Tribalism and Socialism in Zimbabwe

...Indeed, the reverse could be argued: the empires, including the Belgian, but particularly the British and French, kept the balance between potentially warring tribes, and while without political power (though not as powerless in general as he is in most African states today) the black enjoyed considerable security, and even a modestly rising standard of prosperity...

...The argument was put to me in this way by one of Mugabe's senior ministers in Harare, in connection, particularly, with agriculture...

...Nigeria and Kenya have modified a basically collectivist system with elements of rampantly corrupt capitalism...

...Though in many respects the most gifted, least blinkered, and most attractive of all the contenders, Chikerema had no prospect of admis sion to Lancaster House or of electoral success: his tribe was too small...

...The president of neighboring Botswana was due to visit Zimbabwe...

...And if there is a severe criticism to be made of the imperial powers it is that they left too early, and too abruptly...

...Moreover-though, of course, these are still early days-Mugabe is unusual among black African politicians in being personally utterly incorruptible, and that judgment applies also to all the ministers closest to him...

...However, throughout the long history of the struggle to overthrow successive white governments in Rhodesia, Nkomo was always prepared to compromise...

...Nkomo likes to style himself "Father of Zimbabwe," because he is the longest serving of all the country's leaders...

...I recall, for example, in a conversation with President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, venturing a criticism of the fact that night after night-and sometimes hour after hour-Zambian television carried self-glorifying exhortations to the people by himself...

...Both the British instructors attached to his armed forces for the purpose of post-independence training, and the majority of Zimbabwean whites who had served in Ian Smith's army, quite simply refused either to participate in thorough-going methods of suppression or to train black troops to do so...

...Against this settled gloom the passionate reiteration by Mugabe and his ministers of their determination to build a racially equal state-if only to show the South Africans that it can be done-has little weight...

...Practically without an exception (Ian Smith is, perhaps, one), the white Rhodesians who were most passionate in their denunciations of Mugabe-who, if they had to have a black leader would have always supported Nkomo-are now his greatest admirers...

...By contrast the ascetic, prim, academically eloquent Mugabe neither visited Communist countries nor sought their aid: "I have not taken, and will not take, as much as a bullet from them," he told me in Mozambique early in 1979...

...At the Lancaster House conference in London, which led to the independence of Zimbabwe, the" three main leaders-Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, and Ndabaninge Sit-hole-were all from different tribes...

...The white emigration rate, though, is high, in spite of the formidable difficulties placed in the way of removing any of one's substance abroad...

...To be sure, the artificial borders of the colonies created in the imperial era were allowed by the retreating Western powers to remain as the lines delimiting the territories of the newly independent states, and to that extent Britain and France must bear a measure of historical responsibility for what is happening today...

...Much was made, it is true, in the Western press of the savage repression of Nkomo's people in Matabeleland by the Fourth Brigade, trained by the North Koreans in order-restoring methods which would bring blushes to the cheeks of Soviet commanders in Afghanistan...

...Outside the conference altogether was James Chikerema (Cheeky-cheeky bangbang, as he was known to his friends...

...That prosperity, for all the miracles of improvisation achieved by the Smith government during the years of isolation, was already fragile by the time of independence...

...Washington and London preferred Nkomo's private professions-I recall a hilarious meeting in his hotel room during the Lancaster House conference when this gigantic man, clad only in socks and underpants, padded around explaining that his Eastern visits were merely eyewash-of pro-Western attitudes to Mugabe's actions...

...For me, however, it was graphically illustrated during my last visit to Zimbabwe by a diplomatic difficulty...

...Harare remains its decorous, beautiful self, and even its black inhabitants refer to it as often as not as "Salisbury...

...Men and women of, say, forty or fifty are sanguine that they are secure for their own lifetimes, but they see to it that their children are educated abroad, for preference in South Africa or the United States...

...For the moment, however, there is a delicate balance, if perhaps a precarious one...

...Some of the smaller, and successful, French colonies have taken different routes...

...But he was a self-declared-self-indicted, if you like -'-Marxist revolutionary...

...Nor is their cause well served by such incidents as the trial of white Air Force officers for sabotage, be they guilty or not...

