March 2009 – Association of Concerned Africa Scholars

Africa has several island nations. These are Madagascar, the Comoros, Mauritius, Seychelles, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Cape Verde. Of these, Madagascar is well known: known for its natural beauty, rare species of flora and fauna, for its prominent location, and for its never ending spate of political intrigues and machinations. Things happen here that makes many African countries look like the Vatican’s sister city. Antananarivo, the capital city, is a daggerhouse. Since gaining independence from France in 1960, Madagascar has been beset by political, economic and legal problems. Assassinations, treachery, and treasonable acts are common here.

In recent weeks, we have witnessed another of such commotion play itself out. The Cable News Network (CNN) is reporting that “after two months of political turmoil, former opposition leader Andry Rajoelina was inaugurated… The country’s political crisis ended earlier this week, after then-President Marc Ravalomanana ceded power to the military, which handed over government control to Rajoelina, the former mayor of Antananarivo… Rajoelina declared himself president of a transitional government, and was confirmed by Madagascar’s high court.” In all of these, what has baffled many observers is the fact that the new president, Andry Rajoelina, is only 34 years old.

CNN, BBC and several media outlets are reporting that the new president is six years shy of the age required for ascension. In order words, Rajoelina is not fit to serve as the President of Madagascar. This being the case, one of three things is bound to happen: (1) the constitution may be amendment to accommodate the new president; (2) there may be a “revelation” which puts his age at or over forty; or (3) the age question may become moot. Strange and more bizarre things have happened in African and third world politics. How the military and political elites settles this will not surprise observers of the continent’s political landscape.

This illegality will be explained away and accepted. There is a second illegality. The first, as mentioned, is the breach of constitutional requirement in terms of age; and the second is the manner in which the former president, Marc Ravalomanana, was removed. It is hard to think of what happened in Antananarivo as anything less than a coup. This was a coup – a coup undertaken on behalf of a group that’s yet to make itself public. As unstable as Madagascar is, it is almost unimaginable to have things play out as they have.

For a while, the feeling was that military coups d’etat was a thing of the past. After all, this was continent that, between 1952 and 1989, witnessed over a hundred and fifty successful coups, attempted coups, and counter-coups. Samuel Decalo’s Coups and Army Rule in Africa: Studies in Military Style and Ruth First’s The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup D’état are two of several illuminating works on the coup phenomenon. Others — including Samuel Huntington, Mike Hough, Pieter Esterhuysen, and Morris Janowitz — have all done excellent work on the theory and practice of coups.

Military Coup d’etat, as Harvey Kebschull noted, is a speedily executed extralegal takeover of government by a conspiratorial group, usually consisting of military officers who use force or the threat of force to remove the government and assume power for itself. There are several explanations for coups, but overall, coups happen because of a mix of political, economic, ethnic, cultural, military and personal dynamics. They can be bloody, and generally causes discontinuity in policy formulation and implementation.

Ordinarily, one would say that it is not enough for the Southern African Development Community group to say it “completely rejected the legitimacy” of Rajoelina or for the African Union to suspend Madagascar’s membership. A clearer message should be sent to Antananarivo that this coup and the age-related breach of the constitution will not stand. It must not stand. South Africa, Mozambique, and Nigeria should be more vocal. The irony here is that because other coupists have gotten away with their illegalities, more and more aspiring power centers keep usurping the rule of law. Neither the African Union nor any other regional or sub-regional body has the power or the wherewithal to punish coupits.

And in fact, African states have no way of policing themselves and each other. Also, the majority of African leaders do not have the moral authority to condemn power usurpers. Most got to power through extralegal means. What’s more, the African Presidencies is like an old boys club: illegalities are accepted so long as the fallouts are not too severe. It is why no more than six African leaders will stand on the public podium to condemn Antananarivo. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe got away with killing and maiming his people, and also got away dismantling his country; and so did Mwai Kibaki of Kenya. Ethiopia is a killing field and no one can do anything about it, just as no one was able sanction Obasanjo for his crimes and incompetence.

Indeed one of the major problems of the continent is that there are very few voices of courage and reason left. There are very few governments with the moral backing to condemn Antananarivo for this constitutional breach. Therefore, after several days or weeks of negotiations, the illegality of Andry Rajoelina (and his backers) will be legalized. South Africa and many other countries will relent, and so will the African Union. Publicly or privately, the United States, France and other global powers will look the other way, and business will resume until another thug fights his way into power. In less than six months, Madagascar will be back in the news again. And again!

About the Author

Sabella Ogbobode Abidde, a PhD Candidate & SYLFF Fellow, is with Howard University Washington, DC. His dissertation is on violence, terrorism and underdevelopment as it relates to the Niger Delta. He can be reached at: Sabidde@gmail.com.

Mar 18, 2009

by ACAS

in Events

Africom Awareness Event in Berkeley

Association of Concerned, Africa Scholars (ACAS) & Priority Africa Network Present:

STOP AFRICOM
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
6:00 – 8:00 pm
At La Pena Cultural Center
3105 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley

The new U.S. Military Command for Africa threatens to escalate the militarization of all aspects of U.S. policy towards Africa. Come learn what the Africa Command is all about, what’s at stake, and how we can stop it.
Multimedia presentations and speakers:

Daniel Volman, Director African Security Research Project (Washington D.C.)
&
Dr. Amina Mama, Nigerian Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies Mills College

Light snacks and refreshments available. This is a free event, open to the public.

Sponsoring organizations: Africa Action, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Black Women Stirring the Waters, Global Exchange, Justice In Nigeria Now (JINN), KPFA Radio’s Africa Today, War Times, Women of Color Resource Center (WCRC), United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ) Bay Area, Vukani Mawethu Choir

*For tabling opportunities, contact Priority Africa Network at Tel: (510) 238 8080 ext. 309 or email us at PriorityAfrica@yahoo.com www.PriorityAfrica.org

Mar 16, 2009

by ACAS

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 82

Response to the Mamdani Debate

Most of the responses to Mahmood Mamdani’s article in this issue have challenged his interpretations of several areas in the political debate on the Zimbabwe crisis, including: the land question and the role of the war veterans; the benign position on state violence and underestimation of the enormous levels of displacement that have taken place under Mugabe’s rule; the misreading of the history of the labour movement; the dismissive characterization of the MDC and the civic movement; the mistaken assessment of the contribution of sanctions to the crisis; the brutal closure of democratic spaces; and perhaps most astonishingly the evasion of the enormous loss of legitimacy of Zanu PF and its increasing recourse to coercion, particularly as evidenced in the 2008 elections, to remain in power. Together these responses should, at the very least, cause readers to pause for further thought in reading Mamdani’s analysis of the situation in Zimbabwe, based as it is largely on the work of Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros. In addition to many others I have, in several interventions,[1] offered alternative readings of these events and will this year attempt to consolidate those positions within the context of a new History of Zimbabwe[2] currently being completed by a group of Zimbabwean historians.

It is clear that debate on these issues, particularly the form and outcomes of the land reform processes, will continue for a long time to come. However in the short and medium terms the livelihoods of both the peasantry and what remains of the urban workforce have been subjected to devastating attacks from the state, within the context of an economy that is now characterized by rapid informalization, enormous displacements of livelihoods, a rapid diasporization and loss of skills, hyperinflation, and a rentier state that has shown little evidence that it has anything resembling a coherent strategy to move beyond the current morass. Moreover, notwithstanding the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Mugabe regime, the polices that have been pursued by Zanu PF have so weakened the economy and social forces in Zimbabwe as to make the country more vulnerable than ever to the imperatives of the international financial institutions, as well as forms of investment from countries like China that have yet to show their benefits for Zimbabwe’s national interests.

Equally important has been the gross violations of the democratic political rights of Zimbabwean citizens, of which there is abundant evidence in the literature. This issue continues to be a central problem in the Moyo/Yeros work, and it is most startlingly understated in the Mamdani piece. For Moyo and Yeros the problem of the violence of the state is dwarfed by the broader structural violence that the ‘radicalized state’ in Zimbabwe is confronted with, and the criticisms of those who have highlighted these violations are dismissed for their “resort to ‘human rights’ moralism”.[3] For these two authors a ‘deeper form of democracy’ can ‘only be set on a more meaningful and stable footing by structural changes.’[4] Related to this, for Mamdani the ‘support’ of large numbers of the peasantry because of the land interventions, has allowed the nationalist to ‘withstand civil society based opposition, reinforced by Western sanctions’.

The major problem with these propositions is that the authoritarian state that has emerged over the last decade in Zimbabwe has become a major hindrance not only to longer term structural economic changes, but to the development of a more democratic dispensation. The kind of ‘anti-imperialism’ that has been espoused by the Mugabe regime has been built on a systematic undermining of those democratic spaces that would have been essential to build a democratic base for the land project. It is therefore an ‘anti-imperialism’ built on widespread coercion and diminishing electoral support despite the state violence that has become central to the Zanu PF project. Therefore the ‘sobering fact’ that needs to be kept in mind about the period not just from 2000-3 but from the late 1990’s to 2008, is not just the massive changes on the land, but the widespread state attack on the citizenry of the country that has been the modality of the politics of land. It is doubtful that the manner in which the Zimbabwean ruling party has behaved over the last decade will induce a memory of, in Mamdani’s words, the ‘end of the setter colonial era’ for the majority of Zimbabweans. Rather Zanu PFs selective rendition of who ‘belongs to the nation’ and the violent exclusions and dispersals of large sections of Zimbabwean society over this period, have produced a more problematic conflation of colonial and post-colonial styles of politics, and a deep distrust of the revived nationalism of the state.

