Zimbabwe: Human Rights Defenders Under Attack – Act Now!

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people”.
—Martin Luther King Jr.

Dear Friends,

Today the government of Zimbabwe rearrested Jestina Mukoko and 15 others on trumped up charges of “banditry, terrorism and insurgency”. The arrest follows the appearance of Jestina and her comrades before a Harare Magistrate at which they were formally indicted remanded in custody.

We cannot be silent in the face of this outrageous attack on human rights defenders. The only crime committed by Jestina Mukoko, a long time civic leader in Zimbabwe and her co-accused is standing up against tyranny in Zimbabwe and speaking out in defense of human rights and democracy. As Martin taught us, it takes the silence of good people for abuses of this nature to persist. We call upon people of good conscience all over the world to add your voice in calling for the unconditional release of Jestina Mukoko and her comrades. Zimbabwe’s compromised courts cannot be trusted to deliver justice to activists who have been targeted and victimized for their principled stand on human rights and democracy. There is no chance for these activists getting a fair trial under the unreconstructed judicial system in Zimbabwe.

State agents abducted Jestina and others back in October last year and they suffered torture and abuse in secret detention. Following loud protests from activists in Zimbabwe and around the world, Jestina and others surfaced form secret detention only to be released to the notorious Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison where they were held for two more months and only released on bail as part of a political deal by parties to Zimbabwe’s new inclusive government. The re-arresting of Jestina Mukoko and other activists is a shame to the new inclusive government in Zimbabwe.

We call upon you to raise your voices again in support of these human rights defenders by taking the following actions:

1. Call the Zimbabwe Embassy to the U.S.*: Phone number (+1 202 332-7100) and register your protest at the detention and ill-treatment of these human rights defenders and demand their immediate release.

2. Write to President Obama– and ask him to pressure the Zimbabwe government to release Jestina Mukoko and her fellow activists

Click here to send a message to President Obama.

Reports of horrible conditions and abuse in Zimbabwe’s prisons are rampant we therefore must act with speed to secure the release of these human rights defenders.

Please act now!

In solidarity,
Staff @ Africa Action

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.

Zimbabwe Ten Years On: Results and Prospects

coauthored with Paris Yeros

After a decade of political polarization and international standoff, the debate on Zimbabwe has finally been opened up to a wider reading public, thanks to Mahmood Mamdani’s “Lessons of Zimbabwe,” appearing in the London Review of Books (04/12/2008). Renowned scholars, within and without Africa, have broken their silence and have taken public positions. The debate now extends beyond a small group of specialists in Southern Africa and the UK and also goes deeper into the issues than what is readily available in the daily media. While we may wonder why it took nearly a decade for this to happen, there is good reason for the sudden change: during November-December 2008, Western governments and associated think-tanks began to test publicly the idea of intervening militarily in a small peripheral country and ex-colony, this time under the pretext of the “right to protect” Zimbabweans from a crazed tyrant. For many of us, this is dangerous talk; for others, it is either not serious enough, or serious and overdue. It is no surprise then that the knives would come out in the ensuing debate, and that this would intensify with the prospect of forming an “inclusive government” and resolving critical issues.

Mamdani’s article set out from a simple premise: that Zimbabwe’s deeply unequal and racialized agrarian relations were historically unjust and unsustainable. Restating this premise was significant, because during the course of the crisis the foundation of the debate kept shifting to other issues, such as good governance, productivity, or even historiography. Mamdani went on to argue that the radical land reform of recent years has had various casualties, including the rule of law, farmworkers, urban land occupiers, and agricultural production. But even so, he argued, the land reform has been historically progressive and is likely to be remembered as the culmination of the anti-colonial struggle in Zimbabwe. He concluded that similar, or even worse, convulsions are quite possible elsewhere, for example, South Africa, unless proactive measures are taken there. Mamdani approached a complex issue calmly and methodically, in stark contrast to the emotive analyses and distortions that we see in the daily propaganda war. His article was followed soon after by a public statement by 200 African scholars, attending a continental meeting in Cameroon, who denounced Western saber-rattling and any plan to re-militarize Southern Africa. Their statement was short, without detailed analysis of the Zimbabwe question, and written with the urgency of resisting a dangerous escalation.

These two statements were enough to blow the lid off. Concerned scholars of Zimbabwe in the USA and Europe scrambled to assert their expertise on the crisis, to label detractors as gullible victims of Robert Mugabe’s anti-imperialist script, to vilify the whole land occupation movement, and to equate it with extreme human rights violations (Scarnecchia, et al). Even scholars on the Left, such as Patrick Bond and Horace Campbell, joined in to dismiss the threat of external intervention as mere Mugabe rhetoric and to dispute really existing imperialism in the country. Despite their evident ideological heterogeneity, they converged instantly around a shared focus on personalities rather than the issues and resorted also to underhanded methods of argumentation (as noted by David Johnson).

The basic issue in Zimbabwe, like in so many other ex-colonies, remains how to resolve the two historic questions, the agrarian and the national. The issue of democracy is intrinsic to both the agrarian and the national questions; one issue can only be enhanced by the other’s advance. Let us recall that in Zimbabwe democracy itself was an historical conquest against settler colonialism. But this democracy fell far short of attending to the historic demands for social justice; instead, the newly independent state began to defend privilege in the name of rights and to criminalize demands for justice through the rule of law. Thus, when the deep antagonisms of this society escalated, civic organizations and ordinary citizens were faced with a confounding dilemma: either to tolerate the suspension of the rule of law and go for a historic breakthrough; or defend the rule of law and defend perpetual inequalities and backwardness. In our case, we defended the land reform not because we are “undemocratic,” but because we believe in a deeper form of democracy, one that can only be set on a more meaningful and stable footing by structural changes. Despite the casualties identified by Mamdani, the land reform has indeed created the social and economic foundation for a more meaningful democratization. There is need now to address the deficiencies of the land reform process, to rebuild the hard-won democratic institutions, and to lay the seeds for the next phase of the national democratic revolution.

That deep structural changes have taken place in Zimbabwe is beyond doubt. This has been established by various studies undertaken by AIAS and associates between 2001-07 (see references on the social and economic outcomes). The only other serious study published to date is by Ian Scoones and his associates at the Institute of Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) in Cape Town. Taken together, these studies have shown that land reform was not “hijacked” by “cronies”; although cronyism has indeed operated, it has been marginal to the whole process. The land reform has been broad-based and largely egalitarian. It has benefited directly 140,000 families, mainly among the rural poor, but also among their urban counterparts, who on average have acquired 20 hectares of land, constituting 70% of the land acquired. The remaining land has benefited 18,000 new small- to medium-scale capitalists with an average of 100 hectares. A small segment of large-scale capitalists persists, including both black and white farmers, but their land sizes have been greatly downsized to an average of 700 hectares, much lower than the average of 2,000 hectares previously held by 4,500 landowners on the whole of this land.

Moreover, various new dynamics are underway in the countryside in terms of labor mobilization, investment in infrastructure, new small industries, new commodity chains, and the formation of cooperatives. And despite the adverse economic conditions, land utilization levels have already surpassed the 40% mark that prevailed on white farms after a whole century of state subsidies and racial privilege. That the crop yields remain low is largely due to input shortages, not the lack of entrepreneurial spirit or expertise by the new farmers, as is so often claimed. The new agrarian structure in Zimbabwe now holds out the promise of obtaining food sovereignty (which it had never obtained before), creating new domestic inter-sectoral linkages, and formulating a new model of agro-industrial development with organized peasants in the forefront.

Needless to say, a number of scholars have never recognized this potential. On the contrary, they continue to speculate about “crony capitalism” (Patrick Bond) and the “destruction of the agriculture sector” (Horace Campbell), without having conducted any concrete research of their own, or properly interrogated the new research that has emerged.

Deep structural change has been accompanied by recurrent state violence. The most serious contradiction of the whole process has been the shrinking of political space, especially for progressive social forces. The state apparatus has continued to resort to brute force, long after the land reform. In this regard, we have been accused of turning a blind eye to state violence (see Brian Raftopoulos and Horace Campbell). But this is not the case. To defend structural change is not to condone murder, rape, abduction, and torture. Our approach to state violence has certainly been different; we have not chosen the path of listing the number of victims and moralizing about it. Rogue violence aside, our purpose has been two-fold: to analyze the changing class character of state violence so as to understand its function; and to provide concrete alternatives to avoid and resist state violence.

We have argued that in the early stages of the land reform (2000-03), while the leadership of the ruling party was struggling to appease and co-opt the land occupation movement, the use of force was used in defense of the landless and against the political forces allied to the white agrarian monopoly and Western interests. From 2003 onwards, as the land movement dissipated and as the enlarged black capitalist class repositioned itself within the ruling party, violence began to be used in defense of narrow class interests, but still against the forces allied to the West. This led to a series of tragedies between 2005 and 2008, especially as economic hardship deepened. The leadership of the ruling party replaced mobilization tactics by quick-fix, military-style operations: first against “illegal” urban dwellers (2005), destroying the new urban settlements that had emerged during the land occupations; then against “illegal” rural miners (2006-08), who had resorted to panning and smuggling for their livelihoods; then against profiteers (2007), in a price-control blitz whose effect was to further expand the parallel market; and finally, during the presidential contest of 2008, against those it could no longer convince. Indeed, these ongoing convulsions, combined with the economic hardship (see below), had the effect of undermining the “vanguard” claims of the ruling party itself, even in the countryside. This culminated in a deep and tense electoral polarization, with the opposition for the first time in the lead, which could only be defused through power-sharing negotiations. The violence (especially irregular detentions) has dragged on until now.

What were the concrete alternatives? It became very clear to us, as the rural and urban land movements dissipated or succumbed, that neither political party was capable of advancing the national democratic revolution to the next phase: if the opposition was a lost cause from the beginning, the ruling party had suffered a terminal class shift. We suggested that the only way forward was for social movements themselves to take the initiative, but not by contesting the control of the state apparatus. We called for a retreat from dogmatic party politics and a return to grassroots political work, with the objective of building durable and democratic structures in the countryside, especially cooperatives, building alliances with urban workers, and beginning once again to change the correlation of forces (Moyo and Yeros 2007a). For us, it seemed self-defeating to stand up to the state apparatus on a neo-colonial platform, or without adequate progressive alliances. For our detractors, however, the platform of the opposition was not neo-colonial.

This, in turn, has been among the most disheartening aspects of our colleagues’ work: their failure to interrogate the external factor and penetration of Zimbabwean politics. Of course, as David Johnson has pointed out, many of our detractors “don’t see contemporary imperialism as a category for analysis” anyway. But there are others who do, and they chose to abscond. Horace Campbell and Patrick Bond, especially, have gone to great lengths to say that there are no sanctions on Zimbabwe and that the economic decline is wholly self-inflicted. Indeed, they have given the impression that imperialism has suddenly been suspended in the case of Zimbabwe. Scarnecchia, et.al. have gone even further to call Mamdani “dishonest” for attributing blame to sanctions. This absurd chorus became complete when supposed ideological adversaries claimed that the West is actually saving Zimbabwe: “USAID was prolific in sending out its food support,” says Bond; “Western food aid has been a lifeline,” say Scarnecchia, et al.

The intrusive external factor is a constant in the history of Zimbabwe and the continent. In the case of Southern Africa, military, financial, and diplomatic support for the white minority regimes was crucial in dragging out the liberation struggles, destabilizing independent states, and sealing neo-colonial transitions. In the case of Zimbabwe, the Western achievement was to enshrine the colonial regime of property rights in the new constitution of 1979. Thereafter, great effort was made by various means, including via the IMF and World Bank, to co-opt internal politics in favor of structural adjustment. And then, in the early 1990s, when structural adjustment was at its height, and when the rest of Southern Africa was making a transition to majority rule, the USA tried to re-establish its military presence in the region, initially in Zimbabwe, and partially succeeded by building an air strip in Botswana. It should have been expected, therefore, that relations would heat up in the late 1990s, when Zimbabwe abandoned structural adjustment in 1996, initiated extensive compulsory land acquisition in 1997, mobilized Angola and Namibia in 1998 to intervene against the US-sponsored invasion of the DRC by Rwanda and Uganda, and finally turned on its neo-colonial constitution in 2000. This was a major shift in the correlation of forces. Did the West really turn the other cheek at this point, as Campbell and Bond seem to suggest?

