Robert Mugabe

Sue Onslow, Martin Plaut

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780821446386
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe sharply divides opinion and embodies the contradictions of his country's history and political culture. As a symbol of African liberation and a stalwart opponent of white rule, he was respected and revered by many. This heroic status contrasted sharply, in the eyes of his rivals and victims, with repeated cycles of gross human rights violations. Mugabe presided over the destruction of a vibrant society, capital flight, and mass emigration precipitated by the policies of his government, resulting in his demonic image in Western media.

This timely biography addresses the coup, led by some of Mugabe's closest associates, that forced his resignation after thirty-seven years in power. Sue Onslow and Martin Plaut explain Mugabe's formative experiences as a child and young man; his role as an admired Afro-nationalist leader in the struggle against white settler rule; and his evolution into a political manipulator and survivalist. They also address the emergence of political opposition to his leadership and the uneasy period of coalition government. Ultimately, they reveal the complexity of the man who stamped his personality on Zimbabwe's first four decades of independence.

1

Controversial and Divisive Leader

Robert Mugabe was head of the Zimbabwean liberation movement, the Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU), then his country’s first prime minister in April 1980. Zimbabwe had experienced a particularly tumultuous path to internationally recognized independence from formal British rule: from quasi-autonomous colonial status in 1923 as Southern Rhodesia; then as part of the decade-long experiment of the Central African Federation; and subsequently as Southern Rhodesia and the defiant attempt at white settler independence from London between 1965 and 1979. From the outset in 1980, his role as head of government, then executive head of state was an especially important variable in Zimbabwe’s postindependence history. Addressing the challenges of colonial legacies and meeting expectations for development and progress placed particular demands on his vision, personal qualities, intellectual attributes, and ability to sustain necessary political alliances. None of this could be separated from the wider international environment. Western governments hoped Zimbabwe under Mugabe’s leadership would represent a successful transition to multiracial, modified capitalism which could be held up as a model for neighboring apartheid South Africa. The Zimbabwean economy was the second-most-diversified economy in sub-Saharan Africa. At the independence celebrations, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania advised Mugabe, “You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way.”¹ However, under Mugabe’s leadership, the country advanced in some areas, only to lurch into cycles of crisis and decline, disappointing these early hopes.

Mugabe embodied the complexity and contradictions of Zimbabwe’s history and political culture. At independence, his emphasis on racial and political reconciliation antedated President Nelson Mandela’s call for national solidarity in South Africa in the 1990s. To the puzzlement of Western observers, Mugabe remained respected and revered by admirers across the African continent as a symbol of African liberation. “To many he is the embodiment of black pride, of achieving true psychological independence, of sticking two fingers up to the arrogant West.”² This heroic status contrasted sharply—in the eyes of his many detractors—with repeated cycles of social and economic disruption, capital flight, mass unemployment, and emigration, precipitated by the policies of his government.

Since 2000, Zimbabwe’s political economy has endured a roller-coaster ride, directly associated with the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). Following the short-lived stabilization of the economy between 2009 and 2014, there have been renewed socioeconomic problems, an acceleration of political protest via social media, and bitter factional infighting within the ruling party, ZANU-PF, over the presidential succession. Furthermore, Mugabe’s leadership is rightly associated with the brutal repression of political opposition in the early years of independence. There have been repeated patterns of state-engineered violence and intimidation around election campaigns, and against individual political opponents, together with massive corruption and theft of Zimbabwean state assets. There is bitter historical irony in the fact that, just as in the period of Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence, Zimbabwe’s fractured political and social landscapes since the 1990s have contributed to regional instability. For many, it is now difficult to remember Mugabe was once widely admired as a progressive leader, a respected chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement (1986–89), a leading Front Line States³ president in the international struggle against apartheid, and a pillar of the Commonwealth in the 1980s and 1990s. There is also the bitter irony that Mugabe hosted the Commonwealth summit in 1991 which produced one of the key declarations of this international association, supporting democracy, good governance, human rights, and the rule of law.⁴

Although journalists and commentators remarked over the years that Mugabe “changed,” the highly respected analyst Stephen Chan has pointed out that he was remarkably consistent in his outlook and ideological beliefs. Instead, it is the rest of the world which has moved on.

