastoral Letter by the Zimabwe Catholic Bishop’s Conference on the Current Crisis of Our Country. 5 April, 2007.
Christian Alliance. CA Voice: Christian Alliance Newsletter. Issue 2, August 2006.
Churches of Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe We Want: Towards a National Vision for Zimbabwe. 2007
By Norma Kriger
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.
When Simba Makoni, who had been a ZANU PF politburo member, announced that he would run for the presidency, it injected a refreshing uncertainty about his impact on the elections. For opponents of ZANU PF, Makoni’s candidacy signaled the ruling party’s internal unraveling. There was also a palpable shift in the political environment during the campaign, especially in ZANU PF’s rural strongholds. On brief visits to Chibi in Masvingo province and to the area in Manicaland province where powerful ZANU PF government minister, Didymus Mutasa, and Simba Makoni both own farms, I saw MDC supporters fearlessly wearing MDC-t shirts, moving freely, and organizing and attending rallies.
For the first time since 1980, ZANU PF lost control of the house of assembly. The MDC-T won 99 seats, the MDC-M 10 seats, ZANU PF 97 seats, and an independent one seat. [Three assembly constituencies, where candidates died before the March 29th election, will hold by-elections on June 27.] Despite the inroads made by the opposition into ZANU PF rural strongholds, ZANU PF still secured a majority of seats in four out of ten provinces. Should a new post-electoral unity agreement between MDC-M (which supported Simba Makoni in the presidential election) and MDC-T hold, the MDC factions will control the house of assembly. In the senate elections, the two MDC factions won 30 seats (MDC-T won 24 seats and MDC-M 6 seats), as did ZANU PF. The senate also has 33 reserved seats for chiefs, provincial governors, and presidential appointees, thus guaranteeing ZANU PF control. A caveat: these parliamentary results are not final. Fifty-three ZANU PF candidates and fifty-two MDC candidates have lodged petitions with the Electoral Court, mainly affecting House seats. Under the Electoral Act, the Electoral Court has six months in which to rule on the petitions.
Official presidential election results were finally announced on May 2, more than five weeks after the polling date. Tsvangirai won 47.9% of the votes, Mugabe 43.2%, and Makoni 8.3%. A fourth candidate won the remainder of the vote. Approximately 43% of registered voters participated in the presidential election. Legally, local government election results were declared at ward level within a day or two of polling on March 29. Councils are required to meet as soon as practicable after the declaration of the results to elect mayors and chairpersons. This did not happen, though. Councils apparently waited for the electoral commission to publish the results in the press, which it is required to do under law. The commission finally began to slowly publish the council results in the press days after it had announced the presidential election results.
Prior to the March 29 2008 elections in Zimbabwe, historical precedent suggested (at least to me) that President Mugabe would find a way to “win” the presidential election despite the inauspicious context – economic collapse and a three-way race in which the vote would be split among himself, Simba Makoni (who stood as an independent), and his longstanding rival, Morgan Tsvangirai (head of the MDC-Tsvangirai faction). While opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC faction (MDC-T) continue to claim outright victory (as they have since soon after the polls closed) and engage in diplomatic efforts to ensure that they inherit state power, President Mugabe predictably shows no signs of ending his 28-year reign. ZANU PF has handled the crisis arising from Mugabe’s failure to secure a majority of the popular vote with familiar guile and ruthlessness.
Almost immediately after the election, the media were abuzz with how a ZANU PF envoy had approached Morgan Tsvangirai to discuss forming a Tsvangirai-led government of national unity. Reportedly, Mugabe had indicated he would resign, as long as he was offered immunity from prosecution from crimes against humanity. These talks were allegedly derailed by hawks in the party, the military, and police. Fearful of facing future prosecutions, they apparently urged Mugabe not to capitulate. At the time, Secretary-General Tendai Biti (MDC-T) denied the reports, saying the MDC-T would not negotiate with ZANU PF until the results had been declared. That these negotiations took place was later confirmed by Morgan Tsvangirai and still later by veteran South African journalist Allister Sparks.