...Before independence, during the election campaign, and for some time afterwards the relations between the two men produced a curious, and still relevant, paradox in Western-and particularly American and British- policy...

...But the creation of the brigade exemplified, in my view, Mugabe's ruthlessness rather than any Communist leanings...

...It may all be deplorable, and inhuman, but it can also be argued, in the light of my earlier sketch on tribalism and its consequences, that it was necessary...

...Mugabe simply sought out the best killers he could find who would not present a threat to his own power-as the Cubans have done to the Angolan government-and hired them...

...Meikles Hotel, the epitome and encapsulation of all that was graceful in colonial Rhodesia, is as it was, and the blacks so recently given the free run of its facilities regard it with the same affection as do the whites...

...Naturally, his meetings with Mugabe and President Canaan Banana would be the high spot of the trip...

...Recognition of his greater intransigence, coupled with the relatively massive numerical preponderance of Shona voters, ensured his pre-independence electoral triumph...

...One or two-like Swaziland- have been relatively successful as independent states, partly through the overwhelming numerical domination of a single tribe, partly because they have so far managed to cling to the formulae of an ancient paternalism...

...The fledgling state remains, and will remain for some time, heavily dependent on the skills and sophistication of the white community...

...It was Russia, and other Warsaw Pact powers, that fueled Ms arsenal...

...Contrary to left-wing suspicions in the West, South Africa was always, except in the supply of oil, a niggardly patron of independent Rhodesia...

...In addition, he has shown remarkable restraint on an issue close to his heart, that establishment of a one-party state which is the consuming ambition of the vast majority of African politicians...

...Nkomo...

...But the rate is higher among whites of the newer vintage: the majority of Rhodesians of old stock seem determined to stay, and those in Mashonaland have little to complain about in their lot, in contrast to their fellows in Matabeleland...

...Nkomo, however, had fallen out with Mugabe and resigned from his government in protest against what he considered to be the harassment by Zimbabwean security forces of some of his own people, former members of his Zimbabwean National Liberation Army, and what Mugabe insisted was merely the suppression of armed and dangerous elements...

...So, the conclusion is that white time, if not actually short, is definitely limited...

...Kaunda-the most courteous and civilized of men-replied by pointing out that there were no less than 33 tribes and sub-tribes in Zambia...

...It is a truism to say that the conflicts of tribalism are at the heart of the post-imperial degeneration of black Africa...

...We may not have been wrong in believing Nkomo-we never had a chance to find out-but we were certainly wrong in assuming, on the basis of his rhetoric, that Mugabe was a Communist puppet...

...Their universal conviction is that there will be no place in the Zimbabwe of the future for the next white generation, and they fear that even the time allowed them may be foreshortened if anything happens to Mugabe...

...Yet, of all the putative black leaders, he was the one who made large numbers of trips behind the Iron Curtain, especially to East Germany...

...Quite simply," an Afrikaner businessman who has lived all his adult life in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and intends to leave his bones there told me, "we could not have gone on any longer, because the South Africans would not back us up...

...But there is more to tribalism than the kind of naked and bloody conflict that has erupted in Zimbabwe between the 'Ndebele people of Mat-abeleland and the Shona-dominated government of the country in Harare...

...Left to himself, again, the African will grow principally for subsistence, and only marginally for the market...

...The people of Botswana, however, are cousins of the 'Ndebele...

...I having remarked earlier on the quite extraordinary generosity of the Mugabe government to white farmers (they are much less generous to white industrialists or white bureaucrats), my companion used this as an illustration in his argument...

...But to a white farmer in Matabeleland the man pointing a gun at him or his wife or his children is an 'Ndebele, an Nkomo man, even if old Joshua cannot control him, and the knight galloping to his rescue is a black killer trained by the North Koreans...

...The rivalry-enmity is not now too strong a word-between Mugabe and Nkomo springs, however, not simply from ancient tribal roots but from their relative positions in the history of the independence movement, and their resulting personal assessments of their own worth...

...Nothing since independence has suggested that we were right...

...but the essence of a truism is that it is true...

