Beyond Mugabe-centric narratives of the Zimbabwe crisis

REVIEWARTICLE

BEYOND MUGABE-CENTRIC NARRATIVESOF THE ZIMBABWE CRISIS

SABELO J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI*

A Predictable Tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the collapse ofZimbabwe, by Daniel Compagnon. Philadelphia, PA: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2011. 336 pp. $39.95 (hardback). ISBN 978 0 81224267 6.

War Veterans in Zimbabwe’s Revolution: Challenging neo-coloni-alism and settler and international capital, by Zvakanyorwa WilbertSadomba. Harare and Oxford: Weaver Press and James Currey, 2011.256 pp. $70.00 (paperback). ISBN 978 1 84701 025 4.

Catastrophe: What went wrong in Zimbabwe? by Richard Bourne.London and New York, NY: Zed Books, 2011. 320 pp. $19.93 (paper-back). ISBN 978 1 84813 521 5.

Zimbabwe’s Exodus: Crisis, migration, survival, edited byJonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera. Kingston and Cape Town: SouthernAfrican Migration Programme–Canada and Southern African MigrationProgramme–Southern Africa, 2010. 432 pp. $39.95 (paperback). ISBN978 1 920409 22 7.

The figure of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe seems to be haunting notonly the Zimbabwean internal political landscape but also academic nar-ratives of the crisis that engulfed the country at the beginning of the thirdmillennium. Books informed by divergent ideological and disciplinarypersuasions continue to be written by those who participated in the liber-ation struggle, such as Zvakanyorwa Wilbert Sadomba, keen to articulatethe ‘authentic’ objectives and agendas of the liberation struggle as having

*Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Professor in the Department of Development Studies at theUniversity of South Africa and has published extensively on history and politics ofZimbabwe.

African Affairs, 111/443, 315–323 doi: 10.1093/afraf/ads008

© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved

Advance Access Publication 16 February 2012

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been betrayed by Mugabe, while also describing their individual roles inthe struggle as heroic and selfless compared to Mugabe’s actions – seenas informed by the imperatives of gaining and holding power.Non-Zimbabwean scholars like Daniel Compagnon and Richard

Bourne, keen to understand what went wrong in Zimbabwe, also focuson the culpability of Mugabe. Those Zimbabweans who emigrated toSouth Africa, Botswana, Britain, and other parts of the world – andwhose experiences are documented by Jonathan Crush and DanielTevera, along with their evaluation of the decade-long crisis – holdMugabe responsible for destroying the economy and authorizing state vio-lence on citizens. Thus Mugabe emerges in most of the recent literatureas this larger-than-life political figure who was midwife to the birth of thenation before becoming its undertaker.While both Bourne and Compagnon make impressive strides in critically

weighing up the available evidence to explain what went wrong inZimbabwe through engagement with complex historical issues includingthe role of Britain, the international community, Africa, the SouthernAfrican Development Community (SADC), and South Africa, they alsospend time explaining Mugabe’s responsibility for the crisis. DespiteBourne’s caveat that the crisis must not be attributed to ‘Mugabe’s evil’but to a combination of historical developments that involved Britain,Africa, and the world, a closer reading of his book reveals a consistentand latent bias, attributing too much determining power to RobertMugabe. Unlike Bourne, who tries to avoid a one-sided explanationthroughout his analysis while at the same time striving to lay bare what heconsiders Mugabe’s terrible abuse of power, Compagnon’s book empha-sizes the role of Mugabe in what he terms the collapse of Zimbabwe. Thisis evident in the subtitle.Bourne and Compagnon also differ in that the former thinks that

no-one in 1980 could have guessed that Zimbabwe would experiencewhat he terms a ‘catastrophe’ at the beginning of 2000. To him,Zimbabwe had every prospect for success in 1980, and this blinded manyanalysts from predicting its fast degeneration into a police state, economiccollapse, and abandonment by its citizens as a failed state in the thirtyshort years of its existence as a post-colonial country. Compagnon differsfrom Bourne in this respect, arguing convincingly that the ‘collapse’ ofZimbabwe was ‘a predictable tragedy’.Compagnon says: ‘Contrary to a view commonly held in the media and

by some observers – that there was a sudden turn of events in 2000, sup-posedly reversing a previous trend towards democratization – the politicalsystem set in place at independence and throughout the 1980s was au-thoritarian in essence’ (p. 8). On the question of who was responsible forthe collapse, Compagnon also argues: ‘It is important also to set the

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record straight about the responsibility of fellow African and non-Africanleaders who let Mugabe have his way and taint the image of the continentthrough his actions’ (p. 7). In short, to Compagnon, Mugabe is respon-sible ‘for the collapse of Zimbabwe’. Bourne’s take is that: ‘For what wentwrong in Zimbabwe is not just a tragedy made possible by RobertMugabe, or the British, or the international community. It has its roots inAfrica and the rest of the world’s attitude to Africa; it is about race, landand nation-building; few of those involved down the years have entirelyclean hands; and this account aims to show how easily the social fabric ofa promising state can be destroyed’ (p. 3).

