Rhodesian-style apartheid

I’d been expecting something exotically different, but aside from the fact that they had television and we didn’t (South Africa’s prime minister, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, feared it would be a pernicious influence), and we had Afrikaners and they didn’t (well, just a few), there didn’t seem much to separate the two countries. The white people we met spoke in accents indistinguishable from ours and their attitudes to their country’s black majority (they called them ‘munts’) were, if anything, more stridently racist than anything I’d come across back home, and from what I could observe, the position of black people was no less under the heel than in apartheid South Africa. Those we met, were serving in kitchens, or gardens or hotels, wearing servants uniforms, and we were regularly told how well “we treat them”.
 
As I later discovered, the comparison between Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa was hardly superficial – a point I stress not because it provides any kind of excuse for Robert Mugabe’s behaviour today, but rather as an antidote to the ridiculous idea, occasional echoed by right-wingers here and in South Africa, that ‘if only we’d listened to good old Smithie things would be fine.’ In addition, it provides a backdrop to understanding some of the problems that were subsequently to emerge, not least the land issue.
 
By then, Rhodesia was a self-declared Republic (mimicking South Africa), recognised by no-one other than Pretoria (and even then, not officially). Most of the black majority, who comprised 95 percent of the population, were denied the vote and the discrimination they faced in day-to-day life mirrored that of South Africa. But most significantly, their rights were restricted to less than 50 percent of the land. Put differently, 5 percent of the population owned over half of the land, including all the best farming bits. In fact, as late as 2000 nearly 70 percent of the prime farming land was owned by around 4 000 white farmers. And, of course, they did not get it by purchase from previous owners or by being industrious or by jolly good farmers. They or their predecessors claimed it through conquest, in much the same way as the Afrikaners did in South Africa – the only difference being that most of this seizure took place in the 20^th century, some of it in living memory.
 
The history of colonial conquest in Zimbabwe began with Cecil John Rhodes’ quest for diamonds, starting in 1889. The indigenous population was made up of two tribes: the Shona majority (whose presence in Zimbabwe went back well over 1000 years) and the Ndebele (who arrived in the 1830s, fleeing the Zulu wars in Natal). The Shonas were too fragmented to put up much resistance and the Ndebele were conquered within three years. Land and cattle were seized and a hut tax was imposed – to force them to become farm labourers. When both tribes rebelled in 1896, their leaders were hanged. As in South Africa, Africans not employed as farm labourers or mine workers, were largely confined to overcrowded reserves. There was also a small freehold purchase area set aside for Africans but it was hard for them to compete – partly because white agriculture was heavily subsidised (particularly under Smith).
 

The refusal to negotiate

At several key moments the settlers had openings to ease their way to a more equitable solution. They rejected each opportunity, preferring short-sighted, racist self-interest.
 
The relatively enlightened Garfield Todd (prime minister from 1953 to 58) introduced a number of modest reforms (including trying, unsuccessfully, to legalise sexual relations between black and white). These were seen as frighteningly liberal and he was ousted by his own party. In his farewell statement he said: “We are in danger of becoming a race of fear-ridden neurotics - we who live in the finest country on earth.” He formed a new party which failed to win any seats and he was banned, placed under house arrest and imprisoned.
 
In 1962 the Rhodesian Front came to power, soon to be headed by the ultra-right Smith, whose platform was one of rejecting the British policy of majority rule. One of his first major acts as prime minister was to imprison the leadership of both African nationalist groups – the largely Shona-based Zanu (including Mugabe, who was imprisoned for 10 years) and the Ndebele-based Zapu. When Smith declared UDI, Harold Wilson concluded he couldn’t send in troops because it would be too unpopular at home and there was a risk of the British forces refusing to put down the white colonials. Instead, in talks held in December 1966 and October 1968, the British offered Smith terms that would have ensured a gradual transition to majority rule. Backed by South Africa, Smith dismissed these offers, insisting there’d never be majority rule in his lifetime, and was re-elected with an increased mmajority.
 