What of Mugabe’s own ideological thinking and thought processes? Political commentators have debated whether Mugabe was an African nationalist, a determined socialist, a Marxist, or a Maoist in his ideological thinking.⁵ “‘Marxist’—The term is relative. . . . Mugabe made it clear in our discussions that his greatest mentor was Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, the founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, from whom he had learned that adherence to communism does not necessarily mean subservience to Russia.”⁶ Mugabe was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, but British intelligence realized he was not a practicing Catholic by the late 1970s, although his first wife, Sally Mugabe, herself a convert, regularly went to Mass. Arguably, there are elements of all these ideological and values-based influences in his outlook, which have endured to the present day. As leader of the revolutionary movement, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), he certainly impressed journalists that he was persuaded by the egalitarian and redistributive qualities of socialism. Mugabe found Marxism to be a useful theoretical critique of white settler capitalism, as well as offering appropriate structures of linkages between party organization and the wider population. However, despite acute international concern over what were deemed to be his extreme Marxist views, at independence he did not seem to have been as committed to Marxism as the radical nationalist leadership in neighboring Mozambique or Angola.⁷

Mugabe’s earlier ideas and advocacy of “developmental nationalism” hardened through the years of crisis and decline in the 1990s and 2000s into a narrower version of Afro-radicalism and nativism, with its reliance on cultural nationalism. This was not a rejection of his earlier ideological outlook, but rather a reinvigoration, which drew increasingly upon “an exclusionary and more adversarial imagery of the nation.”⁸ The Fast Track Land Reform Programme (see chapter 5) encapsulated his view of state prescriptions combining with popular mobilization to reinforce a particular version of Zimbabwean national identity. This then was a question of “changing deployment and articulation of nationalism.”⁹

Mugabe’s Afro-radicalism was purposive—as a state ideology, and also as a self-serving political imagination for a specific elite. This was not a fixed construct, but susceptible and available for manipulation and control. (It must be said Mugabe himself was remarkably consistent in his arguments.) In Mugabe’s case, this articulation of Zimbabwean nationalism—referred to as “patriotic blackness” by some commentators¹⁰—enabled him to reenergize his links and support among the people (the “povo”). It also provided an alternative legitimacy and countermanding narrative to multiracial liberalism and cosmopolitanism, typified by the challenge of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and its supporters. In this mind-set, the MDC represents a regressive, counterrevolutionary, “neocolonial” force, and one that must be resisted at all cost. This mirrors the paradox at the heart of other postcolonial transformations by national liberation movements elsewhere in Southern Africa. In Mugabe’s case, his thinking typified a vision which combines radicalization and embourgeoisement, satisfying the Zimbabwean dispossessed and their demands for social justice, and the vested interests of ZANU-PF party elite and its allies in their search for resource accumulation. In this version of the African national project, Zimbabwe will achieve national unity and solidarity. It demands the merger of party and state to wield control of the economy according to a narrative which privileges indigenous advancement, expressly to resist rollback by external, malign, “neocolonial” forces.

Under Mugabe’s leadership, therefore, ZANU-PF’s decolonization project was not simply a need; it was an entitlement. Thus, those who point out Mugabe did not understand the influences and importance of the forces of globalization on Zimbabwe—only one of his many degrees is in economics—miss the point. Other critics of his ideological thinking focused on his great age and outdated ideas—that by the age of ninety-three, his ideas of monopoly capitalism (formed in the 1950s and 1960s) and conviction of the autonomy of the party-state as paramount socioeconomic actor and driver of development did not correspond to the current international political economy. This outlook was also fundamentally out of step with the predominant thinking of international financial institutions and international money markets.

Mugabe’s Afro-radicalism remained undaunted and undimmed. He remained intent on socioeconomic transformation and its intimately associated racial dimensions through redistributive justice and indigenization of the economy, forging unity and solidarity before moving then to the (increasingly distant) phase of social equity. While to his critics this way of thinking proved to be the ultimate disruptive “denial politics,” and hypocritical in the extreme, to Mugabe, these ideological practices and tenets were entirely rational. His criteria had long been national assertion and identity, agency and status, and a rejection of Western “imperialist” knowledge cultures and neoliberal prescriptions. Everything should be focused on expunging the “colonial personality” of Zimbabwean state and society. This also was bound up in Mugabe’s view of what now defines the nation, who is a citizen—and correspondingly, who is not—and ultimately, what comprises a “good Zimbabwean.” This definition was intimately connected to belonging to a particular political community, participating in and endorsing the ZANU-PF project, with Mugabe as its leader and keeper of the flame of patriotic memory.¹¹

