Zimbabwe by book: The good, the bad and the dire
11 Nov 2011 00:00 - Percy Zvomuya
On the 46th anniversary of Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence, Percy Zvomuya surveys three books about Zimbabwe.
At the Deep End by Morgan Tsvangirai (Penguin)
Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter by Wilfred Mhanda (Weaver Press)
Mugabe and the White African by Ben Freeth (Zebra Press)
One might take it as a sign of approaching normality in Zimbabwe that activists and politicians are taking a break from fighting President Robert Mugabe to sit down and write autobiographies and memoirs.
Most notable is Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who worked with his spokesperson and ghostwriter T William Bango on a 550-page autobiography, At the Deep End.
It is a text that should have been half its size—the first few hundred pages are forgettable. The book lights up around 1999, the year the MDC was formed, which is about chapter 10.
So, if you are pressed for time, skip the first 200 pages. I assure you, you are not missing much.
All right, what’s covered between pages one and 200? It’s a social history of Zimbabwe, the subregion and the world through Tsvangirai’s eyes. But who really wants to view the world through his eyes? Tsvangirai writes about the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal that resulted in independence in Mozambique and the guerrilla war against Ian Smith’s government gleaned from the “avid” reading of Rhodesian newspapers.
Then there are Robert Mugabe’s early years and he even throws in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The result of this is, at times, unfortunate and unschooled. For instance, writing about the relations between Pretoria and Harare in the 1980s, Tsvangirai says: “He [Mugabe] played into Pretoria’s hands by adopting an aggressive stance and the entire nation paid as a result.”
What was Mugabe supposed to do? Engage in sweet pillow talk with apartheid South Africa so soon after Mugabe, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) had been generously hosted by Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania and Samora Machel’s Mozambique?
Tsvangirai also criticises Mugabe for sending Zimbabwean troops to Mozambique in the early 1980s to help fight the apartheid-sponsored Renamo insurgency. That operation can’t be compared with Zimbabwe’s questionable participation in the late 1990s war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance.
Mugabe, eschewing Durban as a port, had to help secure access to the Indian Ocean via the port of Beira. “The operation in Mozambique cost Zimbabwe an average Z$2-million a day when the economy could hardly sustain it; nor were there any benefits from such extravagance, apart from giving Mugabe the political mileage he needed as a donor and powerful regional leader.
Wooden prose
“I was born a few months before the white settler administration formed the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland,” Tsvangirai writes in the first chapter of a book, which can be read as a social anthropological study of life in Zimbabwe after World War II. By page 24, I was struggling to get into its mostly dense, wooden (apologies to all the trees out there) prose. There is an explanation of sorts on page 24: “Although I was extremely competent with figures, arithmetic and mathematics, I had difficulties with both spoken and written English.”
Then there are the strange sentences and weird thought processes. What, for instance, does the following mean? “People felt their former liberators were now preying on them, riding roughshod over basic graciousness after having fallen hard into the trappings of power, ambition and avarice.”
Or this: “Zimbabweans live in a world dominated by symbols. In fact, symbolism is so deeply embedded in our culture that it can be seen as second nature.” Which people don’t value symbols and symbolism?
“My life was destined to be closely interwoven with political, economic and social changes in Zimbabwe.” I don’t know what this means. I could understand it if Mugabe or one of the nationalists said it, but as Tsvangirai joined Zanu-PF at independence in 1980, its meaning is not immediately clear.
Tsvangirai’s liberation war CV is sparse, involving attending “several secret political meetings at which black people sought to assure themselves that Zimbabwe was destined for freedom”.
Early on in the book he gives us a reason why, unlike some young men of his age, he did not go to the bush to join other guerrillas. “Perhaps I would have become a political activist but my parents needed financial help to support the other children through school.”
To people who are not from the subregion, this might sound like pointless nostalgia, but the liberation war is a big deal in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. It’s not a coincidence that where the liberation movements have been voted out, for instance in Zambia and Malawi, wars were not waged to push for independence.
Flawed arguments
Tsvangirai’s nostalgia for the liberation war recalls what Zimbabwe’s generals told him in 2000—we won’t allow you to take power even if you win the elections. It was a message repeated by Constantine Chiwenga, Zimbabwean military supremo, who said a few years ago: “I would not hesitate to go on record again on behalf of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces to disclose that we would not welcome any change of government that carries the label ‘Made in London’, and whose sole aim is to defeat the gains of the liberation struggle.”
I have no space to point out the holes in Tsvangirai’s argument that “the social agenda that Mugabe had pursued from independence faltered under ESAP [an International Monetary Fund-prescribed neoliberal policy], with devastating results.”
Mugabe was able to expand social services, education and infrastructure originally meant to cater for a few hundred thousand whites. Even after a decade of decline, Zimbabwe was last year listed by the United Nations as the most literate country in Africa. Love him or hate him, that’s part of Mugabe’s legacy.
So what new details does this autobiography put in the open? That former president Thabo Mbeki was “financing the Ncube group to destabilise the MDC”, thus the splitting of the MDC into two factions—Tsvangirai’s and that led by university man Welshman Ncube.
Tsvangirai also traces the roots of the anti-intellectualism in the MDC. “If the political project was to succeed, I told myself, it had to be led by ordinary workers, peasants ... not theorists, but doers”. Being one doesn’t preclude being the other; Mugabe is a classic example. He’s very erudite and is a man of action (some would say too much action).
One of the problems that faced the MDC after a few years in existence was its lack of ideological cohesion. Apart from being opposed to Mugabe, one was sometimes not sure what the MDC’s vision for Zimbabwe entailed. But Tsvangirai writes that the MDC was “even more ideological” than the ruling party. “Zanu-PF was just a nationalist movement whose agenda ended with independence in 1980.” Just a nationalist movement?
Tsvangirai writes about the perception that the MDC is a front for the West. “While trying to rescue the white farmers, London created an impression that the MDC was its vehicle for regime change.” It’s not clear whether this impression has gone away because people who dislike Mugabe and Zanu-PF will still tell you that they find the MDC’s positions wishy-washy. Still, Tsvangirai insists, “for all the Zanu-PF hype, neither Zimbabwean whites nor Britain influenced the MDC and me in any way”.
Savage attacks
If you like to see blood, Tsvangirai uses his lance to get at his rivals. About Ncube, he writes: “I had spent the better part of my tenure babysitting some of my highly unpopular colleagues, including Ncube.” He notes that Ncube is a “superb boardroom idealist but lacks a popular or grassroots insights”. These politicians insisted that “I should never address a meeting alone. They all wanted to be where I was, especially at mass rallies, in order to benefit from my personal political brand.”
About Arthur Mutambara, the man invited from South Africa to head the Ncube faction of the MDC, Tsvangirai says: “After perusing a copy of his inaugural speech I realised that one could pass a university and still come out unfinished as a human being.” He describes Mutambara (holder of an Oxford doctorate in robotics) as a “politically illiterate newcomer” and a “lay intellectual”.
Tsvangirai is, obviously, a brave man, conscious of his abilities and pulling power. He is, perhaps, the most illustrious hero of the democratic cause.
Yet he uses the “I” voice in places you would expect him to speak in the collective “we”. Writing about the delay in the release of election results in 2008, he writes: “I was positive that if I had won control of the legislature, there was no way I could have lost the presidency.” And there are other instances of this arrogant “I” voice, as in “finally I had dismantled the monolith to its last pebble”.
What about the contributions of the hundreds who died for the democratic cause and the thousands who were tortured?
At other times he speaks about himself in the third person: “Given Mugabe’s fiery rhetoric and his deep personal hatred for Morgan Tsvangirai ” (Mutambara also does this quite a lot.) I think that’s part of the problem with Zimbabwe now, how everything revolves around Mugabe.
When I told a close friend who has worked in Zimbabwe’s civil society for decades that I wanted to give her a copy of the biography as a Christmas present, she said I should rather get her Julian Barnes’s Man Booker-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending. When I pressed her further that, as an activist, she should read At the Deep End, she said Tsvangirai shoud have written more than one paragraph on the National Constitutional Assembly and also mentioned Tawandah Mutasa and Deprose Muchena. (Muchena is briefly mentioned; Mutasa is not.)
Strange turns of phrases
My friend asked: “Does he finally come out on his polygamous situation?” No, he doesn’t, instead portraying himself as a single parent following the 2009 death in a motor vehicle accident of his wife, Susan, whom he describes as “my pillar and holistic stabiliser”.
Tsvangirai has such strange turns of phrases. On page 542, he writes: “I wish to acknowledge the lack of space in this memoir for me to go into detail about my new experience in the changed political arena.” I wrote in the margin: “No, Morgan, you had over 500 pages to do this.”
In contrast, Wilfred Mhanda’s 300-page autobiography, Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter, is one of the most important works to come out of Zimbabwe. It has authority because it was written by a senior combatant, a liberation war aristocrat, once a member of the high command of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (Zanla), which was the armed wing of Zanu.
In an arena where war credentials are important Mhanda’s CV is sterling. He went to high school at Dadaya, the institution founded by New Zealand-born missionary and former prime minister of Rhodesia, Sir Garfield Todd. Todd was accorded the title mwana wevhu (son of the soil) and billed as the “rallying cry of African nationalism”.
From early on Mhanda wanted to be a politician. Among the most treasured gifts he got from his parents were Ndabaningi Sithole’s tome African Nationalism and a transistor radio (to younger readers, that was the iPhone of its day).
A bright student, Mhanda was accepted in 1971 at the then University of Rhodesia for a bachelor of science degree, majoring in zoology, botany and chemistry. While there he joined the university’s underground Zanu branch. After taking part in protests, he was arrested. He skipped bail and went to Botswana, before proceeding to Tanzania for military training.
Multifaceted account
Mhanda’s account is part war diary, part scholarly tome, part insider/outsider account of one of the most interesting episodes in Zanu history. The book is so authoritative that, not a few times, he disputes what other nationalists, historians and scholars have put out. He was one of the chief protagonists when nationalists such as Mugabe and Edgar Tekere were locked up in Rhodesian prisons and when Josiah Tongogara, Zanla’s supremo, was in detention in Zambia following the suspicious death of lawyer and Zanu chairman Herbert Chitepo.
