As Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, presides over what might be the most rapid disintegration yet of a modern nation-state, it has become de rigueur for journalists, politicians and academics to offer what has become a near-universal analysis: Mugabe, who has ruled his country uninterrupted for 27 years, was a promising leader who became corrupted over time by power.
But this conception of Mugabe is absolutely wrong. From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was not just a Marxist but one who repeatedly made clear his intention to run Zimbabwe as an authoritarian, one-party state.
Mugabe’s formative political education began in 1964, during a decade of imprisonment for subversive activity against the white minority regime that ruled Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia. After he was released, he helped lead a civil war against the government.
Years before taking office, he said “the multiparty system ... is a luxury” and that if Zimbabweans did not like Marxism, “then we will have to re-educate them”.
After assuming office, he confiscated about a dozen private companies associated with the rival ZAPU party and expropriated farms owned by associates of Nkomo (his erstwhile liberation ally), a harbinger of what he would do to white farmers 20 years later.
Yet, even in the midst of these crimes, Mugabe never lost his fan base in the West. In 1986, the University of Massachusetts Amherst bestowed on him an honourary doctorate of law just as he was completing his genocide against the Ndebele.
Partly, this revisionism is what might be termed the West’s “Orientalist” view of Zimbabwe. According to this interpretation, it was only when Mugabe started going after whites that the world began paying attention.
The anti-white violence of the early 2000s took no more than a dozen white lives and the lives of many more black farm workers — peanuts compared with the thousands of Ndebeles slaughtered in the mid-’80s.
That Mugabe did not immediately ruin Zimbabwe’s economy or force the whites out is a large part of why the West did not portray him as a villain. By African standards, he really was not all that bad.
Throughout the Rhodesian civil war in the 1970s, many in the media attempted to portray Mugabe as akin to Nelson Mandela, the quintessence of the heroic, international statesman.
The media already had its villain — Rhodesia’s intractable whites — and portraying Mugabe as just another African strongman bent on turning his country into a one-party dictatorship would have complicated the story of good versus evil.
Mugabe was also a brilliant and eloquent spokesman for black African grievances against colonial rule and for post-colonial aspirations of independence and self-sufficiency. And it’s true that after taking office, he preached racial reconciliation rather than retribution, surprising many whites.
But a fully honest accounting also would have recognised Mugabe to be, whatever his virtues, an authoritarian thug hell-bent on acquiring — and attaining — power at all costs.
Los Angeles Times