Writing in 2006 about Uganda after the Amin experience, Mamdani made an acute observation:

If we can draw one lesson from the Amin period, it is this: how the Asian question is defined and resolved will affect not only the Asian minority, but all Ugandans. The Asian questions can be defined in a racist and exclusive way, as it was by Amin, so that the fact of colour blurs that of citizenship and commitment. Or it can be defined in a non-racial and inclusive way so that we make a distinction between different types of Asian residents in today’s Uganda, legally between citizens and non-citizens; and socially between those for whom Uganda is no more than transit facility, and those for whom Uganda has been a home for generations.[5]

This statement could quite easily be transposed to the white settler legacy in Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe state has legally excluded, not only whites from citizenry but large numbers of farm workers. Moreover it has placed political exclusions on urbanites and their organizations that have a long history of a critical relationship to the violent exclusivism of nationalist party politics.[6] The MDC and the civic movement in Zimbabwe have many problems, not the least of which is their lack of attention to the legacies of structural inequality in the country, and their slow realization of the need to understand the global frame of the Zimbabwe crisis. However, more than Zanu-PF, the forces of the opposition have opened up the discussion on the need for a more democratic citizenship and state that will be essential to dealing with the longer term structural challenges of the country.

Looking to the Future

The September 2008 political agreement signed between the two MDCs and Zanu PF and the Government of National Unity that was established in January 2009 were the result of pressure at various levels. For South Africa and SADC the policy of quiet diplomacy was premised on three issues: firstly South Africa’s need to avoid diplomatic isolation in the region and on the continent; secondly the determination of the region to maintain diplomatic control over the Zimbabwe question in the face of pressure from the West; thirdly the assumption that any agreement on Zimbabwe had to have the support of the Zimbabwe military in order to avoid instability in the event of the defeat of Zanu PF at the polls. Thus from very early on Mbeki had as his goal the establishment of a Government of National Unity with the MDC as the junior partner irrespective of the electoral result. The politics of regional solidarity and stabilization, even under an undemocratic regime like Mugabe’s, always took precedence in regional strategy over the democratic wishes of the Zimbabwean people. This version of ‘anti-imperialist’ politics once again has at its core profoundly anti-democratic propositions that have been challenged by civil society groups in the region. While I have argued for the necessity of accepting the outcome of the SADC mediation in Zimbabwe because of the balance of forces nationally and in the region, I have no illusions about the enormous obstacles that an authoritarian state will pose for the opening up of democratic spaces in the country. The centrality of regional politics in dealing with the Zimbabwe question has highlighted both the importance of such organizations in the current global configuration and the severe limits they place on democratic struggles within states. The irony of course is that SADC will now preside over a new regime of economic liberalization in Zimbabwe, led by South African capital.

In conclusion we are told by Moyo/Yeros that there is ‘good reason’ to surmise that the major reason for the late intervention of Mamdani and other African scholars into the Zimbabwe debate has been the recent ‘Western sabre-rattling’ and plans to remilitarize southern Africa.[7] Apart from the fact that western military intervention in Zimbabwe was the least likely response to the Zimbabwe crisis, the position of African scholars who denounced such unlikely threats would have been much more credible if their criticisms of the violence of the Zimbabwean state over the last ten years had been equally audible. In the event the voice of African scholarship on this issue, with notable exceptions,[8] has been all but inaudible. It appears that it still seems safer for many African scholars to gather behind Mugabe’s impoverished version of ‘anti-imperialist’ politics than against the glaring abuses of a former liberation movement. There is an urgent need for an anti-imperialist politics that places both political and redistributive/economic questions at the centre of its agenda. Until then there will be the temptation to keep holding on to the lesser nightmare.

About the author

Brian Raftopoulos is a former associate professor of the Institute for Development at the University of Zimbabwe and now Director of Research and Policy at the Solidarity Peace Trust in South Africa.

Notes

[1] Eg: Brian Raftopoulos,’The Zimbabwe Crisis and the Challenges for the Left’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 32,2,2006; Amanda Hammar, Brian Raftopoulos and Stig Jensen (Eds), Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis, Weaver Press, Harare, 2003.

[2] Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo (Eds), Becoming Zimbabwe: A History of Zimbabwe from the pre-colonial period to 2008, Weaver Press, Harare, 2009.

[3] Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, The Radicalised State: Zimbabwe’s Interrupted Revolution, Review of African Political Economy, 111, 2007.

[4] Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, Zimbabwe Ten Years on: Results and Prospects, www.pambazuka,org/en/category/features/54037. 16/12.09.

[5] Mahmood Mamdani, The Asian Question Again: A Reflection, www.pambazuka.org

[6] Timothy Scarnecchia, Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence in Zimbabwe: Harare and Highfield 1940-1964, University of Rochester Press, Rochester, New York, 2008.

[7] Moyo/Yeros, Zimbabwe ten years on.

[8] Horace Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberalism, David Philip, South Africa, 2003.

Mar 16, 2009

by Wilfred Mhanda

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 82

Critique of the Article by Mahmood Mamdani

The contribution by Mahmood Mamdani to the London Review of Books on the situation in Zimbabwe would make good comical reading had the situation in Zimbabwe not been so tragic. The poverty and subjectivity of his analysis is nothing short of a mockery of intellectual discourse, and not befitting of a submission to the reputable review. To the broad masses of the people of Zimbabwe and to an objective and dispassionate observer, Zimbabwe is a tale of a man-made human tragedy that exceeds the atrocities and heinous crimes afflicted on the people of Zimbabwe by colonialism. In all fairness, it would be a tall order finding any redeeming feature of Mugabe’s ruinous policies – other than the beneficiaries of his patronage.

Central to Mamdani’s argument is that “Mugabe has not only ruled by coercion, but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him support not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa”. It would appear that the term consent has a totally different meaning to Mamdani than to most people. Since his defeat in the February 2000 Referendum Mugabe stole one election after another until he was finally humiliated in the 29 March 2008 elections. State sponsored violence became a permanent feature of Zimbabwe’s elections in flagrant violation of SADC’s norms and standards for free and fair elections. And how does support for his so-called land reform manifest itself? Mugabe and his party have had to literally bludgeon the electorate into submission, both rural and urban – especially the latter.

Mamdani attributes Mugabe’s political setbacks to Western support for the Opposition and Civil Society. However, whatever support and influence there may be from the West, it pales into insignificance against the means and resources at his disposal to influence the electorate, including total control of the public media. Surely this base of oppositional support has to be something more than the role of the West.

The people of Zimbabwe willingly and freely offered wholehearted support to the struggle to liberate them from white, racist, settler minority rule at great personal risk to themselves and in spite of racist repression and open support for the Smith regime by the West. What could have changed for them now to be duped by the same white racists and the West into bartering their hard won independence? In the circumstances, it is not only an affront and the height of irresponsibility, but also an extreme insult to the intelligence of the people of Zimbabwe to attribute their principled opposition to Mugabe to manipulation by the West.

Mamdani terms Mugabe’s disastrous, violent and chaotic land grab charade a “democratic revolution.” Who are the beneficiaries of this so-called “democratic revolution”? Is the political, bureaucratic and military elite’s dispossession of the white farmers – who happen to be Zimbabweans with full constitutional rights – “democratic” by any stretch of the imagination? At least the occupation of the farms by white farmers had a redeeming quality in that the country was not only self-sufficient regarding food, but also had a surplus for export to feed the region. Now, with Mugabe’s henchmen on the farms, the nation has been starving since the farm occupations began. This has been blamed on a succession of droughts. If that were true, what are we to make of the people of Botswana and Namibia who inhabit perennially drought-prone deserts and are surviving without any food handouts from the West? Surely we have to face reality and call a spade by its name. Drought has very little to do with food shortages in Zimbabwe.

No one doubts the need for genuine land reform in Zimbabwe (which, by the way, is still necessary) and the redressing of historical imbalances. Talk of the irreversibility of Mugabe’s so-called land reform is irresponsible, reactionary, totally misguided and misplaced. The objectives of genuine land reform are:

• Alleviation of poverty
• Food security
• Economic development
• Decongestion of communal areas

None of these core objectives were realized through Mugabe’s chaotic land grab. If anything, the very opposite is the case. There is grinding poverty and no food security with more than half the population relying on food handouts from the demonized West. The communal areas are still heavily congested, with horrendous environmental consequences. The economy has been brought to its knees through the destruction of the value chain both upstream and downstream of agricultural activity, which, thanks to the abuse of the need for land reform for political expediency and to shore up Mugabe’s flagging political fortunes, has now been reduced to worse than subsistence farming.

The first casualty of Mugabe’s madness was the rule of law, followed by democratic and property rights, the economy and service delivery, and culminating in the total collapse of health care and education infrastructure. All of these factors have reduced Zimbabwe to the status of a failed state. Thousands have needlessly died of the preventable cholera epidemic and from other diseases while Mugabe and his cronies are looting the country’s resources on a grand scale in complete insensitivity to the people’s welfare.

Much has been said of the effect of sanctions on Zimbabwe’s economic well-being. If the truth be told, Zimbabwe lost access to multilateral donor support way back in 1999 through failure to service its still outstanding debts. And that was before the farm invasions, in backlash reaction to which the sanctions were supposedly imposed. As for the targeted and personal sanctions, Zimbabwe has on its part also imposed targeted sanctions on both the EU and the United States. In any case, if the West has imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, the country still has a lot of friends in the East and the rest of the world who could easily help it weather the storms. Rhodesia, South Africa, China, Cuba and Libya are examples of countries that were subjected to real economic sanctions without having to experience the stratospheric levels of inflation and economic collapse that Zimbabwe is now facing. Evidently, there is more at play than the sanctions Mugabe’s sycophantic apologists keep harping about.