On the contrary, this is when destabilization was deployed anew. Mamdani has given a taste of this destabilization campaign, and we have also written about it (Moyo and Yeros 2007b and forthcoming a, b; see also Gregory Elich and Stephen Gowans). In short, Western capital went on strike, citing the lack of “investor confidence,” while Western governments dedicated themselves to financing the opposition. Suffice it to say that the combination of economic isolation and political penetration has been severe, giving rise to a war economy, with extreme shortages of foreign exchange and basic goods and inputs, unrelenting hyperinflation, loss of productive capacity, and under-investment in social infrastructure, leading more recently to a very deadly cholera outbreak.

Many of our critics have sought to bolster their argument that there are no sanctions on Zimbabwe by pointing out the signing of new contracts in the mining industry. But whatever new contracts are being signed with Western, Eastern, or South African firms, they are slow in coming and a drop in the bucket. At the same time, the “food aid” that is being provided, and which has been hailed as a “lifeline,” must also be interrogated: this policy is in fact the corollary of a donor boycott against newly resettled areas; food aid would not have been necessary if inputs constraints had been lifted in these areas.

The Zimbabwean state confronted this destabilization campaign by becoming the most dirigiste in the world. It intervened across all sectors of the economy to control prices, distribution, and credit, to nationalize land, to reassert control over natural resources and export revenues, and to impose majority control by indigenous capital over the mining sector. Its economic strategy has included the resurrection of state-owned enterprises to direct the recovery and to diversify trade and investment to the East. But, its overall approach has been to fight the siege by promoting an indigenous bourgeoisie. This has been the basic internal contradiction which, besides its violent political outcomes, has opened the way for the financialization and informalization of business activity, the entrenchment of speculative interests, the profiteering by capitalists all around (white, black, ZANU-PF, MDC), and the excessive printing of money, all too often applied in the interest of the larger capitalists.

It is clear that the heterodox strategy has been insufficient and incoherent, creating a playground for opportunistic behavior. To be sure, the realities of isolation and penetration, combined with serial droughts and irregular rainfall, would have challenged any heterodox plan. Moreover, the fact that regional partners did not go far enough to provide economic support has also complicated the economic environment. But even so, the heterodox policy itself has been insufficient, in that it has lacked ideological clarity from the beginning and has also failed to rise to the occasion in the course of radicalization. To take one basic example, the financial system should have been more thoroughly regulated from the outset, together with agrarian capital. This should have been seen as a prerequisite for the promotion of a whole series of politically defensive and economically developmental measures, from the financing of cooperatives in the countryside to the expansion of urban housing. Another example is the stock market, which became a hothouse of financial opportunism and was only regulated in late 2008. The policy framework has also been incoherent in that it has not made effective use of the market mechanism. Economic policy has relied on the wrong capitalists, the speculators as opposed to the producers, and bypassed the vast majority of producers, who are peasants. However, we must be clear that none of this is a problem of “patrimonialism”, as our detractors claim — a problem which could be eradicated by “regime change.” The insufficiency and incoherence of economic policy is a reflection of the changing balance of class forces in the country and the weakness of urban and rural working-class organizations themselves. Regime change will not change this fact.

Suffice it to conclude with three issues that must now concern all genuine democrats: (a) the need for an economic recovery that is sovereign and socially just; (b) the opening of political space, in form and substance, for the re-organization and expression of the popular will, especially of the urban workers and small peasant producers; and (c) the fortification of the autonomy of the region by devising mechanisms of financial self-help.

In the course of the power-sharing negotiations in late 2008, various think-tanks and donors — including a multi-donor trust fund managed by the World Bank and a donor group called the “Fishmongers” — began to discuss the issue of economic recovery. The UNDP, however, took the lead and proposed that Zimbabwe should readjust to the world economy by means of shock therapy. This was an astounding conclusion, not only because the UNDP had previously distanced itself from IMF and World Bank orthodoxy, but also because shock therapy has been completely discredited worldwide, and because the world economy itself is collapsing. To what exactly should Zimbabwe adjust? As outlandish as it is, we nonetheless take this talk very seriously as well. Indeed, the greatest danger now is of an elite power-sharing pact that re-subordinates Zimbabwe to parasitical international financiers and offloads the costs of recovery onto the peasants and workers.

What is the alternative? First, as Ben Cousins has also pointed out, peasant production should be made the pillar of the economic recovery, through subsidized inputs, fair prices, and secure tenure (which does not mean freehold). Second, economic recovery requires a comprehensive framework for achieving food sovereignty for the country as a whole, not only for the rural producers on a “subsistence” basis. This requires the technical upgrading of agriculture under the control of an organised peasantry and the revival of agro-industries. It also requires the resolution of the farmworker question, an underclass of “cheap labor,” which remains to be allocated land on an equal basis, freed from labor tenancy, and which needs to be incorporated into a cooperativist and social protection system. Third, trade and industrial policy should be reformulated to secure the recovery of strategic industries and their re-orientation to wage goods and to the technical upgrading of agriculture. Fourth, the mining sector must also be guarded closely, as this is crucial to the earning of foreign exchange and public revenue. The regulation of this sector must continue to ensure that the mines are not sold to the highest briber and that the revenues are reinvested locally. Finally, state banks should be given the leading role in the economic recovery, given that the private banking system has not played its part and is unlikely to do so. What is necessary, now more than ever, is a credit system that directs productive and compatible investments to agriculture, industry, housing, and infrastructure. Such a policy would be in line with emerging trends around the world, including the re-positioning of state banks (and even the nationalization of banks) in South America and the recent state interventions in the banking system in the USA and Europe.

Of course, many of our colleagues will again protest: the possibility of a heterodox recovery without IMF funding is naïve! But we would be naïve to believe that an external injection of finance, such as has been promised on the condition of “regime change,” will be delivered as promised. Zimbabweans will be made to beg for each tranche each day, while new conditions will continue to be invented long after regime change. This is a story we know too well. Moreover, we should bear in mind that aid resources have dwindled, and will dwindle further.

The most recent changes in economic policy indicate that policy-making is at a dead end. The ruling party has generally resisted normalization with international finance, but it has now endorsed “dollarization” and has also removed price and foreign currency controls. The policy change has formalized the loss of control over monetary and exchange rate policies in the hyperinflationary environment, but, ironically, it has also sought to retain an element of sovereignty by avoiding a wholesale return to the Bretton Woods institutions and the serial imposition of policy conditions. Its specific objective has been to improve the conditions for non-Western capital investments and to cajole domestic capitalists. Nonetheless, this policy alone can hardly be socially just, given that the poor are virtually shut out of a highly iniquitous hard currency market.

The opening of a political space for the re-organization and expression of the popular will is fundamental to the tilting of state power back to a sovereign and socially just economic program. This does require inclusive government, which has now been realized, but not any kind of inclusive government. Contrary to what has been suggested (see Bracking and Cliffe 2008), the character of this government is still open to dispute. Of course, many have argued that the removal of Robert Mugabe and his replacement by Morgan Tsvangirai is the precondition for the re-opening of political space and “effective” economic policy. But Mugabe’s removal would by no means guarantee the re-opening of political space, given that the opposition has been consistently clear about its support for an extroverted recovery program, which in turn could only be implemented on the back of a new round of political repression.

Defenders of “regime change” have sought to support their partisan argument by taking refuge in myths about the “progressive” nature of the MDC, or of “progressive tendencies” within the MDC. “The MDC and most in civil society have formally opposed Western-style sanctions,” declares Bond. But they never put up a fight, and this is because their main electoral strategy has always been to drive the economy into the ground, not to organize the working class on a working-class platform. “Zimbabweans who want transformation must oppose the neo-liberal forces within the MDC,” Campbell tells us. But who are these opposing forces within the MDC? And why should we expect them to bite the hand that feeds them? And if they did so, why should we expect them to be spared of a new round of destabilization? For us, the task remains for social forces, including the trade unions and farmers’ organizations, to step back from their political party alliances and resist a return to an elite pact and IMF tutelage.

Such a strategy, finally, has a very specific foreign policy, which is to prevent the issue of aid and recovery from being transferred to the United Nations, the IMF, and the World Bank, and to resist the marginalization of the working peoples through superficial consultancy advice and ineffective “dialogues” with civil society. Discussions of aid and recovery must remain under the control of Zimbabweans, within the SADC framework. The latter must now reinforce its strategic autonomy by devising mechanisms of financial self-help and a regional integration scheme based on equality, solidarity, and strategic planning. This, too, is in line with progressive initiatives elsewhere, especially in South America.

In fact, the least noticed aspect of the Zimbabwe question is the regional dynamic that has emerged towards the construction of a strategically autonomous region. To be sure, SADC regionalism remains deeply contradictory. On the one hand, a SADC Free Trade Agreement is now in motion, together with a plan to create a common currency (in which Zimbabwe has expressed interest). Although these developments have been hailed as breakthroughs, their reliance on market power and functionalist logic is most likely to backfire, by reinforcing unequal development in the region and harming solidarity. On the other hand, SADC now counts on a mutual defense pact, a rare if not unique achievement in the South. This pact was pioneered by Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia in 1998, at the outset of the DRC intervention, and was extended to the rest of SADC in 2003. This new strategic posture is based on the principles of equality and solidarity and, thus, runs contrary to the functionalist logic of the economic integration underway. For this reason, we believe there is much more at stake now in Zimbabwe than our critics recognize — and imperialism knows it. A critical aspect of this is the ongoing East-West scramble for minerals and energy throughout the region. No wonder the destabilization campaign has also taken aim at SADC, putting pressure on member-states (particularly Botswana, Zambia, and Tanzania) and trying to undermine SADC solidarity.

Nonetheless, SADC has repeatedly and successfully denied the West direct involvement in the negotiations. Indeed, the intensity of the destabilization campaign against Zimbabwe and the dirty tactics against SADC have forced regional members to look into the mirror and realize that they share something very valuable: a common sovereignty regime, conquered collectively by heroic sacrifices and struggles against imperialism. Thus, while SADC members continue to cling to the logic of the market, they have also judged correctly that what the West really wants in Zimbabwe is the total dismantling of black nationalism, the total defeat of an integration scheme that is strategically impervious, and the wholesale return to the dark ages of neo-colonialism. This has finally yielded an agreement on an inclusive government, which the West views sceptically and continues to threaten with the “stick” of sanctions.

Some of our critics continue to see all this differently. They believe that the inclusive government is evidence that the region lacks the nerve to stand up to tyranny. We believe it is a step forward: there is a realization in the region that only a political project that upholds regional autonomy in the face of external imposition will succeed in marshalling internal forces to wage a consistent struggle for democratization.

This article originally appeared in the Monthly Review Zine (http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/my100209.html) It is republished here with the kind permission of MR Zine editors.

About the Authors

Professor Sam Moyo is Executive Director of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies, Harare, Zimbabwe; Dr Paris Yeros is Adjunct Professor of International Relations at the Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Bibliographical Note

For letters in response to Mahmood Mamdani, see Terence Ranger; Timothy Scarnecchia, Jocelyn Alexander, and 33 other scholars; Gavin Kitching; Horace Campbell, “Mamdani, Mugabe and the African Scholarly Community”; Patrick Bond; Ben Cousins (2008), “Reply to Mamdani,” unpublished; David Johnson (2008), “Mamdani, Moyo and Deep Thinkers of Zimbabwe,” unpublished.

