The leaders of Africa fail to live up to their Sister Souljah moment on Mugabe
If anything is clear, it’s that Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a dangerous thug who has taken his country down the road to economic and human ruin with his ruthless consolidation of power, his quest for revenge, and his Marxist leanings.
And yet his fellow African leaders at the African Union summit in the Red Sea, and even the highly-admired Nelson Mandela, are having trouble saying a discouraging word about him. The rhetorical kid gloves are firmly on, although something else might possibly be happening behind the scenes: African leaders are “gently pushing” (sounds like an oxymoron to me) that he accept a power-sharing deal with the opposition.
Fat chance.
Mugabe has told his Western critics, “Go hang a thousand times.” And if he had the power to do so, he’d enforce those words literally, since his way of dealing with the supporters of his opponents in his own country is to kill them.
Mugabe has been in power since 1980, when the then-Rhodesia threw off the yoke of British colonial rule. Since that time, he’s burdened his once-prosperous country with an even greater yoke, including economic policies that, in the name of taking power from whites and giving it to indigenous disadvantaged blacks (translation: his cronies and supporters), have quite literally beggared the nation, with unemployment estimated at an astounding eighty percent.
So why the great reluctance to condemn a man who is so clearly a very bad guy? The main reason appears to be that he was one of the early heroes of the effort to end colonialism in Africa. As David Plotz wrote in Slate in the relatively good old Zimbabwean days of April, 2000:
Zimbabwe, the “Jewel of Africa,” has been ruined during the last decade of Mugabe’s misrule… It was not supposed to be this way. Mugabe, the last great African liberator still in power, was supposed to be Southern Africa’s savior.
Beware anyone who sets himself up to be a country’s savior, especially a Marxist.
Mugabe’s reliance on violence to consolidate his power is hardly new behavior. It goes back to the early 80s, when he slaughtered between ten and sixty thousand members of the tribe that supported his opponent Nkomo, leaving only one party standing—his. Then he changed the constitution to make it easier to keep that power:
The president gets to appoint 20 percent of legislators; only the ruling party can spend government funds on campaigns; police officers, soldiers, and civil servants must join the ruling party…
Plotz points out that the world had more tolerance for Mugabe back then, probably because he had yet to wreck his country economically with his land-grabs and because he was a staunch opponent of apartheid in neighboring South Africa. His history as a political prisoner of ten years’ duration in the 1970s under Ian Smith’s colonial government also gave him a linkage to Mandela, but their subsequent histories have been far different. Mugabe has been corrupted by power—or perhaps he was corrupt in the first place—and the course of the two countries have diverged significantly as a result.
But possibly the greatest irony of Mugabe’s vile rule is that it’s the Western post-colonial powers such as Britain who are speaking out against him, while his fellow African liberators are mostly silent or “gentle” in their chiding.
And Ian Smith, the widely-reviled final colonial head of Rhodesia and strong opponent of black rule, who insisted that Mugabe’s leadership would lead to the destruction of the country, turns out to have been, for all his flaws (and there were many), better for the country and even for its black population than the liberation hero Mugabe.
In an article in the Telegraph written on Smith’s death in November of 2007, Graham Boynton—once a staunch opponent of Smith—came to the following realizations:
Although the first 20 years of Mugabe’s rule saw a slow, somewhat even-paced decline, the calamitous collapse has been achieved in little more than half a decade, an extraordinary feat of self-destruction when one considers that it took more than a century for Ian Smith’s white antecedents to carve a modern, functioning, European-style society out of raw African bushveld.
But that has been the story of post-colonial Africa and, although this week’s obituaries will largely dismiss Smith as a colonial caricature, a novelty politician from another age, if you were to go to Harare today and ask ordinary black Zimbabweans who they would rather have as their leader—Smith or Mugabe—the answer would be almost unanimous. And it would not be Mugabe.
There is little doubt that events since Smith’s death have only solidified and intensified that feeling.
The European colonization of Africa is a sad story of exploitation and oppression along with only some of the benefits of modernization. But certain African nations have managed to make the transition to self-rule better than others, and those nations owe it to themselves and to their fellow Africans to end their protection of a thug such as Mugabe.
