AN AFRICAN DILEMMA

...the discovery of arms on two ZAPU-affiliated farms last February...

...Sharpshooters, there to prevent anyone from running the blockade, could be spotted behind nearby boulders...

...and Prime Minister Mugabe's moves to install a one-party system...

...People from Upper Volta and Uganda are well acquainted with this problem...

...The first approach would defuse the opposition while the second would diffuse it...

...Nkomo hints that the soldiers may have returned, but did so after dropping some of their weapons at nearby farms—for insurance...

...A more central concern should be that single-party systems can falter when they provide an illusion of unity...

...Unrest can also be linked to an agonizingly slow pace of rural development throughout Zimbabwe...

...Should he attempt to build momentum for a one-party state by relying on traditional ethnic loyalties and curtailing activities of the opposition, the new arrangement will arise over the dead body of ZAPU...

...Disquieting pressures also emanate from less visible sources...

...When Zimbabweans threw off the Rho-desian yoke in 1980, they placed their fate in the hands of a former freedom fighter, little understood by Westerners, whose party had bettered Nkomo's by a 3-to-l margin...

...It is clear that Zimbabwe has many sources of discontent, despite Mugabe's considerable personal appeal...

...Is there a chance Mugabe will drop the one-party idea...

...The assumption underlying both is that Nkomo is a threat because he symbolizes real or imagined oppression in the new Zimbabwe, just as he symbolized oppression in Rhodesian days...

...Some 80 per cent of them, including 5,000 commercial farmers who form the backbone of the country's food industry, remained in the new Zimbabwe, their fears allayed by Mugabe's firm opposition to racism, bolstered by generous subsidies for the commercial farming sector and by assurances that their properties could not be expropriated out of hand...

...Mugabe claims one-party structures can easily accommodate pluralist impulses if they are run by democrats...

...Nkomo had gained favor with both the Americans and the Soviets during the struggle, but only the latter supplied arms and training for his Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA...

...More white land is available for purchase than the government can readily afford...

...Writing in May, In These Times correspondent James North felt confident enough to proclaim Mugabe's reconciliation government "a stirring success...

...Nkomo calls this strategy "poaching...

...It should be noted, however, that Nathan Shamuy-arira, Mugabe's powerful minister of information, insists the media are being readied for a program of socialist education, mobilization, and "mental decolonization...

...Alternatively, Mugabe could return to his Marxist roots and begin building a new party around a clearly articulated and socially pervasive ideology...

...People in drought areas do not recognize these constraints...

...But Mugabe might not get that far...

...In Zimbabwe, the white redoubt has taken a lower profile ever since its scheme to infiltrate police circles was discovered, but the recent army skirmish with South Africans near the border suggests that the provocateurs are active once again...

...Since consensus is hardly the dominant feature of the Zimbabwean landscape, Nkomo suspects Mugabe has something else in mind: He believes Mugabe is out to destroy opposition, particularly that which flows from the Ndebeles, heretofore the cornerstone of ZAPU support...

...For the West, the most encouraging aspect of Mugabe's rule was his apparent ideological turnabout: The pre-independence Marxist had become, in the post-independence era, the democratic socialist, the champion of growth and equity, the pragmatic comrade...

...Nkomo had certainly been the father of Zimbabwe's national liberation struggle, but the new era belonged to Robert Mugabe...

...Whites did not leave en masse...

...He will do this by asking all good Shona, who account for almost 80 per cent of the population, to ratify ZANU's ruling-party status in an "honest" and "fair" election...

...Tentative queries about the situation were answered in soothing tones: they were after "bandits"—the operation was just "routine...

...This would mark Zimbabwe's sixth straight "seizure" in as many years...

...The aging nationalist now claims these arms were probably hidden, unbeknownst to him, during the demobilization period...

...After all, the group held South African visas and was bound for Johannesburg...

...Simply put, he has started the country down a path of democratic pluralism which cannot easily be short-circuited...

...Ethnic conflict was forestalled when Mugabe appointed Nkomo as Minister of Home Affairs, increased wages for industrial and rural workers, and succeeded, with Nkomo's help, to integrate three disparate armies...

...The troubles, he says, are not political in the sense that any party is behind them...

...He went on to say, "Unless South Africa invades, Zimbabwe's heroic period is over...

...If they are run by tyrants, he says, the country will be a tyranny...