Mhanda’s book is a clever critique of the uniform nationalist historiography (“patriotic history”, as British historian Terence Ranger called it) that has become staple since 2000, sometimes known as Mugabeism.
Some of the information might not be of interest to the general reader but would be to scholars of that period. For the general reader, what’s noteworthy is the rise of Mugabe. He wasn’t well known in the training camps in Mgagao, Tanzania. “At the time we knew nothing about Mugabe except for the fact that he was the party’s secretary general.” Rugare Gumbo, one of the few guerrillas who knew him, “spoke highly of him and described him as articulate”.
When Mozambique gained independence in 1975, Zanla moved to the east. When Machel asked them to submit a list of their political leaders, Mugabe topped it. Mhanda writes that “Machel leapt from his chair in disgust. He was clearly not happy that we had included Mugabe, let alone as the leader.” Mugabe was then living in exile in Quelimane, on the Mozambican coast. “He loves the limelight,” Machel said prophetically about Mugabe.
“We lived to regret the day we had put forward Mugabe’s name,” writes the man who later spent three years in a Mozambican prison for his dis-agreements with Mugabe, who was taking control of Zanla at the time.
Selective amnesia
Mhanda is strange bedfellows with Ben Freeth, in whose company he travels to the west of Zimbabwe in a section of Freeth’s Mugabe and the White African.
“Deeply moving” and “fascinating”, writes Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the foreword to the book. As I read Freeth, however, I wondered how much of the memoir the bishop had read. It’s about the struggles of the British-born farmer fighting off war veterans, thugs and politicians who are after his farm.
[At Mount Carmel's 12,000 hectares, you say 'farmers', I say landlord. - MrK]
The most maddening feature of the book is its amnesia about the genesis of the Zimbabwe crisis. “In Zimbabwe none of the white exploiters will be allowed to keep a single acre of their land,” the book declares on page seven. “From 1973 to 1979, 320 white farmers were murdered. This counted for more than the total number of white civilian deaths over that whole period.”
Why the farmers are being killed is never explained. Freeth doesn’t mention the 50 000 blacks who died in the same period. It’s almost as if apropos of nothing black “terrorists” (his word) started killing white farmers.
Ghost of Ian Smith
The book is written in the spirit of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence announced by the late Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, on November 11 1965. When Britain was “granting” independence to its colonies in the 1960s, Smith unilaterally declared independence from Britain.
The ghost of Smith suffuses every page of Freeth’s book—so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if Smith’s brood argued for a share of the royalties.
Early on in the book Freeth tells us about his encounters with “tribesmen” in Ethiopia, “terrorists” killing the whites. The traditional healer is a “witch doctor”. On a visit to a white-run farm, Freeth is impressed by the commercial operation, “an oasis of irrigated crops and productivity”. In contrast the black-populated areas are “dry and barren”, even though both sections receive the same amount of rainfall.
The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, the cornerstone of laws that began the impoverishment of black people, is written of affectionately. The law was meant for the “security of tenure” it provided, argues Freeth.
“Contrary to the repetitious propaganda, every serious farmer knows that land in these communal areas can be made to produce every bit as well as other land in Zimbabwe,” Freeth writes of the rocky, infertile land to which black people were driven by Rhodesian administrations.
Freeth, who is an evangelical Christian, quotes the Bible so liberally that at some point I had to check whether his book was put out by a religious publisher. But his idea of Christianity is one with no empathy for others except his fellow “white Africans”. The Munhumutapa dynasty, whose seat was at Great Zimbabwe, is described as one of “master pillager[s]” and “dictator[s] of the time”. Freeth and his Christian God seems to care only about white people.
The black men’s traditions are “evil practices” and even animals are not spared. The crocodile, Mugabe’s totemic animal, is described as “ugly and evil-looking”. Can’t a crocodile be allowed to be, well, a crocodile? “When I think of African tyrants, I think of the crocodile, because crocodiles are absolute tyrants.” The continent is in a big mess because “the spirit of the crocodile has been roused by many of its leaders”. I will admit that African leaders have messed up but we have to factor in the centuries of colonial rapine and plunder.
[Which continues to this day - every year $1 trillion leaves Africa in raw materials and precious and industrial metals, unpaid for, no taxes levied, and no dividends shared. The processes thatallow this theft are called neocolonialsm, because they continue the colonial economy with frontmen ('dictators' and elected heads of government) instead of governors and viceroys. Instead of the British and other colonial armies, there are the IMF/World Bank and their financial manipulation, and NATO and sometimes conventional former colonial armies as enforcers. - MrK]
Lawless Africa
Before the advent of the white man, the land was a “place of insecurity and hunger and escaping from invading, looting tribes”, Freeth writes. This is another way of saying that before the white man’s arrival Africa was formless and without order, with no history. Freeth also writes about the first Chimurenga, a war that involved “attacks on the white people”. There is no mention of the dispossession that preceded that heroic struggle.
Freeth’s narrative of dispossession and legal fights is, to be sure, touching and heroic. He stoically fights off an assortment of hoodlums and politicians. After being rebuffed by Zimbabwean courts, he took his case to the Southern African Development Community regional court in Windhoek. The court ruled that “white people could be African”.
If they so wish, whites can be black, too. The American liberation theologian James H Cone argued that “to be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind and your body are where the dispossessed are”. It is never about pigmentation.
Labels: BEN FREETH, BOOKS, RHODESIA
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COMMENT - This book review is very revealing with respects to for instance eugenic thought in colonial (Kenyan) literature, especially from the writer of "Flame Trees Of Thika".
Race and Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya, Chloe Campbell, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006, ISBN: 9780719071607; 214pp.; Price: £50.00
Reviewer: Professor Barbara Bush (review no. 632)
Sheffield Hallam University
Before the 1980s, the powerful link between empire and race was marginalised in British imperial history. The postcolonial 'turn' opened up new ways of exploring racial constructions of colonised subjects and stimulated debate over the extent to which representations of the colonised in colonial discourse underpinned imperial power.
In Race and Empire, based on an AHRB/C-funded research project, Chloe Campbell, who now works in publishing, reverts to a more conventional approach in her rigorous and detailed analysis of the Kenyan eugenics movement during the inter-war years. Her key aim is to redress the neglect of imperial eugenic movements through a case study of Kenya, tracing the 'transportation and mutation of British eugenic thought as it moved through the imperial conceptual network' (p. 3).
The British eugenics movement, she argues, was the 'intellectual mother ship' for the Kenyan movement (p. 11). In the 1930s, however, the British Eugenics Society (founded in 1926) sought to distance itself from the Kenyan eugenicists. This was prompted by Nazi racism and by the growing momentum of attacks on what was now regarded as 'unfashionable' racial science, from the left and biologists such as Lancelot Hogben and Julian Huxley, that emphasised environment over genes and heredity. In the wider context, this reflected the deepening gulf between Kenyan settler society and the metropole over the question of African rights.
The Kenyan Society for the Study of Race Improvement (KSSRI) was founded in 1933. Its members were mostly urban professionals and government officers eager to form what was seen as an 'intellectual movement' (p. 6). The immediate context was the Depression that reached its peak in the early 1930s and affected the Kenyan economy, and the British government's rejection of settler demands for political control as a result of the Hilton Young Commission, 1929. Eugenics took root in the Kenyan medical profession, argues Campbell, partly because it promised 'rational, biological solutions to perceived problems ... of African development' (p. 69).
There were, however, splits in the Kenya colonial service between those who were in favour of African development and emphasised environmental factors in African 'backwardness' and those who were opposed on the grounds of heredity and innate racial traits.
A recurrent theme of the book is the 'movement of ideas within the imperial system' (p. 178). Campbell's study reveals a complex network of relations between metropolis and colony centred on differing views of the 'African mind' and African capacities for development. Within the movement itself there were hardliners who emphasised biological differences framed in the language of scientific racism, and progressive liberals, mainly colonial officials as opposed to resident settlers, who emphasised the social hygiene aspects of eugenics in aiding development and addressing the problems of rapid change and urbanisation. Across the spectrum of views within the eugenics movement there was unity of purpose in addressing the problems of rapid change, particularly urbanisation and 'detribalisation' resulting from the development of the colonial economy.
Contemporary racial discourse romanticised the 'bush pagan', while the 'detribalised' urban worker and what Graham Greene referred to as the 'trousered, bespectacled [African] clerk', epitomised in Joyce Carey's novel Mr Johnson (1939), were ridiculed and despised (1). Urbanisation was associated with juvenile delinquency, family breakdown, prostitution and venereal diseases, criminality and mental instability.
The leading figures in the eugenics movement were doctors and psychiatrists and progressive settlers such as Eleanor 'Nellie' Grant, mother of Elspeth Huxley, the biographer of Lord Delamere, the British aristocrat who established the colony as a private fiefdom and remained central in Kenyan settler politics until his death in 1931.
Much eugenics research in Kenya was directed to the question of mental deficiency, or 'amentia', in Africans, pathologising the brain of the Kenyan native as inferior. The progressive faction supported this on the grounds that it would provide a better informed understanding of African life and facilitate the 'scientifically informed pursuit of native development' (p. 6).
The fulcrum of the movement was the influential psychiatrist, Dr Henry Laing Gordon, a settler doctor in Kenya from 1925 who became president of the Kenyan branch of the British Medical Association in 1931. Gordon was supported by Sir Edward Grigg, Governor of Kenya from 1925 to 1930, and Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State for Colonies (1924-9) and a close friend of Grigg (p. 95).
Gordon, argues Campbell, 'shaped a new and extreme interpretation of racial difference' (p. 40). Interestingly, she observes, Julian Huxley, who was associated with challenges to scientific racism and had Kenyan connections, supported Gordon as late as 1938, long after many in Britain regarded him as a 'charlatan' (p. 85).