To an objective observer, Mamdani’s dogmatic support for Mugabe could at best be accounted for by a criminally unpardonable ignorance of the reality on the ground in Zimbabwe despite a tsunami of documented evidence of Mugabe’s crimes and excesses against the people of Zimbabwe. At worst, the motivation might be a rewarding public relations service to spruce up Mugabe’s battered international image.

With regard to the castigation of Botswana and Zambia as being under the spell of the West, it is instructive to note that it was these countries, alongside Tanzania, that constituted the Frontline States. They were the midwives of the liberation of Southern Africa. In the immoral defence of dictatorship and repression, the beneficiaries of their efforts and sacrifices are now claiming to be more ‘revolutionary’ then they. What Botswana and Zambia have done is nothing more than to publicly and steadfastly stand by the letter and spirit of the SADC protocols on good governance: respect for the rule of law and human rights, and free and fair elections – codes to which both Mbeki and Mugabe duly appended their signatures. If one suggested these protocols were dictates from the West, Mbeki and Mugabe would also be culpable of puppetry. On the contrary, it was these very values that were captured as the ideals of the liberation struggles, in support of which these same frontline countries took a principled stand. Furthermore, Zimbabwe is not only a signatory to a whole range of regional and international protocols founded on the observance and upholding of the principles of good governance, the rule of law, respect for human rights and free and fair elections, but more importantly, the country’s own constitution is anchored in the same values.

The fundamental challenge for all progressive people, be they from the East or West, is to stand by the side of the long suffering people of Zimbabwe in their struggle to break free from the yoke of Mugabe’s despotic rule – and not to condone it and prop it up for whatever reason. The latter would make them accomplices and enemies of the freedom of the people of Zimbabwe.

About the author

Wilfred Mhanda, a former senior commander of Zimbabwe’s National Liberation War, is currently secretary of the Zimbabwe Liberation Veterans Forum.

Mar 16, 2009

by David Moore

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 82

Mamdani’s Enthusiasms

Cape Town is 2182 kilometers south of Harare. At the Iziko Gallery, just beside the houses into which much of Zimbabwe’s sovereignty has been deposited,[1] one of philosopher-artist William Kentridge’s stupendous works is on display. The filmic I Am Not Me: the Horse is Not Mine (‘a Russian peasant expression’, Kentridge explains, for denying guilt) is a combination of Kentridge’s take on Gogol’s The Nose with a disturbing rendition of Nikolai Bukharin’s 1937 trials. As Kentridge puts it in his textual accompaniment to the shadows on the walls, the tale of Bukharin’s last gasps exemplifies the ‘comedy of a world at odds with itself … of inversion … where logical argument is a sure sign of duplicity and lying is explained away as strategy’. The trial’s transcripts are ‘as if a mordant comedy is writing itself out’.[2] The shadows of dancing, searching, marching, climbing and exegesis were reminiscent of the academic and activist discourse around Zimbabwe. Harare’s and New York’s renditions of Zimbabwe’s crisis bore uncanny resemblance to Kentridge’s rendition of the end of the Stalinist — nay, even the Leninist/Bolshevik — dream. And Professor Mamdani may have lost his nose as the dreams of African ‘difference’ evaporated: only to find it with a higher rank than he.

This short intervention will investigate Mamdani’s rendition of the Zimbabwean revolution that is not his. It will then offer an alternative notion of a ‘real’ revolution in southern African political economy. Finally, a challenge will be offered to Professor Mamdani.

Mamdani is known for his expertise in sniffing out the cant and hypocrisy surrounding rural despotism, its transformation into genocidal mania, and American foreign policy. Indeed, I thought he was so good at it that in a publisher’s review of one of his books I opined that he might be a new Edward Said. In the case of Zimbabwe, however, his enthusiasm for an apparently pro-peasant, anti-imperialist and ‘Africanist’ cause has rendered him lacking: in seeking to speak what he thinks is the truth to what he thinks is power, he ignores its seeping from where it ebbs to the peripheral recesses where it has become intricately and intimately imprecated. In response to his critics he has listed phone calls from Washington to its puppets and accused well-meaning liberals of falling into the interventionist human rights trap, as well as foolishly linking economic libertarianism with its political parallels: in short as being caught in the hard grip and soft webs of American power.

As if to confirm Mamdani’s views, sometime around the time his version of Zimbabwe’s lessons was published George W. Bush woke up and said ‘Mugabe must go’. A chorus arose singing that tune. As if in response, a CODRESIA meeting in Yaoundé, at which the man praised in Mamdani’s piece for writing the most truths about Zimbabwe was elected president, released a much-debated statement (opposed by most of Zimbabwe’s young generation present) supporting Zimbabwe’s anti-imperialist pretenses. A South African brokered ‘government of national unity’ in Zimbabwe vindicated the celebrants of an African diplomatic renaissance just a few weeks later, seemingly to prove the signatories correct. Imperialists were not necessary. Armchair critics from North America and England, along with their civil society comrades around the world should thus take note — and caution. True revolutionaries would have supported Mugabe and Mbeki all along.[3] Empire’s mendicants opposing Mugabe and his peasant revolution are tools of neo-liberalism. They are either dupes or cynics.

The trajectory of Zimbabwe’s transitional moment remains to be seen. In the case of the scribes, however, Mamdani’s case has been taken up by a blogger named Stephen Gowans. Gowans’ writing (his corporal person remains mysterious) is known to many academics and activists concerned with Zimbabwe for his venemous attacks on civil society activists he deems funded too generously by imperial philanthropists. His blogs, including one minimizing Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic, are printed ardently by the Zimbabwean state’s organ, The Herald.[4] He has labeled Mamdani’s detractors as cynics stuck in the ruts of the ‘comfortable slogans and prejudices that has marked much progressive scholarship on Zimbabwe’. Besides being liberal imperialists they are elite theorists, believing that Robert Mugabe’s ‘crude anti-imperialist rhetoric’ easily manipulates the masses. This is the mirror image of Gowans’ belief that all ZANU-PF’s opponents are manipulated by puppet-masters in the evil west, but that is beside the point. There are no puppets; those who forget this soon face blowback. ZANU-PF’S history, shared with most liberation movements, is littered with benign, sanctimonious, misguided and malicious global assistance. Just ask Robert Mugabe: ‘who looked after your wife for years in London?’ Or, ‘who convinced the British election masters in 1980 not to cancel the contest due to ZANU violence?’ Thus it is hardly surprising that the National Endowment for Democracy and its ilk try their hands in Zimbabwe now: and the contradictions thereof will be just as intense, and unanticipated, as they were forty years ago.[5] The issue is not that, although it is important how recipients deal with donors. Rather, it is excessive enthusiasm — shared by the cosmopolitans and the patriotic agrarians.[6]

At least, that’s the way Kentridge might see it. His melancholic reflection on the fate of the Russian revolution discusses not only the forced enthusiasm of the marches, May Day parades and accelerated five year plans — in Zimbabwe, the President’s birthday parties, in which those sharing that holy date partake Kim Il-Sungian membership in the 21 February Movement, the screaming phalanxes of Mercedes-Benz, the sighting of which commands pedestrians to freeze, and the absurd budgets and annual reports of Reserve Bank Chairman Gideon Gono (cited approvingly by Comrade Mamdani) come to mind — but the genuine hope that is ‘beyond self-preserving or strategic’. Mamdani and Gowans express that hope – one assumes they have no interest in maintaining Mugabe and the Joint Military Command’s Mauser-like hold on power — as do the libertarians on the other side of the mirror. It is clear, though, that the hope to which Mamdani and Gowans cling is clouded. Indeed, it is covered by Mamdani’s banal assertion that the ruling clique in Zimbabwe combines ‘coercion and consent’ as it contrives a century at the helm: this elides the murders, rapes, tortures and disappearances that mar Zimbabwe’s history with some between-the-lines assertion of Gramscian realism. It’s a well-trod road, though, by those in the Stalinist tradition of substituting a vague assertion of social rights for the supposed first generation. In addition, though, it allows an extraordinary rendition of sloppy scholarship — and this may be even worse for one whose reputation rests in an ivory tower. We need not worry about Gowans in this case, given his reputation rests only on the popularity of his blogs and the patronage of the Zimbabwean Minister of Information.

Even a casual newspaper reader wouldn’t label the National Constitutional Assembly the National Constituent Assembly. An informed historian would balk at Mamdani’s misrepresentation of labor history. A social theorist would wonder why such an extreme divide would be drawn between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ in Zimbabwe, surely a country with the most mobile ‘semi-proletarians’ (to borrow a phrase from a Brazil-based ZANU-PF praise-singer) around. An urban geographer would wonder from whence Mamdani derives his guesses about Operation Murambvatsina.[7] One political economist-cum-diplomatic analyst would wonder about the professor’s assertions vis a vis sanctions while another, more theoretically inclined and with an agrarian bent, would query his take on Ian Scoones et. al’s description of what could most optimistically be described as a rural form of petty commodity production in the context of a possible process of primitive accumulation[8], but wonder why then he did not extend his investigations into other realms of crisis driven accumulation strategies such as ‘informal’ gold and diamond mining harking to the recent histories of Sierra Leone and Liberia.[9]

Mamdani’s ‘lessons’ rely inordinately on the work of researchers intent on saving their international academic and ‘social movement’ reputation as ‘leftists’ while consulting simultaneously for anyone with foreign exchange or some notion of peasant empowerment (and remember that institutions from the World Bank and USAID to the Swedish International Development Agency did put money on the table during the 1998 land conference). In proving that their long-held desire for land to the tillers has finally been vindicated their work risks self-travesty. Here lies one source of the Zimbabwean enthusiasts. With the failures of ‘African socialism’ and industrialization projects in the past decades, success becomes measured with a fantastic finality that ignores the travails and tragedies of primitive accumulation — a process that could be celebrated with due respect for its brutally universal history but only if it is encountered honestly. Capitalism may indeed be re-inventing itself in Africa — perhaps with Chinese characteristics — but it’s questionable if it should be called something else.