Mugabe’s Afro-radicalism should also be seen in a broader context beyond the domestic sphere, as it had direct implications for Zimbabwe’s foreign policy during his time in power. Responsibility for foreign policy was concentrated in his office, and in his position as first prime minister then president. Mugabe’s advocacy and standing in the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1980s was a deliberate attempt to chart a more independent course in Southern Africa in the Cold War era—a “rough neighborhood,” given apartheid South Africa’s counterinsurgency activities—which was equidistant between the superpower blocs. This was a concerted effort to give Zimbabwe greater room for maneuver and more influence on the international stage. Until 2003, he also used the postcolonial modern Commonwealth as a platform to promote Zimbabwe’s national interests, and to criticize both the United States and the United Kingdom (particularly over the crisis of the American invasion of Grenada in 1983.) His Afro-radicalism was also bound up with his view of revitalized Pan-Africanism, manifest through the Southern African Development Community and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and its successor organization since 2001, the African Union (AU). (This determined assertion of African identity and entitlement in opposition to what he deemed to be Western imperialism, and Zimbabwe’s own progressive diplomatic isolation, led him to collaborate actively with the maverick Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, in the late 1990s and 2000s, with sinister consequences.¹²) Mugabe long regarded the AU’s economic agenda, and its evolving peace and security architecture, through the lens of African postcolonial autonomy in the international community. This was an extension of expunging the “colonial personality” of international interference, aid, and assistance to the continent, involving “weaning” the AU from foreign donor support. Despite being Africa’s oldest head of state, Mugabe was appointed chairman of the AU in 2015. His acceptance speech encapsulated his determination to ensure African control over its natural resources and to reduce foreign exploitation of its mineral wealth: “African resources should belong to Africa and to no one else, except to those we invite as friends. Friends we shall have, yes, but imperialists and colonialists no more.”¹³ (To Mugabe’s chagrin, 60 percent of the AU’s funding has come from international donors such as the World Bank, the European Union, and other individual Western governments.¹⁴) Mugabe’s one-year appointment exasperated his many critics at home and in Western capitals, who felt it reflected poorly on the AU’s agenda of good governance and human rights. However, after 1980 Mugabe refused to be deflected from his version of good government and African states’ rights. He was indeed remarkably consistent in his arguments and approach.

As for his personal characteristics, Mugabe was supremely disciplined, and well into late middle age, would wake early, around 4:30 a.m., exercise, meditate, and then return to his books. This was a regime he established in his thirties in Ghana and maintained throughout his incarceration by the Rhodesian government, exile in Mozambique, and even after his election as prime minister and then president of Zimbabwe. This denotes determined self-control—using routine to instil order at the core of his daily life, even when surrounded by political turmoil, violent disorder, and upheaval. Unlike Nelson Mandela, Mugabe emerged from prison in the mid-1970s into an extraordinary degree of factional infighting within his movement, tumultuous liberation politics, and regional criticism and dissent. He therefore faced intense challenges which required remarkable personal resilience, inner conviction, the ability to marshal a disciplined team, and a ruthless determination to exploit weakness and opportunity.

Over the years his political opponents repeatedly described Mugabe as intellectual but withdrawn, emotionally cold but with extraordinary personal energy. On first meeting him in Lusaka in December 1974, his domestic opponent Bishop Abel Muzorewa characterized him as slender and intense: “He was quite the opposite of the imagined big-shouldered militant.”¹⁵ British foreign secretary David Owen, his political antagonist in the 1970s, likened him to “a coiled spring, tense and very prickly and also somewhat withdrawn.”¹⁶ “Reserved, almost shy in manner, Mugabe at first impression seemed more cut out for the priesthood than for leadership of a political party. This was soon belied by his formidable intelligence and steely determination.”¹⁷ Another British foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, was struck by his poise and lack of bitterness at his long imprisonment. “I am not bitter against people personally. . . . But I am bitter against the system, the regime.”¹⁸ He impressed Swedish officials in 1977 (whom he was approaching for substantial financial support) as a humble, soft-spoken, and intelligent man—the very opposite of the expected popular stereotype of a guerrilla leader as “fierce, rugged, pugnacious, bombastic and permeated through and through with megalomania.”¹⁹

In contrast to th...