How much longer the night? The remorseless tyranny of Robert Mugabe

Times Literary Supplement

22 September 2017

A review of two books by Stuart Doran, “Kingdom, Power and Glory” and David Coltart “The Struggle Continues”

In a pastoral letter sent to congregations throughout Zimbabwe ten years ago, a group of Catholic bishops issued a scathing indictment of Robert Mugabe’s rule. The plight of Zimbabwe’s people, said the bishops, was pitiful. They faced mass unemployment, soaring inflation, hunger and destitution. The health
system had all but disintegrated; schools were in dire straits; public services had collapsed. Yet far from addressing their grievances, Mugabe’s regime had responded “with ever harsher oppression through arrests, detentions,
banning orders, and torture”. In their agony, said the bishops, quoting from a passage in the Book of Isaiah, Zimbabweans were asking, “Watchman, how much longer the night?”

The night has lasted for far longer than the bishops hoped. At the age of ninety-three, though prone to falling asleep in meetings and afflicted by memory lapses, Mugabe clings to power with the same determination and ruthlessness that has marked his political career from the start. His aim, he says, is to live until he is 100 and to rule for life. His
wife, Grace, an avaricious and menacing figure with ambitions to establish a Mugabe dynasty, suggested earlier this year that even if he dies before the 2018 presidential election, he should run “as a corpse”, thus facilitating her own path to power.

Whenever the end comes for Mugabe, the night will not end with him. Zimbabwe is not only in the midst of economic collapse but in the grip of a culture of violence and corruption that its president has fostered since he gained power
in 1980 and is now deeply embedded among the ruling elite. Power for Mugabe was not a means to an end but the end itself. His overriding ambition, he once admitted, was total control, and he has pursued that objective with relentless
single-mindedness, crushing opponents and critics. His accomplices in power have become accustomed to using methods of violence as a matter of routine, able to act with impunity.

A talented teacher with intellectual inclinations, Mugabe once boasted that, in addition to his university degrees, he had since entering politics acquired “many degrees in violence”. In the early 1960s, in Rhodesia, he was
among the first nationalists to advocate armed struggle to overthrow white rule. Given the intransigence of Ian Smith’s regime, it was ultimately the only method available.

Simultaneously, he was involved in organizing attacks against black political opponents. When the nationalist movement split in 1963, setting off internecine warfare between two rival factions, Zapu and Zanu, Mugabe played a prominent role in orchestrating Zanu’s youth group violence against Zapu. Zapu was politically aligned with the Soviet Union and tended
to focus on the urban proletariat, whereas Zanu was a supporter of Mao’s China, and agrarian in outlook. What both sides wanted was a monopoly of control and the “extinction” of the other. Many of the personal hatreds and antagonisms
engendered in the nationalist movement in the 1960s festered as an inveterate subculture that came to the fore after independence in 1980 with disastrous consequences.

In his meticulous study of Mugabe’s quest for supremacy, Kingdom, Power, Glory, Stuart Doran, an Australian historian, concludes that “violence was, for Mugabe, the most effective and gratifying means of dealing with adversaries of any complexion”. The primary evidence, Doran maintains, is to be found not during the civil war of the 1970s, but in the
1960s. “His commitment to violence was already absolute . . . it was directed against both whites and blacks.”

Eleven years of imprisonment hardened his resolve. Whereas Nelson Mandela used his prison years to open a dialogue with South Africa’s white rulers, Mugabe left prison adamantly opposed to any idea of negotiation. In 1975, he escaped into exile to neighbouring Mozambique, intent on taking control of Zanu’s war effort, determined to overthrow white society by force and replace it with a one-party Marxist regime. In 1979, after seven years of civil war in which at least
30,000 people died, when a negotiated settlement under British auspices was within reach at Lancaster House in London, Mugabe still hankered for military victory – “the ultimate joy”. Only an ultimatum from African presidents who had hitherto backed him forced him to compromise. “As I signed the document I was not a happy man at all”, he recalled.

While winning the 1980 election and gaining worldwide plaudits for his speeches on the need for reconciliation, Mugabe lost no time in settling old scores. His main targets were not former white adversaries but his Zapu rivals, led by Joshua Nkomo. Within weeks of taking office, Mugabe initiated plans to crush Nkomo’s support among the Ndebele in his
stronghold of Matabeleland, and in secret he arranged for the North Koreans to train a special Shona-speaking Zanu military brigade, called Gukurahundi, as a strike force.