The other mode of enthusiasm is in the anti-imperialist trope, itself not antithetical to the rise of a new bourgeoisie that is continental in scope. Mamdani’s support for Mugabe (sure, he makes gestures, writing hastily that ‘there is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behavior of his supporters’ before going on to bite the liberal hands that feed him), along with many African intellectuals like him, goes back to the alter of the liberation struggles that used force — wielded by poor peasants, workers and noble youth — to take their petty-bourgeois leaders to statehood. The belief that this noble battle was never tainted by compromise with ‘imperialists’ — or that they were only betrayed by deals made at the end of what would otherwise have been revolutions to match those of Lenin and Castro — may well be at the root of this over-reaction to today’s imperialism. Real history — and even realistic fiction along the lines of Stanley Nyambfukudza’s Nonbeliever’s Journey, Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns, Alex Kanengoni’s Effortless Tears or Charles Samupindi’s Pawns — reveals the flaws in this selective memory very easily. In the meantime, however, imperial power from Africa’s strongest capitalist centre can be ignored. To judge this in Zimbabwe’s case, some history needs to be invoked. This enables assessment of the real revolution in southern Africa, that being the way in which South Africa’s ‘quiet diplomacy’ managed to keep ZANU-PF in power.

Real (Cynical) History, Revolutionary Changes

Such a story brings an infamously noisy diplomat into the history books. Henry Kissinger, an academic turned power broker, who probably lives not far from Mahmood Mamdani, in the northeast part of a country wherein many people think they can change the whole world. In 1976 Kissinger hastened the slow diplomatic process moving Ian Smith out of power and finding the right person to replace him. The person to compare with Kissinger, however, is Thabo Mbeki, oft regarded as a formidable intellectual himself. In the 21st century, the diplomacy that moved the Zimbabwean mountain was orchestrated by the regional hegemon, neither a colonial nor neo-colonial power although some analysts call it a ‘sub-imperial power’. South Africa — neither the USA nor the United Kingdom — led the game. Thabo Mbeki, while South Africa’s president and even after his unceremonious sacking, held the cards.[10]

In 1976 Kissinger and the then British Secretary of State, Anthony Crosland, worked very closely to put a flagging process of Smith-dumping back on track. Their collaboration led to a conference in Geneva lasting from October to the end of that year. As the conference approached an angry Kissinger wrote a letter (suggesting it be destroyed) to his British partner. Quietly diplomatic, Crosland hesitated to follow Kissinger’s and South African Prime Minister Vorster’s proposal to alter the black majority on a proposed a transitional council of state. Kisssinger advised Crosland to heed Bismarck. Good ideas were useless without force. If they weren’t ‘timid’ the British could succeed. Crosland’s power, said Kissinger, rested on the ‘the black leaders’’ need for the British. ‘They can accept your proposals, not Smiths!’ Furthermore, they were ‘unable to do the job themselves. In short, they look to you to save them.’

The shuttle diplomat told his fellow traveler that his prevarications simply encouraged ‘radical Africans’. The Russians would meddle. Chaos would ensue. Since ‘the whole enterprise … only makes sense as a firebreak to African radicalism and Soviet intervention’ Her Majesty’s Government daren’t hint at ‘different minds’ between the Atlantic powers. If the British failed, Kissinger concluded, it would confirm ‘the general fear that every potential peaceful Rhodesian settlement is built of sand’. Crosland replied that he would not ‘cramp your style’ but the continental crusader should be ‘tolerant of our difficulties’. He pleaded: ‘if you can pull this off where we have so often failed, it will be a major coup.’

The Geneva conference’s chair, Ivor Richard, admitted in late 2008 the October to December 1976 conference’s failure. The British wanted to annul it, but Kissinger’s masters faced an election and so wanted to be seen active in Africa. In fact the conference served only to help the relatively unknown Mugabe. In the hotels and halls of Geneva — paid for, of course, by the imperialists — he patched together an alliance of Zimbabwean nationalists and convinced the west he controlled ZANU’s soldiers. In 1977, with the failure of the conference and the newly elected Carter regime in confusion about matters Zimbabwean (they thought Muzorewa was worthy of support) the British tried to start an election. However, Mugabe was busy eliminating his perceived opposition within the ranks and was hard to find.

This is the history against which SADC’s negotiators measure. If Mamdani and Gowans are gauging the power of a new revolution, they must start here. Their yardstick may be ‘success’ in the short and middle term, but the question the global humanitarians must ask is: has the South African brand of diplomacy improved on Kissinger’s?

Has Kissinger’s perception that ‘the black leaders’ can’t manage their own affairs been altered? The South Africans say ‘this was a Zimbabwean solution’. The regional powerhouse replaced imperialist intervention. Yet ‘imperialism’ is weak anyway. Bush was bluster; Obama uncertain still. Yet the local kingpins trust the Zimbabwean people no more than did their realpolitik mentor. Otherwise, elections since 2000 would not have been stolen, legitimized by Mbeki’s obsequious ‘observers’, and finally replaced by negotiations entrusting few. SADC has managed an easy way out for the ZANU-PF ruling class, while the Americans and British eased it in.

The ‘radical Africans’? For African nationalists, Mugabe is as radical as he was for the Cold War Kissingers. Thinking in terms of generations, though, Mugabe & Co. resemble Smith and the Rhodesian Front. Now, young democrats threaten the formerly red pretenders. SADC may have only temporarily slowed history. Are Mamdani and Gowans then on its wrong side?

Peaceful settlements? Mugabe and the Joint Operational Command wage low-level war. A war mode of production looms. The temporary cement of force has been central for ZANU-PF under Mugabe, from the liberation war, the Gukurahundi campaign killing an estimated 20,000 Matabeleland residents in the 1980s, and notably political violence from May 2008. Peace (let alone justice) remains a dream unless the recently abducted civil and political activists are released.

Foundations of sand? The Geneva conference in 1976 failed to produce a transitional state. Now there is a Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee. Facilitated (JOMIC) by the local Kissingers’ minions, it is ‘guaranteed and underwritten by the SADC Facilitator (still Mbeki), SADC and the African Union’.

There goes Zimbabwe’s sovereignty. The myth has collapsed alongside its economic guarantor, its currency. JOMIC means South Africa is the regional sovereign. It must take that responsibility to its heights. Thabo Mbeki and his temporary heir are the Kissingers on the block. If they don’t guarantee a decent Zimbabwean dispensation the political economy of Zimbabwean lives will tumble to unfathomable depths. South Africa’s regional hegemony will sink into cholera infected sewerage, not just sand.

Mamdani and Gowans demonstrate an uncanny enthusiasm for the mechanisms of local power as the American form of imperial power dwindles.[11] They are representatives of a Kissingerian intelligentsia. As Kentridge quotes Mayakovsky, ‘Comrade Mauser, you have the floor.'[12] While we hope they do not share his fate, we have to remember that contrary to Cabral’s touching faith, the petty bourgeoisie do not commit class suicide: they reinvent themselves, often with a brutality as extreme as they are ideology crude, along the new contours of power and accumulation.

And the challenge…

Let Professor Mamdani and me choose our guides in Zimbabwe to lead us together through a documentary film, produced by an independent filmmaker or television network — al Jazeera perhaps — charting Zimbabwe’s contradictions.

About the Author

David Moore is a Professor of Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg

Notes
[1] David Moore, ‘Now onus is on SA to Deliver: Power-sharing arrangement makes regional sovereign responsible for building a decent dispensation’, Cape Times, February 3, 2009.

[2] William Kentridge, I Am Not Me: the Horse is Not Mine, Johannesburg and Cape Town: Goodman Gallery, 2008, 19.

[3] Particularly notable in this discourse is Eddy Maloka and Ben Magubane, “Zimbabwe: An International Pariah: What are the Revolutionary Tasks of the South African Democratic Movement?” a paper circulated within the African National Congress in early May, 2008 to defend Thabo Mbeki’s support for Robert Mugabe in the wake of his electoral defeat. Just over twenty per cent of the document is borrowed from various English publications such as the Guardian in which the ‘anti-imperialist’ line is trumpeted on Zimbabwe.

[4] Stephen Gowans, ‘Cynicism as a substitute for scholarship’, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/cynicism-as-a-substitute-for-scholarship, December 30, 2008; ‘Zimbabwe: Questions About Zim Cholera Cases’, The Herald, December 30, 2008, re-published, with telling responses, on http://allafrica.com/stories/200812300666.html.

[5] David Moore., ‘ZANU-PF and the Ghosts of Foreign Funding,’ Review of African Political Economy, 103 (March 2005), 156-162; ‘Today’s ‘Imperialists’ were those who nurtured Mugabe’, Sunday Independent (Johannesburg) January 20, 2008.

