Robert Mugabe, then and now

Twenty-eight years ago, I was chatting with Robert Mugabe in his backyard in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. We were sitting in the cool shade of towering trees in the garden of the presidential residence. In his crisp, clipped, eloquent style of speaking, he was telling me of the prosperous future that lay ahead for his country. Prosperous and, he also stressed, democratic. The next day -- April 18, 1980 -- was to be day one of the new nation of Zimbabwe.

Though it is difficult to imagine now that the Switzerland of Africa has been turned into a Stalinist gangster state, a great aura of hope hung over Zimbabwe at the time of its birth. It all could have been -- and for a while it actually was -- a wonderful Cinderella story.

As a TV reporter, I'd covered the last stages of the grisly guerrilla war in the late 1970s that was about to end the existence of the outlaw "country" of Rhodesia. Now, I was talking with the man who won that war and turned Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. He was full of moderation -- in contrast to his dark talk during the war that had just ended, about people's courts and firing squad-vengeance. Such blood-curdling language had sent chills through the whites of Rhodesia as they imagined what they could expect at the hands of these Marxist fanatics once in power.

There would be no Rhodesians and no Black Zimbabweans, Mugabe assured me, and no tribes, white or otherwise. There would be only Zimbabweans. White farmers -- the very backbone of the country's economy -- could keep their land. The wrongs of the past must be forgiven and forgotten, he stressed. It was a remarkable conversion from ruthless guerrilla to reasoned conciliator and statesman. The next day he repeated the same reassurances on Zimbabwean TV during the independence celebrations.

The world came to Zimbabwe's independence party. Among the high-flyers: Prince Charles; the American vice-president; India's Indira Gandhi; and the leaders of most of the African states. (Pierre Trudeau, curiously for all his purported interest in the Third World, stayed home. He sent instead Canada's external affairs minister.)

Zimbabwe was everyone's poster child that day. The good guys (the oppressed, landless masses) had defeated the bad guys (the white, fascist, land-grabbing exploiters, who made up only about 5% of the population but seemed to own everything of value). And now the victors were, to the amazement of all, forgiving and welcoming to the vanquished.

Ian Smith would buy into none of this. He was the man who had illegally declared independence from Britain in 1965 rather than accept majority rule (a condition that the British had insisted on). He doubted that Mugabe's love-in would ever have real substance.

But he now accepted that he'd lost the war. (Smith once said there will "never be majority rule in Rhodesia in a thousand years." It was a short thousand years.) And he wished his new country well.

He ran in the new elections, winning a seat in Parliament -- and remained in the country, operating his farm a few miles outside Harare. But he was utterly unrepentant about the past. Smith insisted his fight had been a worthy and noble cause, and that no one should now be hoodwinked by a "new" Mugabe. Lurking behind Mugabe the born-again Jeffersonian democrat, he warned, was Mugabe the thug and gangster who would one day make his move. Mugabe's very nature, Smith felt (correctly, as it turns out), was totalitarian.

Smith repeated this openly and constantly. Yet Mugabe never moved against Smith. And he lived out his years unmolested.

Most Rhodesians that I met during this era were not interested in politics. They didn't much care who ran the government, black or white. What they feared was chaos, corruption and murder -- such as they saw in Congo and other sub-Saharan nations. It had not been Mugabe's "blackness" that fuelled the white's determination to fight on and dig in -- it was his shrill violent Marxism and talk of firing squads.

The whites saw themselves not as colonizers, but as pioneers. Most had been born there, and felt they were fighting for the land of their birth against communist terrorists.

But now at his country's birth, Mugabe was reaching out to the whites as allies in nation-building. For 10 years, they would be guaranteed seats in Parliament. He also appointed a white farmer as minister of agriculture, a supreme gesture of conciliation.

Mugabe inherited a remarkable country. Despite almost 15 years of war, Zimbabwe still had an excellent road network, a first-rate airline, an honest and effective civil service, a functioning health and education system and a reasonably healthy economy despite years of international sanctions. All the while, it was producing an educated and sophisticated workforce, with a growing black middle and business class.

The tough and professional Rhodesian army, by war's end, had more blacks than whites in the ranks, including a great many black NCOs and even some officers. (We were left with the irony of a highly motivated, largely black army battling black guerrillas, both claiming to be fighting for their country.) A surprising number of white soldiers stayed on and served side-by-side with their former guerrilla enemies, who were now to be incorporated into the new Zimbabwean army.

When he needed to be, Robert Mugabe could be practical and non-ideological, which makes it such a mystery why the Mugabe of today acts against his own best interests. During the war, some white farmers I knew secretly travelled to Mozambique to meet with Mugabe at his exile base and explain the economic facts of life. These particular Rhodesians, sensing which way the wind would eventually blow, anticipated that the guerrillas would someday come to power. So they reached out and explained to Mugabe that their farms were vital to the country's economy. They produced most of the foreign exchange and most of the jobs. Rhodesian farms were run on modern management principles and many (this was the late '70s) were even using computers. Do not wreck all this, they pleaded.

The farmers also made clear they were not a political threat. They just wanted to be left alone, to farm. Someone else could run the country.

Mugabe listened politely. To those at the meeting, it seemed he'd never before actually met the type of people he'd been busy denouncing as class enemies. He was a propagandist and war leader, not an economist. Economics to him was Marxist theory, not actual real-life farms and crops and jobs. He'd never thought through the consequences of turning complex farming operations over to peasants (a step he would finally take two decades later, with catastrophic consequences).

Mugabe never actually said that he had been won over by his Rhodesian visitors. But he did stop talking about grabbing their farms, and said no more about firing squads for the exploiters of the masses. Which may explain why after independence most farmers who were left still stayed on to chance it.