On the social and economic outcomes of the land reform, see Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (2005), “Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Towards the National Democratic Revolution,” in Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited by S. Moyo and P. Yeros, London: Zed Books; Walter Chambati and Sam Moyo (2003), Fast Track Land Reform and the Political Economy of Farm Workers in Zimbabwe, Harare: AIAS Monograph Series; Chrispen Sukume and Sam Moyo (2003), Farm Sizes, Decongestion and Land Use: Implications of the Fast Track Land Redistribution Programme in Zimbabwe, AIAS Mimeo; Sam Moyo (forthcoming), The Contemporary Land Question and Prospects for Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe; Sam Moyo (2007), Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Way Forward, Food Files Magazine ActionAid; Sam Moyo (2004) The Overall Impact of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, AIAS monograph. 2004; Sam Moyo (2003) Land Redistribution: Allocation and Beneficiaries, mimeo; Sam Moyo and Prosper Matondi (2003), Agricultural Production Targets, AIAS mimeo; Walter Chambati (2007), Emergent Agrarian Labour Relations in New Resettlement Areas, Zvimba District, Harare: AIAS Monograph Series; Sam Moyo (2007), Emerging Land Tenure Issues in Zimbabwe, Harare: AIAS Monograph Series; Tendai Murisa (2007), Social Organization and Agency in the Newly Resettled Areas of Zimbabwe: The Case of Zvimba District, Harare: AIAS Monograph Series; Wilbert Sadomba (2008), War Veterans in Zimbabwe’s Land Occupations: Complexities of a Liberation Movement in an African Post-colonial Settler Society, PhD Thesis, Wageningen University; and Ian Scoones (2008), “A New Start for Zimbabwe?”, www.lalr.org.za

On the politics of the land reform and the character of the state, see Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (2005), “Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe,” op. cit.; Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (2007a), “The Radicalised State: Zimbabwe’s Interrupted Revolution,” Review of African Political Economy, 111; Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (2007b), “The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts,” Historical Materialism, vol. 14, no. 4; Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (forthcoming, a), “After Zimbabwe: State, Nation and Region in Africa,” in The National Question Today: The Crisis of Sovereignty in Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited by S. Moyo, P. Yeros, and J. Vadell; Wilbert Sadomba (2008), War Veterans in Zimbabwe’s Land Occupations, op. cit.; Amanda Hammar and Brian Raftopoulos (2003), “Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation,” in Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis, edited by A. Hammar, B. Raftopoulos, and S. Jensen, Harare: Weaver Press.

On the international politics of the Zimbabwe question, see Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (forthcoming, b), “Delinking in Crisis: The Resurgence of Radical Nationalism in the South Atlantic”; Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (2007b), “The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts”, op. cit.; Gregory Elich, “Zimbabwe under Siege,” Swans Commentary; Ian Phimister and Brian Raftopoulos (2004), “Mugabe, Mbeki and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism,” Review of African Political Economy, 101; Horace Campbell (2008), “The Zimbabwean Working Peoples: Between a Political Rock and an Economic Hard Place”; and Stephen Gowans (2008), “Cynicism as a Substitute for Scholarship.”

On the economic recovery, see UNDP (2008), Comprehensive Economic Recovery in Zimbabwe: A Discussion Document, Harare; and Sarah Bracking and Lionel Cliffe (2008), Plans for a Zimbabwe Aid Package: Blueprint for Recovery or Shock Therapy Prescription for Liberalisation?, mimeo; Adam Smith International (2007), “100 Days: An Agenda for Government and Donors in a New Zimbabwe,” A paper from Adam Smith International’s Fragile States and Post Conflict Series; Marian L. Tupy (2008), “A Four Step Recovery Plan for Zimbabwe,” Cato Institute.

Zimbabwe: Where is the Outrage? Mamdani, Mugabe and the African Scholarly Community

Concerned scholars should revitalise their opposition to Zimbabwe’s Mugabe regime, writes Horace Campbell. While being against any form of opportunistic, external intervention in the country, Campbell argues that scholars must come to offer an effective challenge to ZANU-PF’s persistent retreat into spurious anti-imperialist discourse. Heavily critical of writers like Mahmood Mamdani for echoing ZANU-PF’s claims around the effects of economic sanctions levied against Zimbabwe, Campbell argues that blocking international payments would prove a far more efficacious means of tackling Mugabe’s misappropriation of funds.

It was most apt that on the 60th anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights a group of 200 scholars at the 12th congress of CODESRIA expressed their concern over the threats of military intervention in Zimbabwe. The scholars pointed to the detrimental effects of military intervention, noting that:

‘Military interventions exacerbate political and socio-economic crises and internal differences with profoundly detrimental and destructive regional implications. We recognize that threats of military intervention come from imperialist powers, and also through their African proxies.’

These scholars were signaling their opposition to the vocal calls for the removal of Robert Mugabe by the Secretary of State of the United States and by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and the Prime Minister of Kenya, Raila Odinga, had earlier raised the call for the removal of Robert Mugabe by the force of arms.

This scholar joins with African people everywhere who welcome the alertness of our colleagues against foreign military intervention. I also welcome their concern for the appalling situation in Zimbabwe.

It is important that the Mugabe government and the spokespersons for ZANU-PF do not consider the statement by scholars as an endorsement for the appalling tragedy that has befallen the Zimbabwean poor and exploited. After all, these CODESRIA scholars termed what is happening in Zimbabwe ‘a nightmare’.

This was in the same week that President Mugabe argued that the imperialists were planning a military invasion and that the cholera outbreak had been based on biological warfare against Zimbabwe. The Minister of Information went further and in a statement in the Herald newspaper the minister claimed:

‘The cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe is a serious biological chemical war force, a genocidal onslaught on the people of Zimbabwe by the British. Cholera is a calculated racist terrorist attack on Zimbabwe by the unrepentant former colonial power which has enlisted support from its American and Western allies so that they invade the country.’

This claim by Dr Sikhanyiso Ndlovu was an insult to the intelligence of humans everywhere in so far as cholera is an acute intestinal infection caused by unsanitary conditions. The key to prevention of the disease is simple: clean water.

It is because of the simple nature of the cure that the response of the Zimbabwe government to the death of more than 1,000 persons is one more callous response to the exploitation and brutal oppression of the Zimbabwean working peoples. Biological warfare is a serious matter not to be used for games of crying ‘wolf’. One world figure is already leaving the stage with the record of this kind of crying wolf in Iraq.

While this writer will oppose any form of external military intervention by imperialists, it is important that concerned and progressive scholars oppose the crude anti-imperialism of the Zimbabwean political leadership under Mugabe. This writer awaits equal concern from my colleagues over the gender violence, repression of trade union leaders, wanton destruction of lives by the Mugabe government and the brutal repression of ordinary citizens.

At the same time that the statement of concern was being signed human rights activists were calling on the Zimbabwean government to account for the whereabouts of Jestina Mukoko, director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP). Mukoko is only one of the more than 20 known human rights activists who have disappeared in the past six weeks. Mukoko’s 15 year-old child saw his mother being abducted from their home.

We must raise our collective voices against such kidnapping and abduction while opposing any imperialist plans for a military invasion of Zimbabwe. One question that immediately came to mind after reading the CODESRIA statement was whether our colleagues have become blind to the suffering of ordinary people in their struggle against the latest and more complex phase of imperialism in Africa.

Mugabe and the exploitation of anti-racist and anti-imperialist sentiments

The Zimbabwe government is very aware of the anti-imperialist and anti-racist sentiments among oppressed peoples and thus has deployed a range of propagandists inside and outside of the country in a bid to link every problem in Zimbabwe to international sanctions by the EU and USA. Anti-imperialists in the USA cite the Zimbabwe Reconstruction and Development Act – passed by the US Congress in 2001 – as being a source of economic woe for poor Zimbabweans. While the scholars at the congress of CODESRIA hardly resorted to the same kind of praise for Mugabe as their counterparts writing in the special issue of Black Scholar, there is not enough evidence that there was sufficient attention paid to the gross violation of basic rights. If this debate did occur at the CODESRIA congress it was not reflected in the statement.

One of the key entrepreneurs of the Zimbabwe regime, John Bredenkamp, commands considerable experience in manipulating the question of sanctions for the enrichment of those in power, both in the time of Rhodesia and now Zimbabwe. Bredenkamp started on his way to fortune by breaking sanctions for Ian Smith. Bredenkamp has been involved in the politics and economics of looting southern Africa and is one of the key props of the ZANU-PF regime. His plundering activities also tie him to the political and financial leaders in South Africa who are being probed by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in relation to the £100 million in bribes to ensure the sale of weapons to the South African government. This author is calling on members of the CODESRIA network to reveal their research findings on John Bredenkamp, Muller Conrad Rautenbach (a.k.a. Billy Rautenbach) and to recommend the arrest and charge of those involved in looting Zimbabwe and southern Africa. Both Bredenkamp and Billy Rautenbach (of the white settler forces) featured in the orgy of looting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and established long term business relationships with ZANU-PF’s leaders. John Bredenkamp had matured in the art of manipulation while aligned with Ian Smith. He exulted in this dual service to imperialism and to African nationalists with the leadership of ZANU-PF, and his expertise has been placed at the service of the crude accumulators within the South Africa’s ANC.

Instead of oversimplifying imperialist threats in Zimbabwe, those who want to see the demilitarisation of Africa must aggressively support the exposure of the arms deals that have linked Bredenkamp and Fana Hlongwane across the politics of repression in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The British arms manufacturer British Aerospace (Bae) has been involved with Bredenkamp and Hlongwane in Africa, along with corrupt elements in the Middle East. There have been calls for BAe to be prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of the USA. Such an investigation would have potentially seismic consequences for military contractors and arms manufacturers and would provide another means of opposing Western militarism in Africa.

Blaming Zimbabwe’s problem on Zidera

The convergence of fraud, corruption and cover-ups in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Britain render simplistic conceptions of imperialism less than useful for those who want to see peaceful change in Zimbabwe. The Mugabe government blames all of its problems on the economic war launched by the USA and Britain. For the Mugabe regime, at the core of this economic war are the targeted sanctions against Mugabe’s top lieutenants under its Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA), passed by the Bush administration in 2001.

What has been clear from the hundreds of millions of dollars of investments by British, Chinese, Malaysian, South African and other capitalists in the Zimbabwe economy since 2003 is that the problems in Zimbabwe have not been caused by an economic war against the country. Even when facing pressure from the British government, Anglo-American indicated its willingness in 2008 to invest an additional US$400 million to continue its control of platinum mines in Zimbabwe. What has been most remarkable has been the ways in which the dictatorship in Zimbabwe has destroyed the rights of workers in the mining sector in order to facilitate and welcome foreign capitalists in the diamond and mining sectors. Whole villages are being laid to waste in order to support and welcome external diamond mining interests.

If human rights activists and committed scholars were to expose the linkages between ZANU-PF arms dealers John Bredenkamp and Fana Hlongwane along with the wider linkages to international capital, then it would be clear that it is quite an oversimplification to argue that ZIDERA is at the centre of Zimbabwe’s problems. Bredenkamp had been schooled from the Smith era to blame everything on sanctions while beating the sanctions with the help of apartheid South Africa. In the present period Bredenkamp is an ally of the ANC, ZANU-PF and British imperialist arms manufacturers like BAe all at the same time. It is also important for African scholars to join the call to the South African President Kgalema Motlanthe for an arms deal judicial commission, in order to bring to the attention of the wider public the dealings of individuals such as Fana Hlongwane.

Scholars, while alerting the world against foreign military invasion, must examine the conduct of the Zimbabwe military and especially those ordering Mugabe to remain in supreme control.

It is in the interest of concerned scholars everywhere to understand the conditions of farm labourers and mine workers in Zimbabwe. What was not expected was for Professor Mahmood Mamdani to use his scholarly knowledge to repeat ZANU-PF’s sham argument that economic sanctions have aggravated the economic crisis in Zimbabwe. While the nationalists have been crude in their fawning over the ‘revolutionary’ credentials of Robert Mugabe, Mahmood Mamdani used his considerable international reputation to line up support for the Mugabe regime in a lengthy review published in the London Review of Books.

Is there a democratic revolution going on in Zimbabwe?

From the outset Mamdani located himself as a victim of forced expulsion, identifying the forced expulsion of the Asians in Uganda with the expropriation of the white setter farmers in Zimbabwe. In the process, Mamdani compared Robert Mugabe to Idi Amin of Uganda. Mamdani went on to explain the popularity of Amin’s economic war against Asians and used the word ‘popularity’ in his characterisation of the current ZANU-PF leadership. Very few would doubt the ‘popularity’ of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and other parts of Africa in the period of the anti-colonial struggles, but in the past fifteen years Mugabe has turned the victories of the people into a never ending nightmare of murders, killings, forced removal and brutal oppression. Idi Amin remains popular in West Africa, just as Mugabe is popular in West Africa and other parts of the world where there is not a full understanding of the real tragedy of what is going on in Zimbabwe. Idi Amin, like Robert Mugabe, is popular outside of his own country for the wrong reasons.

