Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe by Martin Meredith
PublicAffairs, £8.99
IN SEPTEMBER the TUC passed a resolution saying: “Congress rejects Robert Mugabe’s claim that the problems facing Zimbabwe are the result of imperialist intervention, which is a smokescreen to obscure the responsibility of his destructive and corrupt regime and to deter opposition domestically and regionally.â€
Martin Meredith’s newly updated study of Robert Mugabe takes us behind that smokescreen and reveals the destruction and corruption which have been the watchwords of his regime from the very beginning.
Meredith shows how Mugabe’s cunning spawned ZANU PF, the political machine which has ruled Zimbabwe since independence, and knows only one way to operate – through fear.
Those who have followed southern Africa’s development over many years often express surprise at what is happening in Zimbabwe today. “After all, he started out so well,†they despair, before recounting the advances in universal education and health care achieved in Zimbabwe after independence.
However, as Meredith shows, this early progress came at a very heavy price. The UK government and other donors, relieved that the armed struggle against Ian Smith’s illegal minority regime had been brought to a conclusion, determinedly turned a blind eye to the continuing ruthlessness of Mugabe’s tactics rather than admit their success story had turned sour.
Starting early in his days of political exile, Mugabe’s ability to use violence with precision and detachment never abated. Whether against individual opponents or dissident communities, he commissioned his death squads to eliminate those who stood in his way. Since those likely to compete in the struggle for power tended to disappear rather suddenly, often in motor accidents, the circle at the top of ZANU PF surrounding Mugabe came to be composed increasingly of those with an eye for plunder rather than power.
As with so many megalomaniacs in history, Mugabe can bewitch an audience with words. Whether addressing villagers in rural Zimbabwe or an international summit of world leaders, he has the ability to pitch his rhetoric compellingly; his oratory is hypnotic at times. Utterances that ought to shock with their brutality or reactionary audacity are delivered with confident plausibility. Meredith gives us many of Mugabe’s most chilling quotes; they are by turns xenophobic, racist, tribalist and homophobic.
Unfortunately, Meredith also allows his narrative to be guided by Mugabe’s authorised version of events. Far too much of his book dwells on the impact of Mugabe’s policies on members of the white minority. Meredith overlooks the fact that Mugabe’s move against the agricultural sector, after 20 years of dragging his heels over land reform, was not motivated by a sudden urge to right the unjust distribution of resources. The real aim was to cripple the trade union movement and the looming political threat it posed to ZANU PF power.
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, had broken its alliance with ZANU PF, eventually founding an alternative political formation, the Movement for Democratic Change. Farm workers constituted the largest sector of unionised labour and could furthermore be portrayed by the regime as not truly Zimbabwean since many were of foreign extraction. Lacking official documentation, even though they had been in Zimbabwe for several generations, and with no continuing connection to the countries of their forebears in Malawi, Mozambique or Zambia, they should have been accorded full rights as citizens of Zimbabwe.
Meredith’s book is a useful and readable account of a man whose vanity and lust for power has destroyed a nation. Perversely, he is still accorded the respect of a liberator by many across the continent; and, for as long as African leaders remain unwilling to confront the real horror of Mugabe’s oppression of the people of Zimbabwe, they will see their lives ruined and their dreams betrayed.
David Banks