Using “dissident” activity in Matabeleland as a pretext, Mugabe in 1983 unleashed Gukurahundi on a campaign of mass murder, torture, arson, rape and beatings directed mainly against the civilian population there. Most of the atrocities occurred in rural areas, largely hidden from public view.

But a courageous young white Bulawayo lawyer, David Coltart, together with a handful of Catholic human rights activists, began to collect evidence from surviving witnesses. In his absorbing memoir, The Struggle Continues, Coltart writes: “The brutal reality of genocide confronted me . . . in the genteel surrounds of St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral”. Hundreds of victims had lined up to give their testimony. Sitting at a table in the hall one woman after another told me how her husband, father, brother, son, uncle, grandfather, nephew, had been gunned down before their very eyes; how whole
families had been herded into huts – men, women and children, even babies – which were locked from the outside and set alight . . . . I heard about pregnant women who had been bayoneted; I was told of the systematic rape of others.

Mugabe’s campaign to destroy Zapu lasted for four years. An estimated 20,000 civilians were murdered, many thousands more were beaten and tortured, and an entire people was
victimized. To avoid further violence and repression, Nkomo eventually capitulated andnagreed to disband his party. For years, Mugabe rejected all demands for an inquiry into the Matabeleland atrocities. But Coltart continued his investigations and played a leading role in the publication in 1997 of a detailed account of the terror, entitled Breaking the Silence. He went on to become a prominent critic of Mugabe’s regime and duly suffered the consequences. Denounced by the presidentas a public enemy, he endured death threats, intimidation, harassment and malicious prosecution. Coltart captures in vivid details the hazards facing opposition activists.

Despite the risks, popular resistance to Mugabe’s corrupt and incompetent regime spread to many parts of Zimbabwe. After a humiliating defeat in a referendum in 2000
designed to give him greater power, Mugabe resorted to violence once more, launching a campaign of terror against white farmers and hundreds of thousands of black farm workers, whom he accused of supporting a new opposition party. Across the country, white farmers were murdered, assaulted and driven from their homes by gangs of armed youths paid by the government and organized by the military. Commercial agriculture eventually collapsed, leaving Zimbabwe dependent on foreign food to prevent mass starvation.

In 2005, Mugabe’s target became the mass of disaffected Zimbabweans living in slums and shanty towns on the fringes of urban centres, the poorest of the poor. In a campaign
called murambatsvina, a Shona phrase meaning “Drive out the rubbish”, police squads obliterated one community after another, using bulldozers and sledgehammers. According to a United Nations investigation, some 700,000 people lost their homes, their source of livelihood, or both; a further 2.4 million were affected indirectly. Mugabe claimed that the aim of murambatsvina was slum clearance and promised reconstruction. But virtually nothing was done. His real purpose was to make clear the fate of anyone who voted against him.

The damage inflicted on Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s thirty-seven-year rule is immense. To sustain his grip on power, the president has violated the courts, trampled on property
rights, rigged elections, hamstrung the independent press and left his country bankrupt and impoverished. Every single state institution – the civil service, the judiciary, the police, the military – has been subverted to enforce his will. One quarter of the population lives abroad in order to survive; 4 million depend on food aid; vast numbers of children are stunted by malnutrition; life expectancy at fifty-five years is one of the lowest in the world. What remains is a corrupt elite engaged in a
vicious struggle over the succession, offering little hope for Zimbabwe’s future. The air is thick with accusations of assassination plots, poison attempts, even witchcraft. Two main factions are in contention. One is rooting for the fifty-two-year-old Grace Mugabe, head of Zanu’s women’s league, a crude political operator known for her finger-jabbing tirades against opponents and her penchant for luxury living, most recently in the headlines after being accused of brutally assaulting a model,
Gabriella Engels, in South Africa. The other faction backs Emmerson Mnangagwa, a sinister seventy-five-year-old who played a central role in the Gukurahundi campaign and has remained Mugabe’s chief enforcer, gaining a reputation for cunning and ruthlessness. He is nicknamed Ngwenya – or the Crocodile.

What is nevertheless remarkable about Zimbabwe is the courage and fortitude of so many citizens who, like David Coltart, are still prepared to stand up against tyranny when
the results are so predictable. As he observes, wistfully, after thirty-five years of active service as a human rights lawyer and politician:
“Violence is so deeply rooted in our political culture that it has become our default tactic”.