[6] David Moore, ‘Marxism and Marxist Intellectuals in Schizophrenic Zimbabwe: How Many Rights for Zimbabwe’s Left? A Comment,’ Historical Materialism, 12, 4 (December 2004), 405-425.

[7] Maurice Vambe, ed., The Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe, Harare & Pretoria: Weaver Press & African Institute of South Africa, 2008.

[8] David Moore, ‘”Intellectuals” Interpreting Zimbabwe’s Primitive Accumulation: Progress to Market Civilisation?’ Safundi, 8, 2 (April 2007), 199-222. More from the Scoones team is in Mavedzenge et. al., ‘The Dynamics of Real Markets: Cattle in Southern Zimbabwe following Land Reform,’ Development and Change, 39, 4 (2008), while more devastating is Fox, Rowntree and Chigumira “On the Fast Track to Land Degradation? A Case Study of the Impact of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Kadoma District, Zimbabwe”, highLAND2006 Symposium, Mekelle University, Ethiopia, September 19-25, 2006.

[9] Angus Shaw, ‘Police move to curb diamond rush in eastern Zimbabwe’, International Herald Tribune, September 3, 2007; Showers Mawowa, ‘Tapping the Chaos: Crisis, State and Accumulation in Zimbabwe’, MA Dissertation, Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2008.

[10] The following paragraphs constitute a much revised version of my Cape Times article noted above.

[11] John Gray, ‘A shattering moment in America’s fall from power’, The Observer, September 28, 2008.

[12] Kentridge, I Am Not Me … 23.

Mar 16, 2009

by Elaine Windrich

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 82

Some Observations on Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’

By way of introduction, I would suggest that whatever Mamdani writes he is always brilliant and provocative. But he also tends to indulge in false generalizations and analogies, particularly when he compares his native Uganda with another African country which is not comparable.

• Here is an example of a generalization which is obviously not true. Replying to critics of Mugabe’s land distribution programme, he writes that they sound “as if these lands were doomed by black ownership”. No sources are given for this allegation at all, which would properly belong to a racist minority.

• Mugabe’s policies have “helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part”. But the sanctions were targeted against the ZANU elites, who are on a list observed by the EU and the US, not against the people of Zimbabwe. The loss of international donor aid (such as the IMF’s) was caused not by sanctions but by the Mugabe government failing to comply with the terms of various structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) adopted after 1990, which the government refuses to admit.

• The people of Zimbabwe are not likely to remember 2000-2003 as “the end of settler colonial rule”, as Mamdani claims, but as the end of the rule of law, human rights and democratic electoral practices.

• “The inadequacy of land distribution did not ensure that it remained the focus of politics in independent Zimbabwe”, he writes. But in fact Mugabe devoted few resources to it until he was threatened by the revolt of the war vets, the collapse of the economy and the loss of power.

• Britain’s contribution to land redistribution had “dwindled to a trickle” by 1987, when the Labour Party took office. But Britain convened an international donor conference on land redistribution, which provided for transparency and accountability, but which the Mugabe government refused even to consider.

• Allegedly Mugabe responded with the 1999 constitution legalizing land seizures because the Aid Minister Clare Short had denied British responsibility, citing her Irish ancestry and opposition to British colonial rule. This joking irrelevancy was seized upon by Mugabe’s government as an abdication of Britain’s responsibility.

• “The ferocious repression of Ndebele in 1986” began long before then. Mugabe sent his all-Shona 5th brigade to suppress his ZAPU rivals in 1983, killing some 20,000 of them, until peace was made with the ‘unity pact’ in December 1987.

• The reason for Mugabe’s electoral victory in 2002 was not that his support was “greater” than before the land redistributions but because there was massive fraud (at least 450,000 stuffed ballots), along with widespread violence and intimidation of the opposition MDC, leaving more than a hundred dead and thousands injured. The same tactics ensured a ZANU PF victory in the Parliamentary election in 2000. While these elections may have been endorsed by South Africa and Namibia, they were not acceptable to the overwhelmingly non-British and non-white Commonwealth, which suspended Zimbabwe’s membership because of this fraud and violence.

About the Author

Elaine Windrich is a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies, Stanford University.

Mar 16, 2009

by Ben Cousins

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 82

A Reply to Mamdani on the Zimbabwean Land Question

The most useful aspect of Mahmood Mamdani’s article “Lessons from Zimbabwe” (London Review of Books, 4 Dec 2008) is his challenge to influential stereotypes of land reform commonly found in the media and elsewhere. Citing Ian Scoones’ note on five myths of land reform in Zimbabwe[1], Mamdani points out that the massive redistribution of farms since 2000 has not resulted in complete agricultural failure. Provisional research findings from the Zimbabwe component of our three-country study of the impacts of land redistribution, which form the basis for Scoones’ article, do indeed show that some of the new occupants of former commercial farms in Masvingo Province have produced good crop harvests in years of reasonable rainfall (such as the 2005/6 season).

Other research by Scoones and colleagues[2] demonstrates how the livestock sector in southern Zimbabwe has remained vibrant through a fundamental restructuring of both production systems and commodity chains.

As pointed out by Mamdani and as is evident in our research sites, drought has played a key role in constraining crop output from land reform farms in recent years, and is undoubtedly a key factor in the current food crisis. Other factors include the completely inadequate supply of inputs such as seed and fertilizer, partly as a result of the wider economic crisis, and exacerbated by corruption in the allocation of these inputs as well as a dire shortage of foreign exchange. The collapse of the old commercial farming economy, together with non-production on some of the farms taken over by the new elite, have contributed to that wider crisis, for sure, but are far from the sole causes.

This complex interplay of factors affecting the agricultural sector is rarely acknowledged in the media, or in ill-informed commentary[3] where all the problems of the economy are sometimes ascribed simply to the impact of radical land reform.

More problematic is Mamdani’s core argument that the Mugabe regime has survived in large part due to its popular support, located in particular amongst the rural peasantry. Despite occasional acknowledgement of the authoritarian and repressive nature of the regime, the violence that has accompanied land occupations, and corruption by members of the ruling elite, the overall thrust of the article is to de-emphasize repression and highlight popular support for Mugabe.

As other responses to Mamdani’s piece have shown[4], his characterization of the political dynamics at work in Zimbabwe is simplistic and specious. He over-emphasizes ethnicity, the urban-rural divide, donor support for civil society, rich country sanctions, and the degree of rural support for Zanu (PF). He under-plays class divides, the extent of state violence and intimidation, the withholding of food aid to opposition supporters, the manipulation of election processes and results, and the support provided to the regime by Mbeki and SADC governments. Key instances of repression, such as the Matabeleland massacres of the 1980s, the deprivation of farm workers’ and others’ citizenship rights, and the massive assault on the urban poor in Operation Murambatsvina are mentioned but downplayed. Ignored are effective rule by and through the state security apparatus, and the role of a politically connected rentier class (overlapping substantially with ruling party bigwigs) in manipulating the foreign currency market for parasitic wealth appropriation, thus buffering the elite from the economic meltdown it has helped to bring about, but contributing further to that meltdown.[5]

Mamdani’s professed aim in his intervention is to “free the debate about Zimbabwe from the narrow confines of a regime-opposition polemic”. This a worthwhile objective, given the debilitating effects of a political discourse that sets up an opposition between the politics of rights and the politics of redistribution, as Brian Raftopoulos and others have pointed out, and the need for fresh ideas on a way beyond the present impasse. Unfortunately Mamdani has succeeded only is stoking the fires of the polemic, through a selective and myopic use of writing about Zimbabwe. In some cases he appears to simply invent his own evidence, as in his attribution to me of a view that I have never held (that previous to our research I was of the opinion that “the land reform would destroy agricultural production”). Mamdani’s analysis of Operation Murambatsvina is similarly fantastical.

However, one key point not acknowledged sufficiently by Mamdani’s critics is the highly effective way in which Mugabe and Zanu-PF has used both the land issue and anti-imperialist demagoguery to win support in both urban and rural areas, and across the region. Even in the most recent elections there was evidence of continued support for Mugabe despite the very extreme hardship being experienced by most people. This forms part of the complexity of the political situation that moral correct denunciations tend to obscure.

To return to questions of land and farming, there is an urgent need to gain a nuanced understanding of the new realities that have emerged in the Zimbabwean countryside in recent years, to help inform thinking about land and agricultural policies in the post-Mugabe era. At present we have only a partial picture of these realities, and there is little debate (in public at least) about what those policies should be. Ideologically driven stereotypes will hinder rather than help, and critical scholarship has a key role to play in subverting such constructs.

The MDC view that a future land policy must focus mainly on restoring the health of the large scale commercial farming sector, in part by restoring private property rights, is problematic. As Scoones points out, the old agrarian structure, premised on a stark divide between large-scale (mostly white) and small-scale (black) farmers, has given way to a more complex and less polarized structure. This reality should form the basis of policies to enhance the sector’s performance. On the other hand, an “agrarian populism” that idealizes peasant production and homogenizes the rural population is not very helpful either. It ignores the short-term need to restore export earnings from estates and other specialized, capital- and knowledge-intensive production regimes, and the importance of feeding large urban populations, and does not sufficiently acknowledge class differentiation amongst land reform beneficiaries and peasants.