Mahmood Mamdani as a Ugandan is very aware of the extent to which the British government supported elements within the Amin dictatorship while using the British media to revile Africans in general, and Idi Amin in particular. Amin (who was promoted by the British and the Israelis in the military coup of January 1971) was useful as a propaganda tool for imperialism. As a scholar who has written extensively on Uganda and on the politics of fascism, Mahmood Mamdani is very aware of the role that Bob Astles played as an agent of US and British imperialism in eastern Africa. Bob Astles (ally and confidant of Idi Amin from 1966 to 1979) had been implicated in the scandals involving looted gold from the Congo in the 1960s and survived with Amin as a key confidant, until he left for Britain when it became clear that the Tanzanian military invasion of Uganda would succeed. Mahmood Mamdani had returned to Uganda in 1979 in the military train of the Tanzanian military and political forces. This was a case where Mamdani recognised that it required regional African intervention to rid Africa of the manipulation of the British and the brutal genocidal politics of Idi Amin.

Contrary to his research on the Ugandan dictatorship, Mamdani’s research skills seem underused while elaborating on the ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’. Professor Mamdani has maintained that, ‘In social and economic – if not political – terms, this was a democratic revolution. But there was a heavy price to pay.’

This line of the ‘democratic revolution’ emanated from the Newtonian concepts of hierarchy that had been internalised by some who have called themselves Marxists. During the period of the Soviet Union, this discourse was used to support so-called revolutionaries such as Mengistu, the butcher of Ethiopia. Is it by chance that Mengistu has found his refuge in Zimbabwe?

Under this ‘democratic revolutionary stage’, African capitalists had to accumulate so that there would be a maturation of capitalism in Africa. Walter Rodney refuted this ‘stages’ theory in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. In that study Rodney established the reality that there was a link between the development of capitalism in Europe and the forms of plunder, looting and genocide in Africa. Capitalism in Africa had been implanted in a very different form, and all over the continent those who supported capitalism have used the formulation of the ‘democratic revolution’ to support black capitalists. This is nowhere more evident than in South Africa, where the communist party, as one component of the tripartite alliance, has used this formulation to silence itself in the face of the crudest and fastest rate of accumulation by a fledgling capitalist class in recent history.

In his elaboration of ‘the heavy price to pay’ for this democratic revolution in Zimbabwe, Mamdani noted the impact on: (a) ’the rule of law’; (b) Farm labourers; (c) The urban poor; and d) Food production.

What was most contradictory about Mamdani’s line of argument is that while he recognises the impact of the policies of the Mugabe government on the urban poor and farm workers, he expends a great deal of his analysis on a critique of the absence of donor support for the people of Zimbabwe. Before the era of neoliberalism and the pseudo-humanitarianism of the so-called international non-governmental structure, these donors would have been called imperialists and there would have been a call for the government of Zimbabwe to use its resources to provide clean water, sanitation and healthcare for its people. Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF have selectively implemented a home grown neoliberal agenda to enrich one of the crudest of the capitalist classes in Africa while depending on international imperialist agencies to provide social services for the people. Mamdani overlooks the fact that the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange has been posting the most profitable gains under the Mugabe regime.

Mamdani is wrong.

While the discussion about whether Zimbabwe is going through a ‘democratic’ revolution can be debated, Mamdani is wrong on numerous grounds. As a scholar who has written on genocide, it is curious why he left out the close relationship between the leaders of the Interahamwe and the Zimbabwean military in the DRC. Mugabe’s military trained those had committed genocide in Rwanda to fight for Laurent Kabila. He is simply wrong to use tribal formulations to describe the sharp class divide in Zimbabwe. It is here that the consistency of the donor language corresponds to the language of ethnic divisions in Zimbabwe. In describing the manipulation of Mugabe, Mamdani noted:

‘Very early on, the colonial bureaucracy had translated the ethnic mosaic of the country into an administrative map in such a way as to allow minimum co-operation and maximum competition between different ethnic groups and areas, ensuring among other things that labour for mining, manufacture and service was not recruited from areas where peasants were needed on large farms or plantations. These areas, as it happened, were mainly Shona and so, unsurprisingly, when the trade-union movement developed in Rhodesia, its leaders were mostly Ndebele, and had few links with the Shona leadership of the peasant-based liberation movement (Mugabe belongs to the Shona majority).’

What is this language of Shona majority? Is this not the old tribal discourse of the colonial anthropologists?

Mahmood Mamdani’s benign criticisms cannot disguise the reality that his submission has been represented as one component of the anti-imperialist intellectual support for the Mugabe regime. Despite the atrocities, killings and abductions of grassroots activists, Mamdani has managed to use the term ‘popularity’ in the same sentence while describing the current Zimbabwe leadership. Nowhere did this writer take note of the fact that this ‘popular’ government withheld the election results in March 2008 for over a month. Mamdani says there is a democratic revolution at a high price. Indeed at the price of democracy itself and in its most simple expression: the right to vote.

Writing this backhanded support for Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF as a review of a number of books on Zimbabwe, Mamdani was inordinately dependent on the scholarship of those from the Agrarian Institute for African Studies in Zimbabwe. The papers from this institute have been fulsome in their praise of the ‘land reform’ process in Zimbabwe. The authors of these papers supporting Mugabe were the very same ones claiming that the horrors of ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ (the operation to round up hundreds of thousands of citizens) were exaggerated by the Western media.

Neither Mamdani nor the scholars from CODESRIA have expressed their outrage in relation to the repression and forced removal of 750,000 people from Zimbabwe’s urban areas in 2005. If a white government had done this there would have been outrage. Current scholarly work on the displacement of Zimbabwean farm workers by Amanda Hammar will assist future scholarship focused on the reintegration of individuals scattered across Southern Africa. These citizens suffered from the xenophobic attacks against poor migrants in South Africa.

While merely recycling the scholarship of this agrarian institute, Mahmood Mamdani was careful to hedge his bets in noting that: ‘What land reform has meant or may come to mean for Zimbabwe’s economy is still hotly disputed.’

What is not in dispute is that the policies of the Mugabe government have destroyed the agricultural sector in Zimbabwe. In our examination of the fast track land seizures in the book, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation, we exposed the reality that an examination of land reform cannot be separated from water, seeds, fertilizers and most importantly, the labour that has worked on a piece of land. It is on the question of workers and labour where one would have expected Mamdani to have drawn on the scholarship of Brian Raftopoulos and Lloyd Sachikonye. It is not too late to recommend to Mahmood Mamdani two books that will shed light on the relationship between land and labour: Striking Back: The Labour Movement and the Post-Colonial State in Zimbabwe, 1980–2000, edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Lloyd Sachikonye; and Lloyd Sachikonye, The Situation of Commercial Farm Workers after Land Reform in Zimbabwe.

Idi Amin and Bob Astles; Robert Mugabe and John Berdenkamp

Qualifications on the disputed outcome of the ‘land reform’ by Mahmood Mamdani should not derail committed scholarship on what a democratic land reform process could yield in the new southern Africa when there is serious decolonisation instead of the Africanisation of exploitation. Mamdani’s analysis could not hide the reality that there is a capitalist class that is profiting from the misery and exploitation of the peoples of Zimbabwe. The present divide in Zimbabwe that is manipulated under ethnic terms cannot hide the opulence and disparity between those with power and the exploitation of millions, with hundreds dying of cholera. The billions of dollars being exported by those in the regime, along with the leadership of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, will only come to light when scholars, in general, and African scholars, in particular, support the UN Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative. African dictators from the Sudan to Equatorial Guinea and looters from Nigeria and Angola to Kenya want African scholars to be silent on the repatriation of stolen wealth. This writer opposes all sanctions against Zimbabwe (including ZIDERA) because sanctions do not work when there are experienced entrepreneurs such as John Bredenkamp and Billy Rautenbach in the service of ZANU-PF. What is far more important is a full analysis of Gideon Gono’s exportation of money at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. As a scholars in universities with the space and resources to do research, it is our collective duty in the context of an Obama administration to call on the US Justice Department to prosecute those of the British firm BAe who have been involved in corruption and fraud in southern Africa.

Additionally, African scholars and progressives must pressure the Obama administration to use the resources of the Treasury Department of the Office of Foreign Assets Control to democratise the information on the billions of dollars being stolen from Africa, and in this case, southern Africa.

As in the case of Idi Amin, imperialism can be very selective in releasing the information of the theft and export of capital by the Mugabe leadership. In the past month the Treasury Department of the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control slapped further sanctions on John Bredenkamp.

There is need for concerted research and exposure of the continued role of elements such as Bredenkamp and the alliance with those in the South African government who are profiting from the misery and exploitation of the Zimbabwean people. Is it by accident that the same forces aligned with Bredenkamp also supported the ‘quiet diplomacy’ of Thabo Mbeki? The countries of the European Union are also complicit in the looting of Zimbabwe. Decent individuals in Europe and concerned African scholars must pressure the democratic forces in Belgium to call on the Belgian Central Bank to expose the amounts of money being exported by Gideon Gono on behalf of Robert Mugabe and the dictatorship. The international banking system now relies on a network administered by Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) based at La Hulpe outside Brussels. SWIFT links 7,800 financial institutions in 205 countries, including Zimbabwe’s banks, and processes about US$6 trillions’ worth of transactions each day. Although owned by banks, SWIFT specifically falls under the control of central banks and, in particular, the control of the Belgian Central Bank. Instead of speculating on whether the Mugabe regime is exporting US$9 or US$15 billion every year, the exposure of the head of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe is far more important than talks of removing Mugabe by force. Blocking international payments is far quicker and more effective than trade or other sanctions. This strategy can also be reversed as soon as its objectives are reached, without permanent damage to the economy or its infrastructure.

Committed scholars should be outraged at what is happening in Zimbabwe

People are being killed and brutalised. Homophobia and virginity tests reflect the most extreme forms of patriarchy and deformed masculinity in Zimbabwe. The women who bear the brunt of this oppression have called for international solidarity. Under the leadership of the group, Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), these brave fighters have exposed those who mobilise sophisticated post-modernists and anti-imperialist discourse to support Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwean workers are being assaulted every day and it is the task of concerned African scholars to defend the rights of organised and unorganised Zimbabwean workers alike.

Unfortunately for Mamdani this article defending Mugabe came out at a time when there was news of the health emergency and the more than 1,000 who have died from cholera. Already, spokespersons for the Mugabe dictatorship have begun to use the writing of Mahmood Mamdani to give legitimacy to their anti-imperialist rhetoric. Mahmood Mamdani opposed the expulsion of the Asians from Uganda. This author opposed the expulsion of the Asians from Uganda on the grounds that it was racist. Mahmood Mamdani has recognised that after the removal of Idi Amin the top Asian capitalists returned to Uganda. In order to ensure that imperialism and the white settlers are not the beneficiaries of the quagmire and nightmare in Zimbabwe, there is a need to explore new agricultural techniques rooted in the experiences of farm workers to develop cooperatives as a means of breaking the domination of the new black capitalists. It was the democratic right of the Zimbabwean people to reclaim the lands seized by British colonialists, but progressive scholars must oppose all forms of exploitation, whether black or white.

At this time, this author supports the Zimbabwean farm labourers and opposes both the settler capitalist classes in Zimbabwe and their African allies seeking to continue the exploitation of the country’s workers, poor peasants and traders.

Western imperialism understands the delicacy of the balance of forces in Zimbabwe. It is for this reason that the West is pressuring neoliberal elements in the MDC to join a government of national unity with the same group that has killed over 20,000 Zimbabweans and expelled over 750,000 urban dwellers from their places of shelter. The recent scholarship on Zimbabwe offers one avenue for those who want to interrogate the links between ZANU-PF and the immense suffering of the country’s (as reflected in the Special Bulletin of the Association of Concerned African Scholars)[1]. Mamdani is correct to draw attention to the influence of neoliberal forces such as Eddie Cross within the MDC, but neoliberalism is dead and the governments of western Europe and the USA are busy nationalising banks without democratic control and accountability. Zimbabweans who want transformation must oppose the neoliberal forces within the MDC to ensure that the suffering of working people does not continue after the ultimate departure of Robert Mugabe.

