If I were going to write a reflective long-term book about the elections in Zimbabwe, I would call it “A Primer for Demagogues.” But, writing today, I call the grave new danger to Africa demagogic anti-colonialism.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe doesn’t even pretend anymore that the parliamentary elections scheduled for this weekend in that once-promising country are going to be fair. There is not even the whiff of any public suggestion of shame, the deference that hypocrisy pays to reality. As he loses any remaining support, Mugabe has banned election observers, raised the levels of oppression and threatened the opposition, all with a stunningly honest openness.
Everybody in Zimbabwe by now knows the real story–but one wonders whether the outside world (still not a token of concern from African-American leaders) realizes how aptly the events in Zimbabwe fit into the old and remarkably dependable demagogic patterns.
Mugabe, we now know, is supported not by the state but by what observers are calling a “Third Force” of hard-line army, police and Central Intelligence Organization men answerable only to the president. In fact, this is the way it is always done, whether with Adolf Hitler and his SS forces in Germany, with Benito Mussolini and his Brown Shirts in Italy, with Slobodan Milosevic and his special Serb militias, or Juvenal Habyarimana and his Rwandan Hutu fighters.
Mugabe has unleashed waves of terror across his naturally rich but now impoverished country in order to stay in power as he becomes too old and corrupt to mask his greed any other way. His professed “concern” for white ownership of land is belied at every turn by the fact that most of the land that has been confiscated has gone to his cronies. Whites are “enemies of the state,” but in reality his enemies are the black Zimbabweans of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
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Mugabe’s government, run by his ZANU-PF party, has become yet another African regime haunted by diamonds. London’s Punch magazine recently detailed the diamond connection in a comprehensive piece called “All Mugabe’s Men.” It traced not only how Mugabe has l0,000 troops stationed around the billion-dollar diamond mines in the Congo (600 soldiers have reportedly come back in body bags) but how he now depends upon his “take,” which is duly provided him by corrupt white British politicians-turned-diamond smugglers.
In a masterful speech last week in the city of Mbare, the country’s besieged opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai laid out the choice: “There is a new whispering through the people of Africa. We suffered under colonialists, but after nearly 50 years of `uhuru’ [freedom) across Africa we find terrible oppression has come from the African leaders who were supposed to liberate us. The people of Africa are saying, `No more.”‘
Meanwhile, Mugabe presents himself as the liberation lion, aging, but still roaring. Instead, he is a man forced by his inner corruption to cynically adopt the pretense of the demagogic anti-colonialist or, another of my terms, the “professional anti-colonialist.” Colonialism may have been gone from Zimbabwe for 20 years, but it still clearly has its uses.
Robert Mugabe must be voted out or overthrown. This weekend’s elections, being only for parliament, cannot remove him but can, if the many courageous Zimbabweans in the opposition can vote at all freely, lay bare the real sentiments of the people.
But even beyond his cruel oppression, it is croupier Mugabe’s cynical dependence upon the game of colonial cards that must also be destroyed, whether in Harare or Mbare, or even Washington or New York. That era is over; it is far past time to stop using its recidivistic passions to feed the misery of Africa today.
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