Author: David Moore

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.

The words of Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho fit Zimbabwe. If the process of ‘democratisation’, liberalisation, and all those other aspects of capitalist modernity is ‘westward,’ then Zimbabwe under a challenged Mugabe has been heading there in almost the worst conceivable way. But for the democrats struggling to enlarge their space the words of the ultimate tragic optimist are appropriate too. More than three decades (including the liberation war after the mid-seventies) under Mugabe have meant those attempting to widen space for their democratic desires being doomed to repeat Beckett’s injunction: “ever tried? Ever failed? No matter, try again, fail again, Fail better”.(1) It’s hard not to “throw up for good” in such a struggle, but they haven’t yet. The problem, though, is finding a way to combine parliamentary and extra-parliamentary roads to that end.(2)

The Deal Signed: Arthur Mutambara (MDC-M), Robert Mugabe, Morgan Tsvangirai (MDC-T) & Thabo Mbeki

As these words were written Zimbabwe was on the edge of another of its many historical precipices. Mid September’s high hopes for a transitional government based on the Agreement between the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and the Two Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Formations, on Resolving the Challenges Facing Zimbabwe had seemed to come to naught. Yet there had been hope. Zimbabwe’s two main parties (and the third, a small splinter of the Movement for Democratic Change — MDC-M, led by once radical university student Arthur Mutambara) signed the settlement on September 11. A huge SADC procession four days later poured praise on SADC’s facilitator Thabo Mbeki for pulling the hare out of the hat, and appeared to add enough pomp and circumstance to satisfy Mugabe’s royal pretensions. Many thought it would mark the beginning of his end, even if it fell far short of registering the full extent of changes in Zimbabwe’s democratic contours since the MDC had been struggling for its due share of power in 1999. To be sure, warnings ensued from the National Constitutional Assembly’s Lovemore Maduku that the accord was ‘more of capitulation by the MDC than by ZANU-PF’ that only gave ‘cosmetic executive authority’ for Tsvangirai(3), and the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions thought it wasn’t worth its paper. A hard front in the MDC led reportedly by Secretary-General Tendai Biti (also a former student radical) took its cue from civil society, opposing the parliamentarians who’d very much have liked to get down to work — and continue to get paid: by the end of October their salaries in a non-functioning parliament were only worth US$10 a month. Harare sources claimed that Mutambara had joined his old university chum to call for abandoning the deal, although his partners Welshman Ncube and Priscilla Misihairabwi-sMushonga, who led the 2005 split away from Tsvangirai and later invited Mutambara back from his American pursuits of robotic science and historically devoted to parliament at any cost, would presumably be against that strategy. It could be that the volatile Mutambara, badly bruised by appearing to be a Mugabe acolyte during the pre-settlement conjuncture, was recouping his student-civil society credentials.(4)

The MPs were sitting on the cusp of a significant victory: Mugabe had unilaterally called parliament — now structured by the March 29 MDC victory that even the ZANU-PF biased Zimbabwe Electoral Commission could not fix, after five weeks of trying (5) ) — to sit in late August, hoping an MDC-M candidate for speaker would cause some friction on its August 23’s election. But some MDC-M members voted against their candidate, as did a few from ZANU-PF. The MDC-T’s National Chairman Lovemore Moyo won the speaker’s prize with 110 votes of the assembly’s 210. Some of these votes weren’t quite private, given that many MPs waved their marked ballots to all and sundry (thus inciting Independent MP Jonathan Moyo, ZANU-PF’s former propaganda chief, to file an application to the High Court against it), and it has been said that a few were paid for by Freedom House’s Orange revolutionaries: nevertheless they constituted something of parliamentary coup. Democracy seemed to be on a roll.