Of the three main strands of British eugenics - heredity, meliorism or social improvement (which attracted reformist socialists), and Malthusianism (population control) - only heredity and meliorism survived in Kenyan eugenics. The key emphasis was on providing biological evidence of innate racial difference. This became central to the debate over race and intelligence as education was fundamental to new Colonial Office policies to promote African development. The welfare, development and meliorative aspect of the eugenics movement attracted the more liberal and progressive colonial officers and settlers, like Nellie Grant. These aspects are explored in the final chapter which contains some interesting insights into attitudes towards juvenile delinquency as a symptom of the problems of development. As in South Africa, where there were similar concerns over young male Tsotsis, juvenile delinquency was blamed on family dislocation but, as Campbell emphasises, the subtext was doubts about the suitability of Africans for urban life (p. 169).
Campbell's study is coherently organised, exploring the different facets of the eugenics movements in both colony and metropole. Chapter one effectively sets the context; chapter two focuses on British eugenics, empire and race. This is followed in chapter three by a detailed examination of Kenyan medical discourse and eugenics, while the fourth chapter reverts to the metropolitan arena, focusing on the reception of Kenyan racial theories in Britain. Kenyan eugenicists lobbied for funding in Britain to establish a research programme in Nairobi to investigate the causes of 'African backwardness' and Gordon was elected to the consultative council of the Eugenics Society in 1939 (he died in 1947). Chapter five returns to Kenya, providing an analysis of the KSSRI and settler attitudes to race and eugenics to demonstrate how the Kenyan eugenics movement 'both chimed and at times subtly clashed with settler prejudices and preoccupations' (p. 114). The final chapter examines the link between biology, development and welfare, focusing on debates about juvenile delinquency, mental health, criminal insanity and African educatability.
Race and Empire is scrupulously researched, using a wide range of archival sources located in Britain and Kenya, and additional primary sources. The author provides a thorough, in-depth study of the Kenyan eugenics movement from different perspectives, highlighting networks elaborating race discourses and interconnecting Kenya to other white settler states, particularly South Africa, and to the metropolitan centre. The responses of different agents to the eugenics agenda are examined, including doctors and scientists, metropolitan eugenicists, settlers, colonial officials, the Colonial Office and philanthropic funding bodies such as the American Carnegie Foundation (which had a strong interest in an African education agenda that would counteract the destabilising impact of social and economic change). In developing her arguments Campbell engages with seminal studies on race and/or empire and settler societies by Dane Kennedy (1987), Saul Dubow (1995), Elazar Barkan (1992), Paul Rich (1990) and Jock McCulloch (1995).
All this is commendable; Campbell's monograph expands on existing works on the eugenics movements in Europe and the Americas and will certainly be of value to those with an interest in the history of race, empire and eugenics. In her key aims Campbell is successful. But the author's strengths are in her specialised study of Kenya and the book only partially reflects her claim to demonstrate how different eugenicist movements in different parts of the world 'were shaped by national cultures and associated with different political and social interests and ambitions' (p. 24). The language and preoccupations of the Kenyan eugenicists, discredited and offensive as they are now, were not unique to a defensive settler society but part of a much wider movement in Europe and the USA that nourished the extreme policies of Nazi Germany. It was these ominous developments in the 1930s that stimulated a rejection of scientific racism.
Furthermore, the author might have addressed more incisively the contribution of eugenics to the shaping of racial attitudes to Kenyan Africans in comparison to other influences - racial psychology, American racial science, anthropology and liberal paternalism. After all, the KSSRI only had 60 members at a time when there were 16,812 European settlers. Linked to this is Campbell's handling of congruencies and divergences between different racial discourses, scientific, eugenicist and liberal, which is the weakest aspect of the book.
Additonally, the analysis is rather too dense in places, detracting from the clarity of themes and arguments. The text could have read more fluidly in parts and, additionally, in driving home some of the key points, the author tends to repetition. Some terms, such as 'colonial imperialism' (p. 19) needed fuller definition and, at times, the arguments are not very convincingly made or appear somewhat naive. For instance, initially, Campbell argues that race was not an issue in British eugenics (p. 1), yet later on the point is made that the 'language of race abounded in eugenic discourse' (p. 19). A more incisive study of the centrality of race in metropolitan discourse would have helped to reinforce her arguments about imperial knowledge/discourse networks.
In the metropolitan context, anxieties over miscegenation, and the alleged resultant racial degeneration, intensified with the increase in 'coloured' residents in major ports and cities. M. E. Fletcher's Report on the Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports (1930), which focused particularly on the social problems of 'halfcaste' children and adolescents, was sponsored by the Eugenics Society and reflected such preoccupations (2).
More could also have been made of the opponents of eugenics, and the significance of the development of anti-colonial nationalism and anti-racism in this period. Mention is made of the letters of the educated Ugandan, K. Kisonole, to the KSSRI (pp. 123-4). There is also reference to the nationalist leader, Jomo Kenyatta, and to Parmenas Githendu Mockerie, author of An African Speaks for his People (1934) and one of the founders of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association. KISA was linked to the formation of independent churches and constituted a challenge to schools run by missionaries and the government and intensified the debate around race and intelligence (pp. 133-8). Given the significance of these developments in the 1930s, they warranted fuller discussion as essential context to Kenyan eugenics and its link to validating settler supremacy. Omissions of oppositional viewpoints also apply to the upsurge of metropolitan anti-colonialism in the 1930s. The Kenyan settler state and its treatment of Africans was a focus of metropolitan liberal and left critics of colonialism, including Norman Leys, author of A Last Chance in Kenya (1931), and a doctor in the Kenyan medical service before retirement in 1918, who is briefly mentioned.
The author is so close to her subject, of which she is undoubtedly in command, that the wider context is sometimes forgotten. Kenya was not unique and similar debates relating to the innate characteristics of the 'native' or 'primitive' mind occurred in Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, and indeed throughout sub-Saharan colonial Africa. As education became a development priority, African (and African American) men were deemed suitable to 'vocational' rather than to academic education. Such issues divided the more conservative paternalists from the progressive liberals and left, who supported African progress to independence. Debates about education were also gendered. Most discussions about race, intelligence and difference referred to male colonial subjects. Here, Campbell misses the opportunity to integrate a gender dimension to her study. Eugenics and the new scientific and biomedical discourse of hygiene, health and welfare also gave greater priority to colonised mothers and to the moral and sexual health of colonised and coloniser. The breakdown of patriarchal controls over women with migration to the cities was seen as a primary cause of social problems such as illegitimacy, juvenile delinquency and venereal diseases that also concerned eugenicists. Kenyan pro-eugenicists like Nellie Grant were involved in schemes to 'uplift' women, and thus their communities in general, through domestic science and 'home life' education emphasising health, cleanliness and hygiene (3).
Race and empire focuses primarily on the 1930s and the eugenics movement reflected the 'modernity of the colonial project in Africa' (p. 3). The aim was to create a society based on insights from eugenics research, envisaging Kenya as a laboratory for 'scientific colonialism' (p. 3). In metropolitan policy, however, a new discourse of racial equality was emerging that was incorporated into official Colonial Office policy during the Second World War. There was now more emphasis on social research as a basis for development. Rejection of scientific racism was reflected in an emphasis on economic modernisation, education and the metamorphosis, in colonial discourse, of the colonial subject into a potential commonwealth citizen. Influential agents of these changes, including the architect of the monumental An African Survey (1938), Sir Malcolm (later Lord) Hailey, distanced themselves from the eugenics-based research in Kenya (p. 108). Leading cultural anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowsksi, who visited Kenya in the 1930s, were also openly critical and scornful of eugenicists (p. 24). With these developments the Kenyan eugenicists became more isolated, as did the wider settler society, which was increasingly at odds with official commitment to 'native paramountcy' as opposed to white settler supremacy.
These developments reflected important changes in the context and articulation of racial discourse. Where racial inequalities and divisions existed these were now attributed to cultural and environmental factors, not to innate racial characteristics, and it was assumed that progress towards equality was possible with education and social and economic development. A new language of cultural and ethnic difference thus emerged to replace the now discredited language of scientific racism. Eugenics, observes Campbell, was 'swiftly, though not entirely convincingly' displaced as the key to racial difference in post-war Kenya (p. 185).
But, she adds, as the Kenyan settlers became more entrenched with the emergence of Mau Mau in the 1950s, biological arguments for racial difference were revived, albeit with a heavier emphasis on environmental factors (p. 184). As in apartheid South Africa, culture and ethnicity became euphemisms for race in official discourse (4).
Belief in innate racial difference persisted, however. With the emergence of socio-biology and the new racism in the 1980s, questions of nature/nurture were revisited in explaining enduring racial/cultural differences. Thus the key value of this book for advanced students and scholars, who will be its main market, is that it expands on existing studies of eugenics in Europe and the Americas (amply referenced in the book) to include the imperial eugenics movement, providing valuable additional historical context to the evolution of a British imperial race discourse that echoes still into the present.
Notes
1. B. Bush, Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919-1945 (London, 1999), pp. 59, 69. Back to (1)
2. Bush, Imperialism, p. 229. Back to (2)
3. B. Bush, 'Gender and empire: the twentieth century', in Gender and Empire, ed. P. Levine (Oxford, 2004), p. 105. See also A. L. Stoler and F. Cooper, 'Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda', in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. A. L. Stoler and F. Cooper (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), pp. 26-31. Back to (3)
4. S. Dubow, 'Ethnic euphemisms and racial echoes', Journal of Southern African Studies, 20 (1994), 355. Back to (4)
Labels: BOOKS, COLONIALISM, EUGENICS, RACISM
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Coltart underestimates scale of textbook thefts
03/04/2012 00:00:00
by Takavafira Zhou
THAT David Coltart is a brilliant Minister of Education, Sports, Art and Culture is a fact that no level-headed Zimbabwean can dispute.