...Short of this, genuine unity would remain illusory...

...In Matabeleland, the center of Ndebele settlement extending from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls, robberies had become commonplace and army checkpoints loomed every fifty or so miles along the one main road serving the region...

...his abrupt dismissal from the government...

...All they know is that government relief is too little and too late...

...The result will undoubtedly be an overwhelming victory for the one-party notion, and it will be trumpeted as evidence that Zimbabweans prefer democratic unity to disruptive diversity...

...The prime minister's preference for a single-party system was already known to Zimbabweans...

...Of course, this explanation does not account for the SAM-7 missiles found on one farm, or the quantity of personal arms discovered—enough to supply at least one battalion...

...It is a viable strategy to pursue only if Mugabe is willing to assume the risks—shortfalls in the economy, an angry West, anti-communist reprisals from South Africa, loss of support by Zimbabwe's entrepreneurial groups—in the interest of the socialist transformation...

...Again, financial constraints can be blamed, although infra-structural weaknesses inherited from the Smith regime compound the problem...

...But Mugabe is walking a fine line...

...Mugabe maintains an arrangement of this nature will diminish tribal hostility while accommodating politically diverse viewpoints...

...But Matabeleland has also suffered a drought reputed to be its worst ever...

...My interpretation of the Zimbabwean dilemma may play into the hands of the wily Nkomo, whose innocence and interest in coalition politics are questionable...

...It is also widely believed that the sophisticated attack on Thornhill military base was masterminded, if not wholly executed, by South Africans, and some go so far as to implicate them in the kidnapping of the foreign tourists last July...

...villages based on individual ownership of land and cattle with grazing, marketing, and social services handled communally, and state farms...

...They are usually defended on the grounds that they help keep the lid on ethnic problems created when Europeans ran their fountain pens across the continent, drawing national boundaries that corresponded to their own squatter settlements more closely than to local tribal conditions...

...He implies that the problem arose because the soldiers were given confusing and conflicting orders...

...Nevertheless, the dismissal which followed, and the way Nkomo claims to have heard about it (on the radio), disturbed ZAPU supporters...

...Candidates for resettlement on former white-owned lands could choose between three models: farms run on the basis of communal ownership and production...

...At one time, he might have chosen this course...

...He indicated that "the story" was unfolding several blocks to the west...

...All the while, the bottlenecked Christine Sylvester is an assistant professor of political science, specializing in African politics, at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania...

...For this to work, however, Mugabe would have to provide a place for Nkomo within the one-party structure...

...Then came the crackdown on the Matabele/ZAPU capital of Bulawayo...

...In his eyes, Zimbabwe suffers from a rampant crime wave brought on by a feeling that "things are going wrong...

...to date, less than 1 per cent of the total population has been resettled...

...Outside observers had been wary of Mugabe at first, and expressed concern about the situation he faced...

...Zimbabwean society seems to exhibit qualities that make it a poor candidate for single-party rule—its bifurcated population is not fully susceptible to "poaching" tactics at this time, and the structural foundation of its politics militates against single-tracking...

...The government later countermanded this order and told the soldiers to return to assembly places near Bulawayo to be disarmed...

...The sixty-five-year-old nationalist had spent an hour and a half with us, obviously relishing the opportunity to present his side of several stories: the split between his Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU...

...supposedly he had taken ill...

...He appears to be banking on his ability to woo disaffected or ambitious ZAPU supporters to ZANU's cause...

...Soldiers brandishing automatic weapons were stopping all persons seeking to enter or leave the city, asking for identification cards...

...Although Americans typically look askance at one-party arrangements, forgetting the many incidences of one-party dominance in the United States, single parties are not inherently antidemocratic, nor are they always tools in the hands of demagogues...

...It was clear to us that Nkomo was a desperate and utterly frustrated individual, but it was not yet clear whether that frustration was strictly personal or whether it was shared by the broader population, as Nkomo claimed...

...A white man was killed on his farm near Bula-wayo, an attack on Thornhill military base destroyed a quarter of the national air force, and, of course, the Harare residences of Mugabe and Minister Nkala were assaulted in a somewhat amateurish fashion...

...Since Mugabe felt it necessary to oust the popular nationalist from the government, and has, since then, openly accused Nkomo of scheming against him, it is improbable that another compromise will be attempted soon...

...The drought comes at a time when the country faces a $400 million balance-of-payments deficit...