A better starting point is a disaggregated analysis of existing and potential agrarian structures. This must take account of variability and difference in terms of scales and forms of production, class and gender identities, as well as agro-ecological region. Investment in up-stream and downstream linkages to provide inputs to producers and to market their surpluses will be critical. Secure property rights are, of course, important, but these need not take the form of freehold title; conditional leasehold, as well as renovated forms of communal tenure and strengthened institutions for common property management, could provide both security and a means to ensure that agrarian reform objectives are met. Crucial will be effective, transparent and accountable institutional frameworks to oversee agrarian reform and guard against the corruption that has become so pervasive in Zimbabwe. Only a government with real democratic credentials can create such institutions, which is why a way must be found to exit Mugabe, his henchmen and the generals from the seat of power.

About the Author

Ben Cousins is director of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (http://plaas.org.za) and holds a chair in Development Management at the University of the Western Cape.

Notes

[1] See http://www.lalr.org.za

[2] Mavedzenge, B.Z., J. Mahenehene, F. Murimbarimba, I. Scoones and W. Wolmer (2008), ‘The Dynamics of Real Markets: Cattle in Southern Zimbabwe following Land Reform’, Development and Change 39(4): 613-639.

[3] See for example RW Johnston, London Review of Books, Letters, 30 (24),18 Dec, 2008.

[4] London Review of Books, Letters, 31(1) I January 2009; Patrick Bond in Links, International Journal of Socialist Renewal (http://links.org.au)

[5] Davies, Rob (2004), ‘Memories of Underdevelopment: A Personal Interpretation of Zimbabwe’s Economic Decline’, in Brian Raftopoulos and Tyrone Savage (eds), Zimbabwe, Injustice and Political Reconciliation, Cape Town, Institute for Justice and Reconciliation: 1-18.

Mar 16, 2009

by Amanda Hammar

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 82

The Measure of Just Demands? A Response to Mamdani

Judging by the passionate and wide-ranging responses to Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’ (London Review of Books, 4 December 2008), he has struck a deep chord amongst scholars of and from Zimbabwe – as well as others concerned more broadly with questions of African politics – both with the particular issues he has raised and those left starkly absent from his analysis. The present ACAS Bulletin is doing us all a valuable service by usefully bringing together the different responses evoked by Mamdani’s original piece and his subsequent response to his critics (London Review of Books, 1 January 2009). Although in disagreement with much of what he has written in these two pieces, I nonetheless express my appreciation for his efforts to stimulate serious public debate about Zimbabwe beyond partisan rhetoric (even if he himself has not entirely avoided such rhetoric). This is certainly welcome.

Much has already been written by eminent scholars as part of this debate, with whom I concur (among others, Patrick Bond and Ben Cousins). Having already added my name to a wider critical chorus (the letter to the LRB by ‘Scarnecchia et al’, 1 January 2009), I will limit myself here to a few additional points where I feel Mamdani’s analysis would have benefited from more considered reflection, and engagement with a wider selection of sources. These points relate to his somewhat idealized reading of the land occupations and position of war veterans in this process; his underplaying of the Zanu (PF) party-state project; and his unexpectedly narrow definition of ‘the people’.

One of the key premises of Mamdani’s analysis of the apparently ‘democratic’ nature of Zimbabwe’s post-2000 land revolution is that it was largely driven by an authentic ‘land occupation movement’, a thesis developed largely by Moyo and Yeros (2005) and which Mamdani accepts uncritically. One cannot deny the significant role played by war veterans in initiating the land invasions and occupations both in the late 1990s and from 2000 onwards, alongside a range of other interested, mainly local actors (Sadomba 2008, Marongwe 2003). However, to account for the extent of the nationwide operation that perhaps started with more spontaneous occupations but then led fairly quickly into the ‘official’ fast-track land reform process, (primarily) in terms of “the success of the veterans’ mobilisation”, seems a rather exaggerated claim. Not only is there little evidence to substantiate the claim of a pre-existing, organized ‘land occupation movement’ prior to 2000 as Moyo and Yeros and now Mamdani claim.[1] In addition, despite contributions from varied independent sources (Sadomba 2008), it would have been materially, let alone politically, highly unfeasible for under-resourced veterans to sustain such national-scale mobilization independently of extensive party and state backing on multiple levels. Logistical, financial and other forms of support, as well as protection from legal prosecution for property-related or violent crimes, provided the basis on which many of the occupations were organized and sustained for as long as they were (Kriger 2006).

To represent the regime as somehow passively following the lead of the war veterans, or conveniently jumping on their bandwagon as a matter of elite cooptation of an established agrarian land movement, is to over-estimate the capacities, resources and scale of the veterans’ ‘organisation’, and to significantly under-estimate the overlapping (and persistent) projects of sovereignty and hegemony of the Zanu (PF) party-state. As post-independence history has amply demonstrated, there has been no organization or group to date in Zimbabwe that the ruling regime has been unable or unwilling to crush if so desired. As such, it seems strange for Mamdani to so resolutely downplay the party-state capacity and inclination to keep control of the country’s key political and economic assets, least of all land. It seems equally misplaced for Mamdani to dismiss as ‘conspiracy theories’ the attention given by some scholars to the explicit and largely violent practices of state-making that have accompanied if not superseded the land revolution, not to mention the largely undisguised elite accumulation linked to party loyalty. Naming this as such is not a question of conspiracy but of politics.

Furthermore, to look at the land occupations in isolation from the broader political landscape of post-2000 Zimbabwe, and most critically the evolution of a viable political opposition and its threat to Zanu (PF) hegemony and state control, represents a key blind-spot in Mamdani’s analysis. Certainly one needs to look at the land redistribution project in terms of ‘historically just demands’. But one also needs to examine this project in its broader contemporary setting of wide-scale party-state attacks on any form of opposition, and the mass displacement of both rural and urban Zimbabweans. If one opens up the picture in this way, surely one cannot suggest comfortably, as Mamdani does, that “it is striking how little turmoil accompanied this massive social change” of radical land reform.

It remains hard to fathom why there is such an insistence by Mamdani, Moyo and others, on ignoring or down-playing the extensive evidence of the party-state project itself, and the profound contradictions between what the regime has claimed to be doing, and what it has actually done. And why do ‘historically just demands’ (defined uncritically within the paradigm of a singular and static Land Question) automatically outweigh or supersede currently just demands not for only land, but for the basic conditions of life: health, food, shelter, safe water, safety, and the right to exercise one’s democratic right to vote or even voice objection to one’s suffering? Surely these are all valid.

Drawing attention to the limitations of the war veterans’ thesis and to the need for more analytical emphasis simultaneously on the party-state project is not to argue against the need for a radical land redistribution process (albeit one that doesn’t undermine national and local economies, or one that violates basic human rights). Nor is it to deny the depth of grievances or the genuine activism of many war veterans and other land hungry or economically disadvantaged citizens in Zimbabwe. It is rather to ensure a less idealized and more honest account of both the meaning and realities of the so-called radical land revolution that Mugabe has so successfully and cynically peddled as heroically anti-imperialist.

Finally, it is hard to understand why, with so much evidence on the brutal intimidation of the electorate both directly by force and indirectly through structural violence, Mamdani would claim so glibly that “almost half the Zimbabwean electorate” is in support of Mugabe and Zanu (PF). Certainly some are. Certainly there have been selective benefits and uneven successes related to the land reform process and other forms of redistribution of assets. But this has been overtly linked to party loyalty, and counters the too-easy assertion made by Mamdani of this being ‘a social and economic – if not political – democratic revolution’. Democratic for whom? In relation to this, there is a sense, to paraphrase George Orwell, that ‘some people are more equal than others’, or rather in the case of present-day Zimbabwe, some get to be validated as ‘the people’, while others are regarded as mere surplus. And so when Mamdani says “The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era”, one has to wonder which ‘people’ this refers to, and what will others, who have been violently excluded from the benefits of this revolution or worse, remember of this time.

[1] Indeed, Moyo himself in earlier work noted the absence of “a nation-wide political movement and/or peasant rebellion, over demands for land” (Moyo 1999, 5). This is not to suggest that there wasn’t an active war veterans movement especially during the 1990s, but this cannot be assumed automatically to be the same as a peasant or land occupation movement.

References

Kriger, Norma, 2006. Guerrilla Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe. Symbolic and Violent Politics 1980-1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marongwe, Nelson, 2003. ‘Farm Occupations and Occupiers in the New Politics of Land in Zimbabwe’. In Amanda Hammar, Brian Raftopoulos and Stig Jensen (eds), 2003, Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis. Harare: Weaver Press, pp. 155–90.

Moyo, Sam, 1999. Land and Democracy in Zimbabwe. Harare: SAPES Books.

Moyo, Sam, and Paris Yeros, 2005. ‘Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Towards the National Democratic Revolution’. In Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (eds), Reclaiming the Land. The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. London: Zed Books, Cape Town: David Philip, pp. 163–205.

Sadomba, Wilbert Zvakanyorwa, 2008. War Veterans in Zimbabwe’s Land Occupations: Complexities of a Liberation Movement in an African Post-colonial Settler Society. PhD Thesis, Wageningen University, The Netherlands.

About the Author

Amanda Hammar is a Program Coordinator at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden.

Mar 16, 2009

by Patrick Bond

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 82

Mamdani on Zimbabwe sets back Civil Society

Although Mahmood Mamdani is an inspiring intellectual and political writer, one of Africa’s greatest ever, his London Review of Books article ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’ invites debate and disagreement. To begin, consider Mamdani’s ‘abiding recollection of my first few months back’ in Uganda when his compatriots did not oppose Idi Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’, saying only that ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The Zimbabwe case is so different as to repel such comparisons. The 4000 whites who controlled the bulk of good land until February 2000 included beneficiaries of the historic colonial theft, while others bought into the system by purchasing farms after independence. Most had vast swathes of underutilised land, but many were extremely productive, using racially exclusive networks for credit, inputs and marketing, especially to growing international markets during the 1990s liberalisation era. Helter skelter, they were all removed; a few hundred remained on their farms through the late 2000s because they cut deals with local elites or in some rare cases, had the support of neighbouring Communal Area constituencies for whom they provided services.

