Sunday, June 29, 2008By Tom McGurk
The political and social crisis engulfing Zimbabwe represents the awful reality of a continent left behind by the rest of the world.
It was certainly not the sort of 90th birthday present Nelson Mandela wanted last Friday; the elephant at the party was clearly Robert Mugabe’s re-election in Zimbabwe.
Indeed, given that the world was contemplating the changed political landscape over Mandela’s nine decades, could the contrast be greater between the legacies of the two figures central to the end of white colonial rule in southern Africa at the end of the 20th century -Mandela and Mugabe?
Seemingly only after widespread international criticism, given his international status, was Mandela finally moved last Wednesday to say something about the growing Zimbabwean political and humanitarian crisis. For months now, his silence has been deafening, if not puzzling.
In the end, while he eventually criticised the killing of Africans, he didn’t even name Mugabe. Nor, in the face of international impatience, have either South African president Thabo Mbeki or the country’s main political party, the ANC, condemned Mugabe. But there are reasons for this, to which I will return later.
It is easy to forget now, but when Mugabe first strode out of the final settlement agreed at the Lancaster House conference in London in 1980, he was seen as the ‘great black hope’ for Africa. Educated (mostly by Irish Jesuits), sophisticated, intelligent and powerfully articulate, Mugabe impressed all who came across him.
As Zimbabwe, against so many expectations, moved with an almost faultless democratic process from white minority to black majority rule, South Africa was constantly reminded to look northwards to its neighbours to see how it could be done.
It is hard to imagine now that, in the first years of the Zanu (Zimbabwe African National Union) government, large numbers of whites - who had fled to South Africa after the unilateral declaration of independence by Rhodesia - returned to live.
I met some of them in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare in the late 1980s, and it was remarkable to hear them talking about how they preferred Zimbabwe’s black majority rule to apartheid South Africa.
They were proud of what they then affectionately called ‘Zim’, and were determined to make the new state work. Their greatest fear at the time was for their children, and what sort of future they would have in the new society.
In retrospect, it was a heady political moment for millions across the world who passionately believed in the creation of a new African democracy out of the relics of the old colonial continent. There, we thought, in that land between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers, a remarkable postcolonial experiment was succeeding.
Zimbabwe was important, not just because of its wider political significance, but also because of the many links between Ireland and that part of Africa.
The missionary link, particularly in the fields of education and health care, was a century old, and many families from Ireland had settled there down the centuries.
In an act not unlike what happened when Zimbabwe itself emerged from history after independence, large numbers of Anglo-Irish people left Ireland in the 1920s to settle in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia.
Of course, historically and culturally for us - as an English-speaking white race which experienced colonisation - there was always an instinctive understanding of the African experience.
Indeed, just like Irish history across the centuries, land ownership has precipitated Zimbabwe’s current crisis. Creating European-style democracies in Africa is one thing, but attempting, within the judicial limitations imposed by that society, to change the inevitable economic consequences of generations of colonisation is quite another.
In fact, the crisis of land ownership has plagued civilisation ever since the French Revolution - ask the native Americans or Russia’s collective farmers.
By the late 1990s, in the face of the economic failures of the black majority government to make a radical difference to the lives of the millions of the poor, Mugabe began to use the land issue as a political weapon. Blaming former colonisers and white land-owning farmers became the panacea for his failures.
The parallel crisis brought about by AIDS and hyperinflation did not help, and Mugabe began to use the land question as a method of buying the allegiance of his most powerful followers and switching the political spotlight onto his former colonial enemies. What was once the breadbasket of southern Africa quickly began to experience famine.
One statistic perhaps says everything about the extent of Mugabe’s political failure; male life expectancy in Zimbabwe has declined from60 to 37 years since 1960. It’s now the lowest in the world.
As this crisis deepens, it is important to remember that the ANC’s failure publicly to condemn Mugabe is, in itself, a measure of its prescience at how quickly it senses its own political honeymoon in South Africa ending.
Already, the ANC is facing allegations of political corruption. Critics claim black majority rule has merely produced a new black middle-class, and that the economic lives of millions in South Africa remain largely unchanged since minority rule.
Even more critically, what better than the fate of Mugabe to remind the ANC of how seminal the historical subtexts are, given that land ownerships patterns in both South Africa and Zimbabwe are analogous. They might well be thinking of Mugabe, that ‘there but for the grace of God (or even Mandela) go we’. South Africa’s next president after Mbeki will almost certainly be Jacob Zuma - already a controversial figure. Could he become a Mugabe in his time?
Long gone are the days of high expectation for European-style democracies as the simple solution to the crisis of colonial rule in Africa. As one African state after another plunges into economic, social and political disaster, the history of post-colonisation is clearly still being written.
The reality is that living standards and life expectancy in Africa today are lower than in colonial times. Mugabe’s vicious civil war is only the latest chapter in a post-colonial African history that comprises of one depressing chapter after another.
One wonders whether it was another manifestation of our colonial mentalities when we thought the creation of democratic societies - which took three painful and bloody centuries in Europe - could be achieved in Africa almost overnight.
Now, with the ending of the Cold War, the entire African continent has slipped from the super-power strategic radar. Africa has been left to the tender mercies of its failed political leaderships and international charity.
In the meantime, at least you can sign a petition to Mbeki and other African leaders to move against Mugabe, by logging on toAvaaz.org. Currently,145,000 have signed. Please join them.
