Why Mugabe still has support and how to deal with him

(crossposted at Daily Kos)

Mugabe may be running one of the less effective dictatorships in the world today, but he does have more support among Zimbabweans today than Bush does among Americans. No, this is not some troll diary arguing that we shouldn't really oppose Mugabe because of all the things he and ZANU-PF did to liberate their country or because he is facing a western imperialist conspiracy against the African people. It's not an argument in favor of Mugabe at all. It's just an attempt to explain why he does still have support in Zimbabwe, who his supporters are, and how well-informed policy could more effectively remove him than the kind of ignorant, "speak loudly but carry a small stick" policy currently favored in Washington could. If you're interested in a little reality based background, read on.

Mugabe certainly gets some backing because of his role as leader of the major guerrilla group in the Chimurenga, the war for independence. That support has been eroded by the failure of his recent economic policies, of course, but why doesn't he change them, what is he getting at, and why do a minority of Zimbabweans continue to support him? That was then, this is now, and why does he seem to be such a different person?

First, you have to understand that the Chimurenga war against the Ian Smith led white oligarchy was not fought so much for independence or even an end to racial discrimination as it was fought over the land. Land is a sacred issue to many Africans, the Shona and Ndebele of Zimbabwe included. If you're Irish you may understand that. The Irish didn't have a concept of private land ownership, but they gave up everything (language, culture, everything that constitutes national identity to most nations) to take back their land. The Shona and the Ndebele felt and feel the same way. They may not have had to give up as much, or fight as long as the Irish did, but they still had to fight. Indeed, they were fighting among themselves over the land when Cecil Rhodes came in and changed its name to Southern Rhodesia.

Joshua Nkomo, head of ZAPU, the Zimbabwe African People's Union, who joined with Mugabe during the Chimurenga but fell out with him later, was once asked by a reporter if he intended to nationalize the land. He said that land belonged to society and everyone has a right to land. Confused, the reporter asked if that meant that he did intend to nationalize land. Nkomo replied (quoting from memory here)

You may call it "nationalization" if you wish, but land will be normalized.

Had he been asked the same question, Mugabe would probably have replied "Yes, we are Marxist-Leninist Communists and we intend to nationalize land." I remember watching an official ZANU-PF representative introducing a documentary about the Tanzam Railway to a Maoist group. He finished his introduction by claiming that "We also had this Marxism Leninism Mao Tse-Tung Thought before the Europeans came." I asked him later if he meant that the Shona way of life was based on principles of Dialectical Materialism. The ZANU-PF representative laughed at my question, which was more Socratic than serious, but he did say that the attitude toward land ownership was the same, that land should be the collective property of the community.

Why had I used the term "Shona way of life" in asking the question?

Because even Jesuit missionaries had trouble figuring out Shona religion, and reverted to teaching them "natural religion" before trying to convert them, it is common to refer to "the Shona way of life" rather than "Shona traditional religion."

from an art site:

The Shona way of life centers on the family and reflects profoundly spiritual and humanistic values.

from a religious site:

The Shona in large part do not display a sense of being overwhelmed by evil. They do not spend their time calculating the degree of evil in creation nor do they express anger at spiritual forces for permitting the world to crush them so. Rather they have developed a society that is based on values so foreign to our own Western thought that it raises the important issue of whether our Western based theodicies are irretrievably culture-bound. Where I began the study focusing on the inability of Western theodicies to account for the high incidence of evil in the third world, my focus was now changed to look at the irrelevance and incongruence of the values of Western theodicies in relation to the traditional cultures of southern Africa.

If you want to understand how people there feel about it, give up everything you thought you knew and try to look through other people's eyes. This is not a rational fight over economic policy. It is a sacred struggle over land. Mugabe and his backers still care about that, even if Tsvangirai and his mostly modern, urban, working class followers don't.

ZANU-PF was allied with Maoist China during the Chimurenga, and they were armed by the Chinese. This was partly convenience, but partly ideological, since both were peasant based movements. ZANU-PF had an ethnic base among the Shona, while ZAPU had an ethnic base in the Ndebele. Ethnicity is never the whole story in politics, Zimbabwean or American or elsewhere, but it can't be ignored anywhere, either. ZANU-PF was also peasant based, while ZAPU had a strong base in the urban proletariat. Joshua Nkomo was an old union leader of railway workers, and continued to get strong support from the working class, as well as arms and support from the Soviet Union.

