It was painful to behold, and initially you were inclined to deny the evidence of your eyes, and the stories that filtered into your ears. On the bustling streets of Bulawayo – the name means the place of slaughter – in the evenings, people stood in sullen silence as military trucks rolled by, conveying the dreaded “fifth brigade”. The fifth brigade was Mugabe’s North Korean-trained elite force de frappe.
They were much hated by the people – who were mostly Ndebele, supporters of Joshua Nkomo. Defiantly, some of the young people wore T-shirts bearing the image of Nkomo, with the label “Father Zimbabwe”.
Mugabe was not integrative but divisive.
In the stark realpolitik that was all-too prevalent in Africa, the Shona “majority” he belonged to had 70 percent of the population and were in power. Anybody who didn’t like it could lump it.
By the time you left Ingutsheni, barely a year later, you could see that Zimbabwe, the land that had briefly embodied African triumph and ascendancy, was heading relentlessly downhill.
For anyone to understand the psychology of Mugabe, they need to know that his paternal grandfather once served under Lobengula, the last King of Matabeleland. The Ndebele, who were now the minority, had boasted in the past of ruthless monarchs who carried out great exploits and struck terror into the hearts of their neighbours and their enemies, including Mugabe’s Shona.
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Over the years, it was easy to see that Mugabe’s personality hardened as adversity multiplied. He was a self-declared Marxist from when you all first knew him, but he was many things besides. Acknowledged as the best-read and most cerebral African leader of his day, he had a sharp dress sense and impeccable manners. He was quaintly English, with a fondness for sharing afternoon tea and scones with friend and enemy alike in his tie and jacket.
The plan, originally, was that the guerrillas from the two major groups who fought the bush war against white oppressors would be integrated into the new national army. For some time, the arrangement seemed to work. Then distrust set in. In short order Nkomo’s ZIPRA fighters began to escape into the bush to launch a new guerrilla war, or to make a life as bandits.
Gradually, Mugabe strangulated his old rival into political extinction. The army harshly suppressed the civilian population in Matabeleland, leading to thousands of deaths. Rendered effectively impotent, unable to bear the continued suffering of his people, Nkomo succumbed, and allowed his party to be absorbed into a lopsided coalition in which he had little say. Eventually he faded into oblivion, even before his death. For Mugabe it was a pyrrhic victory. Many people would never forgive him for what he did to the older man.
Over the years, it was easy to see that Mugabe’s personality hardened as adversity multiplied. He was a self-declared Marxist from when you all first knew him, but he was many things besides
Mugabe, in the course of time, seemed to feel an increasing sense of irritation that anyone should oppose him – he, the liberator who had sacrificed all for his nation and made the struggle his life.
It did not help matters that early on, the British government of Margaret Thatcher had promised to help with the cost of a gradual process of voluntary transfer of land back from white farmers to the black population, from whom it had been expropriated in the first place. It was an issue that was fundamental to the Liberation struggle. Not long after independence, a labour government came to power in the UK and disavowed the commitment. Incensed, Mugabe responded by seizing the land anyway, allowing hordes of war veterans to invade white-owned farms, driving the previous owners off the land, in some cases killing them.
Vilified by the western press, opposed now by a new generation not just in Matabeleland but all across the nation, including Harare the capital, which became a hotbed of opposition, and with his nation sliding into a bottomless recession, Robert Mugabe dug in deeper, and became more self-righteous.
Of Mandela, his friend and alternative model, President Mugabe was reputed to have said, “He has given his people statues and monuments,
I have given my own people land.”
It is a philosophical notion that cannot be dismissed out of hand. As evidence that “the Mugabe option” has traction, Robert Mugabe is much admired by the new kid on the block in South Africa, Julius Malema, the leader of the economic freedom fighters”.
Mugabe, you concluded sadly, long ago, was a leader for war, and not a leader for peace. Perhaps his legacy would have been different if he had acted like Mandela – holding office for a term, then retiring to the background to guide the next generation.
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Allowing so-called “war veterans”, run rampant, suggested that those who fought in the liberation struggle did it for booty and not for pure love of nation – a clear and despicable aberration. And what was the point in giving people land, if the result was to convert a nation that was the breadbasket of Africa into an economic basket case, forcing millions into economic exile?
Still, Africa needs to control the narrative on Mugabe. To dismiss him as a tin-pot dictator as the western press has done, does no justice to history, or to the man. A warped sense of entitlement might have made him think he owned Zimbabwe, and that he could even make his wife Grace president after he was dead.
But Mugabe is a genuine generational African hero.
He has posed a question to pan-Africanists which they are yet to answer – if his way is the wrong way to right the wrong of racist expropriation of black people’s land and natural resources, what is the right way?
Certainly, it is not just by building statues and monuments, as he said dismissively of his friend Mandela.
Robert Gabriel Mugabe was the real “father Zimbabwe”, warts and all. His errors were monumental, but his place cannot be erased. May his soul rest in peace.
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