But Bourne’s argument about the multi-layered nature of theZimbabwe crisis and its multiple causation is not at all new. As far backas 2003 Amanda Hammar and Brian Raftopoulos introduced ideas ofZimbabwe’s multi-layered and mutating millennial crisis. Hammar andRaftopoulos also made it clear that ‘the crisis is not about a single issue,neither is it rooted in a one-off event or single historical trajectory, nor isit the predictable outcome of an assumed pattern of “failed states” inpost-colonial Africa.” They concluded that the Zimbabwe crisis was gen-erated by ‘at least’ three interweaving analytical themes and empiricalarenas: the politics of land and resource distribution; reconstructions ofnation and citizenship; and the remaking of state and modes of rule.’1

Bourne’s location of the causes of the Zimbabwe crisis in the nature ofthe liberation movement is not new, either; work by Norma Kriger,Terence Ranger, and myself has provided a critique of nationalism andliberation war, revealing its antipathy towards democracy, its disdain forhuman rights, its commandism and authoritarianism.2 In his last chapter,Bourne, like Compagnon, provides much space to the culpabilityand responsibility of Mugabe for the ‘catastrophe’, arguing that: ‘Thereis little doubt that if either Mandela or Kaunda had been the first leaderof an independent Zimbabwe its future would have been different’(p. 266).

But Mugabe cannot be elevated to a tool of analysis of the Zimbabwecrisis. He is a mere human being brought into political life by a

1 Amanda Hammar and Brian Raftopoulos, ‘Zimbabwe’s unfinished business: rethinkingland, state and nation’ in A. Hammar, B. Raftopoulos, and S. Jensen (eds), Zimbabwe’sUnfinished Business: Rethinking land, state and nation in the context of crisis (Weaver Press,Harare, 2003), p. 203.2 Norma Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,1992); Terence Ranger, ‘Introduction to Volume Two’ in T. Ranger (ed.), The HistoricalDimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe Volume Two (University ofZimbabwe Publications, Harare, 2003), pp. 1–37; Terence Ranger, ‘Nationalist historiog-raphy, patriotic history and history of the nation: the struggle over the past in Zimbabwe,’Journal of Southern African Studies 30, 2 (2004); Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Do‘Zimbabweans’ Exist? Trajectories of nationalism, national identity formation and crisis in a post-colonial state (Peter Lang, Bern, 2009).

BEYOND MUGABE-CENTRIC NARRATIVES OF THE ZIMBABWE CRISIS 317

combination of contingent historical factors. This argument is not meantto privilege structure over human agency, however, in explaining theZimbabwe crisis, or to exonerate Mugabe from culpability. It is meant tomove the debate beyond Mugabe-centrism. It deploys Masipula Sithole’sconcept of ‘struggles within the struggle’ and extends it into ‘strugglesafter the struggle’ as providing a better context within which to under-stand the Zimbabwe crisis.3 An undue obsession with the personal role ofMugabe inadvertently rebuilds the discredited ‘big men thesis’ thatemphasized the role of particular ‘big men’ like King Shaka of the Zulu,who are said to have single-handedly built nations and states and alsosingle-handedly destroyed them.The concept of ‘struggles within the struggle’ not only captures the

crucial issue of continuity and change that traverses the nationalist liber-ation struggle and the post-colonial period. It also encapsulate issues ofpersonal clashes, ethnic clashes, generational clashes, ideological schisms,power struggles, strategic and tactical differences informed by exigenciesof the liberation struggle – all this as a broad historical and discursiveterrain within which Zimbabwe was born and leadership styles werehoned. It is also the terrain within which political identities of patriots,puppets, sell-outs, revolutionaries, and counter-revolutionaries wereformed. Analysis of ‘struggles within the struggle’ and ‘struggles after thestruggle’ reveals the failure of nationalists to nurture and build democratictraditions, and the absence of peaceful coexistence of races, ethnicities,genders, and generations that invites the rule of violence and coercion. Itexposes the nationalist struggle as a school of violence, intolerance, andcommandism. Mugabe is a graduate of this school.It was also during the ‘struggles within the struggle’ that cults of per-