There is nothing democratic or revolutionary about what is going on in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF. African scholars and progressive forces must use all of their resources to support producers as they seek new forms of emancipatory politics in the face of the global capitalist crisis. Africans, like decent humans in all parts of the planet, want to live in dignity and with basic rights.

Notes

[1] Timothy Scarnecchia and Wendy Urban-Mead, eds., ‘Special Issue on Zimbabwe’, ACAS Bulletin 80 (Winter 2008): https://concernedafricascholars.org/?p=123

This article originally appeared on the Pambazuka website: http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/52845 on December 18, 2008, as ‘Mamdani, Mugabe and the African scholarly community: The Africanisation of exploitation’. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of its author and its original title.

About the Author

Horace Campbell (Syracuse University) is a member of the African Studies Association and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

Re: Lessons of Zimbabwe (Mamdani)

Returns in the 2008 election suggest that Zimbabwe is a deeply divided society. This is so whether you go by the official count or that of the government. I have argued that this split has three fault lines: urban-rural, ethnic and class. R.W. Johnson ([London Review of Books] Letters, 18 December 2008) and Timothy Scarnecchia et al disagree, but they have not offered a satisfactory alternative explanation. Instead, they suggest, apparently in unison, that the splits in Zimbabwean society are a result of the machinations of those in power — ‘Mugabe and his cronies’ — who wish to hang on to it at all costs.

In a utopian variation on this argument, Gavin Kitching gives a blueprint of policies that ‘should have been’ followed: he assumes that the will of rulers translates into policies, with no intervening factors, internal or external, historical or contemporary, acting as checks and constraints. Terence Ranger [see this issue] concludes that whereas ‘Mugabe’s policy may be an inspiration to those in South Africa who want to redress gross inequalities in landholding . . . it should also be a warning of how not to go about it.’ This is the same verdict I heard in Kampala in 1980 on Amin’s expulsion of Ugandan Asians: he should not have done it this way! My object is not to propose the ‘fast-track reforms’ as a model of land redistribution for South Africa, but to sound a warning about the kind of demagoguery that is likely to follow, should those in power continue to ignore historically just demands.

I do not question that Mugabe and Co desire to hang on to power — at considerable cost — but I do argue that this single fact cannot explain their ability to do so. Nor can fear or intimidation by itself explain why so many who have no power — almost half the Zimbabwean electorate — would vote for the regime. This is not just a split between state and society, as critics of my article suggest, but a case of a society itself being deeply divided.

In my article I identified two divisive issues in particular. The primary issue, in a predominantly rural society just emerging from the settler colonial era, was the land question. The second — whose importance is bound to grow in the aftermath of land redistribution — is the freedom to organise independently of the regime.

The government responded to the exercise of that freedom with a mixture of repression and incorporation. Critics of my article focus only on the former. Repression — especially of trade unions and civil society organisations — has been very marked in the urban areas. A far more nuanced relationship developed between the regime and the war veterans’ organisation, partly because of its historical links to the liberation struggle, and partly because it straddled the two major divisions, between state and society and urban and rural.

The explanation for the fast-track reforms of 2000-3 does not lie in the machinations of government, as these letters suggest, but in the success of the veterans’ mobilisation. The regime’s response evolved as the organisation grew: as I explain in the article, the same government that was initially showered with plaudits for using force to evict squatters was later condemned for using force to redistribute land. I do not believe the official embrace and co-option of the veterans’ organisation can be explained as a conspiracy; the debate on how to respond culminated in a split at the highest levels of power.

Scarnecchia et al dismiss the destructive impact of Western countries, both as drivers of sanctions and as powerful opponents of any regional effort to resolve the Zimbabwean crisis. Let me recall that the sanctions predated fast-track reforms: they were a response to Zimbabwe’s involvement in the Congo war. As early as November 2001, Jack Straw as foreign secretary publicly boasted of building coalitions against Zimbabwe. There were reports of British threats to withhold budgetary support — some claimed even food aid — from Malawi and Mozambique as the Extraordinary Summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) opened in Blantyre, Malawi on 14 January 2002. During the summit, the Tanzanian president, Benjamin Mkapa, said Baroness Amos, who was then parliamentary under-secretary for foreign affairs, had urged him in a phone call not to support Zimbabwe; when that failed, he said, Straw phoned and attempted to bully him. In 2007, the SADC called for an end to sanctions and for international support for a post-land reform recovery programme. In 2008, Western countries managed to bring their influence to bear on key SADC members — Botswana and Zambia — to split the SADC.

I am not suggesting that there is a single explanation of Zimbabwe’s rapidly accelerating economic crisis: the causes of the crisis are complex and multiple. My critics seem to think that the economic crisis is explained either by the regime’s repression and incompetence or by the draconian sanctions set in place by the West. The fact is that neither one nor the other on its own, but both — and other factors, including recurring drought — underlie the crisis.

My disagreement with Johnson, Scarnecchia et al is both political and methodological. They seem to imagine only two options: either to romanticise Mugabe as a liberation hero or to demonise him as a post-liberation despot. I have suggested that these caricatures overlap for one reason: the liberation struggle against settler colonialism did not end with the guerrilla war and political independence in 1980, but continued through the fast-track reforms. In any case, the regime that championed land reform is the same regime that unleashes repression against anyone who dares to organise independently of it. Scarnecchia et al cannot fail to see this, but apparently they refuse to accept it; whence their insistence on an either/or conclusion, and their tendency to scour all scholarship for a hidden agenda: is the author for or against Mugabe? Actually, that is beside the point.

Focused on Mugabe and eager to defend the opposition, they seek to portray my article as a piece of pro-regime writing, whereas it aims to free the debate about Zimbabwe from the narrow confines of a regime-opposition polemic by understanding Mugabe’s survival as part of a far bigger picture: that of land reform and the historic struggles which underpin it — struggles that Mugabe and Zanu-PF championed in the liberation era, opposed during the period of structural adjustment and ‘reconciliation’, and turned to their advantage when faced with an effective

This letter originally appeared in the London Review of Books 31, n.1 (January 1, 2009). It is republished here with the kind permission of the LRB editors.

Re: Lessons of Zimbabwe (Timothy Scarnecchia, Jocelyn Alexander, et. al.)

For a number of scholars, Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’ requires a further response, given Mamdani’s stature as a scholar and public intellectual. Some aspects of his argument are uncontroversial: there was a real demand for land redistribution — even the World Bank was calling for it in the late 1990s as the best way forward in Zimbabwe — and some of the Western powers’ original pronouncements and actions were hypocritical. There is a real danger, however, in simplifying the lessons of Zimbabwe. It isn’t just a matter of stark ethnic dichotomies, the urban-rural divide, or the part played by ‘the West’.

One of the more difficult tasks for scholars working on Zimbabwe is to convince peers working on other areas of Africa to look more deeply at the crisis and not to be fooled by Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimisation. Mamdani has, unfortunately, fallen in with this rhetoric by characterising Zimbabwean history and politics as fundamentally a battle between what he sees as an urban-based opposition, supported by the West, and a peasant-based ruling party besieged by external forces. This flight of fantasy portrays Mugabe and his Zanu-PF cronies as heroes of a landless peasantry (which is how they see themselves) and the state — backed up by the paramilitary violence of war veterans and others — as the vanguard of a peasant revolution. We suggest that Mamdani acquaint himself with the large body of Zimbabwean scholarship, which is easily available, rather than selectively using the arguments of scholars such as Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros on land reform, and Gideon Gono, Mugabe’s Reserve Bank governor, as his source on sanctions. Citing Gono is rather like using Milton Obote’s writings as a source for conditions in Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s. A starting point for more informed scholarship is the recent Bulletin of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars.

Mamdani’s portrayal of Zimbabwe’s opposition politics is insulting to those who continue to endure so much in their struggle to build a better Zimbabwe. He argues that urban trade unions have always been marginal to the nationalist movement because of their supposed ‘Ndebele leadership’, and that the current opposition follows in this ‘weak’ trade-union tradition as well as being in thrall to Western interests. What he doesn’t mention is the trade unions’ hard-fought battle against repression before and after 1980. There were many challenges to overcome, among which ethnic politics was hardly the most prominent. That leaders such as Morgan Tsvangirai managed to reshape the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) from what had been a pro-Zanu organisation into a viable political opposition by the early 1990s reflects an Africa-wide and Africa-based phenomenon that Mamdani apparently missed. By accepting Zanu-PF’s argument that the MDC is primarily limited to urban areas and is the product of the West, Mamdani’s account loses credibility.

Mamdani has also sugar-coated his portrayal of political violence in Zimbabwe. He fails even to mention that many ‘peasants’ in Shona-speaking Zanu-PF strongholds turned against Mugabe and major Zanu-PF leaders in the March 2008 elections. It was this reversal that sparked a new round of state-sponsored violence against the same Shona peasantry that Mamdani cites as the beneficiaries of Mugabe’s benevolent dictatorship. In addition, during the months preceding the run-off election (April-June 2008), food relief was denied to rural areas, leaving the World Food Programme and other groups to scramble to re-establish supply to the Zimbabwean peasantry Mamdani suggests are at the centre of Zanu-PF’s concern. Repressive legislation and actions by Zanu-PF activists are magically transformed by Mamdani into acts of generosity to outsiders. After noting discrimination against farm workers in gaining access to land on the grounds they or ‘their elders’ came from another country, Mamdani adds that ‘some were given citizenship.’ Yet he omits the fact that just before the 2002 presidential election the Zanu-PF government removed citizenship from many farm workers and other Zimbabweans whose parents or grandparents had non-Zimbabwean citizenship rights. The disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of perceived opposition supporters disappears in Mamdani’s analysis.

Mamdani’s contention that the West, not Mugabe and the Zanu-PF government, is responsible for the current crisis is as dangerous as it is wrong. By selectively citing instances over the past eight years when the West has cancelled donor funding, Mamdani gives the impression that the West has not been involved in sustaining life in Zimbabwe. The reality is that there are whole sections of the Zimbabwean population that the Zanu-PF leadership would rather punish with starvation than allow to support the opposition. ‘We would be better off with only six million people, with our own [ruling party] people who supported the liberation struggle,’ Didymus Mutasa, one of the key insiders in Zanu-PF, said in 2002, when drought again threatened to kill thousands of rural Zimbabweans. ‘We don’t want all these extra people.’ Western food aid has been a lifeline for ‘these extra people’ — when the state has allowed access.

Sanctions cannot excuse the callous disregard for human life Mugabe and his associates have shown, dating back to the Gukurahundi between 1983 and 1986 (which Mamdani glosses over as a brief bout of violence following from the tension between Zanu-PF and the ‘Ndebele unions’ in 1986), or the repeated land seizures which have been going on since the 1980s, the forced removals, violent reprisals, and the withholding of food aid. Furthermore, Mamdani’s suggestion that the fall in direct investment in Zimbabwe is the result of sanctions is dishonest. There are no sanctions against direct investment in Zimbabwe, as shown by Anglo American’s willingness to invest $400 million in Zimbabwe during the summer of 2008 to protect access to platinum mines. There have been large investments from South Africa, India and China, as Mugabe has bartered away the nation’s resources for short-term interests. It is the kleptocracy and violence fostered by Mugabe and Co that has scared off other investors, not sanctions.

At a time when thousands of people in Zimbabwe are threatened by a cholera epidemic — in part at least as a consequence of Zanu-PF’s decision to replace MDC municipal officials with Zanu-PF ‘urban governors’ — and international donors are scrambling to help deal with the collapse of the health sector and widespread hunger, intellectuals such as Mamdani should display more responsibility and less posturing in their attempts to draw meaningful lessons from Zimbabwe.