The result was the bush war, led by the military forces of Zanu and the Zapu (which jointly became known as the Patriotic Front), to which the Rhodesian forces responded with increasing barbarity, including large-scale civilian massacres and routine torture. The Patriotic Front committed numerous attrocities of their own and the war quickly escalated in viciousness. When it was over, more than 30 000 people had lost their lives.
 
War does horrible things to people’s minds and I saw these up close in my first year at the University of Cape Town in 1979. The Rhodesian students came in two groups – those who’d served in the military, many of whom had been exposed to attrocities, and those studying to avoid military service, who, if anything, were more overtly racist and beligerent because they needed to over-compensate. Their all-weather style of dress included under-sized boxer shorts, flip-flops and T-shirts with slogans like, ‘The Rhodesians are coming!’, complete with pictures of wide-eyed, terrified black people fleeing triumphant white people, and they strutted around in a spirit of insular defiance. In my school years I had come across my share of overt racism, but nothing in comparison with the filth dished out by this lot – aggressive, unbending, right-wing extremism, sometimes accompanied by violence. I remember, for example, when Zanu won the February 1980 election, one prominent Rhodesian student leader randomly picked on a black man outside the main student pub and beat him up. I guess part of the reason for this behaviour was the dim realisation that they were in the end game – that their position in the world, their lifestyle, their dreams were about to be obliterated – but in that final year of white rule many of them were living in denial.
 

Lancaster House

In the end, with Rhodesia in a state of near-collapse, Smith was forced to the negotiate – a move prompted by the combination of the failure of his forces to quell the resistance, the crippling effect of international sanctions and South Africa’s decision to pull the plug on his regiime (a move that started under Vorster, as part of his bid to curry favour with his policy of ‘détente’ with ‘moderate’ African leaders). The British-hosted Lancaster House talks delivered majority rule with one significant gap – for ten years 20 percent of the seats in parliament were reserved for whites (who, by then, represented just 4 percent of the population). In addition the British and American governments offered to buy land from whites not prepared to accept reconciliation, although both fell well-short of their promises in this regard.
 
Anyway, within the student left we broadly supported the Patriotic Front, but the position put forward by our leaders, emanating from the ANC, was that it was Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu rather than Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, which deserved the spoils. The reason for this related entirely to political alliances. Both Zapu and the ANC were backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, with the result that a close alliance developed. For example, the first post-Rivonia guerrilla activity of the Umkhonto we Sizwe (the ANC’s military wing) was a joint operation with Zapu in 1967, known as the Wankie Campaign. Zanu, on the other hand, was backed by China and had an alliance with the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), the ANC’s putative rival. However, Zanu-PF had three big advantages over Zapu: first, it was based largely among the Shonas who represented about 80 percent of the black population; second, they did the bulk of the serious fighting; third it was led by Mugabe who was far more dynamic, intelligent and ruthless than the plump patrician Nkomo. The result was that Zanu-PF won 63 percent of the vote on the Common Role and Zapu 24 percent– an outcome that disappointed the ANC.
 

Visit no. 2: the newly liberated Zim

I visited Zimbabwe for the second time in December 1980, as part of a leftwing student delegation from the University of Cape Town. We re-formed something called the Africa Society and set off in a university kombi to tour the country and produce a comprehensive report on developments there. In the course of this month-long trip (during which I was recruited to the ANC underground) we covered thousands of miles of territory, meeting government notables including cabinet ministers, Zanu-PF party organisers, church leaders, peasant farms, settlements for war veterans, beer halls, markets, tourist sites and so on. There were, however, a few more ominous signs – such as an unannounced visit by two Zanu-PF security and intelligence officials when we were meeting with a Zapu notable. But generally we came away with a naively positive impression and tentatively concluded that the country might just be beginning a ‘transition to socialism’.
 