Of course there was no doubt that the September 11 settlement signified dual power, not shared power. Sharing would be too warm and fuzzy a concept to describe the feelings between the MDC and ZANU-PF after an eight and a half year campaign in which the latter used every dirty trick in the book, and invented new ones when those ran out. But in spite of awkward notions such as giving Morgan Tsvangirai prime ministerial ‘executive power’ over a cabinet ‘council’ which was actually the same as the cabinet over which Mugabe would preside, and creating two deputy prime ministers from the MDCs to match Mugabe’s two vice-presidents, there was a decent core to the 18 or more month transitional scheme. The drafting of the accord was almost half and half MDC liberal humanism (“DETERMINED to act in a manner that demonstrates respect for the democratic values of justice, fairness, openness, tolerance, equality, respect of all persons and human rights” and “to build a society free of violence, fear, intimidation, hatred, patronage, corruption and founded on justice, fairness, openness, transparency, dignity and equality”) side by side with ZANU-PFist nationalism (“RECOGNISING and accepting that the Land Question has been at the core of the contestation in Zimbabwe”, noting “the present economic and political isolation of Zimbabwe by the United Kingdom, European Union, United States of America and other sections of the International Community” and that “the primary obligation of compensating former land owners for land acquired rests on the former colonial power” (6)), but a momentum borne by that intangible concept of political ‘will’ might have carried it on beyond the hackneyed past. If the MDC-T and MDC-M could have co-operated they’d have held a fragile one-seat majority in cabinet and parliament (and it was expected the ‘appointments’ to Senate and governorships would be even-handed). There would have been economic and military councils, and a widely consultative process to create a new constitution on which the National Constitutional Assembly, which started the whole process of constitutional democratisation back in 1998, started work immediately on that score. As well, a Periodic Review Mechanism, consisting of two members from each party, signified equal weighting (although one can argue that the Mutambara faction may not ‘really’ deserve equality at such a level, having only gained 10 seats and 4.83% of the March 29 vote,) on final say.

Even the naysayers seemed to think there’d be a fair sharing of important cabinet posts. The MDC, it was agreed — but never signed — had secured the departments of Home Affairs, Justice, Finance and Information Ministries while ZANU-PF retained Defence, Agriculture, Mines and Prisons. An MDC MP with a long tradition in the labour unions, eager to take up his new legislative seat, opined ‘we are not at war: Mugabe can keep the army;’ when queried on rumours that Anglo-American and the like had pushed hard for the deal — any deal! — in fear of heightened British sanctions, he joked ‘I hope they sponsor my football team.’ Even the caustic RW Johnson was buoyed by the prospect of imperial intervention: he declared that the trusty Brits would ride in to rectify the military.(7) The crazed Gideon Gono would be no longer chair of the Reserve Bank, so the donors’ “Fishmongers” plan (named after the Harare restaurant in which the usual suspects met to draft tough IMF-style shock therapy with lots of humanitarian band-aids) would cool an inflation rate that as of mid-October was 231,000,000%. With the help of a billion and a half dollars of aid, Zimbabwe would soon reach its (mythical) historical status of ‘breadbasket’ state. As if immaculately conceived, a 240 page ‘discussion document’ authored by a UNDP team ranging from University of Zimbabwe Management Studies professor Tony Hawkins on the right to former Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) economist Godfrey Kanyenze on the left was unveiled, promising economic nirvana (if heaven was last seen in 1991) in 12 years if growth could average five per cent annually. The ‘manufactured in Zimbabwe’ Comprehensive Economic Recovery in Zimbabwe(8) struck radical political economist Patrick Bond as ‘neo-liberal’, perhaps because it said that Zimbabwe is not ready for a ‘developmental state’, while John Robertson, an economist of more orthodox bent, said it would only serve to breed bureaucrats. On signing, Tsvangirai said to the sceptical Sunday Independent reporter that he had to give the ‘benefit of the doubt’ to the man who had so often labelled him as Blair’s tea-boy and an ignorant ‘chematama’ (fat-face).(9)