However, his recent statement (27 March 2012) that the illegal sale of ETF Textbooks was limited since all public schools got the books, and that the books must have found their way into the streets after getting to the schools is not only unfortunate but ill-conceived.
At best the statement is a fantasy and at worst a fabrication or 'alibi' which amounts to nothing more than public relations absolving high ranking education officials from the cancer of corruption.
The Progressive Teachers' Union of Zimbabwe has no doubt that the Minister is ill-informed about the hemorrhage that occurred in the distribution process and the corruption inherent in the education system.
A number of school heads have revealed that those who distributed the textbooks never gave them chance to verify the numbers and on many a times heads discovered that the books were far less than they had signed for.
In other instances the distributors got to a school at mid-night and left not only inadequate books at the station but also for a number of neighbouring schools. There are also reported cases of politicians who helped themselves to books of cluster schools left at a particular school with some even donating these books at schools of their choice.
Ultimately, some schools received nothing at all particularly for Forms 3 and 4. A number of ETF books also found their way in private colleges owned by high ranking politicians and education officials.As such a considerable number of schools received few books or nothing at all.
While Coltart's assertion that the Ministry will investigate the illegal sale of books is welcome, he seems to have conclusions before launching such an investigation which is unfortunate.
Coltart is a lawyer and knows that you cannot find someone guilty before investigation.
This is not to imply that books did not disappear after reaching schools as some of the books taken from the streets of Harare by PTUZ certainly had school stamps but only to say there are no sacred cows in corruption and the Minister would be best advised to approach the challenge with a broad mind rather than to be closeted by misinformation from his subordinates.
Takavafira Zhou is the president of the Progressive Teachers' Union
Labels: BOOKS, CORRUPTION, DAVID COLTART, MDC CORRUPTION
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Coltart in tender scandal
Wednesday, 21 March 2012 00:00
Zvamaida Murwira Senior Reporter
PARLIAMENT yesterday took Education, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister David Coltart to task for awarding a textbooks supply tender to an international firm leaving out Zimbabwean companies. Legislators said the decision will subject all primary school pupils to one school of thought for the next five years, the lifespan of the textbooks.
The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Education and Sports, chaired by Gokwe MP, Cde Dorothy Mangami (Zanu-PF), said there were several issues that raised eyebrows in the manner in which the minister handled the tender. The textbooks were being funded by the Unicef under the Education Transition Fund.
Chitungwiza North MP Mr Fidelis Mhashu (MDC-T) said the tender bordered on “corruption as Longman Zimbabwe was merely used as a front for Longman International” (United Kingdom) ahead of local firms like Zimbabwe Publishing House, Mambo Press and College Press among others.
The committee said this while presenting a report in the House of Assembly. In its report, the committee noted that several stakeholders, including ministry officials dropped out of the meetings as they felt the process was not being handled transparently.
This saw Minister Coltart chairing the meetings himself.
It was noted that various agreed procedures were violated and these include, achieving least cost, promotion of local industry, equitable distribution of work between publishers and printers and ensure that there was no monopoly.
An advert for the tender was flighted just before Christmas in 2009 inviting printers to submit bids, a situation that saw other stakeholders like publishers not applying since they thought it was for printers.
Upon inquiry, publishers were asked to apply and were given less than 13 days.
“Tenders were publicly opened on January 18 2010 and only the content of the first two tenders were announced. The opening requirement to read out all tenders was bypassed. The details of the tender, which should have been read out at tender opening on 18 January were released after two months,” said Cde Mangami while presenting the report.
The tender was eventually awarded to a publisher and not a printer without explanation.
If ranking of unit price per page was applied, Longman would have won the right to supply only English and Shona textbooks while price per page would have seen Longman being awarded English, half of Maths and Shona while ZPH would have been awarded half of Maths, Science and Ndebele.
“Final tender adjudication results were never released as one would expect in accordance with the Statutory Instrument No 171 of 2002 which requires unsuccessful tenders to be advised of the name of the successful tenderer and the amount of his tender by the Board.
“Tender results were communicated to Longman Zimbabwe only through a contract signing ceremony without announcing results to tenders in writing,” said Cde Mangami.
“The failure by the minister to announce the winner of the tender was a clear sign that the tender procedure was not well followed and observed,” said Cde Mangami.
Contributing to the debate, Mr Mhashu said one challenge with providing school pupils with one school of thought is that it leads to conditioning and indoctrination.
“This will kill innovation and creativity, it retards learning. There was blatant, deliberate violation of the tender process. In this case Longman Zimbabwe was a front for Longman International UK and they have their printing firm in South Africa where they would bring the material duty free, that is corruption,” said Mr Mhashu.
He said awarding Longman the tender violated the indigenous laws of the country since the local publishing arm was merely a front of its parent firm in London.
As a result of this, said Mr Mhashu, primary school pupils will be subjected to routing and monotonous learning material as opposed to variety material.
Labels: BOOKS, DAVID COLTART, FIDELIS MHASHU, MDC CORRUPTION
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Full text: Mugabe's 88th birthday interview
21/02/2012 00:00:00
by Tazzen Mandizvidza I ZBC
President Robert Mugabe turned 88 on Tuesday. The following is the transcript of an interview with the state-run ZBC General Manager News and Current Affairs, Tazzen Mandizvidza, broadcast on Monday night:
TM: Your Excellency, thank you for being with us on this special programme.
President Mugabe: Thank you!
TM: Ndakamirira mhuri yeZBC ndingatange ndichiti makorokoto, amhlope, congratulations.
President Mugabe: Aiwa ndeedu tose. Kwete pamakore asi mufaro wacho.
TM: Your Excellency, one issue that has been talked about for quite sometime is the issue of the Constitution. It has taken longer than we all thought but are you really happy with the progress?
President Mugabe: Not really. It’s a process that is puzzling us now. When we begun we thought it was a matter of 18 months and we have an election. But as things look now, one doesn’t know what’s happening and one doesn’t know which way people would want us to go.
There is the dragging of feet, so much delay in the process. I don’t know what the real problem is but as others describe the problem, they think those who are charged with the task of putting ideas together, examining what the people said during the outreach programme are dragging their feet deliberately.
They want longer time, longer time because it means more money. They are given allowances. They are being paid and if the process comes to an end, so does naturally, the payment. It comes to an end.
I don’t know it, that is, the reason, whether it’s because the people who are at the top of it want a longer period to earn money or there are some problems.
But, I would want to believe that one problem is that some people or shall I say, one or two parties to the constitution-making process might now have discovered that this way of the constitution making is not in their favour and that the views that were obtained during the outreach programme are not in their favour.
They are not supportive of their parties and so they are dragging and dragging and dragging on, either to confound the process or to get the other side to tire and give up the exercise and the exercise doesn’t happen at all.
So one wonders why we abandoned, in the first place, the process that we had agreed on that this was going to be based on the Kariba Draft, which was all ready, all agreed and enunciating, you know, the process, which could have been completed in a short period. But we listened to our counterparties that it was better to listen to the people first.
To get a comprehensive view from our nation and on the basis of the views that would have been expressed, build a constitution.
But this is not proving to be a success at all.
TM: Your counterparts in the Global Political Agreement are actually accusing Zanu-PF. They say Zanu-PF is causing the delays because it’s afraid of elections.
President Mugabe: No! We want elections, we wanted them yesterday, we want them today, we want them any day, but others are saying no, no, no, we can’t have elections.
First, they were saying 2012, now they are saying in 2013. But perhaps when we get much further without elections they will say no elections at all; let us remain in power without elections.
TM: Your Excellency, looking at this scenario, when are we likely to have elections?
President Mugabe: Yes, sure; this year! We just must have elections. They just must take place with or without a new constitution.
And we will, on our side as a party, we have made a decision, last year at our conference that this year we definitely have an election exercise. If others don’t want to have an election then they are free not to participate.
Nobody is forced to go to an election but definitely I will exercise my presidential powers in accordance with the main principal law, the Constitution of our country and announce when the election will take place. And I will do this.
TM: But looking at the process that we have been going through with the help of our brothers from the Sadc region. If, for example, we have elections and the other parties boycott, what will likely be the result? How would Sadc react?
President Mugabe: Well, we will tell Sadc what the problem is and Sadc can’t compel us to continue an exercise which is futile and I am sure there is greater wisdom on the part of Sadc. And anyway, the GPA states that a party can resign, completely reject it and once a rejection takes place, we revert back to our Constitution, which all these years we have based ourselves and it becomes the basis of our election.
TM: Your Excellency, are you telling us that Zanu-PF is likely to withdraw from the GPA if this does come to an end?
President Mugabe: No, no, no! All I am saying is that Zanu-PF will withdraw from the GPA if others continue with these dirty tricks. We can’t have them anymore. We can’t put up with them anymore.
Anyway, what I should say is, last week, the principals — that is the other two and myself — Tsvangirai, Mutambara and myself decided that we be provided with the draft constitution, that the management should present that to us.
We got the draft (but) we haven’t looked at it yet and we would want to see what the draft says but I am told the draft is not yet reviewed by the management committee and so it’s a draft which we can’t base any definite views of our own.
The other part which should look at the draft hasn’t done so and hasn’t presented it to us as a reviewed draft. But it’s just a raw draft directly from the drafters. All we can do is just look at and perhaps see what the drafters have put together and give time to our management committee to look at it and present a reviewed version of it.
Now we had decided that once we have looked at the draft having been looked at, first, by the management committee, we will then decide on the road map. We the principals and I think none of us is for any undue postponement of elections. No!
TM: Your Excellency, what is this roadmap? What should the nation expect?
President Mugabe: They should expect a referendum, a referendum to get the people’s views, whether the people accept the draft constitution or not.
If they reject it then we revert to the old constitution, if they accept then the usual process takes place. Parliament must also endorse it and then it becomes a legal document after it has been passed by Parliament and we can go for an election. If it’s rejected then of course, announce the process that should take place.
TM: Your Excellency, talking of the draft constitution, there have been reports that there is a certain clause that has been put there in order to bar you from contesting as a presidential candidate by limiting terms of office.