...There was no trial...

...By the same token, Mugabe has remained adamant about the necessity of turning in a one-party direction, and the banning of future ZAPU rallies underscores this sentiment...

...If his is the rallying cry for all persons whose expectations exceed the bounds of existing circumstance, the trick is to loosen those bounds so the climate of polarization eases and attention can be refocused on development...

...The diversity of perspective which this approach encourages is reinforced by a relatively open press—the door closes only when one is suspected of being a "dissident," although that status is dangerously ill-defined...

...In the former Tribal Trust Areas (renamed communal areas), where the majority of Zimbabweans live, rural flight was discouraged by offering families nearby outlets for their produce and accessible centers for social services and local industry— the "growth-point" approach to village development...

...For one brief year, the Mugabe government worked adroitly with the Zimbabwean people to keep the situation under control...

...Waiting to be cleared through the blockade, I wondered whether the era of heroics was truly over or was just reemerging in transmuted form—and if the latter, who was the enemy now...

...The soldiers were pleasant enough to us...

...Here is the rub...

...This option is tossed about by a tiny number of radicals in Zimbabwe who feel an ideologically based party would help Zimbabweans identify their true class enemies: monopolistic commercial farmers, agents of foreign capitalists, and Zimbabwe s petty bourgeoisie...

...Last July, Mugabe strengthened his hand against all opposition elements in Zimbabwe by extending the state of emergency in the country, and the emergency powers of the prime minister, for another six months...

...Those who had no cards were detained for questioning behind high wire fences...

...the current wave of lawlessness in Zimbabwe...

...in both states, members of the opposition have been bought off, outlawed, or hounded to the point where something called unity emerges, but it does so by default—there are simply no challengers left—or by military design...

...Rather, people are taking advantage of a climate of unrest that derives from Mugabe's "silly actions...

...But at a time when tempers in many parts of Zimbabwe are turning mean, Mugabe—if he is serious about running a democratic socialist state—may find it necessary to reach some two- or multi-party accommodation with his old rival, at least for the time being...

...The fear, in a nutshell, is that Zimbabwe's popular advocate of nonracialism and reconciliation will preserve his power and provide an illusion of unity in the country simply by playing a tribal card...

...There are two other courses Mugabe could choose, although neither centers on the immediate ascendance of single-party rule: He could drop the one-party idea and attempt to work alongside Nkomo's party again, or he could promote multi-party activity, as Senegal's Senghor did before retiring in 1980...

...One of the main roads connecting Bulawayo to the rural areas of Matabeleland was blocked by army tanks and personnel carriers...

...One final point on the nontribal nature of some unrest in Zimbabwe: At the height of the crackdown on Bulawayo, ZAPU staged a political rally in a township near Harare, deep in Mugabe territory...

...Government officials and outsiders alike have blamed the maelstrom on a resurgence of Shona-Ndebele animosity, which the ambitious chief of the Ndebeles, Joshua Nkomo, is supposedly stoking...

...Uppermost in Nkomo's mind, naturally, is his own "silly" dismissal from the government last February—an act prompted by the discovery of arms on two farms linked to him...

...The rally, and the subsequent clamp-down on ZAPU, bring to mind another factor about Zimbabwean politics which Mugabe should consider as he lays the foundations for a one-party state...

...The economy grew by 14 per cent that first year and by 8 per cent in 1981-82...

...In such settings, it is impolitic to inquire into people's ethnic backgrounds, but one organizer suggested about half those in attendance had to be Shona...

...Optimism began to replace foreboding...

...The timing of his announcement—a full three years before the next elections were scheduled—and the eagerness he showed to push this issue to the forefront of Zimbabwean politics, gave rise to the interpretation that Mugabe was out to break ZAPU and its leadership...

...This will not come by pushing ZANU down the throats of ZAPU supporters or by limiting channels of popular participation...

...Tanzania's system, shepherded by Julius Nyerere, is a case in point...

...It was now June 26, a scant month later...

...Mugabe's subsequent actions against the opposition party and its leader have churned the waters of discontent...

...Under these circumstances, Mugabe might be hard pressed to accomplish his goal at all, especially while maintaining himself as a democrat...

...Now there is so little ideological verve in Zimbabwe that the Marxist basis of Mugabe's victory slips the mind...