Yet by November it looked as if none of this would come to pass. For some reason Tsvangirai had buckled to the SADC negotiator’s ‘don’t worry: crisis what crisis?’ attitude to the construction of the cabinet (along with just about everything else in Zimbabwe) and failed to gain guarantees on the distribution of posts. Thabo Mbeki, known to harbour a pungent dislike for Tsvangirai (“he could never lead Zimbabwe to liberation”, he’s reported to have said) must have foreseen his unceremonious sacking back home at the hands of the ANC’s Zuma gang, so pushed Tsvangirai to accept empty promises about that cabinet. Mugabe, who as ex-guerrilla leader (thrown into jail from 1977 to 1980 by Mugabe and Samora Machel for seeming to be a threat to the former) and now co-leader of the oppositional Zimbabwe Liberation Veterans’ Forum Wilfred Mhanda says will take the 1% of a deal that looks 99% against him and win, was soon to deny the MDC’s place at the table. Beholden to the prospects of losing control of the ZANU-PF congress in December, and tied to a rejectionist camp led by Emmerson Mnangagwa (infamous for his role as head of security in the Gukurahundi that claimed thousands of lives as ZANU-PF forced Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union to enter into a unity pact that no one wants to see repeated now: ZAPU was swallowed whole) he could not summon the strength to deprive any of his ministers of a place around the trough. Cutting a cabinet of thirty in half is not an easy task: nor is giving up the military or finance. The former keeps opposition in check and precludes justice for sins of the past; the latter keeps the official rate of exchange alive and thus the main channel of corruption (it takes about four billion Zimbabwean dollars to buy one American one on the parallel market, but only ten thousand if one has access to the official rate!). A Harare story that Mnangagwa pushed the unelected Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa (who in 2002 had, with the active encouragement of perhaps the only foreign policy-maker in South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, entered into heavy negotiations with then MDC Secretary-General Welshman Ncube, thus nicely the sewing lines of division in the MDC that contributed to its split in 2005), and was severely beaten by Mugabe’s bodyguards, indicates the strains in the ruling party that is governing less and less every day. The popular exaggeration of the rumour, that had Mnangagwa pushing Mugabe, was squelched by one man who knows Mugabe well: if that had happened, he said, Mnangagwa would now be dead. Mugabe himself has admitted publicly that he fears rebellion from within.(10) Mugabe remembers the mid-1970s divisions in ZANU very well, and probably après moi, la deluge, not quite realising the storms have been pelting for nearly a decade.

Thus on October 12, a day after the three main protagonists in the prolonged haggling over dividing the cabinet positions agreed to call in Private Citizen Mbeki, in need of consultancy fees during his forced retirement, ZANU-PF announced the cabinet: Defence, Home Affairs, Justice, Media and Higher Education (those pesky students have to be watched) would be all for the ruling party, while the two MDCs were thrown the crumbs with economic reconstruction and social welfare functions — not good candidates for winning an election in a few years sans the donors pitching in for a government that is not even plus ça change. Finance was unresolved: perhaps that was left to the itinerant negotiator to assign. Tsvangirai addressed an October 12 rally saying that unless Home Affairs would be in his hands, the deal would be off. He was facing a split in his party: some said that only a demand for a new national election would save the MDC-T face. In the meantime, concerned activists were consulting the SADC (Southern African Development Community) and AU (African Union) diplomats persuading them to call an emergency summit. The Zimbabwe Liberation Veterans’ Forum, made up of war veterans opposed to their peers who allied with Mugabe in the hopes they’d get some free land, appealed to the AU and SADC to let go of the lame-duck mediator and get a new process rolling. The ZLVF wondered “what informs the position of SADC leaders by conferring legitimacy to a rogue president whose hands drip with the blood of his own people and not of his imagined enemies from the West.” (11)