Jocelyn Alexander, Linacre College, Oxford
Andrea Arrington, University of Arkansas
Michael Bratton, Michigan State University
Bill Derman, Michigan State University
William J. Dewey, The University of Tennessee
Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics
Linda Freeman, Carleton University
Petina Gappah, Zimbabwean writer and lawyer
Kenneth Good, RMIT University Melbourne
David Gordon, Bowdoin College
Amanda Hammar, Nordic Africa Institute
David McDermott Hughes, Rutgers University
Diana Jeater, University of the West of England
Tony King, University of the West of England
Bill Kinsey, University of Zimbabwe
Norma Kriger, Cornell University
Todd Leedy, University of Florida
JoAnn McGregor, University College London
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Showers Mawowa, University of KwaZulu Natal
David Maxwell, Keele University
Donald Mead, Michigan State University
John Metzler, Michigan State University
David Moore, University of Johannesburg
Shylock Muyengwa, University of Florida
Blair Rutherford, Carleton University
John S. Saul, York University
Richard Saunders, York University
Timothy Scarnecchia, Kent State University, Ohio
Anne Schneller, Michigan State University
Marja Spierenburg, Vrije University of Amsterdam
Colin Stoneman, JSAS Editorial Coordinator
Blessing-Miles Tendi, Oxford University
Wendy Urban-Mead, Bard College
Elaine Windrich, Stanford University

This letter originally appeared in the London Review of Books 31, n.1 (December 1, 2009) in response to Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’. It is republished here with the kind permission of the LRB editors.

Lessons of Zimbabwe: Mugabe in Context

It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the explicit aim of unseating him.

There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe’s crisis can be found everywhere, from the Economist and the Financial Times to the Guardian and the New Statesman, but it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe.

What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 — and not the formal handover in 1962 — as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact.

Though widespread grievance over the theft of land — a process begun in 1889 and completed in the 1950s — fuelled the guerrilla struggle against the regime of Ian Smith, whose Rhodesian Front opposed black majority rule, the matter was never properly addressed when Britain came back into the picture to effect a constitutional transition to independence under majority rule. Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, but the social realities of the newly independent state remained embedded in an earlier historical period: some six thousand white farmers owned 15.5 million hectares of prime land, 39 per cent of the land in the country, while about 4.5 million farmers (a million households) in ‘communal areas’ were left to subsist on 16.4 million hectares of the most arid land, to which they’d been removed or confined by a century of colonial rule. In the middle were 8500 small-scale black farmers on about 1.4 million hectares of land.

This was not a sustainable arrangement in a country whose independence had been secured at the end of a long armed struggle supported by a land-hungry population. But the agreement that Britain drafted at Lancaster House in 1979 — and that the settlers eagerly backed — didn’t seem to take into account the kind of transition that would be necessary to secure a stable social order. Two of its provisions, one economic and the other political, reflected this short-termism: one called for land transfers on a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ basis, with the British funding the scheme; the other reserved 20 per cent of seats in the House of Assembly for whites — 3 per cent of the population — giving the settler community an effective veto over any amendment to the Lancaster House terms. This was qualified majority rule at best. Both provisions had a time limit: 1990 for land transfers based on the market principle, and 1987 for the settler minority to set limits on majority rule. The deal sustained illusions among the settlers that what they had failed to achieve by UDI — Smith’s 1965 declaration of independence from the UK — and force of arms, they could now achieve through support from a government of ‘kith and kin’ (as Smith called it) in Britain. In reality, however, the agreement drew a line under settler privilege.

The inadequacy of the Lancaster House provisions for the decolonisation of land ensured that it remained the focus of politics in independent Zimbabwe. The course of land relations and land reform in Zimbabwe has over the years been meticulously documented by Sam Moyo, a professor who directs the African Institute of Agrarian Studies in Harare. Transfers during the first decade of independence were so minimal that they increased rather than appeased land hunger. The new regime in Harare, installed in 1980 and led by Mugabe and his party, Zanu, called for the purchase of eight million hectares to resettle 162,000 land-poor farming households from communal areas. But the ban on compulsory purchase drove up land prices and encouraged white farmers to sell only the worst land. As the decade drew to a close, only 58,000 families had been resettled on three million hectares of land. No more than 19 per cent of the land acquired between 1980 and 1992 was of prime agricultural value.

As the 1980s wore on, land transfers actually declined, dropping from 430,000 hectares per annum during the first half of the decade to 75,000 hectares during the second. The greater land hunger became, the more often invasions were mounted; in response, Mugabe created local ‘squatter control’ units in 1985, and they were soon evicting squatters in droves. At this point Zimbabwean law still defined a squatter in racial terms, as ‘an African whose house happens to be situated in an area which has been declared European or is set apart for some other reason’. By 1990, 40 per cent of the rural population was said to be landless or affected by the landlessness of dependent relations.

When the Lancaster House Agreement’s rules on land transfer expired in 1990, the pressure to take direct action was intensified by two very different developments: an IMF Structural Adjustment Programme and recurrent drought. Peasant production, which had been a meagre 8 per cent of marketed output at independence in 1980, and had shot up to 45 per cent by 1985, declined as a result of the programme. Trade-union analysts pointed out that employment growth also fell from 2.4 per cent in the late 1980s to 1.55 per cent in the period 1991-97. The percentage of households living in poverty throughout the country increased by 14 per cent in five years. There was now widespread squatting on all types of land, from communal areas to state land, commercial farms (mainly growing tobacco), resettlement areas and urban sites.

The demand for land reform came from two powerful groups at extreme ends of the social spectrum yet both firmly in Mugabe’s camp: the veterans of the liberation war and the small but growing number of indigenous businesses, hitherto the main beneficiaries of independence under majority rule. At the end of the liberation war in 1980, 20,000 guerrillas had been incorporated into the national army and other state organisations, and the rest — about 45,000 — had had to fend for themselves. They found it difficult to survive without land or a job, which is why land occupations began in the countryside soon after independence.

Mugabe and the Zanu leaders tended at first to dismiss complaints from veterans as expressions of resentment on the part of the rival liberation movement, Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu, which had been marginalised in 1980. But after Zanu and Zapu signed a unity accord in 1987, former fighters from both groups became involved in land agitation. Their most significant joint initiative was to form a welfare organisation, the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA) in 1988, which called for pensions to be paid and land redistributed. It soon gained a large membership drawn from most sections of Zimbabwean society and from the two ethnic groups — the Shona majority and the Ndebele — which had defined Zanu and Zapu respectively. Its members, about 200,000 of them, came from a variety of classes, employed and unemployed, urban and rural, with positions in different branches of the state and party and the private sector. Although their strength lay in the countryside, the war vets formed the only alliance that was both independent of Mugabe and Zanu-PF, and could claim to have national support, giving them a decisive advantage over the better organised but urban-based trade-union federation in the power struggle that would shortly tear the country apart.

War vets were among the first targets of Structural Adjustment, when its effects began to be felt in 1991. Entire departments and ministries that had been heavily staffed by ex-combatants were disbanded and the stage set for a series of high-profile confrontations between veterans and government. Mugabe accused the vets of being ‘armchair critics’ at the inaugural conference of the ZNLWVA in April 1992; they went on to organise street demonstrations, lock top government and party officials in their offices, interrupt Mugabe’s Heroes’ Day speech in 1997, intervene in court sessions and besiege the State House.

After the Lancaster House Agreement had expired, the government tried to occupy the middle ground by shifting from the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ formula with a new law, the Land Acquisition Act of 1992, which gave the state powers of compulsory purchase, though landowners retained the right to challenge the price set and to receive prompt compensation. By the late 1990s, market-led land transfers had dwindled to a trickle. So had British contributions to the fund set up to pay landowners, with a mere £44 million paid out between 1980 and 1992, much less than anticipated at Lancaster House. When New Labour took over in 1997, Clare Short, the minister for international development, claimed that since neither she nor her colleagues came from the landed class in Britain — ‘my own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers,’ she wrote to the Zimbabwean minister of agriculture and land — they could not be held responsible for what Britain had done in colonial Rhodesia.

This effective default coincided with a rise inside Zimbabwe of demands for compulsory acquisition. Veterans led land occupations at Svosve and Goromonzi in 1997, clashing with Mugabe and Zanu-PF. They were joined by local chiefs and party leaders, peasants and spirit mediums (who had played a key role in the liberation war against Ian Smith). The next year, a wave of co-ordinated land occupations swept across the country, with veterans receiving critical support from the Indigenous Business Development Centre (IBDC), an affirmative action lobby set up in 1988 by members of the new black bourgeoisie. From now on, two very different elements huddled under the war vets’ banner: the landless victims of settler colonialism and the elite beneficiaries of the end of settler rule.

It was largely for his own purposes, but also as a response to pressure from squatters, occupiers and their local leaders, as well as from sections of the new black elite, that in 1999 Mugabe decided to revise the constitution drafted at Lancaster House. Two major changes were envisaged: one would allow him to stay in power for two more terms and would ensure immunity from prosecution for political and military leaders accused of committing crimes while in office; the other would empower the government to seize land from white farmers without compensation, which was held to be the responsibility of Britain. The proposals were put to a referendum in February 2000 and defeated: 45.3 per cent of voters were in favour. But only a little more than 20 per cent of the electorate had cast a vote. The urban centres of Harare and Bulawayo were three to one against adoption; voting in the countryside was marked by large-scale abstentions. Post-colonial Zimbabwe had reached a turning point.

Very early on, the colonial bureaucracy had translated the ethnic mosaic of the country into an administrative map in such a way as to allow minimum co-operation and maximum competition between different ethnic groups and areas, ensuring among other things that labour for mining, manufacture and service was not recruited from areas where peasants were needed on large farms or plantations. These areas, as it happened, were mainly Shona and so, unsurprisingly, when the trade-union movement developed in Rhodesia, its leaders were mostly Ndebele, and had few links with the Shona leadership of the peasant-based liberation movement (Mugabe belongs to the Shona majority). I remember listening to the minister of labour in Harare in 1981 complain that workers had failed to support the nationalist movement. When I suggested that it might be useful to turn the proposition around and ask why the nationalist movement had failed to organise support among workers, there was silence.

The Shona-Ndebele divide so conspicuous in the two guerrilla movements produced great tension after independence between the mainly Shona government and the mainly Ndebele labour movement, with Mugabe’s ferocious repression in Ndebele areas in 1986 remaining the bloodiest phase in post-independence Zimbabwean history. The slaughter in Matabeleland was followed by a ‘reconciliation’ that paved the way for a unity government in 1987, but Zanu-PF leaders thereafter suspected all protest — from whatever source — of concealing an Ndebele agenda.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, formed in 1981 with the blessing of the government, had by the end of the decade distanced itself from its Zanu patrons, purged internal corruption and elected an independent leadership. In the 1990s it spearheaded the national agitation against Structural Adjustment and the one-party state that acquiesced in it. Yet its organisation in the countryside was confined to workers on commercial farms. The ZCTU had at first been an umbrella body for private sector unions. The spectacular growth of ZCTU, its organisation of public sector workers, has been written about by two Zimbabwean social historians, Brian Raftapolous and Ian Phimister. After independence, workers in the rapidly Africanised public sector had retained close links to the government. But this began to change when the Structural Adjustment Programme led to public sector job losses and many African workers — especially veterans — were dismissed. When government workers came out on strike in 1996, the ZCTU was able to establish a base in the public sector. A general strike in 1997 and mass stay-aways the following year set the trade unions against the government. Civil servants — including teachers and health workers — who had declared allegiance to the ruling party and the state now began to affiliate to the ZCTU. In 1998, it organised a National Constituent Assembly, with the participation of civic, NGO and church groups.

By the time Mugabe put forward amendments to the Lancaster House constitution, an impressive alliance of forces — not only trade unions, churches, civic and NGO groups, but white farmers and Western governments — was arrayed for battle. The Movement for Democratic Change was formed a few months before the 2000 referendum, to campaign for a ‘no’ vote. The coalition was diverse, containing, on the one hand, public sector workers trying to roll back the tide of Structural Adjustment; on the other, uncompromising free-marketeers such as Eddie Cross, the MDC secretary of economic affairs and a senior figure in the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, who was intent on privatising almost everything, including education.