ANC misgivings

Over the next decade I visited Zimbabwe eight more times (usually for a week or two)  – to report back to the ANC leadership, receive further instruction, undergo training and to carry money, codes and information back to South Africa. Despite the tension inherent in this role, I always felt relaxed there – the wide open spaces, the friendliness of the people, the relative lack of crime and the sense of being in a ‘liberated zone’. Harare, in particular, had a vibrant feel – filled with NGO and United Nations staffers, South African military exiles (escaping conscription), ANC operatives, foreign correspondents and the like – and without paying close attention, it was easy to gain the impression of a country that was thriving.
 
The ANC regional leadership in Harare, however, were less sanguine. They complained about constant surveillance from Zimbabwe intelligence, about the harassment and worse faced by their Zapu counterparts, and some of them complained about restrictions on freedom of the press (including the nationalisation of the Herald newspaper) repression of trades unions, strike breaking and, more generally, about Mugabe’s monopolisation of power and the corruption this was generating, along with his anti-democratic tendencies. The Zimbabwe government permitted the ANC to retain a political presence there, but not to engage in any military-related activities, although, within limits, the ANC found ways to circumvent some of these restrictions. Overall, it was clear that relations between Oliver Tambo’s ANC and Robert Mugabe’s Zanu tended towards the frosty.
 

Matabeleland massacre

The ruthlessness displayed by Mugabe in crushing a rival source of power should have come as no surprise. Back in the mid-1970s, when Mugabe was consolidating power within Zanu after his release from prison, some of his opponents simply disappeared, others were murdered and his operatives were blamed for bombing a rival printing press and assaulting critical journalists. His attitude to opposition was shown more clearly through the massacres committed by his forces against Zapu rebels in Matabeleland between 1982 and 1987. Led by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, his forces moved into the area and killed thousands of Zapu members and suspected supporters, including many civilians  (the precise number is not known), some in public executions, others burned alive in their huts. Thousands more were beaten and tortured. Eventually, the defeated Nkomo was forced into a unity accord and Zapu dissolved into Zanu, removing the final, viable source of political opposition.
 

Reform in the 1980s

In the late 1980s, the ANC moved its underground command structure into South Africa (through the Operation Vula cell network), which meant I no longer needed to take the risk of regular trips to Zimbabwe and I stopped paying attention. The news of the Matabeleland massacres left a bad taste in the mouths of Harare-based ANC leaders, but it was under-reported internationally, and soon forgotten by all of those unaffected. The general impression was that despite Mugabe’s shortcomings, the country was an African success story.
 
A reader of this blog who lived for many years in Zimbabwe recently wrote to me in some detail about developments in Zimbabwe, encouraging me to look again at the period when I had lost interest. As he pointed out, despite Mugabe’s intolerance of dissent, and despite the continued control of business and agriculture by whites, the 1980s saw a series of reforms of a genuinely progressive nature, including a large-scale expansion of education, better and more extensive primary health care, support for small-scale African farmers and significant improvements in women’s rights (they were legal minors until 1980). The economy was growing and expectations were raised.
 

IMF & World Bank approval

But as my correspondent illustrated, at the turn of the decade, it changed. The collapse of the Soviet Union and consequent de-regulation of the world economy put huge pressure on Zimbabwe’s highly regulated and protectionist system, with its restrictions on foreign currency, stiff import tariffs and price controls. At the same time, the black elite were becoming frustrated by their failure to join the super-rich in significant numbers. The response of the government to these pressures was to de-regulate under a policy dubbed Economic Structural Adjustment. Price controls were phased out, taxes cut, the import of foreign goods eased and the government’s commitment to health and education reduced. So while business was booming in Harare, conditions in the rural areas and among the urban working class were rapidly deteriorating. School enrolment plummeted (largely the result of school fees), health care deteriorated alarmingly and unemployment rocketed. These developments, incidentally, greatly pleased the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which declared Zimbabwe to be a ‘model economy’. But by the late 1990s the deterioration in living conditions, prompted at least in part by these ‘free market reforms’ was reaching crisis proportions, and Mugabe was facing a pincer effect of pressures from two sides.
 