One must question whether this ZANU PF overture was ever more than a deliberate attempt to give the ruling elite time to consider its options and perhaps ensure that the MDC-T did not call for street protests to demand the announcement of the results. (There is no evidence that the MDC-T had such a plan, and its critics believe it lost another opportunity to back up its electoral performance with organized mass action.) Mugabe’s alleged readiness to quit is out of character. During his campaign, for instance, he vowed that he would never allow Morgan Tsvangirai to rule Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s verbal threats are seldom gratuitous.
Announcements made on April 3 and 4 indicated that ZANU PF had settled on the run-off scenario: Mugabe would challenge Tsvangirai in a second round ostensibly because neither candidate had secured the necessary 50% + one vote for a first-round victory. To ensure a Mugabe victory, the Joint Operations Command (JOC), reportedly led by Emmerson Munangagwa, himself an aspirant presidential successor to Mugabe, launched a strategy of violence and intimidation, chiefly against rural voters who had supported the opposition in former ZANU PF strongholds. The JOC is composed of the commanders of the army, air force, police, prison, and intelligence services. The military, police, war veterans, and youth militia, aided by ZANU PF supporters and senior ZANU PF officials, are leading the terror campaign. ZANU PF has a history of using state-orchestrated violence to punish those who vote against it. For example, it embarked on violent campaigns against ZAPU after the 1985 election and against urban MDC voters after the 2005 election.
A sad paradox of the effort to bring transparency to elections is that the new legal requirement to post the election results outside the polling stations enabled the ruling party to target those villages or farms or resettlement areas which had voted for the opposition in its Operation Makavhoterapapi (Where did you put your cross?). Victims of violence and arrests also include local election observers and those who administered the elections – the polling officers, MDC electoral agents, and even Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) officials. They are accused of assisting the MDC through fraud, vote-rigging, and other electoral irregularities.
ZANU PF continued to play for more time, not only to prepare for a run-off but also likely to explore other options, such as a government of national unity under President Mugabe. Legally, ZEC did not need to announce the parliamentary election results. Once they had been posted at the polling stations, they were official. Nonetheless, ZEC behaved as if it had the authority to declare the parliamentary results. The ZEC dragged out the announcement of the assembly results, then moved to a similarly drawn out process of announcing senate results. On April 12 the ZEC ordered a recount of the parliamentary, presidential, and local government election votes in 23 constituencies. The recount only began on April 19 and continued for over a week. Whether or not the ZEC intended to reverse ZANU PF’s narrow but historic loss of its majority in the house is unclear; in the end, the recount merely confirmed the parliamentary results announced earlier. Given the weakness of the House, ZANU PF may have decided to accept the loss of control over it rather than further inflame international and regional hostility.
ZANU PF normalized the abnormal. Mugabe’s cabinet, which he dissolved on the eve of the election, continues to serve as if legal. Moreover, at least six cabinet ministers lost their seats in the parliamentary election but remain in office which violates the legal requirement that ministers be elected to parliament. The state media, a mouthpiece of Mugabe and ZANU PF, focused attention away from the undeclared presidential election result, and alleged conspiracies against the nation’s sovereignty involving variously the US, the UK, the MDC, white farmers, critical SADC heads of state, and the UN.
After ZEC had announced the presidential election results on May 2, it initially said the run-off might not be held for up to a year. The commission cited lack of resources (the Reserve Bank governor says the run-off will cost at least US$60 million) and of preparation time. Under the electoral law, the electoral commission must announce the date for the run-off election within twenty-one days of “the election” – the only reasonable interpretation in this case must be that the run-off be held within twenty-one days of the declaration of the election result. However, the Electoral Act empowers the commission to make statutory instruments to extend the twenty-one day period – and indeed to affect virtually any aspect relating to the election – as long as the Minister of Justice approves the statutory instruments. The commission used these powers. On May 16, the commission announced that the run-off would be held on June 27.