President Mugabe: Cowards, cowards, cowards! Why are they afraid of me? Why should they ban anyone at all?
We haven’t come to a position where political tricks or legal tricks, for that matter are put in place to bar anyone, who normally has the right to participate in an election.
TM: Still on elections, is Zanu PF ready for elections? I am saying this in light of the factionalism we hear about. Are you prepared as a party?
President Mugabe: Well I don’t know anything about factionalism. You always get differences in a party. I suppose this makes the process. It’s always the fact of differences, we have contradictions. We must resolve these contradictions, move forward and you move forward, you will also encounter new contradictions, new differences and also have solutions and that’s how progress is made, isn’t it?
It always comes after such contradictions provided solutions do occur in regard to them. Yes, yes, yes the party is always ready, ever ready. This means we are always ready to fight.
TM: Your Excellency, what calibre of a leader would you want to succeed you and at the moment can you say you have found that successor?
President Mugabe: NO! The party will find a successor. It’s the people who can find a successor. I came from the people and the people in their wisdom, our members of the party, will certainly select someone once I say I am now retiring, but not yet.
At this age I can still go some distance, can’t I?
TM: Zanu-PF has been in power for the past 32 years, what do you offer the electorate?
President Mugabe: What do we offer the electorate? Goodness me! Independence gave us political freedom and we say that political freedom can not be complete unless we have sovereignty over our natural resources and we started by exercising the right, sovereign right, in acquiring our land and apportioning it to our people and so the first step was for us to feel that we are not just politically sovereign.
That we are also economically sovereign and the first step as I said was that of acquiring the ownership of our land and getting it from the British settlers and put it into the hands of Zimbabweans. That sovereignty over the land resources! But that’s not all. The land question is just one area. There are other areas which are economic. We must exercise our sovereignty also in regard to, you know, the economic sector.
And not that the agriculture sector is not part of the economic sector, it is!
But you have also mining, manufacturing sector. You have the infrastructure and that sovereignty has not yet based itself. Therefore, now with our law on indigenisation and empowerment, we will want to ensure that our people also have the ownership of the resources that lie underneath.
That way the mining sector is meaningful. It was not meaningful all along because there is a process where it is owned by outsiders but we want the resources to remain in our hands even though we are ready, we are prepared that those who will be partners with us should have a share of our resources, not ownership, but of the benefit that comes from our resources.
And that is why the Indigenisation and Empowerment Act was passed and this requires that whatever companies undertake mining in the country or any manufacturing exercise or any other socio-economic activity; if these companies are foreign, they must cede at least 51 percent.
This should belong to the people of Zimbabwe either to the Government and Government acting on behalf of the people and that’s part of indigenisation also and so this is an exercise we are working on now.
The land has come, now the minerals must also come and manufactured products must also belong to us and of course we have the infrastructure, we have the telecommunication and other communication activities.
The programmes that are due to take place, we want our people and all those to participate as owners and shareholders but particularly owners in that regard on their own.
Yes we will continue to produce people with skills in that they work, become workers, they become labourers in some cases but they must be owners of their own resources, owners of these enterprises. Be entrepreneurial, in attitude, in their disposition, generally not expect that outsiders will come into the country and develop the country for us and do it at our own expense.
When we get the benefit of being workers and nothing more than workers and then at the end of the day what comes to us is that which the State gets by way of taxation. That must stop now!
TM: Just out of curiosity, Your Excellency, draft constitution ikauya kwamuri mukaona ma issues amusingafarire, do you have the authority ekubvisa?
President Mugabe: Tinoramba. Ehe, tinobvisa. Ko togoregererei? Nhai, nhai, nhai! It’s a draft constitution and we will say this we do not want. If for example, you have in the constitution kuti ngavatemwe makumbo, vanenge vaba, ngavatemwe makumbo. Aiwa zve tinoramba. Kana homosexualism zvese tinobvisa.
TM: Let’s move away from elections and the party. Let’s look at the GPA. Are you happy with the progress that you have made?
President Mugabe: I am happy with the fact that it has managed to at least get us together with the other parties so they can participate in Government and have a feel of what Government is and also be exposed to the public. Now that the public knows what Zanu-PF stands for, MDC-T, M, N or whatever they call themselves; what these stand for.
I am sure no one can deceive the public anymore by hiding their own views and ideas because they have not yet entered the arena but they are now in the arena and the people can see who speaks sense and who speaks nonsense and who is better behaved. And who is guilty of misbehaviour and so on and so forth.
So we are there for the people. It has also enabled us, and it is one good thing it has done; the GPA enabled us to work together, know each other. We are parties and perhaps cease regarding ourselves as enemies but regard each other as opponents.
People, yes, with differences among themselves, ideological differences, political differences.
Differences in approach to definite issues and therefore people who can tolerate each other and at the end of the day we are Zimbabweans. All of us so that is very important and it’s important to our people that we may differ politically, religiously even ethnically. Differ in various other ways but we are all Zimbabweans and that is what counts much more than anything else.
It counts much more than your ethnicity, it counts much more than your political affinity and much more than any other — ism that you may have that you are a Zimbabwean national, Zimbabwean citizen, mwana wevhu; singing one national anthem and waving one flag. That is what must always guide us; that these differences are really artificial.
But one thing that we can never deny an individual, no matter what dress he is wearing, no matter what religion he belongs to, what tribe he belongs to, is the nationality.
The fact that he is a Zimbabwean. That is the son or daughter of the soil. So that is very important and that is also the source of the other principles that derive there; the fact that we are one.
Must we hate each other because we belong to different religions and bodies or because we are of different tribes or different parties? No!
But yes, we may oppose each other and oppose each other quite firmly. But must we unleash violence to each other? That must stop of course. No violence.
That is what the GPA has taught all of us and we are also very happy that our national healing exercise, as there is an organ which is led by Vice President John Nkomo, and each championing this, you know, campaign of getting people to understand each other, appreciate each, one another, sons and daughters of Zimbabwe.
But having said that, there are great differences between us and the other parties — Zanu-PF and the others. We believe ourselves in the people of Zimbabwe as a sovereign people. We believe that they are endowed by the Almighty with the right to sovereignty over their land. That no one from outside has the right, you know, to acquire a piece of land or any national resource without their permission.
In other words, the outsiders must be entertained by us, accommodated by us, must be permitted by us to live here and to make homes here, to enjoy themselves, to marry our beautiful girls and also to eat our beef; to kill our deer, antelope, go to Kariba and fish, catch our fish; in other words, to do things that we can do. Yes!
We accommodate people from outside, just as our people can be accommodated in other countries as well. But no, they should never, never, never attempt to impose their power over us. I am talking now of countries like Britain, of nationals like Britons who once upon a time said the sun never sets in the British Empire. Priding themselves on never, never, never being slaves; as they sang Britain, Britain, Britain will never be slaves.
They never sang Britain will never, never be slave masters. You see they will never be slaves but how about being slave masters? So there is the difference between us. They should never try to impose their culture on us and hence our abhorrence or feeling of abhorrence. The feeling that if we are to get aid from Britain we must first accept that man can marry man and woman can marry woman. That’s what David Cameron said. You don’t say those things to other nations. So there it is.
The GPA emphasises that, but we differ with the other parties. Zanu-PF is of the strong view that we are sovereign but we still have these other parties still going to the Europeans, you know, Europeans, when we have problems, Europeans.
They must get to Britain; they must go to France, German etc to get ideas. No! We have ideas here.
Fortunately, now we have well educated people. Very, very highly educated people and nobody can boss us intellectually.
TM: Yes, Your Excellency and we also read of alleged clashes between yourself and the Prime Minister. How do you describe your working relationship with the Prime Minister?
President Mugabe: I read of the clashes in the papers. In the Standard and what are the others? The little papers! (TM: Daily News?) Dustbin things, Yah!
This is where the fights are and I wonder where they get the information from.
But because they must create these fights it’s Tsvangirai going for Mugabe. So and so and I am always at the receiving end, you see. Even when people come to my State House where I am the resident, they have come to fight me. No, no, no!
It has always been very peaceful. We were very suspicious of each other at the beginning but as time went on, we got to know each other.
Now Tsvangirai can drink a cup of tea which I make and I have no objections drinking a cup of tea which he makes.
TM: Your Excellency, from what you have said this might become a tricky situation where it has been alleged that the Prime Minister was involved in some fraudulent activity which involves the purchase of the Prime Minister’s residence and it is said the police have done their work and are waiting for the go ahead to arrest him. Is he going to be arrested?
President Mugabe: I am not a policeman. The President is not a policeman. When crimes are committed, the police do not come to the President to ask permission to arrest an individual.
They just proceed on the basis that they derive their power from the law and arrest individuals.
I have read also in the papers that there has been some fraudulent behaviour but it if this is so, well, it’s the Prime Minister who should answer and if he does not get to you, you don’t have to get him to answer via the President.
If there is really a case that requires him to answer, I am sure he will be able to explain what happened, himself.
What we don’t want is people getting arrested on the basis of evidence which is not clear and on the basis of facts which have not been thoroughly investigated.
The police must investigate these cases thoroughly so that by the time they get to the stage of building a case and taking it to the court they are quite sure that they have a case against the particular individual to whom it relates. But just rushing to build a case against somebody doesn’t do us good at all.
If anything, it harms our reputation and I hope they have investigated the matter thoroughly not just rush to make up things against the Prime Minister.
TM: Your Excellency, from there we take you to the state of the economy. You spoke about mining, you spoke about indigenisation, are you happy with the contribution that mining has done to the economy in totality?
President Mugabe: There is mining taking place. Just now our eyes are fixed on diamond mining. Not much has come from that mining yet because the sales are not many and there are hindrances being put along the way.
Put in the way of selling and marketing diamonds by the United States. They go to our main markets, to main buyers of diamonds and threaten them. (The go) to ask them not to buy Zimbabwean diamonds. It is alleged that these are blood diamonds but I haven’t seen any blood flowing on the diamonds. I have visited Chiadzwa, I have done so twice, but they are very clean.