sonality were developed, as leaders like Mugabe and Nkomo fought toemerge at the top of the nationalist movement in order to assume powerin the event of the demise of colonialism. Perhaps it is this obsession withspecific leaders that has bequeathed a leader-centred approach toZimbabwean historiography. There is an uncomfortable increase inMugabe-centric analysis of the rise and fall of the state, nation, andeconomy, just as there was a Shaka-centric explanation of the Mfecane inSouthern African history. The major shortcoming of the big-men-centricanalysis of history in general is that history ends up as a human enterprisemade and driven by the whims of ‘great men’. What is missed in this typeof analysis is that ‘big men’ like Mugabe and Shaka were products ratherthan progenitors of history. This focus is mainly dominant in the work ofjournalists like Martin Meredith and Heidi Holland, and has percolated

3 Masipula Sithole, Zimbabwe: Struggles within the struggle, second edition (RujekoPublishers, Harare, 1999).

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into academic work like that of Stephen Chan, which preceded the booksby Bourne and Compagnon under review here.4

In all these works, Mugabe emerges as a powerful person who played acentral role in the struggle that produced Zimbabwe, only to single-handedly destroy the same nation at the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury through plunder and violence. But the analyses offered byCompagnon and Bourne are far superior to the simplistic and one-sidedcondemnatory journalism by David Blair, Martin Meredith and othersthat was produced at the peak of the Zimbabwe crisis and squarelyblamed everything on Mugabe personally.5 Historical context is fullytaken into account in both these books and evidence is used to back upeach claim made, despite the rather clichéd titles – invoking ‘catastrophe’and ‘tragedy’. Compagnon and Bourneboth provide comprehensive, his-torically situated accounts of the responsibility of Mugabe for the collapseof Zimbabwe, while revealing clear continuities between colonial andpost-colonial interludes. Their narratives are informed by strong belief inliberal democracy, to the extent that there is little sympathy for revolution-ary nationalism and its redemptive potential during the current age of glo-balization. They both see nothing but ‘catastrophe’ and ‘tragedy’ inZimbabwe’s ‘Third Chimurenga’.

For a sympathetic yet critical treatment of nationalist liberation struggleand its relevance today one needs to turn to the work of Sadomba. He isa former ZANLA freedom fighter hailing from the Manyika branch of thedominant Shona ethnic group. The Manyika experienced elimination andmarginalization in Mozambique during the liberation struggle at thehands of the Karanga and Zezuru group following the death of HerbertChitepo (national chairman of ZANU until 1975 and a Manyika). Hisbook provides an engaging and important eye-witness assessment of‘struggles within the struggle’, and his narrative also engages with themost recent dynamics of the ‘struggles after the struggle’, when war veter-ans were initially sidelined and condemned to poverty and suffering bythe ZANU-PF elite who acquired state power in 1980. Sadomba’s bookmust be read together with other biographies and autobiographies pro-duced by active participants in the liberation struggle – such as those ofJoshua Nkomo, a veteran nationalist and former leader of ZAPU who isconsidered to be the ‘Father of Zimbabwe’; Fay Chung, a ZANU-PF pol-itician and former cabinet minister; Edgar Tekere, a veteran nationalist,former ZANU-PF Secretary General and former cabinet minister who

4 Martin Meredith, Mugabe: Power and plunder in Zimbabwe (Public Affairs, Oxford, 2002);Heidi Holland, Dinner with Mugabe (Penguin, London, 2009); and Stephen Chan, RobertMugabe: A life of plunder and violence (I. B. Tauris, London, 2003).5 Meredith, Mugabe, and David Blair, Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the struggle forpower in Zimbabwe (Continuum, London, 2000).