Rather than confuse matters with the Uganda comparison (which related mainly to urban Asians and those in commercial circuitries), the following is more ‘likely to be said’ of the situation prevailing in February 2000:

• land transfers to the majority were necessary and long overdue, since the free market model agreed at Lancaster House [the independence agreement between the liberation movement and the British government] and in subsequent World Bank loans wasn’t working (nor was it meant to), and since structural adjustment had generated vast profits for tobacco, horticultural and other (mainly white) agro-exporters, while peasants lost economic ground during the 1990s (a point important for understanding resentments against wealthy white farmers);

• notwithstanding a record of hostility to rural squatter movements, Mugabe turned from a defeat in the national constitutional referendum of February 2000 to desperate encouragement of war veteran invasions of white farms (especially after white farmers were shown on TV writing cheques to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change), which does represent a profound change in tenure to be sure, but moreso represented a desperation power grab;

• Mugabe allowed far too many of his cronies to get good farms (as even a state investigating commission conceded), and didn’t set up proper agricultural support systems for those millions of landless who should have benefited from redistribution, leading to a huge decline in agricultural output, food aid dependency on Western donors and NGO distributors, and the repeated prospect of mass starvation (points that Mamdani skirts).

For Mamdani, both Mugabe and Amin ‘projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system.’ Naturally, there are a wide variety of such rulers who used a fake anti-imperialism and anti-neocolonialism to rally support, from Marcos in the Philippines to the Argentine generals, back to the characters Frantz Fanon described in Wretched of the Earth in 1961. It’s an old trick, but Zimbabweans are not so blind as to ‘remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact.’ And yet two countervailing ‘facts’ also stand out:

• 2000-03 was the moment when — reminiscent of the early/mid-1980s in Matabeleland — an electorally-threatened Mugabe used brutal violence against his opponents, terrorising the society and vindicating those who claimed Mugabe’s rule would necessarily end in dictatorship, hence leaving the early 2000s the definitively ‘exhausted’ state of Mugabe’s ultra-nationalism (insofar as it stopped delivering goods and instead switched to coercion); and in any case,

• ‘settler colonialism’ easily transformed into post-settler neocolonialism nearly everywhere, and Zimbabwe is no exception, for while the society may now have less than a quarter of its former peak of white inhabitants, the economy is still oriented to activities that, if not controlled by white Zimbabweans or white South Africans or white Brits, mimics that control through compliant local black ownership — in finance, commerce, mining and residual manufacturing especially (while a preponderance of white senior managers remains).

For Mamdani, ‘The best publicised casualties of the land reform movement were the urban poor who hoped to benefit from extending land invasions to urban areas.’ There was, in reality, a huge disconnect between what was happening in the countryside and the cities, so that this sentence is misleading: ‘The veterans spearheaded occupations of urban residential land in 2000-1. Housing co-operatives and other associations followed their lead and set up “illegal” residential or business sites.’ Actually, the housing coop movement was firmly established by the mid-1990s and did not follow the war veterans’ lead — but instead joined hundreds of thousands of atomistic urban residents in setting up illegal or informal economic activities and residential situations in the overcrowded, underhoused cities. They did so in an incremental way beginning in the 1980s, hence there were an estimated 700,000 people whose shelter and livelihoods were destroyed by Operation Murambatsvina, including those of Mugabe supporters.

For Mamdani, ‘the state feared that it would lose control over towns to the MDC if the land reform movement was allowed to spread’ – an unusual formulation to explain Murambatsvina. Mugabe had a simple rationale for invoking Murambatsvina: demonisation/intimidation of opposition supporters (and even, by accident, some of his own urban supporters). Victims included the broader progressive political project of those in civil society – e.g. many Zimbabwe Social Forum affiliates – who consistently supported poor people both through radical rural land reform advocacy and through ‘rights to the city’ projects such as informalisation of survival activity. To conflate these complex and thoroughly contradictory processes with no concrete evidence is far beneath Mamdani’s capacity.

Turning to Mugabe’s faux anti-imperialism, Mamdani blames much of the hostility from the West upon ‘Zimbabwe’s entry into the Congo war in August 1998.’ But recall that in 1998 Mugabe was supporting Laurent Kabila (who came to power in part through global mining interests), and his own allies’ and generals’ personal interests in that process are well documented. No doubt some geopolitical factors related to control over the eastern DRC were also in play, with the US lining up with Uganda and Rwanda for medium-term control of the region’s resources. But Mamdani forgets that the IMF explicitly allowed huge financial transfers from within the Zimbabwe fiscus to finance the war (so long as cuts in other programs paid for it), and expressed much more concern about a new set of late 1990s economic policies that reflected structural adjustment’s failure: introduction of selective price controls, increased tariffs, import licensing on some goods, procrastination in meeting regional liberalisation targets, pegging of the exchange rate, suspension of foreign currency accounts, introduction of new export incentives and application of new levies on tobacco and consumer goods.

For Mamdani, ‘Participants in the donor conference for Zimbabwe that year [1998] were decidedly lukewarm about committing funds’, yet they had been the whole time since 1980. For Mamdani, there followed another alleged punishment: ‘The following year the IMF suspended lending to Zimbabwe.’ Hang on, by then, Mugabe had stopped repaying IMF loans, and was violating several of the neoliberal conditions placed on earlier loans. For Mamdani, another indication of the fall-out in 1999 was that ‘the US and the UK decided to fund the labour movement, led by the ZCTU, first to oppose constitutional change and then to launch the MDC as a full-fledged opposition party.’ Yet international donor support for the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions’ more conservative initiatives dated back to the 1980s, in part through the AFL-CIO’s cold-warrior dominated Solidarity Center and the African American Labor Center (as I recall from personal victimization when a left project gathered pace within the ZCTU).

Mamdani agrees with Mugabe that sanctions can serve as an explanation for Zimbabwe’s crisis, because after land reform finally began in 2000, ‘the Western donor community shut the door on Zimbabwe.’ The data collected by the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development suggest otherwise. In 2007, the last year full statistics exist, the West gave $465 million to various Zimbabwe projects, representing 10 percent of the country’s GDP and – at $40/person – a higher per capita amount than that of SubSaharan African countries receiving aid ($39), and more than twice as much as all Third World countries ($17). The G7 donations were $294 million, higher than the 1980s average ($254) when Zimbabwe was a donor favourite. Britain gave $94 million ($65 million average during the 1980s) and the US gave $139 million ($58 million average during the 1980s).

The 2000s downtick in imperialist donations to Zimbabwe – a fall by 50% from average 1990s figures, until 2007 – can be blamed on various factors: the uptick in state repression, Mugabe’s zigzagging away from neoliberal economic policies, and a sense that Mugabe would soon lose to Tsvangirai in an election. But $277 million flowed each year, on average, during the 2000s, hardly a ‘shut door’. US AID in particular was prolific in sending out its food support, replete with branding logos all over the maize bags and cooking oil tins.

Mamdani’s ‘door shut’ metaphor is incorrect and so is this comparison: ‘The sanctions regime, led by the US and Britain, was elaborate, tested during the first Iraq war and then against Iran.’ The only real US sanctions were the smart sanctions against the elites. Instead of imposing genuine economic sanctions, George W. Bush left Zimbabwe to his ‘point man’ (sic), Thabo Mbeki. Mamdani makes much of the idea that Bush and Jesse Helms invoked a law to oppose the World Bank and International Monetary Fund from lending to Mugabe’s government. Surprisingly, he does not mention the most profound reason for the IMF’s above decisions: Mugabe’s failure to repay overdue loans. Moreover, when in 2005-06, Mugabe (egged on by Mbeki) tried to clear $210 million in extreme arrears (with more than $1 billion in other arrears to the IMF, World Bank and African Development Bank still outstanding), he had not put in place the neoliberal economic policies required by the IMF for ongoing support.

My own understanding is that at no time did the US have to exercise the veto over IMF loans it has been notorious for in other cases. The ‘sanctions’ Mamdani describes were simply not a factor — Mugabe had himself imposed sanctions on himself by not repaying the Bretton Woods Institutions starting in 1999, and by adopting non-neoliberal economic policies following his celebrated imposition of structural adjustment through 1996 (‘highly satisfactory’, opined the World Bank that year – the highest possible rating Washington gives). In any case, ‘sanctions’ by the Bretton Woods Institutions should be no barrier to a country’s growth, if it is managed properly, as Argentina showed after its 2002 default on $130 billion in foreign loans. It then led Latin America in recovery from the ‘lost’ 1980s-90s neoliberal era.

One of the most dangerous fallacies about the country’s economic crisis is that it stems from sanctions, a point to be proven in coming days and weeks as the Government of National Unity compels a rethink of the donor aid bans, international financial boycotts and other economic ‘sanctions’ that are allegedly holding Zimbabwe back. The awful tragedy played out the last week of February was SA foreign minister Nkosozana Dlamini-Zuma’s call for ‘an end to sanctions’ against Zimbabwe. Specifically, SA finance Trevor Manuel aimed to clear at least $1.2 billion in arrears by sanitizing Mugabe’s old loans with a new mega-loan that will immediately repay the Bretton Woods Institutions, precisely the way Manuel sanitized Mobutu’s loans through a June 2002 credit to the DRC which went straight to the IMF.