We know that the US, Britain and other Western countries do not want to see us succeed. They want their sanctions to pull us down and ruin us economically but we refuse to be ruined.
We are a resilient nation and we know what our rights are and we will not be subjugated by anyone. But they try their best and this is the reason why not much has come from the diamond sector. But with more companies being licenced, we hope that the State will get a greater benefit. I can assure you I have my eyes there.
We know of the talk about diamonds being smuggled, but no really, there is strict security; but it’s a case of selling the diamonds. The mining is taking place but the marketing is what is so limited when it takes place.
But other areas of the mining sector are also important. We have platinum, but there is very little contribution being made by platinum to our development.
If anything really, our platinum is developing other countries much more than it is developing Zimbabwe. Then there is gold, gold is the main, I would want to believe, the main mineral and you get it practically in every province in the country.
And you have small miners, makorokoza, vanamai nanababa, along the rivers, digging everywhere. We have nothing against them but we want them to be better organized, taught how to do their gold mining.
But they are making a contribution, where they are doing it properly; to the development of the country but these are areas that should be better organized. However, because of sanctions there has been a sagging of the sector and it needs to be revamped, needs quite some capital to go into it. You know, machinery wears out and there is need for some spare parts or new machinery. We need to see much more production.
Gold is fetching higher prices. US$1 755 per ounce, that’s the international price at the moment and it is lots of money and we need now to improve and get the process which will see our gold mining recover very much. So we want to get to about 30 tonnes that we used to produce in the past. About that and even exceed that.
Platinum also must be managed. I hope the Indigenisation and Empowerment Act will now enable us to get greater benefit from all this mining exercise which has been taking place in the past by doing so at our expense, national expense that is.
Now that we must go into all these companies with at least 51 percent, that is least, it can be more than that. Fifty-one percent shareholding in a company! The reward to Zimbabwe must be greater but what is required is revamping, improving the performance and greater productivity taking place in the mining sector.
Manufacturing also requires the same exercise; injecting more capital and I think companies, as you see, had actually gone down miserably to about 10 percent. And now we want to see this production capacity rise but we must inject more capital, more capital into them and this has been the problem.
TM: Do you have this capital?
President Mugabe: We thought we had SDRs. The IMF gave us but they were used otherwise. Yes, we create capital. We can borrow from international institutions but the World Bank and IMF must obey the dictates of the West and impose sanctions on us. Even if they don’t say so but in practice that is what happens and we can’t rely on those ones.
But we have the Afrrexim bank which has been there and the regional banks and reliance on the eastern bloc, China, India and their financial institutions.
We can borrow from them and use our resources as security and get loans.
They are prepared to give us loans. They are also prepared to bring their companies here and partner us and that way get us rejuvenated and increase the production of our companies.
TM: Your Excellency, you mention the issue of sanctions, how are you going to handle that within the GPA as your partners are constantly failing to sing from the same hymn book?
President Mugabe: That is what baffles us. Surely, if you are a Zimbabwean and Zimbabwe is being attacked by outsiders and it doesn’t matter what differences between the MDC and ourselves, when outsiders attack us, we must unite against the outsiders and try to drive the outsiders out of Zimbabwe, get his hand off us.
His intervention bids us to be together but, no, the MDC decides to side with the Americans, with the Europeans in supporting sanctions against its own people. We do not understand that. They fail to, they find it very difficult, to say sanctions are hurting us.
They try to avoid using the word sanctions; they want to call them restrictions. I do not understand, perhaps, it’s the lack of political consciousness, national consciousness, which characterize them. You see, they have not gone through the grill like us. But one doesn’t have to have been a member of the ANC, National Democratic Party, Zapu, Zanu in order to have national consciousness.
Just a feeling that Zimbabwe is your country and you will countenance, you will not accept any attack from outside, whether this attack is physical or it’s economic by way of sanctions.
That’s what a real party that stands for the people, that operates in the interest of the people, should do.
But if you are for the people, how can you then at the same time turn against the people by supporting sanctions, which hurt them.
TM: Pamunosangana hamumbobvunza here kuti zvii zvinorema?
President Mugabe: Vanoti tiritose asi kuti vaenda kunze uku vanoudza varungu vavo kuti ah, chimboregai ma sanctions aripo, vanhu vaye, vanaMugabe havasati vavakuda regime change, havasati vanzwa. Hatife takanzwa!
Imperialism is imperialism. An imperialist is just an imperialist. I often repeat the words of Nkurumah: Only a dead imperialist is a good one.
TM: One of the issues to do with the economy inyaya yemari. We have serious cash shortages. Are we likely to see the return of the Zimbabwean dollar? What solutions do you have as a Government to deal with the shortages seeing that the money we are using doesn’t come from Zimbabwe?
President Mugabe: I agree, the US dollars did help a bit but the dollars are not minted by us, we don’t manufacture them, we don’t print them. They are American. You can’t expect to develop an economy using foreign currency, American foreign currency. You got to have your own foreign currency.
Yes, sure, we had that inflation that rendered our Zim dollar worthless but these things happen to economies when they have the burden of sanctions, the burden of bearing lots of debts and so on and so forth.
We cannot improve the situation in the GPA very much. That’s why we would want to have an election and we know as Zanu-PF government we would certainly bring about a far, far much better situation to the economy in respect of getting capital injection into it.
We are persons who look east and at the moment if you look west, Europe and America are looking east, what you encounter are eyes that are looking east and your eye is looking west.
In other words, they have nothing to offer at all and it’s futile to hope that the West can redeem us.
Even if we were in good books with Europe, Europe will never ever help you to the extent of your being able to transform your economy from being, you know, a primary producer to being a producer of secondary products.
In other words, that adding of value to our raw products, qualitative improvement, which Europe did when they started industrializing as much as possible, moving dependence on agriculture to dependence of manufactured food.
That is yet to occur in Africa, in South Africa it is okay, here it had started okay a bit but we are now handicapped and that is what we must do, ensure that we raise the level of our economy. Take it from primary to secondary and that’s get it to the manufacturing stage where now you beneficiate your products.
And you produce products of greater value. Then, of course, you can have your own currency that is backed by an economy which is viable. We have gold, we have diamonds, we have platinum, valuable minerals and very precious minerals and these can back our economy.
But I believe that if we can go back to the use of gold as the basis of our currency, that will ensure that our currency will become viable and will not be doubted internationally at all.
And it cannot be assailed by the American dollar, which is just a paper and America has been printing and printing. Because then you can only print money if it’s based on the value of gold that you have. This is based on purely the effectiveness of your economy. How much level of volume of production of your GDP, Gross Domestic Product and then you print money according to the level of development in that regard.
So I believe personally that we have a very great future and thank God we still have lots of wealth underground. Thank God the British settlers did not scoop all and in some cases didn’t discover some of the minerals like platinum. But perhaps, diamonds for one reason they were discovered but they did not want to reveal to the world. De beers I understand were carrying; they said they were carrying out tests, year in, year out, getting lots of soil to South Africa.
Filling lorries from Chiadzwa there and when you ask they say we are still doing tests then we discovered later that, no, there were diamonds, ah, then they stopped; the tests didn’t continue.
And then we had that company called the ACR, born out of De Beers. They tried to put Africans, you know, into it. We resisted it, remember. We said no, and it was then that we took some action and said only the State can operate in that area.
[I did not know ACR was directly tied to De Beers. African Consolidated Resources, perhaps better called Andrew Cranswick Resources, was run by Andrew Cranswick, which is wanted in Zimbabwe for f
We were fencing it because we wanted time to arrange and gear ourselves and prepare ourselves for proper mining in the area. Well, I have great hope that, in the GPA, they will be real, real development in gallops rather than in slow strides as at present.
Well, we have done something with the GPA but very little. The companies are still down. Manufacturing factories, main factories in Bulawayo, down, down, down! And the mining ones too, even gold, some closed and we are having to open some of them now, you see, but we will do so with our friends.
They are not the Chinese only, there are lots of other friends in the East there who are prepared to partner us properly and not on a horse and rider partnership which was what (Roy) Wellensky and (Godfrey) Huggins during the Federation talked about that the partnership with an African was a horse and rider partnership.
And we asked who was the rider and who was the horse and they didn’t provide the answers. Then they talked about the two-pyramid system, that’s Huggins now, who became Lord Malvern later. Two pyramids, the European pyramid is up there, the African pyramid is down here. But when will it ever rise and grow in order to get their height.
But look at the strides we have made since independence, education and socially. Look at our people, we have almost eradicated illiteracy and almost everybody can read and write and this is it. And not the skills, we have now been able to export skills, you see, South Africa, most of our young people.
Even in Australia, Britain, they are proud to have young Zimbabweans with skills to operate in their factories or in their banks etc. That’s Zimbabwe.
But we put ourselves much more together; get our people in the Diaspora to come and join us and we sail together. Our young people must feel that they have a stake in their country and that’s very important because the future is more theirs than ours.
They are the ones we want to equip, they are the ones we feel must have the necessary skills, intellectually and physically, that will enable them now, to run the country and undertake the various operations that are necessary in order to bring about greater development and transformation of the socio-economic system.
TM: Thank you Your Excellency, let me take you to issues facing Africa as a continent. Recently you came back from the AU summit and you came back a disappointed man. Do you feel betrayed by your African brothers when it comes to decision-making; decisions that affect Africa?
President Mugabe: I think the crop of leaders we have now is quite different, quite different from the older crop, from their elders. Those of them who came together to form the Organisation of African Unity and vowed that Africa would be freed from imperialism and colonialism and you had them like Nkrumah, you know, pledging that Ghana would not regard itself as free if any part of Africa was still under the yoke of colonialism and imperialism.
Then they were bidding that Africa must unite and Nkrumah wrote a book to that effect.
You see, they formed the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 and formed also the liberation committee and taught us how to fight for our countries, organised us and showed us how unity could enable us to fight and fight successfully in redeeming our countries and liberating them.