Buying favour
 
On the one hand he maintained his ability to crush opposition by buying off key players on an ever-increasing scale. These included his security apparatus (particularly the generals and other senior officers the army, police, intelligence services), his cabinet members and other MPs, the bureaucracy and large swathes of the aspirant black business establishment. And to this I should add the avariciousness of his own extended family and, in particularly, the extraordinary greed of Grace Marufu, a young woman (40 years his junior) who became his secretary, mistress, mother of two of his children and later, his second wife. These people gave him absolute loyalty and became reliant on his patronage. In many cases this appears to have involved huge sums of money squirreled away in foreign bank accounts. Aside from the culture of corruption this patronage encouraged, it also prompted the hyper-inflation that was soon to take hold. As the list of clients and their demands for money grew, so did the government’s temptation to go for short-term solutions – like simply printing more money.

The War Veterans

On the other hand Zanu-PF faced significant pressures from below. To a limited extent this came from the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (whose secretary general was Morgan Tsvangirai) but more importantly from the war veterans, who had been ignored and sidelined by Mugabe for the first 15 years of independence. He basically bought them off by dipping deeply into the budgets of his own ministries to pay them lump sums and lifetime pensions, thereby further exacerbating the inflationary pressures within the economy. And whatever was left was devoted to pursuing a futile military campaign in the Congo.
 
So by the late 1990s, Mugabe economic policy was reduced to plundering state resources, and when that reached its limits, he allowed the seizure of white-owned farms. While this was publicly justified in terms of righting historical wrongs in terms of land distribution (and particularly by the failure of Britain to fund the redistribution of land), it was, in reality, a cynical move that had been rejected for the previous two decades, and it prompted the virtual collapse of the vital agricultural component of the economy. The War Veterans, which had once been a commendable group with legitimate grievances, were transformed into Mugabe’s farm-seizing, opposition-crushing shock troops: basically, armed groups of thugs, many of whom were born long after the war of independence ended. It was in this context, of plundered state resources and rapidly rising inflation that the ZCTU and later the MDC (led by Tsvangirai) finally broke with Zanu-PF and began to challenge Mugabe’s power, eventually defeating him at the ballot box, leading to the current crisis, where the consequences of ceding power to the winners were viewed as too drastic for his acolytes to contemplate. 
 

Mugabe’s personality deficiencies

In all this Mugabe’s personality was hugely significant. Even in a democracy with multiple, competing sites of power, the person at the top can have a disproportionate influence on history (if Al Gore rather than W Bush had been awarded the 2000 election, there would have been no war in Iraq; if John Smith hadn’t had a heart attack Britain wouldn’t have followed suit). But in Zimbabwe this was amplified by the fact that all power was channelled to and from Mugabe. In the Smith era, the main source of opposition outside the Patriotic Front, came through the commendable role played by the Catholic church. But there were few other strong sources of organisation from within civil society and most of these were crushed or compromised during the first 20 years of Mugabe’s power. So Mugabe’s weaknesses were hugely significant and were magnified the longer he remained in power.  Prodigiously intelligent (seven university degrees), he was also deeply paranoid, and profoundly narcissistic. He came to see himself as the embodiment of his nation. Where once his goal had been to improve the lot of his people, it shifted to a goal merely of retaining power at all costs – a goal encouraged by his minions because their own hold on power depended entirely on that of their patron. In the end (and at 84 he is, surely, near the end) he became an Idi Amin figure, whose every move deepened the crisis faced by his desperate people.
 