As expected, the October 13-15 meetings mediated by South Africa’s past president resolved only that the MDC could take Finance for its troubles. Somewhere along the line it was proposed that Home Affairs be split: the MDC could take immigration functions while the guys with guns would be in the violent party’s hands. No deal: and Tsvangirai seemed to be gaining ground. Denied a passport for months (Home Affairs says there is no paper, but swimming star Kirsten Coventry got one in days and civil servants say the document is sitting in a desk) he refused to take emergency travel documents enabling him to attend the October 20 meeting of the SADC security troika+1 (Chair, South Africa; members, Angola, Mozambique and Swaziland) in Mbabane. And so, as the summer begins in southern Africa, millions of Zimbabweans are dying faster than ever before and the MDC ups the ante to SADC as a whole (to meet in South Africa in the first week of November), then the AU, and then elections to be monitored by the UN.

The time for such an intervention whilst thousands were beginning to starve as never before, would be, however, far too long. Kwashiorkor, Pellagra (an adult form of malnutrition leading to madness and death) and Marasmus stalked the land: estimates were that five million would be in danger of starvation by January 2009. The senior doctors are bought off: as Jan Raath wrote, in September the Reserve Bank bought imported cars for the hundred or so of them. The cost? US$5 million.(12) The state had no funds to run examinations for its schools; and towards the end of October it recalled all government vehicles from their temporary users.

A new election could bring hope or more despair. There are indications that this is what the Mnangagwa faction wants. They will take complete power in the December ZANU-PF congress and resort again to the Gukurahundi tactics that raised their head in the weeks before the June 27 non-election to such an extent that Tsvangirai withdrew. This line of thought predicts that the MDC will be destroyed so they had better sign a deal now.

On the other hand, if the UN could rise out of its bureaucratic lethargy and run a real election — something that, if it had taken place more than half a decade ago, might have solved the problem in the making — the humanitarian aid would flow in. Millions of lives could be saved, and more than a modicum of democracy could creep in. However, the UN is not well-known for doing much of anything in Africa — is the Democratic Republic of the Congo a success story? — although, ironically, one of its more successful elections was managed by Zimbabwean professor of law Reg Austin, in Cambodia in 1992. If one writes off the UN, only the settlement is left. The MDC would like two years to let the Economic Council bring a material base back in, and the constitution could be debated vigorously.

Joshua Bakacheza, an MDC activist, was abducted by men in a truck on 25 June 2008 in Msasa, Harare and shot in the head a few hours later, according to his colleague who survived a bullet to the head and the lungs in the same incident. Bakacheza’s body was discovered lying in the open on 5 July, after a search of ten days. This pattern of abduction and subsequent murder account for 45 known deaths during April-June 2008.(13)

Could a wounded Mbeki magically wave his wand to solve all this? Could SADC? The AU? Resorting to fantasy in something approaching an ‘academic’ article illustrates the surreal nature of Zimbabwe now. The fact that senior doctors drive around in hypocritical abuse of their Hippocratic Oath while grown men and women place their faith in an Aids-denialist brings us back to Beckett and his tradition. Such tragedies take us back to the world of literature, a salvation in Africa’s perpetual crisis. This time, a leading MDC politician still under treason charges invokes African writers to state his position. Tendai Biti, writing of the crisis in education, brings Ngugi wa Thiongo’s brilliant The Wizard of the Crow to his side: for him Ngugi’s ‘Abhurian State’ “brilliantly describes” what happens to ruling classes and their empty ideology of nationalism.

Faced with the frustration of failing to transform the colonial state during the national democratic stage of the struggle, nationalism degenerates and decomposes into neo-patrimony, clientelism, the imperial presidency and patronage. In short, it converts the state into a rogue state where violence, corruption and personal accumulation become vehicles for the continued reproduction of the state.

The Abhurian State … had been fore-written by Chinua Achebe in A Man of the People, Sembene Ousmane in The Last of the Empire and Ayi Kwei Armah in The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born. At that stage, the highest level of decomposition, nationalism needs to be saved from itself or it will take the nation with it.