lost favour with Mugabe and ZANU-PF in the late 1980s because of hisoutspoken condemnation of corruption; and Wilfred Mhanda, formerleader of the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZPA), whom Mugabe crushedviolently during ZANU’s exile life as he paved his way towards the pinna-cle of the party.6 These touch on struggles within the struggle, strugglesafter the struggle, and also on the role of Mugabe in the liberation strug-gle. Some of these authors openly try to belittle Mugabe as a leader whileat the same time blaming him for causing the Zimbabwe crisis.The duel between Nkomo and Mugabe seemed to have been over the

title of ‘Father of Zimbabwe’, as clearly seen in attempts by Mugabe toimplicate Nkomo in dissident activities and label him the ‘Father ofDissidents’ in the 1980s. Chung remained confident in Mugabe’s leader-ship, whereas Tekere consistently tried to belittle Mugabe’s liberation cre-dentials while raising his own. Mhanda reveals the bad blood betweenhim and Mugabe that began during the Geneva Conference of 1976 overthe Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA, a new revolutionary military outfitthat had imbibed deep Marxism and was uniting comrades from ZIPRAand ZANLA, was committed to armed struggle, and was very critical ofthe divisive behaviour of the old guard nationalists like Mugabe). Mugabeand other old-guard nationalists feared that young military commanderslike Mhanda were taking over the leadership of the nationalist movement.ZIPA was violently crushed by ZANU under Mugabe’s leadership, andMhanda and his comrades were incarcerated until the end of the liber-ation war. This is why Mhanda is trying, in his book, to express his often-silenced role in the liberation struggle and to expose Mugabe’sMachiavellian conduct towards ZIPA.War Veterans in Zimbabwe’s Revolution fits into this genre of writing

because it is at once a biographical work as well as a critical participantobservation and an informed commentary on various themes in the longhistory of the study of the liberation struggle and its aftermath. Butthroughout these pages there is also an underlying attempt to projectZANLA as a superior army that contributed more to the liberation strug-gle than their ZIPRA counterparts, who had received superior trainingand weapons from the former Soviet Union but were less active in thestruggle. This represents a continuation of competition for revolutionarycredentials between ZIPRA and ZANLA that dates back to the era of theliberation struggle.

6 Joshua Nkomo, Nkomo: The story of my life (Methuen, London, 1984); Fay Chung,Re-Living the Second Chimurenga (Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, 2006); Edgar Tekere,Edgar 2-Boy Tekere: A life of struggle (SAPES Books, Harare, 2007); and Wilfred Mhanda,Dzino: Memories of a freedom fighter (Weaver Press, Harare, 2011).

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Like Mhanda, Sadomba is proud of his ZIPA connections and hejoined the struggle during the dominance of ZIPA. Read together withMhanda’s work, War Veterans in Zimbabwe’s Revolution is an authoritativenarrative of the war from the military side of the Zimbabwe struggle andthe two authors and participants in the struggle reinforce each other. Thetwo books capture in minute detail the ruptures, crises, turns, hopes,fears, sacrifices, commitment, and tenacity of the two ‘soldiers’ andothers within a terrain that was dangerous due to ethnic, generational,personality, and ideological power cleavages and suspicions that con-sumed some of the cadres in Mozambique. A close read of the two booksreveals how the liberation struggle was not just dominated by struggleswithin the struggle, but also by abuse of the notions of ‘revolutionaryjustice’ and making the ‘revolution to eat its own children’.7

Sadomba, like Bourne and Compagnon, is also concerned to explainthe Mugabe factor in Zimbabwean historiography. His Chapter 3 is dedi-cated to a detailed analysis of what he terms the ‘roots of the Mugabe era,1977–1979.’ He argues that Mugabe’s leadership is the ‘longest in thehistory of the liberation movement’ and ‘had the greatest influence onthat movement’ (p. 40). War Veterans in Zimbabwe’s Revolution comparesand contrasts the Chitepo period (1966–1975) with the Mugabe period,which he says was characterized by ‘regressive ideological shifts’ and‘short-lived guerrilla involvement’. Sadomba has no kind words for theMugabe era, stating that under Mugabe even ‘recruitment was conscious-ly used as a weapon for manipulating power and entrenching leadershippositions’ (p. 41). He further argues that Mugabe is ‘often misread andmiscalculated by his opponents, with disastrous consequences. Mugabe’saptitude to dominate and control, using divide-and-rule tactics and clinic-al personnel management seems to be his key quality’ (p. 42). As alsoexpressed by Tekere, Mhanda, and even Nkomo, the rise of Mugabe tothe leadership of ZANU in 1977 and of the country in 1980, was not thebest option, and was pregnant with future problems because of his un-democratic leadership style. Sadomba noted that: ‘The Mugabe phase ofthe war left a complex legacy. The nationalists, like the cunning woundedbuffalo, had bounced back to take control of the liberation movement’(p. 61).