TM: 88 years makore akawanda. Ndaapi mashoko amungape vechidiki kuti varame hupenyu hwakanaka?
President Mugabe: Life is what you make it, they say. But it’s not always what you make it. You have a part of it which is inherited. The physical entity which we are we inherit from our parents so the genetic system is inherited from what your parents gave you.
But there are things that you must do for yourself. Don’t drink. Ahhm or if you want to drink don’t drink too much but I would say don’t drink at all. Yeah, don’t smoke at all. When you smoke the nicotine goes to your lungs; it’s a sure case that your lungs are inhaling... Look after yourself...girlfriends...when you are young you want two or three girlfriends, but you finally make a choice...little houses, some little houses are dangerous these days.
And then nechirwere chedu ichi. I have seen youngsters in the extended families just going one after another. Kune vakasiiwa...We are having to look after them. Havasisina vanoriritira. And i have said to myself if this is what has happened around me, what about the extended family of Tazzen, my neighbour there?
This is what has happened to our nation, young people going in their 30s, 40s - so that is the part that we take care of. The other part we inherit from our parents.
Otherwise if you don’t take to drinking, take to smoking and exercising of course...
TM: You are still exercising?
President Mugabe: Every morning. I have my one hour and ensure I exercise. That’s the way we grow but some live longer than others. My brother Raphael I never saw him. He was born before me, 1922 and when he was six months, mother said he suffered from dysentery. But Michael, who was born before him ... takatamba tese naMichael. He was very bright, a footballer - everything, an athlete.
I wasn’t bright, I was much more conservative, much more inward thinking, but bookish... my mother at one time was worried kuti mwana wangu anogona kunyengawo asikana imi?
Mike was clever; he was also bright, perhaps much brighter than myself. Ah he was really bright, but poorly (in) 1934 he drank poison achibva afa aine 10 years. It was a sad sad death my father couldn’t take it vakati ah mwana wangu apuwa poison kwasekuru vachibva varamwa kuenda kuBulawayo from 1934 only to come back 1944 atova nemumwe mudzimai, 1945 achibva afa muna June, ini ndatova teacher zvangu.
Ndini ndakazodzidzisawo vakanditevedzera, so i was lucky that way. ndikazogona kunyenga ndikati amai ndauya nomuroora ndabva naye kuGhana.
So God looks after us but there is a portion we must play. You must eat well, you take some vegetables, don’t over-eat beef, it’s dangerous, eventually unoita gout. Taida kudya nyama zvakakomba tiri mafreedom fighters. Vose vatakadya navo vaida nyama ah, as for Joshua Nkomo ndiye aive mukuru weduzve, aida nyama maningi, Ndebele style. Kana tikapihwa chicken aitora yose, but then akazoita gout, then the doctor said no...Ah. VaMuzenda gout; VaMusika gout...
TM: Well thank you so much Your Excellency for giving us your time to talk to us about your family, the state of the economy and the country at large. We wish you many more.
President Mugabe: Thank you thank you, you are doing a good work, continue doing that good work. Most of you are on the younger side so we hope that you continue to be revolutionary, if you are, if you are not then read, read mabhuku avana Nkrumah, read a lot, even go out to read.
Labels: BOOKS, DEBEERS, GOLD, HOMOSEXUALITY, INFLATION, INTERVIEW, KARIBA DRAFT CONSTITUTION, MDC, MDC CORRUPTION, NEOCOLONIALISM, ROBERT MUGABE, SANCTIONS, ZDERA
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Mapesi Gondwe authors book: ‘To strive for African greatness’
By Andrew Nyayah, Nyasa Times
December 27, 2011
Economist and former MP for Rumphi West, Vincent Mapesi Gondwe, has written a book titled “To Strive for African Greatness”, which he said is an attempt to bring potential comrades to salvage the African continent.
“Despite great achievements by great persons, our life on earth is far from being perfect. There are still injustices and sufferings. We are still brutal and destructive. People still starve in the midst of plenty food.
“People still take pride in obvious absurdities. Fraud, Corruption, Crime, Prostitution and Gambling in the money markets are established ingredients of current civilization. Therefore we will need Messiahs,” reads an extract from page 28 of the book.
The book cover
Gondwe touts he 150 pages book, which will be on the market between March and April 2012, as a must read for young educated Africans.
The Harvard trained scholar told Nyasa Times that his intention is to awaken a burning desire in the educated young Africans between the ages of 18 – 35, to lift the African people from under dog status and vulnerable state to heights of shining achievements and influence.
“Being that vulnerable, would we not become slaves again, may be in a different form still slaves – may be on a new planet. To me, we – the Africans – had gotten the worst consequences of that social and political vanity,” reads an extract from the foreword of the book.
Mapesi Gondwe was known for his constructive contributions in the National Asembly when he represented Aford.
Labels: BOOKS, ECONOMY
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COMMENT - Morgan Tsvangirai: "the social agenda that Mugabe had pursued from independence faltered under ESAP [an International Monetary Fund-prescribed neoliberal policy], with devastating results." See here, what the MDC means with 'mismanagement by Mugabe' - the
World Bank's Enhanced Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), otherwise known as austerity. It is the MDC that wants to return to austerity, without telling the Zimbabwean people, of course.
Zimbabwe by book: the good, the bad and the dire
11/11/2011 00:00:00
by Percy Zvomunya I Mail & Guardian
At the Deep End by Morgan Tsvangirai (Penguin)
Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter by Wilfred Mhanda (Weaver Press)
Mugabe and the White African by Ben Freeth (Zebra Press)
One might take it as a sign of approaching normality in Zimbabwe that activists and politicians are taking a break from fighting President Robert Mugabe to sit down and write autobiographies and memoirs.
Most notable is Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who worked with his spokesperson and
ghostwriter T William Bango on a 550-page autobiography, At the Deep End.
It is a text that should have been half its size -- the first few hundred pages are forgettable. The book lights up around 1999, the year the MDC was formed, which is about chapter 10. So, if you are pressed for time, skip the first 200 pages. I assure you, you are not missing much.
All right, what's covered between pages one and 200? It's a social history of Zimbabwe, the subregion and the world through Tsvangirai's eyes. But who really wants to view the world through his eyes? Tsvangirai writes about the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal that resulted in independence in Mozambique and the guerrilla war against Ian Smith's government gleaned from the "avid" reading of Rhodesian newspapers.
Then there are Robert Mugabe's early years and he even throws in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The result of this is, at times, unfortunate and unschooled. For instance, writing about the relations between Pretoria and Harare in the 1980s, Tsvangirai says:
"He [Mugabe] played into Pretoria's hands by adopting an aggressive stance and the entire nation paid as a result."
What was Mugabe supposed to do? Engage in sweet pillow talk with apartheid South Africa so soon after Mugabe, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu) had been generously hosted by Kenneth Kaunda's Zambia, Julius Nyerere's Tanzania and Samora Machel's Mozambique?
Tsvangirai also criticises Mugabe for sending Zimbabwean troops to Mozambique in the early 1980s to help fight the apartheid-sponsored Renamo insurgency. That operation can't be compared with Zimbabwe's questionable participation in the late 1990s war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance.
Mugabe, eschewing Durban as a port, had to help secure access to the Indian Ocean via the port of Beira. "The operation in Mozambique cost Zimbabwe an average Z$2-million a day when the economy could hardly sustain it; nor were there any benefits from such extravagance, apart from giving Mugabe the political mileage he needed as a donor and powerful regional leader.
Wooden prose
"I was born a few months before the white settler administration formed the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland," Tsvangirai writes in the first chapter of a book, which can be read as a social anthropological study of life in Zimbabwe after World War II. By page 24, I was struggling to get into its mostly dense, wooden (apologies to all the trees out there) prose. There is an explanation of sorts on page 24: "Although I was extremely competent with figures, arithmetic and mathematics, I had difficulties with both spoken and written English."
Then there are the strange sentences and weird thought processes. What, for instance, does the following mean? "People felt their former liberators were now preying on them, riding roughshod over basic graciousness after having fallen hard into the trappings of power, ambition and avarice."
Or this: "Zimbabweans live in a world dominated by symbols. In fact, symbolism is so deeply embedded in our culture that it can be seen as second nature." Which people don't value symbols and symbolism?
"My life was destined to be closely interwoven with political, economic and social changes in Zimbabwe." I don't know what this means. I could understand it if Mugabe or one of the nationalists said it, but as Tsvangirai joined Zanu-PF at independence in 1980, its meaning is not immediately clear.
Tsvangirai's liberation war CV is sparse, involving attending "several secret political meetings at which black people sought to assure themselves that Zimbabwe was destined for freedom".
Early on in the book he gives us a reason why, unlike some young men of his age, he did not go to the bush to join other guerrillas. "Perhaps I would have become a political activist but my parents needed financial help to support the other children through school."
To people who are not from the subregion, this might sound like pointless nostalgia, but the liberation war is a big deal in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. It's not a coincidence that where the liberation movements have been voted out, for instance in Zambia and Malawi, wars were not waged to push for independence.
Flawed arguments
Tsvangirai's nostalgia for the liberation war recalls what Zimbabwe's generals told him in 2000 -- we won't allow you to take power even if you win the elections. It was a message repeated by Constantine Chiwenga, Zimbabwean military supremo, who said a few years ago:
"I would not hesitate to go on record again on behalf of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces to disclose that we would not welcome any change of government that carries the label 'Made in London', and whose sole aim is to defeat the gains of the liberation struggle."
I have no space to point out the holes in Tsvangirai's argument that "the social agenda that Mugabe had pursued from independence faltered under ESAP [an International Monetary Fund-prescribed neoliberal policy], with devastating results." Mugabe was able to expand social services, education and infrastructure originally meant to cater for a few hundred thousand whites. Even after a decade of decline, Zimbabwe was last year listed by the United Nations as the most literate country in Africa. Love him or hate him, that's part of Mugabe's legacy.