It is here Mamdani amplifies what can be considered Mugabe’s greatest myth: economic destruction and inflation unprecedented in recorded human history is due to ‘sanctions’. First, it must be recorded that, contrary to his claim that the MDC and unions favoured a suspension of aid and loans ‘in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2000’, the only sanctions publicly advocated have been ‘smart sanctions’: personal bank account freezes and travel bans on about 200 ZANU-PF and state officials. The Durban dockworkers’ refusal to offload weapons and three million bullets from a Chinese ship in April 2008 was applauded, no doubt, but Zimbabwe’s oppositional forces have rarely expressed support for specific sanctions, and the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition specifically rejected anything beyond smart sanctions.

Mamdani has been led to believe that ‘sanctions have played no small part’ in ‘laying waste’ to the economy. My own view – documented in Uneven Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe’s Plunge – is that a deeper capitalist malaise engulfed Zimbabwe since around 1974, the year that per capita wealth began to decline. The problem can be summarized as a classical case of overaccumulated capital and, by the time of structural adjustment in the early 1990s, a turn to the speculative/parasitical mode of not only capital accumulation but also state management. These deep-rooted problems cannot be reduced to Mugabe’s ‘policies’, but instead are problems all state managers have faced, nearly everywhere in the world. Mugabe had much more leverage — because politically he is a dictator — to adopt a unique zig-zag technique. He has weaved between market liberalisation, crony-capitalist corruption and state interventions, leaving Zimbabwe with the highest inflation ever recorded in human history, at a time when neighbouring states’ inflation was declining substantially due to more pure versions of neoliberalism. But zagging right again in January 2009, he authorized a nearly complete liberalization of Zimbabwe’s monetary sector, which immediately caused a reported $45 million capital flight by his cronies.

In comparison to such deep-seated endogenous processes, exogenous ‘sanctions’ have played a very small part in the present manifestation of this long crisis. Moreover, instead of ruling ‘by consent’ and instead of land reform measures winning ‘him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa’, as Mamdani posits about Mugabe, we should understand his zig-zag dirigisme as last-gasp measures to retain power through patronage on the one hand, and to bail out crony-capitalist allies on the other. The insistence on bloating out the Cabinet to 71 members is only one reflection of the addiction to patronage that his rule embodies.

Sadly, Mamdani’s source for sanctions evidence is the notorious, corrupt central bank chief, Gideon Gono, who has long abused the forex control system. Mamdani doesn’t mention that Zimbabwe has had the third worst outflow of capital flight of any country in Africa (only Nigeria and Angola have suffered a higher proportion of their GDP moving abroad, illegally, since the mid-1970s, according to the most rigorous study — by Leonce Ndikumana and James Boyce), not to mention ubiquitous luxury good imports for Mugabe’s cronies.

In dealing with foreign debt, Mamdani laments that Zimbabwe’s arrears soared starting in 1999, but this is a matter of controversy. After all, the Jubilee movement (locally represented by the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development) repeatedly requested that Mugabe stop repaying foreign loans. But instead of Mugabe following a principled strategy linked to other Third World leaders in a debtors’ cartel, as Jubilee South (and Julius Nyerere and Fidel Castro) advocated a quarter century ago, there was a simple reason for default: he ran out of forex. In 1998, Zimbabwe paid more in debt servicing than any country in the world (as a percentage of GDP) aside from Brazil and Burundi.

Having stopped repaying — except for the silly strategy of partial IMF repayments in 2005-06 — naturally arrears increased dramatically. The Jubilee movement was disgusted by the IMF repayment and advocates that Zimbabwe’s entire foreign debt — $5+ billion — be repudiated, and indeed declared as ‘odious debt’ under international law, since the vast majority of people who suffered because of those loans (which mainly funded the 1990s structural adjustment destruction of the economy and social wage) were not properly consulted by the Mugabe regime.

In a related argument, Mamdani worries that ‘Foreign direct investment had shrunk from $444.3 million in 1998 to $50 million in 2006.’ But the Zimbabwe economy has been the fastest-shrinking in the world, so this is only to be expected — it’s not a sign of sanctions. And when he records the shrinking support to the state for health (e.g. the Danish state’s aid suspension), he fails to note the systematic abuse of aid — both in day-to-day activities (as the World Development Movement and ActionAid have documented) and also in Zimbabwe where forex used for aid has been systematically looted by the central bank and government departments. There are a great many providers of humanitarian aid, as well as NGOs, ready to supply the Zimbabwe countryside with food and other services — but Mugabe has systematically prevented them from operating.

Further, when choosing evidence that can legitimize Zanu-PF, it is regrettable Mamdani reverts to the 2005 bogus electoral statistics, and in turn to findings by Namibian, Nigerian and South African official observers, given how readily African elites (from Windhoek, Abuja, Pretoria) support other African elites (in Harare) – against the mass of Zimbabweans.

Moreover, in contrast to Mamdani’s hope that settler colonialism has been solved by the land invasions, ultimately, thorough-going pro-povo land reform will again be needed in Zimbabwe, so as to dislodge Mugabe’s cronies who have merely taken over existing plantations, leaving many wrecked. Mugabe’s rural victims have a right to a better future than the rancid deal negotiators from the region have imposed. Mugabe’s land reform measures were ‘harsh’ (Mamdani) — to a few thousand white farmers yes, but most importantly, to millions of black peasants and urban workers now starving or unable to buy food, and hundreds of thousands of rural farmworkers — not to those outside Zimbabwe who support him (who remain well-fed). Hence the middle-ground phrasing Mamdani employs here sets the tone for a false balance.

But land aside, the September 15, 2008 ‘powersharing’ agreement Mamdani endorses is a disaster in many other respects, as it combines the worst of both worlds: looming neoliberalism if the business faction of the MDC influences economic policy (the MDC gets the finance ministry, but while it is presently held by a leftist, Tendai Biti, the real power over reconstruction financing is being imposed from Pretoria, Tunis and Washington) on the one hand, and on the other, ongoing crony capitalism through Mugabe’s extensive patronage system within the Zimbabwe state. Add to this the monopoly of violence relegitimised: a more actively repressive arm of the state for those in civil society who would protest the new elite transition, e.g. the Women of Zimbabwe Arise members arrested in late February, and so many other dozens of human rights advocates rotting in Chikurubi and other prisons at the time of writing.

Finally, a few matters on South Africa. It would be nice if ‘The experience of land reform in Zimbabwe has set alarm bells ringing in South Africa’, as the Landless Peoples Movement (LPM) hoped would be the case by raising this spectre in 2001 at the World Conference Against Racism and in 2002 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Not so, for tragically, the LPM was subsequently destabilised, and there is presently no rural South African social movement with the weight necessary to raise an alarm bell that the Zimbabwe experience will be repeated.

Mamdani also misreads SA civil society by claiming that ‘many activists and intellectuals, for the most part progressives, have aligned themselves with distant or long-standing enemies in an effort to dislodge an authoritarian government clinging to power on the basis of historic grievances about the colonial theft of land. Symbolic of this was the refusal by Cosatu-affiliated unions to unload a cargo of Chinese arms destined for Zimbabwe when the An Yue Jiang sailed into Durban in April.’ In reality, there was no alliance with enemies, for what happened in April 2008 was simple: a local progressive church leader, Bishop Rubin Phillip (whose political roots are in the black consciousness movement), and the anti-Mugabe South African trade union movement together raised the alarm about crates of guns and about three million bullets moving from Durban to Harare, and prevented the unloading there and across the region (and they were assisted by a lawyer based at Open Society’s regional arm). The most important alliance began in that process: people-people solidarity across the Limpopo River. After xenophobic attacks on tens of thousands of Zimbabweans here in May-June 2008, this point is ever more crucial to note. It means that instead of an ‘alliance’ between progressive activists (like Phillip or COSATU) and ‘long-standing enemies’, the way forward is cross-border cooperation by oppressed peoples of both countries.

From the top-down, in contrast, the picture painted by officials and the corporate media in South Africa resembles the world view of a vulture. Consider a suggestion last September for Tsvangirai from Investec Bank’s Roelof Horne: “austerity from within”. At the same time, the SA Independent newspaper group editorialized that the Mugabe/Tsvangirai government should “introduce drastic policies, including slashing government spending and freeing up price, currency and other controls” as “conditions for receiving foreign aid.” Particularly in the weeks following Tsvangirai’s acceptance of the prime ministership chalice in February, with Manuel and the African Development Bank preparing belt-tightening strategies for the world’s thinnest people, a deep critique of Pretoria/Johannesburg’s subimperial designs on Zimbabwe is vital. This project, which I think is consistent with Mamdani’s prior, inspiring work on African politics, is set back a little by the myriad confusions raised in his Zimbabwe analysis.

About the Author

Patrick Bond is the Director of the Center for Civil Society at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.

Page 1 of 212

Monthly Archives: March 2009

Legalizing Illegality in Madagascar

Africom Awareness Event in Berkeley

Further Reading on Zimbabwe

Response to the Mamdani Debate

Critique of the Article by Mahmood Mamdani

Mamdani’s Enthusiasms

Some Observations on Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’

A Reply to Mamdani on the Zimbabwean Land Question

The Measure of Just Demands? A Response to Mamdani

Mamdani on Zimbabwe sets back Civil Society