Sadomba writes as a concerned war veteran committed to the ‘authen-tic’ agendas of the liberation struggle, just like Mhanda. Both are criticalof how the elite nationalist leadership betrayed the noble objectives of theliberation struggle; how they tried to sideline the guerrillas; how they soldout at the Lancaster House Conference; how they used hate and inflam-matory speeches to ignite intra-and-inter-guerrilla armed clashes in the

7 Sithole, Zimbabwe: Struggles within the struggle, p. 67.


1980s; how they compromised with white capital; how they neglected theex-combatants and condemned them to poverty; and how they delayedthe land acquisition and redistribution revolution until the war veterans inalliance with peasants and workers revived the revolution. Havingimbibed Marxist literature and been exposed to other radical literature ofrevolution, Sadomba’s book is not only a critique of nationalist leadershipbut also of neo-colonialism, settler colonialism, and the dominance ofinternational capital. To Sadomba, what is generally termed the ThirdChimurenga is a revolution led by war veterans that challenges the neo-colonial state, the ruling ZANU-PF party, the opposition MDC, RobertMugabe, and settler and international capital simultaneously.While Sadomba celebrates the Third Chimurenga as a protracted strug-

gle for ultimate freedom, Bourne and Compagnon see it as a ‘catastrophe’and ‘predictable tragedy’. What Sadomba succeeds to a minor extent inrehabilitating is the role of war veterans as the vanguard of a popular revo-lution, but he does not clearly explain how the war veterans are used byZANU-PF as stormtroopers once more for a very narrow nationalism per-meated by crony capitalism. His counterpart, Mhanda, argued that:‘Today Zimbabwe is a far cry from expectations of all those who took uparms for liberation; it is also a mockery of the term “liberation”.Zimbabweans are arguably in a much worse position socially, materiallyand economically than they were before independence.’8

If indeed the material life of Zimbabweans is worse today than beforeindependence, then there is no surprise that perhaps what Sadomba cele-brates as revolution resulted in a tragedy. It is the outcome of this tragedythat Crush and Tevera’s edited volume deals with through critical reflec-tions on such issues as a history of migration, internal migration, brain-drain, transnational lives, gender dimensions of migration, and the role ofremittances in the survival of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans. There areindeed direct and inextricable connections between Zimbabwe’s degener-ation into unprecedented socio-economic and political crisis and migra-tion as a survival strategy. Citizens will not just abandon their country inunprecedented numbers, as has happened here, unless there is indeed a‘catastrophe’ and a ‘tragedy’ threatening their well-being.Crush and Tevera’s book not only succeeds in historicizing the

problem of migration, but also describes in detail the turmoil and tenacityof the life of Zimbabweans in exile – in Britain where they had no optionbut to enlist as care workers (a job that is despised and disparaged), andhow they were exposed to xenophobia in South Africa. They also capturehow Zimbabweans’ ability to migrate to other countries has enabled themto save the lives of those who remained behind, and how even the state,

8 Mhanda, Dzino, p. 247.

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which failed to cater for the needs of its citizens, has benefited fromremittances of billions of dollars that enter the country each year. Theexiting of Zimbabweans from their state in large numbers is one of theclear indicators that the ‘struggles within the struggle’ and the ‘strugglesafter the struggle’ culminated in crisis. This is a point well captured byCrush and Tevera’s opening argument: ‘When modern states go into ter-minal decline or fail altogether, the predictable response of ordinarypeople is to get out, as soon as they can, to wherever they can go’ (p. 1).

A total of seventeen chapters on various aspects of migration ofZimbabweans into countries like Botswana, South Africa, Britain andothers provides a detailed exposé of what Crush and Tevera correctly sumup as ‘crisis, migration, survival’. The large exodus of Zimbabweans fromtheir country is a clear indictment of those analyses that try to paint a rosypicture of the country and try to sell the Third Chimurenga as amountingto something more than a tragedy. Zimbabwean studies have beenenriched academically and intellectually by the ever-burgeoning criticalliterature from inside the country as well as from outside. It would seemthe question of what went wrong in Zimbabwe will never be settledamong academics, partly because of the multi-layered nature of the crisisand the multi-rootedness of its causes, giving rise to various academicand intellectual interpretations. There are also ideological and partisanfactors that colour interpretations of the crisis. We will continue to livewith different regimes of truth.


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Beyond Mugabe-centric narratives of the Zimbabwe crisis