On May 10 Morgan Tsvangirai announced that he would participate in the run-off. Over the past few weeks, the MDC and its leader first said that even though Tsvangirai was the president-elect, he would participate in a run-off but only under certain conditions, only to later assert he would not participate in a run-off under any conditions. Tsvangirai’s announcement to contest the run-off, or perhaps the reporting of it, does not entirely remove ambiguity about the MDC’s position. Some accounts say his participation is contingent on certain conditions being met: SADC must send peacekeepers, the election must be held within twenty-one days, international observers must have free access, SADC peacekeepers must be in-country, ZEC must be re-constituted, and the media must be free for local and international journalists. Other reports treat these conditions as an MDC wish-list rather than prerequisites for his participation. One thing is certain: the government, as it quickly responded, will not meet the conditions.
One sympathizes with the opposition’s dilemma, yet again, about whether or not to participate in another election. If Tsvangirai does not contest the election, Mugabe automatically becomes the next president. If he participates in the run-off, his supporters are almost certain to be the victims of ZANU PF’s escalating campaign of terror. Should Tsvangirai, who has been in self-imposed exile for weeks now, return to Zimbabwe as he said he would, he too may face the ruling party’s wrath. Beyond its use of terror tactics, ZANU PF plans to further tilt the playing field in other ways. ZEC and President Mugabe have the power to alter electoral rules that, according to the Minister of Justice, disadvantage ZANU PF vis-à-vis the MDC. And ZANU PF has already made changes to ensure that the state media will be even more pro-Mugabe for the run-off than the first round.
It is easy to see why the MDC would prefer to form a government of national unity rather than participate in a run-off which Mugabe will not allow them to win. Almost immediately after Tsvangirai said on May 10 that he would participate in the run-off, MDC Secretary-General Tendai Biti spoke in favor of a government of national unity as a solution to the electoral crisis. The independents – the Makoni faction and Jonathan Moyo, who broke from ZANU PF before the March 2005 house of assembly elections – also prefer the formation of a government of national unity to a run-off. The securocrats and Mugabe might consider a government of national unity, but only on condition that it is headed by Mugabe. Mugabe told President Mbeki on May 9 that he would consider a government of national unity only after the run-off. However, there are reports that Mugabe is interested in holding talks with Tsvangirai about forming a government of national unity rather than holding a run-off. Neither the independents nor the MDC factions will accept a Mugabe-led government of national unity, before or after the run-off. Nor will the MDC accept a government of national unity that its leaders do not dominate. President Mbeki has long promoted a government of national unity under a successor to Mugabe. His preferred candidate for the job was Makoni, whom he expected would win the presidential election. For a government of national unity to be brokered, mediation will be necessary.
Since the disputed presidential elections in 2002, which the MDC believes Tsvangirai won, there has been a cycle of elections followed by attempts to mediate a constitutional settlement between the MDC and ZANU PF so as to pave the way for holding elections that will be considered legitimate. To date, neither elections nor mediation has solved the political crisis. Moreover, after President Mbeki, who has served as SADC’s appointed mediator for the past year, famously declared on April 12 that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe and asked for ZEC to be given more time to declare the presidential results, the MDC-T asked SADC to remove Mbeki. SADC subsequently endorsed Mbeki’s role as mediator but a new mediator will probably have to be found. SADC is apparently exploring appointing a team of mediators, which would include President Mbeki. The pattern of disputed elections and failed mediation looms ahead.
For the overwhelming majority of Zimbabweans, the ruling party’s post-election shenanigans and its escalating campaign of violence will be further proof that ballots cannot change a dictatorship. Expect the percentage of registered voters who participate in the run-off – assuming that it is actually held - to plummet well below 43%.
Norma Kriger
Honorary Research Fellow,
School of Economic History and Development Studies,
University of KwaZulu/Natal, Durban, South Africa
1. Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, Political Violence Report: December 2007, 13 February 2008, http://www.kubatana.net/docs/hr/hrfpolviol_080213_dec.pdf
Note: This research was partially supported by a grant from Idasa, South Africa. An earlier version of this article appeared on the Royal Africa Society website http://www.royalafricansociety.org