The veterans reacted to the defeat of the constitutional proposals by launching land occupations in Masvingo province. This prompted a split in the ruling party. With Mugabe out of the country, the acting president, Joseph Msika, told the police to torch the new squatter shacks. This was consistent with Zanu-PF policy: in the early days, Mugabe had been praised as a ‘conciliator’ by the international community for ensuring the security and property of those whites who remained in Zimbabwe, and evicting black squatters. Two decades later the position had changed: the support of the whites was no longer so important to Mugabe, and he was under enormous pressure from the veterans. With much to gain from casting his lot in with the rural insurgency, he returned from his trip and announced that there would be no government evictions. As land occupations spread to every province — 800 farms were occupied at the height of the protests — the split in the government and party hierarchy deepened. Inevitable tension between the executive and the judiciary undermined the rule of law; the executive sacked a number of judges, replacing them with others more sympathetic to land reform, and enacted pro-squatter legislation.

‘Fast-track’ land reform was now underway. The types of land that would be acquired compulsorily were specified by the government: unused or underutilised land, land owned by absentees or people with several farms; land above a certain area (determined by region) and land contiguous with communal areas. The white owners of around 2900 commercial farms listed for compulsory acquisition and redistribution were given 90 days to move out. Government directives specified that ‘owners of farms marked for redistribution will be compensated for improvements made on the land, but not for the land itself, as this land was stolen from the original owners in the colonial era.’

The closing date for ‘fast-track’ land acquisition — August 2002 — came and went, but occupations continued unimpeded until mid-2003, and on a diminished scale for a year or so after that. Chiefs fought for land for their constituents and for themselves, and so did their counterparts in the state bureaucracy and the private sector. In Matabeleland, a minority of pro-MDC chiefs were sceptical of land reform, but later submitted claims. The black elite made a brazen land grab in direct contravention of the ‘one person, one farm’ policy, provoking a hue and cry in society at large and within the ruling party; the government set up a presidential commission to determine the facts. Crucially, in 2005 the government passed an amendment declaring all agricultural land to be state land. Land was seized from nearly 4000 white farmers and redistributed: 72,000 large farmers received 2.19 million hectares and 127,000 smallholders received 4.23 million hectares.

What land reform has meant or may come to mean for Zimbabwe’s economy is still hotly disputed. Recently there have been signs that scholarly opinion is shifting. A study by Ian Scoones of Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies — in collaboration with the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape — challenges some of the conventional wisdom in media and academic circles within and beyond Zimbabwe. The problem with this wisdom is that certain highly destructive aspects of reform — coercion; corruption and incompetence; cronyism in the redistribution of land; lack of funds and an absence of agricultural activity — have come to stand for the whole process. In particular, Scoones identifies five myths: that land reform has been a total failure; that its beneficiaries have been largely political cronies; that there is no new investment in the new settlements; that agriculture is in ruins; and that the rural economy has collapsed. Researchers at PLAAS have been quick to point out that over the past eight years small-scale farmers ‘have been particularly robust in weathering Zimbabwe’s political and economic turmoil, as well as drought’. Ben Cousins, the director of PLAAS and one of the most astute South African analysts of agrarian change — who had previously argued that the land reform would destroy agricultural production — now says that the future of Zimbabwe lies in providing small farmers with subsidies so that food security can be achieved. According to researchers at the African Institute for Agrarian Studies in Harare, new farms need to receive subsidised maize seed and fertiliser for a few seasons before achieving full production. Some might give up during this period, but not many — partly because the land tenure system doesn’t allow land sales; only land permits or leases can be acquired.

Zimbabwe has seen the greatest transfer of property in southern Africa since colonisation and it has all happened extremely rapidly. Eighty per cent of the 4000 white farmers were expropriated; most of them stayed in Zimbabwe. Redistribution revolutionised property-holding, adding more than a hundred thousand small owners to the base of the property pyramid. In social and economic — if not political — terms, this was a democratic revolution. But there was a heavy price to pay.

The first casualty was the rule of law, already tenuous by 1986. When international donors pressured the regime in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2000 by suspending aid and loans — a boycott favoured by the MDC and the unions — the government simply fixed the result in its favour. In the violence that followed, more than a hundred people died, including six white farmers and 11 black farm labourers. Some of the violence was government-sponsored and most of it state-sanctioned. The judiciary was reshaped, local institutions in rural areas narrowly politicised, and laws were passed which granted local agencies the powers necessary to crush opponents of land reform. Denouncing his adversaries in the trade unions and NGOs as servants of the old white ruling class, Mugabe authorised the militias and state security agencies to hound down opposition, as repression and reform went hand in hand. In 2003, the leading independent newspaper, the Daily News, was shut down. While jubilant government supporters applauded the sweep of the revolution in agrarian areas, the opposition denounced the repression that accompanied it. Land reform had been ruthless, but in 2004, the violence began to abate. There was noticeably less violence surrounding the parliamentary elections of 2005.

In retrospect, it is striking how little turmoil accompanied this massive social change. The explanation lies in the participation of key rural figures in ad hoc but officially sanctioned land committees. When first introduced in 1996, these committees had mixed fortunes, some not functioning at all, others becoming instruments of this or that group of squatters. But a radical change occurred in 2000, when the committees were expanded to include centrally appointed security officials, ruling party representatives and local government personnel, as well as local veterans and traditional leaders. Charged with implementing fast-track land reform, these committees sidelined the old local administrative structures. They also had a national impact, since they reported to similarly constituted provincial committees, which in turn reported to the Ministry of Local Government. It was the infusion of veterans that gave the new semi-bureaucratic committees the edge over their wholly bureaucratic counterparts. Local committees usually comprised between 15 and 30 members. The veterans formed ‘base camps’ represented by ‘committees of seven’ which took the lead in identifying land for acquisition as well as finding prospective beneficiaries (mostly from veterans’ waiting lists and rosters in former ‘communal areas’). They also judged disputes, punished petty criminals and allocated farm equipment, seeds and so on. In a word, the committees co-ordinated everything, thus constituting new centres of power.

The second casualty of the reform was farm labourers. There were about 300,000 in all, around half of them part-time. Fast-track reform resulted in a massive displacement of these workers, who were traditionally drawn from migrant labour. Nearly a fifth came from neighbouring states and were regarded with suspicion by peasants in communal areas; even if they’d been born locally, they were often seen as foreigners and denied citizenship rights. Migrants and women (many employed as casual labour) were the weakest links in the rural mobilisation for land reform. Many were thought to have been encouraged by landowners to vote against the government’s constitutional proposals, and the anti-land-reform lobby certainly tried to organise farm workers, ostensibly to protect their jobs, but really to protect the white ownership of farms. When the workers rallied by the MDC, civil society activists and white farmers clashed with veteran-led occupiers, they came off badly. Occupiers held meetings to explain to workers what was at stake and eventually came themselves to distinguish between white farms, not only on the basis of size, proximity to communal areas, and the amount of unused land, but also on the basis of the farmer’s attitudes, particularly on race and towards his workers, and whether he had participated in the counter-insurgency during the independence struggle.

Some of the 150,000 full-time farm workers threw in their lot with the occupiers, though usually not on the farms where they had been employed. About 90,000 kept their jobs on sugar and tea estates, and on new or already established tobacco and horticulture farms. About 8000 were granted land, but most were denied it on the grounds that they or their elders had come from foreign countries, though some were given citizenship. Many went from steady employment to contract or casual work; many others were forced to supplement their meagre incomes through fishing, petty trading, theft and prostitution.

The best publicised casualties of the land reform movement were the urban poor who hoped to benefit from extending land invasions to urban areas. 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. But the state feared that it would lose control over towns to the MDC if the land reform movement was allowed to spread and met these occupations with stiff repression, including Operation Restore Order/ Murambatsvina, a surprise military-style intervention in 2005 in which tens of thousands of families were evicted. Not surprisingly, those who opposed land reform in rural areas were the strongest critics of government efforts to stifle occupations in urban areas.

The final casualty was food production: Zimbabwe, once a food surplus country, is today deficient in both foreign exchange and food. In 2002-3, half the population depended on food aid: this was a drought year and the figures improved in 2004-5. The UN now estimates that nearly half the country’s 13.3 million inhabitants will once again be dependent on food aid in 2009, after another drought year. A million of these are poor, urban residents who can’t afford imported food. The rest are peasants, most of them hit by drought. Climate change is clearly a factor here, its role most obvious in marginal land: the communal areas worked by millions of small farmers. A 2002 World Food Programme study noted that there had been three droughts in Zimbabwe since 1982 and that the 2002 drought, which also affected several neighbouring countries in Southern Africa, was the worst in 20 years. The WFP estimated that 12.8 million people in the region would require assistance as a result of that drought and that in Zimbabwe alone, overall production would decline by 25 per cent, with cereal production down 57 per cent and maize, the staple in the diet of ordinary Zimbabweans, down by a devastating two-thirds.

To separate out the effect of drought and that of reform — and thus to understand how land reform has hit production — one needs first to distinguish between three groups of agricultural producer: local white farmers, who were the target of the land reform; peasants with farms in communal areas; and foreign corporations, whose large farms (except for small tracts of unused land) remain intact. Harry Oppenheimer, for example, lost most of his private land, but his firm, Anglo American, kept its sugar estates, which it then sold to Tongaat Hulett, a South African firm with 15,000 hectares in Zimbabwe. In a nutshell, white commercial farmers focused on export crops, whereas communal farmers were the major source of food security. The production of tobacco, hitherto the main source of foreign exchange, is concentrated in large-scale commercial farms; it has seen the most severe decline, almost entirely as a result of land reform. Maize and cotton are peasant crops and have not really been directly affected by land reform, but have suffered badly from prolonged drought — maize production was down by 90 per cent between 2000 and 2003. In contrast, the production of crops — sugar, tea, coffee — grown mainly by the large corporate plantations has remained steady.

Besides drought and reform, there is a third cause of declining production: the targeted donor boycott. Zimbabwe has been the target of Western sanctions twice in the last 50 years: once after UDI in 1965 (very ‘soft’ sanctions, which did not stop the country becoming the second most industrialised in sub-Saharan Africa by the mid-1970s) and again after Zimbabwe’s entry into the Congo war in August 1998. Zimbabwe’s involvement in the war was not well received in the West. Participants in the donor conference for Zimbabwe that year were decidedly lukewarm about committing funds. Britain announced a review of arms sales to Zimbabwe and, after the conference, again disclaimed any responsibility for funding land reform. The following year the IMF suspended lending to Zimbabwe, while 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. Its enemies have claimed that, by the late 1990s, the ZCTU was dependent on foreign sources for two-thirds of its income. Once ‘fast-track’ land reform began in 2000, the Western donor community shut the door on Zimbabwe.

The sanctions regime, led by the US and Britain, was elaborate, tested during the first Iraq war and then against Iran. In 2001 Jesse Helms, previously a supporter of UDI, sponsored the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery bill (another sponsor was Hillary Clinton) and it became law in December that year. Part of the act was a formal injunction on US officials in international financial institutions to ‘oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe’. In autumn 2001 the IMF had declared Zimbabwe ‘ineligible to use the general resources of the IMF’ and removed it from the list of countries that could borrow from its Poverty and Growth Facility. In 2002, it issued a formal declaration of non-co-operation with Zimbabwe and suspended all technical assistance. The US legislation also authorised Bush to fund ‘an independent and free press and electronic media in Zimbabwe’ and to allocate six million dollars for ‘democracy and governance programmes’. This was fighting talk, Cold War vintage. The normative language of sanctions focuses less on the issues that prompted them in the first place — Zimbabwe’s intervention in the Congo war and the introduction of fast-track reform — than on the need for ‘good governance’. In citing the absence of this as a reason for its imposition of sanctions in 2002, the EU violated Article 98 of the Cotonou Agreement, which requires that disputes between African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and the EU be resolved by the joint EU-ACP Council of Ministers.

Clearly, the old paradigm of sanctions — isolation — has given way to a more interventionist model, which combines punishment of the regime with subsidies for the opposition. So-called ‘smart’ sanctions are intended to target the government and its key supporters. In 2002, the US, Britain and the EU began freezing the assets of state officials and imposing travel bans. Only four days after the EU imposed sanctions, the US expanded the list of targeted individuals to include prominent businessmen and even church leaders, such as the pro-regime Anglican bishop, Nolbert Kunonga.