So what new details does this autobiography put in the open? That former president Thabo Mbeki was "financing the Ncube group to destabilise the MDC", thus the splitting of the MDC into two factions -- Tsvangirai's and that led by university man Welshman Ncube.
Tsvangirai also traces the roots of the anti-intellectualism in the MDC.
"If the political project was to succeed, I told myself, it had to be led by ordinary workers, peasants ... not theorists, but doers".
Being one doesn't preclude being the other; Mugabe is a classic example. He's very erudite and is a man of action (some would say too much action).
One of the problems that faced the MDC after a few years in existence was its lack of ideological cohesion. Apart from being opposed to Mugabe, one was sometimes not sure what the MDC's vision for Zimbabwe entailed. But Tsvangirai writes that the MDC was "even more ideological" than the ruling party. "Zanu-PF was just a nationalist movement whose agenda ended with independence in 1980." Just a nationalist movement?
Tsvangirai writes about the perception that the MDC is a front for the West.
"While trying to rescue the white farmers, London created an impression that the MDC was its vehicle for regime change."
It's not clear whether this impression has gone away because people who dislike Mugabe and Zanu-PF will still tell you that they find the MDC's positions wishy-washy. Still, Tsvangirai insists, "for all the Zanu-PF hype, neither Zimbabwean whites nor Britain influenced the MDC and me in any way".
Savage attacks
If you like to see blood, Tsvangirai uses his lance to get at his rivals. About Ncube, he writes: "I had spent the better part of my tenure babysitting some of my highly unpopular colleagues, including Ncube." He notes that Ncube is a "superb boardroom idealist but lacks a popular or grassroots insights". These politicians insisted that "I should never address a meeting alone. They all wanted to be where I was, especially at mass rallies, in order to benefit from my personal political brand."
About Arthur Mutambara, the man invited from South Africa to head the Ncube faction of the MDC, Tsvangirai says: "After perusing a copy of his inaugural speech I realised that one could pass a university and still come out unfinished as a human being." He describes Mutambara (holder of an Oxford doctorate in robotics) as a "politically illiterate newcomer" and a "lay intellectual".
Tsvangirai is, obviously, a brave man, conscious of his abilities and pulling power. He is, perhaps, the most illustrious hero of the democratic cause.
Yet he uses the "I" voice in places you would expect him to speak in the collective "we". Writing about the delay in the release of election results in 2008, he writes: "I was positive that if I had won control of the legislature, there was no way I could have lost the presidency." And there are other instances of this arrogant "I" voice, as in "finally I had dismantled the monolith to its last pebble".
What about the contributions of the hundreds who died for the democratic cause and the thousands who were tortured?
At other times he speaks about himself in the third person: "Given Mugabe's fiery rhetoric and his deep personal hatred for Morgan Tsvangirai " (Mutambara also does this quite a lot.) I think that's part of the problem with Zimbabwe now, how everything revolves around Mugabe.
When I told a close friend who has worked in Zimbabwe's civil society for decades that I wanted to give her a copy of the biography as a Christmas present, she said I should rather get her Julian Barnes's Man Booker-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending. When I pressed her further that, as an activist, she should read At the Deep End, she said Tsvangirai shoud have written more than one paragraph on the National Constitutional Assembly and also mentioned Tawandah Mutasa and Deprose Muchena. (Muchena is briefly mentioned; Mutasa is not.)
Strange turns of phrases
My friend asked: "Does he finally come out on his polygamous situation?" No, he doesn't, instead portraying himself as a single parent following the 2009 death in a motor vehicle accident of his wife, Susan, whom he describes as "my pillar and holistic stabiliser".
Tsvangirai has such strange turns of phrases. On page 542, he writes: "I wish to acknowledge the lack of space in this memoir for me to go into detail about my new experience in the changed political arena." I wrote in the margin: "No, Morgan, you had over 500 pages to do this."
In contrast, Wilfred Mhanda's 300-page autobiography, Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter, is one of the most important works to come out of Zimbabwe. It has authority because it was written by a senior combatant, a liberation war aristocrat, once a member of the high command of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (Zanla), which was the armed wing of Zanu.
In an arena where war credentials are important Mhanda's CV is sterling. He went to high school at Dadaya, the institution founded by New Zealand-born missionary and former prime minister of Rhodesia, Sir Garfield Todd. Todd was accorded the title mwana wevhu (son of the soil) and billed as the "rallying cry of African nationalism".
From early on Mhanda wanted to be a politician. Among the most treasured gifts he got from his parents were Ndabaningi Sithole's tome African Nationalism and a transistor radio (to younger readers, that was the iPhone of its day).
A bright student, Mhanda was accepted in 1971 at the then University of Rhodesia for a bachelor of science degree, majoring in zoology, botany and chemistry. While there he joined the university's underground Zanu branch. After taking part in protests, he was arrested. He skipped bail and went to Botswana, before proceeding to Tanzania for military training.
Multifaceted account
Mhanda's account is part war diary, part scholarly tome, part insider/outsider account of one of the most interesting episodes in Zanu history. The book is so authoritative that, not a few times, he disputes what other nationalists, historians and scholars have put out. He was one of the chief protagonists when nationalists such as Mugabe and Edgar Tekere were locked up in Rhodesian prisons and when Josiah Tongogara, Zanla's supremo, was in detention in Zambia following the suspicious death of lawyer and Zanu chairman Herbert Chitepo.
Mhanda's book is a clever critique of the uniform nationalist historiography ("patriotic history", as British historian Terence Ranger called it) that has become staple since 2000, sometimes known as Mugabeism.
Some of the information might not be of interest to the general reader but would be to scholars of that period. For the general reader, what's noteworthy is the rise of Mugabe. He wasn't well known in the training camps in Mgagao, Tanzania. "At the time we knew nothing about Mugabe except for the fact that he was the party's secretary general." Rugare Gumbo, one of the few guerrillas who knew him, "spoke highly of him and described him as articulate".
When Mozambique gained independence in 1975, Zanla moved to the east. When Machel asked them to submit a list of their political leaders, Mugabe topped it. Mhanda writes that "Machel leapt from his chair in disgust. He was clearly not happy that we had included Mugabe, let alone as the leader." Mugabe was then living in exile in Quelimane, on the Mozambican coast. "He loves the limelight," Machel said prophetically about Mugabe.
"We lived to regret the day we had put forward Mugabe's name," writes the man who later spent three years in a Mozambican prison for his dis-agreements with Mugabe, who was taking control of Zanla at the time.
Selective amnesia
Mhanda is strange bedfellows with Ben Freeth, in whose company he travels to the west of Zimbabwe in a section of Freeth's Mugabe and the White African.
"Deeply moving" and "fascinating", writes Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the foreword to the book. As I read Freeth, however, I wondered how much of the memoir the bishop had read. It's about the struggles of the British-born farmer fighting off war veterans, thugs and politicians who are after his farm.
The most maddening feature of the book is its amnesia about the genesis of the Zimbabwe crisis. "In Zimbabwe none of the white exploiters will be allowed to keep a single acre of their land," the book declares on page seven. "From 1973 to 1979, 320 white farmers were murdered. This counted for more than the total number of white civilian deaths over that whole period."
Why the farmers are being killed is never explained. Freeth doesn't mention the 50 000 blacks who died in the same period. It's almost as if apropos of nothing black "terrorists" (his word) started killing white farmers.
Ghost of Ian Smith
The book is written in the spirit of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence announced by the late Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, on November 11 1965. When Britain was "granting" independence to its colonies in the 1960s, Smith unilaterally declared independence from Britain.
The ghost of Smith suffuses every page of Freeth's book -- so much so that I wouldn't be surprised if Smith's brood argued for a share of the royalties.
Early on in the book Freeth tells us about his encounters with "tribesmen" in Ethiopia, "terrorists" killing the whites. The traditional healer is a "witch doctor". On a visit to a white-run farm, Freeth is impressed by the commercial operation, "an oasis of irrigated crops and productivity". In contrast the black-populated areas are "dry and barren", even though both sections receive the same amount of rainfall.
The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, the cornerstone of laws that began the impoverishment of black people, is written of affectionately. The law was meant for the "security of tenure" it provided, argues Freeth. "Contrary to the repetitious propaganda, every serious farmer knows that land in these communal areas can be made to produce every bit as well as other land in Zimbabwe," Freeth writes of the rocky, infertile land to which black people were driven by Rhodesian administrations.
Freeth, who is an evangelical Christian, quotes the Bible so liberally that at some point I had to check whether his book was put out by a religious publisher. But his idea of Christianity is one with no empathy for others except his fellow "white Africans". The Munhumutapa dynasty, whose seat was at Great Zimbabwe, is described as one of "master pillager[s]" and "dictator[s] of the time". Freeth and his Christian God seems to care only about white people.
The black men's traditions are "evil practices" and even animals are not spared. The crocodile, Mugabe's totemic animal, is described as "ugly and evil-looking". Can't a crocodile be allowed to be, well, a crocodile? "When I think of African tyrants, I think of the crocodile, because crocodiles are absolute tyrants." The continent is in a big mess because "the spirit of the crocodile has been roused by many of its leaders". I will admit that African leaders have messed up but we have to factor in the centuries of colonial rapine and plunder.
Lawless Africa
Before the advent of the white man, the land was a "place of insecurity and hunger and escaping from invading, looting tribes", Freeth writes. This is another way of saying that before the white man's arrival Africa was formless and without order, with no history. Freeth also writes about the first Chimurenga, a war that involved "attacks on the white people". There is no mention of the dispossession that preceded that heroic struggle.
Freeth's narrative of dispossession and legal fights is, to be sure, touching and heroic. He stoically fights off an assortment of hoodlums and politicians. After being rebuffed by Zimbabwean courts, he took his case to the Southern African Development Community regional court in Windhoek. The court ruled that "white people could be African".
If they so wish, whites can be black, too. The American liberation theologian James H Cone argued that "to be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind and your body are where the dispossessed are". It is never about pigmentation.
Labels: BEN FREETH, BIOGRAPHY, BOOKS, MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, THABO MBEKI
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