Note to anyone who thinks that ZANU-PF was "pro-Chinese" while ZAPU was "pro-Soviet": you have it backwards. The Soviets were backing ZAPU while the Chinese were backing ZANU-PF. The Chimurenga wasn't started by outside Communist agitators. It was started by Africans for their own purposes.

ZANU-PF in power continued to be a peasant based party concerned primarily with the land issue. They ran the country well for the first several years of their rule, and the country developed so rapidly it was held out as proof that an African country didn't immediately collapse or stagnate just because Africans took over the government. Because of that the example of Zimbabwe was important in convincing the South African government to release Nelson Mandela from prison and negotiating an end to apartheid with him. Mandela has spoken out against what has been going on recently but he is refraining from criticizing Mugabe by name, and some interpret his remarks as even-handed criticism of both sides.

Mugabe's very success changed the political ground from under him. Mugabe and ZANU-PF's continued insistence on the centrality of the land issue and the confiscation of white farms was increasingly irrelevant to the urban proletariat that his successful development policies were creating. They didn't care about the land issue any more. They were more modern than that. Once again, Mugabe's main opponent was someone who came out of the union movement, in this case the miners' union. It has been from the working class that most of the support for his Movement for Democratic Change has come.

Mugabe's support still comes in strong in the villages. His party is well organized there and he has support from traditional rulers. Few people there care about the decline of the Zimbabwean dollar as long as they can feed themselves from the land, and international standards of democracy matter less than the Shona way of life that they see Mr. Mugabe defending. Things look very different than they do to a wage worker in a mine or a city. Wage workers in the cities, on the mines and in factories have a more modern, less traditional outlook. They are the ones feeling the brunt of Mugabe's repression and economic mismanagement and they are the ones who most desperately want to get rid of him.

I have read all kinds of conspiracy theories. One was that the Zimbabwe military is led by white generals who are afraid of war crimes trials for their actions during the Chimurenga wars and that they are holding Mugabe hostage. Others usually center around western plots to hold onto stolen land. Neither kind of conspiracy theory is convincing. What's obviously happening here, the simplest possible explanation, is that Zimbabwe is changing too fast for Mugabe and his aging Chimurenga leaders to comprehend. Those who were once tomorrow's people have become yesterday's.

I think it was President Kennedy who said that when we make non-violent change impossible we make violent change inevitable. That's what Mugabe has done, tried to prevent the normal processes of history from working the way they are supposed to. That's why he and his group, formerly progressive but now reactionary, will be swept aside by the forces of history. Marx (or at least the Marxists) may have been wrong about the proletariat bringing socialism, but he was certainly right that the process of economic development creates this working class that then becomes the dominant force in society.

But that sweeping aside of the old peasant-based ZANU-PF rule must not only be done by the Zimbabweans themselves, it must be SEEN to be done by the Zimbabweans themselves, not by Western or other international intervention. Not that the US military is in much condition to intervene anywhere right now. Not that Bush really cares about Zimbabwe any more than he cares about Darfur or Myanmar. They don't have enough oil and no one there tried to kill his daddy. Sanctions have done what they can, but where sanctions served notice on apartheid South Africa that it couldn't expect support from the west, they only convince Mugabe that the west never would let him take back land from the settlers. It seems only a political revolution can bring change to Zimbabwe. It can only be led by the working class. Only the working class has the power and the interest in bringing democracy to Zimbabwe. Only the people themselves can create democracy in a country. We couldn't export it to them even if we wanted to. Democracy by its very nature cannot be imposed on a people. It must be learned.

Well, why shouldn't the working class lead the struggle against dictatorship in Zimbabwe? The working class led the collapse of Communism. It is unions that are taking the lead in toppling Mugabe. They have already taken the lead in seeing that he couldn't get more arms from China.

All praise to the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, which for four days refused to unload a shipment of Chinese arms destined for landlocked Zimbabwe. That was long enough for a South African court to issue a judgment refusing to let the 77 tons of weapons be shipped across the country to Zimbabwe, despite the South African government’s unwillingness to intervene.

I almost forgot. There was a discussion on DemocracyNow.org you should consider. I particularly recommend the views of Horace Campbell in the discussion.