One refugee from Zimbabwe told me, “Mugabe likes to lecture us about how under Smith, whites ate steak while blacks ate gruel. What he is not so quick to mention, is that under Mugabe, Mugabe eats steak, the war veterans eat gruel, and everybody else eats dirt.”
The motto for all the failed progressive experiments of the last century or so has to read, as Plotz writes, “It was not supposed to be this way.”
Still, there is an achievement of sorts for Mugabe’s reign. He makes one nostalgic for Rhodesia.
One of the most interesting articles on blogs about Rhodesia is
Unqualified Reservations: The country that used to exist
Which begins:
Like all entries at Unqualified Reservations it is long, very long, if not so long as others, but it rewards patience.
In the final analysis, the best hope for Africa is the restoration of colonial rule, based on English common law – the best legal system in history of humankind. The very big problem is absence of a viable colonial project in any Western democracy. Such project can result, though, as unintended consequence of GWOT, in struggle against islamic imperialism, against piracy and in massive humanitarian interventions that can became needed to prevent mass starvation, civil wars, genocide and other types of humanitarian cathastrophes, to which Africa is so disposed to.
***Beware anyone who sets himself up to be a country’s savior, especially a Marxist.***
Hmmm, gee, I don’t know anyone offhand, say running for President of the United States, who would fit that description. Do you?
Neo, I think you’re again being a bit sloppy with your research here. The article you linked to regarding Nelson Mandela was from June 9th. Mandela has harshly criticized the Mugabe regime, as numerous news articles have reported:
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5imhcd4-O5lcDINlaAWmo1VipB_2Q
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2008/07/01/the_judgment_of_mandela/
Yes, he did stay silent for quite some time, but since he stepped down as President of South Africa he has generally kept to his promise to avoid direct criticism of his successor or of other African presidents. He wanted to move into the role of elder statesman. But Mugabe’s horrific tactics in Zimbabwe have finally pushed him to speak out.
I think it’s quite unfortunate that you speak about this issue, again, as though it is a left/right issue. Every American ought to be horrified about what is happening in Zimbabwe. This is not a liberal vs. conservative issue. Obama has condemned what is going on in Zimbabwe just as McCain has, and every other leading American politician.
Oh?
This is not even strong criticism for a diplomat, much less a small-d democrat. Here’s plainspoken cricitism: “Mugabe is the marxist version of a kleptocrat, a thug who steals the whole country and enslaves everyone, black, white, and purple. How do you find purple people? Just the way Mugabe does: take white and black people and beat them vigorously.”
You may want to go read some – ummm how to put it – unbiased history of Mandela.
Why would he criticize much of the same things he did? This is about like being shocked that if Che Guevara was alive today he wasn’t condemning it – after all he was a freedom fighter for the common people trying to make a utopia for all to live in harmony together (according to many of the very same leftist who idolize Mandela for much the same reasons).
Give me a break. Whatever his flaws, when Mandela came to power he kept his promises — a commitment to democracy, fairness to the white population in South Africa, and, most importantly, he left office peacefully when his terms of office were up. During his presidency rather than vindictiveness the country healed itself. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a model of how to recover from a brutal civil war without recriminations and revenge. South Africa was and is one of the most stable and affluent countries on the continent. I think it’s really sad that politics is so polarized in this country that some right-wing Americans can’t appreciate someone like Nelson Mandela, whose actions after taking power have been completely unlike that of Robert Mugabe.
What IS regrettable is that Mbeki is taking such a passive line towards Mugabe. I find that quite reprehensible, myself.
But this is not a left/right wing issue, as I said before. Mugabe’s opponent, Tsvangirai, is a trade union leader, whereas Mugabe comes from an upper class educated background. If anything, Mugabe represents the privileged class of Zimbabwe, and Tsvangirai the populist working class. What Mugabe is doing is beyond left vs right: it is thuggish dictatorial terror tactics, and ought to be condemned by everyone on all sides of our political spectrum. There ought to be some issues about which nearly all Americans can agree, and this is damn well one of them.
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Rhodesia did not throw off “the yoke of British colonial rule” in 1980 as it declared independence in 1965 via UDI which was based on the US Declaration of Independence. The country returned briefly to UK rule as part of the negotiations ending white rule in 1979/80.
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