Nonetheless, sanctions mainly affect the lives of ordinary people. Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, wrote recently that the country’s foreign exchange reserves had declined from $830 million, representing three months’ import cover in 1996, to less than one month’s cover by 2006. Total foreign payments arrears increased from $109 million at the end of 1999 to $2.5 billion at the end of 2006. Foreign direct investment had shrunk from $444.3 million in 1998 to $50 million in 2006. Donor support, even to sectors vital to popular welfare, such as health and education, was at an all-time low. Danish support for the health sector, $29.7 million in 2000, was suspended. Swedish support for education was also suspended. The US issued travel warnings, blocked food aid during the heyday of land reform and opposed Zimbabwe’s application to the Global Fund to Fight Aids — the country has the fourth highest infection rate in the world. Though it was renewed in 2005, the Zimbabwe grant is meagre. Agriculture has been affected too: scale matters, but no one disputes that subsidies are vital for agriculture to be sustainable, and sanctions have made it more difficult to put a proper credit regime in place.

Despite the EU’s imposition of sanctions in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2002, Mugabe polled 56.2 per cent of the vote against Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC’s 42 per cent. There were widespread allegations of Zanu-PF violence and last-minute gerrymandering, with polling stations in urban areas — Tsvangirai’s electoral base — closing early and extra stations being set up in rural areas, where Mugabe’s support was assured. Nonetheless, it was clear that support for Zanu-PF was higher than in the pre-fast-track elections of 2000. Bush and Blair refused to recognise the outcome, but Namibia, Nigeria and the South African observer team, which had monitored the elections, concluded that the result was legitimate. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Africans could do little in the face of mounting Western pressure, from Britain especially: a three-member panel of Commonwealth countries — Australia, Nigeria and South Africa — was convened to consider the question of Zimbabwe. There were reports of intense pressure from Tony Blair on Thabo Mbeki. The panel suspended Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth for a year. Zimbabwe withdrew from the organisation.

The experience of land reform in Zimbabwe has set alarm bells ringing in South Africa and all the former settler colonies where land shortage is still an issue. In South Africa especially, the upheaval and bitterness felt in Zimbabwe seems to suggest that the ‘Malaysian path’ to peaceful redistribution and development is not inevitable. An anxious South Africa and less powerful members of the Southern Africa Development Community tend to feel that sanctions, along with other destabilising policies pursued by the West against Zimbabwe, have only made matters worse. SADC states have long tried to reconcile the need to resist Western influence with the fact that they serve as a bridge between Africa and the wealthy Western economies, but South Africa’s non-confrontational policy vis-à-vis Mugabe — which Mbeki pursued despite mounting criticism from the ANC and the unions in South Africa — along with its provision of fuel and electricity to its northern neighbour, set it at odds with Western governments. South Africa and the SADC states describe their approach as one of ‘non- interference’, ‘stabilisation’ and ‘quiet diplomacy’, but the West sees it as a deliberate effort to undermine sanctions, and critics in South Africa — most recently Mandela — have found the Mbeki line much too conciliatory.

In 2007, SADC called for an end to sanctions against Zimbabwe and international support for a post-land-reform recovery programme, but earlier this year Western countries brought their influence to bear on key SADC members — Botswana and Zambia — to split the organisation. Ian Khama, the president of Botswana, went so far as to announce publicly that he would not recognise the results of the 2008 elections. The pressure on SADC came not only from Western countries, but from trade-union movements in the region, in particular Cosatu of South Africa, which has strong links with the ZCTU. Here is another striking aspect of the current Zimbabwe crisis: it is not just Western and pro- Western governments that have joined the sanctions regime, but 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.

The arguments, which are not new, turn on questions of nationalism and democracy, pitting champions of national sovereignty and state nationalism against advocates of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. Nationalists speak of a historical racism that has merely migrated from government to civil society with the end of colonial rule, while civil society activists speak of an ‘exhausted’ nationalism, determined to feed on old injustices. This fierce disagreement is symptomatic of the deep divide between urban and rural Zimbabwe. Nationalists have been able to withstand civil society-based opposition, reinforced by Western sanctions, because they are supported by large numbers of peasants. The tussle between these groups has even greater poignancy in former settler colonies than it had a generation earlier in former colonies north of the Limpopo, for the simple reason that the central legacy of settler colonialism — the land question — remained unresolved and explosive after independence. Southern African leaders have tried, with some success, to put out the fires in Zimbabwe before they spread beyond its borders. It is worth noting that the agreement between Zanu-PF and the MDC signed in September and brokered by Mbeki accepts land redistribution as irreversible and registers disagreement only over how it was carried out; it also holds Britain responsible for compensating white farmers. In the wake of Mbeki’s resignation as president of South Africa it is vital that this agreement remains in place. Few doubt that this is the hour of reckoning for former settler colonies. The increasing number of land invasions in KwaZulu Natal, and the violence that has accompanied them, indicate that the clock is ticking.

Bibliographical Note

Moyo, Sam & Paris Yeros (2005b), ‘Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Towards the National Democratic Revolution’, in Reclaiming the Land, edited by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, London: Zed Books; Moyo, Sam and Paris Yeros (2007), ‘The Radicalised State: Zimbabwe’s Interrupted Revolution’, Review of African Political Economy, 111; Moyo, Sam & Paris Yeros (forthcoming), ‘After Zimbabwe: State, Nation and Region in Africa’, in S. Moyo, P. Yeros & J. Vadell (eds.), The National Question Today: The Crisis of Sovereignty in Africa, Asia and Latin America; Chambati, W. and S. Moyo, Fast Track Land Reform and the Political Economy of Farm Workers in Zimbabwe, Harare: AIAS Monograph Series, forthcoming For a critical point of view, see, Lloyd Sachikonye, “The Land is the Economy: Revisiting the Land Question,” African Security Review 14(3), 2005; and, Raftopoulos, Brian & Ian Phimister (2004), ‘Zimbabwe Now: The Political Economy of Crisis and Coercion’, Historical Materialism, 12: 4; Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge — Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice, Merlin Press, 2002; Henry Bernstein, ‘Land reform in Southern Africa in World Historical Perspective,’ ROAPE 96, 2003

On the non-Zimbabwean debate on the land reform, see, http://www.lalr.org.za/news/a-new-start-for-zimbabwe-by-ian-scoones.html (accessed on 27 September, 2008); IRIN, “Small Scale Farming Seen As the Only Alternative to Food Insecurity,” 22 September 2008. For a contrary point of view, see, Henry Bernstein, ‘Land reform in Southern Africa in World Historical Perspective,’ Review of African Political Economy 96, 2003

On war veterans, see, Sadomba, W (2006) War veterans and the land occupation movement in Zimbabwe, forthcoming, Harare;

On climate change and the impact of drought, see, C.H. Matarira, J.M. Makadho, F.C. Mwamuka, “Zimbabwe: Climate Change Impacts on Maize Production and Adaptive Measures for the Agricultural Sector,” Interim Report on Climate Change Country Studies, 1995, http://www.gcrio.org;

On sanctions, see, Gregory Elich, ‘Zimbabwe Under Siege,’ Swans Commentary Zimbabwe Under Seige,
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/elich004.html; Dr. Gideon Gono: How sanctions are ruining Zimbabwe, opinion piece, African Business, 2007.

On the debate among progressive intellectuals in Zimbabwe, see, Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, ‘The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts.’ Forthcoming in Historical Materialism, vol. 14, no. 4, 2007.

What might a better US policy towards Zimbabwe look like?

I recently attended a symposium sponsored by the Africa Initiative of Syracuse University and the African Studies Center of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, entitled, “Obama and Africa: Which Way?” It was pointed out that the US imports more of its oil from Africa than it does from the Middle East; that there are thousands of US military personnel assigned to the continental strategic military command, Africom. As any scholar of the late colonial period in Africa knows, the US has a long and sordid history of anti-communist interventions, support for dictatorships and disregard of the will of many nations on multilateral funding, trade, health and debt policies. US social agendas dictate the shape of foreign aid programs, rather than the needs of recipients. Even social and agricultural research has often been tainted by “strategic” considerations. US policy thus carries a long legacy of the imposition of an unfortunate level of national arrogance.

However, the thrill of Barack Obama’s assumption of the US presidency has not faded. Symposium participants were celebratory at the departure of George Bush. Even the most cynical seemingly felt a little urge to lift a corner of the gloom, and let a bit of the sun generated by Obama’s dazzling smile shine in.

Perhaps destined to eclipse that sunshine will be the choice Obama is likely to make about where to place the continent of Africa on his list of “change” priorities. Still, his inaugural remarks did seem in some direct way to be pointed towards Robert Mugabe: “To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Readers of this website do not need to be told how dire the situation in Zimbabwe has become. Starvation and cholera stalk that lovely land. The country’s executive “completely ignores the orders of the courts, thus placing itself above the law, able to do whatever it wishes to citizens, ignoring all laws and constitutional rights, abusing its powers at will and with impunity.” Just as there seems to be no limit to the heights that can be reached by the inflation rate, there seems to be no depth that cannot be breached by each new day’s awful reality.

Readers will also be aware of the backlash against the Bush/Blair/Brown style of Zimbabwe criticism, and of the hearty support that Mugabe still seems to enjoy amongst those for whom denunciations of “imperialism” largely trump any evidence of local culpability in the current tragedy. The eternal question “what is to be done?” exercises the rest of us.

In the anti-apartheid solidarity movement, the slogan was developed in the progressive sports fraternity, “no normal sport in an abnormal country.” It is time this spirit was adopted towards Zimbabwe in general (not just in sporting and cultural affairs). It is clear, as the Legal Resources Foundation says, that “the Zimbabwean authorities no longer abide by the Constitution of the country.” The US and other countries can thus no longer fall back on the same policies which imply that appeals to constitutionality will succeed. Zimbabweans are telling America that those appeals will continue to fall on deafened ears. “Change” therefore has to mean doing things differently: no more assumptions that a normal dialogue with Zimbabwe lies just around the corner. The current task is to find ways to isolate Robert Mugabe and render him irrelevant in the service of making a new Zimbabwean reality.

In making this argument, I do not for a moment want to give the impression that the solution to the Zimbabwean problem lies in military force, whether covert or overt. More death will not assist the dying. In a recent otherwise reasonable syndicated column, Nat Hentoff quoted the Washington Times of December 7, 2008, “Alas, at some times in some places diplomacy just doesn’t work…Has anyone in [Zimbabwe] thought of the ‘f’ word – force?” Hentoff is mistaken. Warfare satisfies the impatient but it grinds the boot-heel of suffering ever more closely on the necks of women and children. In Zimbabwe it must be avoided.

What might a better US policy towards Zimbabwe look like?

Genuine multilateralism is the key. The first things the US must do are to pay its dues to the United Nations, and recognize the International Criminal Court, thus making an important statement and crafting a new image as a credible international partner rather than the cowboy bully of the Bush years. It must work to break the old imperialist-era logjams and coordinate more work with the European Union in Africa. It must ask the leaders of the African Union what the US can do to strengthen its negotiation and peacekeeping capabilities. In the southern African region, the most important things it can do are to build up substantial pressure on South Africa to acknowledge Zimbabwe’s pariah status – and to meet its own obligations to the woefully underserved and endangered refugees from Zimbabwe and other African countries who have fled to South Africa.

In the improved international atmosphere that would result from these actions, the US could press for the following specific initiatives which could credibly flow from a better regional diplomatic climate.

• appoint a special envoy to the African Union;
• state that the “who is going to be Prime Minister” circus is at a dead end;
• call for the release of all political detainees in Zimbabwe at the UN;
• encourage the UN Secretary General to approach the heads of the Zimbabwe armed services and negotiate a transitional arrangement;
• as the current Zimbabwean state no longer recognizes its own constitution, consider setting up an AU- and UN-backed government in exile in Botswana;
• insist that Zimbabwean women’s organizations are recognized and brought into international negotiations;
• sponsor and convene a conference of Zimbabwean activists, feminist organizations and NGOs and hear what their ideas are. Zimbabwe is blessed with an extraordinary corps of articulate, knowledgeable, experienced activist women. Let their voices be heard and let their ideas circulate.
• Consult with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontieres, etc on governance and humanitarian issues – rather than treat them warily as adversaries at best.

None of these actions would be an end in itself; rather, each would contribute to the achievement of enabling conditions for a Zimbabwean recovery. These ideas are proposed here in the spirit that “change means doing things differently.”

Terri Barnes is Associate Professor of History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.