That is exactly where Zimbabwe is at the present moment. ZANU-PF needs to be saved from itself or it will annihilate the construct that Zimbabwe is.(14)

There is no doubt that the energies consumed in ridding Zimbabwe of Mugabe could be better spent elsewhere. If that one task could be achieved, it may not be chimerical to advance the proposition that the edifice he has built around himself would fall like a house of cards. One can only hope, with Beckett, that Zimbabwe’s next failure will be better than usual: the doctors’ cars remind us, though, that failure for some is success for others. Zimbabwe’s political economy needs drastic overhauling, so those making new constitutions in this interregnum — a space in which the wisdom of those running the financial markets of the world is seen to be equivalent to Robert Mugabe’s — must constitute a new economy too.

_________
David Moore
Anthropology and Development Studies
University of Johannesburg

1 . Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, London: John Calder, 1983. The ‘tragic optimist’ school of African studies is epitomised by Christopher Cramer’s exceptional Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries, London: Hurst & Co, 2006 (its Indiana University Press version is more boringly called Violence in Developing Countries: War, Memory, Progress).

2. David Moore and Tapera Kapuya ‘Zimbabwe’s Opposition Now: The Parliamentary Road or Mass Action on the Streets?’ Global Dialogue, 10, 2 (August 2005), pp. 4-9.

3. Basildon Peta, ‘Tsvangirai confident that deal will work’, Sunday Independent (Johannesburg), September 14, 2008, Edn. 3.

4. By the end of October it was reported that the MDC was proposing to remove the rival faction from the agreement. This was after Mutambara had spoken in support of Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision not to attend a Southern African Development Community meeting in Mbabane called in the last week of October to settle the deal (about which more later). Zimbabwean politics is nothing if not volatile. Jason Moyo, ‘MDC sets its sights on the UN’, Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) October 31-November 6, 2008, p. 14.

5. Susan Booyson, ‘The Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Zimbabwe, March and June 2008’, Electoral Studies, 24, 4 (forthcoming December 2008). See also Booysen’s authored Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, The Zimbabwe Harmonised Elections of 29 March 2008, Presidential, Parliamentary and Local Government Elections with Postscript on the Presidential Run-off of 27 June 2008 and the Multi-Party Agreement of 15 September 2008, Electoral Institute of Southern Africa Observer Mission Report No. 28, Johannesburg, 2008.

6. The best juxtaposition was this: the accord promised to “reject any unlawful, violent, undemocratic and unconstitutional means of changing governments” and also warned that “no outsiders have a right to call or campaign for regime change in Zimbabwe”.

7. RW Johnson, ‘Security is first test of Zimbabwe deal’, Sunday Times (London), September 14, 2008.

8. United Nations Development Programme, Comprehensive Economic Recovery in Zimbabwe: A Discussion Document, Harare, 2008.

9. Peta, ‘Tsvangirai confident ….

10. Jason Moyo, ‘Mugabe Fears Zanu-PF Rebellion’, Mail & Guardian, October 31-November 6, 2008, pp. 13-4.

11. The Zimbabwe Liberation Veterans’ Forum, ‘An Appeal for the African Union to Intervene to Resolve the Zimbabwean Political Impasse’, Harare: August 26 2008.

12. Jan Raath, ‘Aid agencies: 5m face starvation in Zimbabwe: Silently, in rundown wards, starving children lie dying – malnutrition diseases are overwhelming hospitals,’ Times Online, October 14, 2008.

13. Solidarity Peace Trust, Desperately Seeking Sanity: What Prospects for a New Beginning in Zimbabwe? (Solidarity Peace Trust, July 2008).

14. Tendai Biti, ‘MDC: Collapse of education system an indictment of ZANU PF,’ MDC Press Statement, October 13, 2008. On SW Radio Africa, www.swradioafrica.com/pages/mdconeduc131008.htm.