Mbeki’s folly

Idi Amin was removed from power by the intervention of Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere. Robert Mugabe could have been removed from power by the intervention of South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki. But unlike Nyerere, Mbeki will not go down as one of the continent’s great leaders. The disastrous failure of his policies on Zimbabwe matches his folly on Aids and crime and corruption (and is one of the reasons why I argued in a previous blog that for all his many sins, Jacob Zuma is a less worse option than Mbeki as ANC leader).  Out of naked self-interest Vorster and PW Botha forced Ian Smith to the negotiating table, helping to end 90 years of colonial and minority rule.  Through economic pressure, diplomatic arm twisting, and support for the opposition, Mbeki had it within his power to force Mugabe into an internationally monitored democratic election several years before the current debacle. Instead, he insisted on what was euphemistically termed ‘quiet diplomacy’, which amounted to very little and was accompanied by standing ovations for Mugabe at ANC events. As a result South Africa has been flooded with, according to some estimates, two million refugees, exacerbating South Africa’s own problems with unemployment, crime and poverty and putting huge additional pressures on its public services.
 
So why has the famously stubborn Mbeki persisted with this palpably wrong-headed policy? I have heard many attempts at justification, but the only argument that convinces me is that, when it comes down to it, he cannot stomach the idea of the MDC coming to power on his watch. Despite its origins within the trades union movement, the fact that the MDC has strong white and foreign support, prompts a perception that it is the cat’s paw for the old regime – for a return to white, colonial power. Zanu-PF might have been the historical ally of the PAC, and on strained terms with the ANC, but it won power through a liberation struggle. The MDC is something different and I suspect that when the likes of Mbeki look at it they can’t help thinking of the South Africa’s white-based Democratic Alliance on the one hand, and on the other, of an independent opposition movement based around the Congress of South African Trades Unions, and they shrink away in horror, and think, better the devil you know.
 
Whatever happens in Zimbabwe over the next few months and years – and as we saw in South Africa between 1990 and 1994, the death rattle of a doomed regime can take thousands of people down with it – it will clearly take decades for the country to recover from Mugabe kleptocracy. Frankly, I don’t have a great deal of faith in the vacillating, frequently dishonest and strategically inept Morgan Tsvangirai to put things right, although at this stage anyone would be preferable to Mugabe and his brutally corrupt cohorts.
 

South Africa: the next Zimbabwe?

A question I am frequently asked is whether South Africa will ‘go the way of Zimbabwe’? In trying to answer this, I suppose I should start by acknowledging there are similarities between the two countries. These include neo-liberal economic policies of the kind that set the scene for the disasters of Zimbabwe’s last decade, an emerging comprador culture where black business advancement is frequently linked, directly or indirectly, to connections with government and the state and where several political leaders have accumulated fortunes through political access, and a process of land redistribution that has been tardy in the extreme. There are also some areas where South Africa is significantly worse off, most notably in the state’s failure to provide health services, education (in particular) and welfare services on anything approaching the levels provided by Zimbabwe in the 1980s, but also in levels of violent crime, which erode the fabric of society.
 
However, the factors in South Africa’s favour seem more significant. Unlike Zimbabwe, the rich fabric of civil society effectively provides alternative centres of power. South Africa’s trades union movement has a strong, deep democratic tradition – in stark contrast to the ZCTU, whose first general secretary, appointed by the government, was Mugabe’s brother. The country has a progressive constitution and a judicial system that, so far, has been prepared to uphold it against government interests. Despite the SABC reverting to the role of His Master’s Voice role, the press remains free and independent. And there are several other sources of influence including the churches and universities. Even within the ANC, the tradition of dissent, while heavily compromised in many areas, is stronger than ever existed within Zanu. It might be argued that Mbeki shares several personal traits with Mugabe (prodigious intelligence, profound paranoia, disturbing egotism), but his defeat in the ANC elections suggests that dictatorial instincts are not allowed to go unchecked.  In addition, South Africa is a centre of international interest and investment in a way that Zimbabwe never was, and this imposes limits on its leaders. For instance, just at the Olympics is placing China in the international spotlight, so the World Cup will do with South Africa.
 
None of this guarantees the future of democracy in South Africa. If the economic situation further deteriorates, to the point where large numbers of people are starving, and if ANC was to face a genuine threat of losing power through the ballot box, the temptation to short-circuit the process might prove overwhelming, but for the moment the differences with Zimbabwe seem rather more significant than the similarities.
 

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