...That man is now an enthusiastic supporter of Mugabe, and by his testimony hangs yet another paradox...

...By no stretch of the imagination could the enormous, food-guzzling, paternal, and jolly figure of Joshua Nkomo be considered a Marxist, or even a socialist...

...There are shadows on the horizon, however, and not only in Matabele-land...

...In Zimbabwe, moreover, recent history has given competition: between tribes a vicious twist, and it is this twist that had led to the present crisis...

...It is all very well, from all parts of the political spectrum, in London or New York or Washington, to attack the deployment of the Fourth Brigade...

...But Mugabe could not let him go alone, lest it be thought that it was unsafe for himself to enter Matabeleland...

...Since Nkomo was sulking in Zimbabwe's second city-Buluwayo, effectively his capital-the president would have to go there...

...He went, therefore, accompanied by a bodyguard of a thousand men, a remarkable force for a man who, unlike most black African leaders, eschews large retinues...

...There is no doubt that the application of domestic economic socialism, with its attendant centralizing of economic control and the speeding-up of a black advance in all sectors of the economy, has done enormous damage to Zimbabwean prosperity...

...The two aspects of tribalism, then-an ingrained and destructive economic methodology and an inherently fierce competitiveness- conspire, in black African states, to destroy...

...Socialism, in its basic form of control from the center, was crucial to ensure the preservation, let alone the development, of the agricultural industry...

...Sithole, Muzorewa, Chikerema, and others who were at Lancaster House have long since disappeared into obscurity...

...That, he says, is something for the distant future, and to be attained only by consent, not by imposition...

...Constant rallying, constant exhortation, constant preaching, constant emphasis on the unifying principle of the presidency were merely some of the means he found necessary to achieve the preservation of his country's fragile unity...

...But Nigeria had to endure the cruelest of civil wars, and in Kenya the most able politician of the day, Tom Mboya, was murdered on the road of succession to Jomo Kenyatta, the great 'Mzee, because he was a Luo, and the Kikuyu wanted to keep the top job in the family...

...Its peacefulness may partake of something of the character of a mirage...

...The mechanics and the ideology of socialism have been, for former British colonies, the favored machinery for pinning together desperately disparate groups into a united state...

...However, the burden is nothing as great as that imagined by either Western or African critics of empires and capitalism...

...I summarize this argument not because I agree with it, but because I understand why a man like Robert Mugabe-who calls it pragmatic socialism-should, almost in despair, adopt it...

...All that is gone...

...The poise, the cleanliness, the loveliness of the city may all be evanescent...

...Unlike any black African capital I have been in, Harare has nothing of the shanty town about it...

...On the less important level tribalism, or the necessity in the interests of stability of combating it, is responsible for some of the features of African states that most readily strike the American or European visitor as disagreeable...

...Mugabe, from his late emergence as a Shona leader, was adamant that no halfway house to black majority rule, however brief the period visualized for its life, would be acceptable...

...Compared to Harare, Lusaka, for example, is a run-down village...

...The time-encrusted tribal traditions, he asserted, ensured that, left to himself, the African will indulge in strip-farming, the method most damaging to the soil, most corrosive of prosperity...

...Patrick Cosgrave TRIBALISM AND SOCIALISM IN ZIMBABWE Why Robert Mugabe wants Big Government...

...News of kidnappings, terrorism, and brutal counter-terrorism from Matabeleland have made newspaper readers the world over familiar with the present lineaments of that crisis...

...Virtually to a man, however, they regard their time as limited...

...But at least for the moment the jewel of Central Africa shines brightly...

...It would be unthinkable, therefore, if His Excellency did not call on Mr...

...The incumbent prime minister, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, elected under Ian Smith's power-sharing constitution, was a Shona, like Mugabe, but he came from a different section, of the tribe and his group had, historically, been in constant conflict with Mugabe's...

...Capitalism, he said, or capitalism modified by collective welfare provision, such as obtains in Britain, may well work-and work well-in a country that is, in terms of economic culture, modern, that is, one whose people understand the basic rules of buying and selling, of making and doing, of production and productivity...

...But there is another, non-political, reason for the adoption of socialist doctrines by African leaders...