But Mugabe the pragmatist died many years ago -- replaced by Mugabe the dictator. As a result, there are scarcely any whites left in the nation, perhaps about 40,000 in all. Most white farms, have been seized by roving gangs of so-called "war veterans." Some farmers have been killed trying to defend their land while police stood by and watched. In the cities and townships, thousands of black Zimbabweans suspected of opposing Mugabe have been maimed, torched and murdered.

There were early signs of trouble. In 1981, only a year after independence, Mugabe asked the North Koreans, of all people, to train his dreaded Fifth Brigade, which proceeded to massacre as many as 20,000 people in the country's restive Matabeleland region.

The Zimbabwe army, once one of the best in Africa, has become hopelessly politicized and is now a defender not of the state but merely of the regime. Its medal-encrusted generals have announced they would not let anyone other than Mugabe ever become president. And Mugabe says only God can remove him.

Zimbabwe, once an African breadbasket, now imports food. Yet still there are dire shortages. Seized farms and government contracts have ended up in the hands of Mugabe's relatives and cronies. The corrupt ministry of finance is derided as "Bob's Take-Out." Zimbabwe's education and health services have collapsed. AIDS, in particular, is epidemic.

The economy is a train wreck. Eight adults in 10 have no work. Inflation is running in six digits, perhaps seven. No one is really sure: At such stratospheric heights, numbers lose their meaning, and money has little value.

Mugabe today blames this nightmare on Britain, which he describes to his cheering crowds as a "thieving colonialist" that wants to turn back the clock to the Rhodesian era. But Mugabe's war was never against Britain, which had (to its credit) insisted on majority black rule as a condition for independence back in the '60s. Ian Smith could not live with this and declared, illegally, Rhodesia's independence, with whites in charge. Zimbabwe's independence struggle was a civil war among its own people, not a fight for freedom from imperial Britain.

Some argue that Mugabe remains a pragmatist who is held hostage by hotheads and fanatics in his own entourage. I do not buy this. I have never met anyone as focused, as driven, and as absolutely certain about where he wants to go and how to get there. These are the steely qualities that made him, and not rival guerrilla commanders, the winner in the Rhodesian war. Trained by Jesuits, he has a mind as sharp and as quick as a guillotine. In exile in Mozambique and in power in Harare, he has been utterly ruthless in dealing with opponents and dissent. He can whip up a crowd in a heartbeat. He is no one's man but his own.

Ian Smith got it mostly wrong. He died last November, at 88. Right to the end, he never quite understood how history had left men like him behind. He was wrong to believe that his defiant, besieged little rebel country could hold out alone, recognized by no one. He was wrong to hope that the Americans would back him as an anti-communist bulwark. He was wrong to assume his country's blacks would wait generations to share power and prosperity. He was wrong to believe that his tough little army could cope with guerillas as they swept over his borders in their thousands.

"..Though it is difficult to imagine now that the Switzerland of Africa has been turned into a Stalinist gangster state, a great aura of hope hung over Zimbabwe at the time of its birth. It all could have been -- and for a while it actually was -- a wonderful Cinderella story..."

That is only true of delusional fools like Jimmah Carter. I never doubted that prosperous Rhodesia would turn into poverty stricken, starving and despotic Zimbabwe. The black rule at any price crowd threw that country under a bus.

I remember back in the early eighties, I heard an interview Mugabe did with a fawning American reporter. Mugabe had censored or tried to censor a newspaper in Zimbabwe and the reporter asked him about that. Mugabe said something to the effect that he, Mugabe, ruled in the best interests of the people. Therefore, to criticize Mugabe was to go against the people. Mugabe made it clear that journalists should only be allowed freedom of speech if they serve the interests of the people by not criticizing him. He said this in a very lecturing tone of voice. It was a perfect example of the circular Leninist logic dictators use to justify anything.

I knew right then what I suspected all along, that Mugabe was a Marxist Leninist and he would hold on to power as a dictator.

“Though it is difficult to imagine now that the Switzerland of Africa has been turned into a Stalinist gangster state”

Difficult for the lib media to imagine, maybe. Since I followed the story in the news at the time, I can tell you that there were lots of conservatives warning at the time that this guy was going to bring a communist hell to Zimbabwe.

Good article up to the comment that his mind is quick and sharp as a guillotine. When you have all day everyday to just think, your opinions can flow like s*** through a goose. And no one will not cheer. Only 40000 white devils to go and they can have a perfect country in their own minds. I say, let them all starve or whatever.

Only a white lib could or would believe that the marxist revolutionary would be a democrat over time. We in the West are doomed if we continue to let these Peter Pans have any influence. Instead we could send the author to live in Zimbabwe.

Though it is difficult to imagine now that the Switzerland of Africa has been turned into a Stalinist gangster state, a great aura of hope hung over Zimbabwe at the time of its birth

Much the same was said of Bolshevik Russia, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Kymer Rouge, Cuba under Castro (that one in particular has the same sort of glowing press coverage) and of course Venezuela under Chavez.

Marxist thugs are Marxist thugs, and the end is always the same. Blood, lots and lots of blood, and in the end economic disaster. (Unless like China they turn away from The True Faith, in which case there is only the blood, and danger to the neighbors)

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
-- From "Maud Muller" by John Greenleaf Whittier

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
-- From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald
When push comes to shove, it matters nought what might have been.
Rhodesia is long gone, along with British Colonial Africa, French Colonial Africa and Dutch Colonial Africa.
Many of us said then that Africa was not ready. We were met with "and whose fault is that?". But the fact remains that Africa was not ready and most of it is not ready yet.
But there is no point in looking backword. Africa, ready or not, must stand on its own feet and solve its own problems and deal with its own tyrants.
And we must stop enabling the tyrants by excusing Africa's geopolitical adolescence.

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