...What better way to destabilize Mugabe than to lure disgruntled locals into an act which would thoroughly embarrass him before the international community...

...This "survivor" thinks he holds tribal loyalty as his final trump card too, even as he grandstands on behalf of broader democratic principles...

...Despite these precautions, a group of foreign tourists was abducted along that strip—to be exchanged, it was claimed, for members of ZAPU detained by the government...

...Despite this disappointment and fifty-degree weather, cold by Zimbabwean standards, several thousand ZAPU supporters gathered anyway...

...As supporters filed into the outdoor stadium, they were told that Nkomo would not appear as promised...

...The coup de grace came on August 4, when Mugabe announced his intention to campaign for the next general election on a one-party (ZANU) platform...

...The economy had shown a negative growth rate for five straight years, and the South Africans, upon whom the white regime of Ian Smith had relied for transport and supplies, alternated policies of economic cooperation with words of encouragement for whites toying with leaving Zimbabwe...

...Even Nkomo sees nothing wrong with a one-party approach as long as there is agreement in the country that this is the route to take...

...The small group of American journalists with whom I was traveling had just stepped outside Joshua Nkomo's house near Bulawayo, Zimbabwe...

...Two days earlier, the residences of the prime minister and the minister of supplies had been fired upon by individuals described in the Zimbabwe press as dissidents or bandits...

...The chief merit of the scheme, according to the prime minister, is that it will speed development by centralizing decision-making and grass-roots activities...

...Nkomo, now simply a member of Parliament from Matabeleland, denies all wrongdoing...

...Ambassador Keeley finds Mugabe so "amazing" that he jokes, "One almost trusts him with a one-party state...

...Government relief is deemed inadequate, both by drought victims themselves and by representatives of international relief agencies...

...As speculative as these theories are, the American ambassador to Zimbabwe, Robert Keeley, reminds us, "It is always in South Africa's interest to prove that when you turn a country over to blacks, it goes to the dogs...

...This rally may have been one of ZAPU's last, for in September, Mubage placed a ban on five upcoming ZAPU events...

...Lately there have been rumors that former ZIPRA soldiers are deserting the national army at an alarming rate...

...For the moment, the prime minister seems undaunted by these considerations...

...Such talk may presage the resurrection of Mugabe the Marxist...

...A brain drain was imminent if white Rhodesians, fearful about the future of their investments, their social standing, and their political influence, mounted a mass exit for South Africa...

...ZAPU can then be outlawed, the net-tlesome Nkomo broken, and the political power of the Ndebeles crushed...

...Nkomo told them to "go, take your weapons, and leave Bulawayo...

...By temperament, the self-effacing prime minister is no tyrant...

...traffic was serenaded by low-flying army planes buzzing checkpoints and feeder streets...

...Having had no time to collect our thoughts, we were now being urged by the agitated ZAPU supporter to "see for yourselves what Mugabe is doing here...

...Certain of these grass-roots organizations are decidedly stronger than others—the labor movement is still fledgling—but the important thing is that Mugabe is providing a structural basis for old-fashioned pluralist politics, and Zimbabweans are using these structures to speak their minds on political issues...

...We drove in the designated direction and came upon a scene that took us aback...

...Twenty-four hours before that, Nkomo's last piece of property in Harare had been confiscated by the government...

...He could try persuading Nkomo to merge ZAPU with ZANU, as he did before the Winter of Troubles began...

...If Mugabe is familiar with these arguments, why would he call for a one-party state at this juncture in Zimbabwe's history...

...National revenues, derived primarily from the sale of mineral commodities and tobacco, are declining with the fortunes of the world economy, and almost a quarter of the budget is earmarked for other social services, most notably primary education...

...If he can be taken at his word, this means there is little likelihood that the mistake recently made by President Moi of Kenya—simply declaring the country a one-party state—and the response—a coup attempt—will be repeated in Zimbabwe...

...Probably not, but he has promised the Zimbabweans that his preference will not be foisted upon them...

...Matabeleland does figure prominently in the current difficulties, and, as the homeland for the Ndebeles, one assumes its problems are ethnically based...

...If Nkomo is correct in claiming, as he did recently, that "ZAPU has membership across the country," Mugabe's strategies may be undermining the very sources of support he seeks to nurture...

...he did so, Nkomo claims, without any evidence of illegal activities...

...Not only did the prime minister confiscate property belonging to Nkomo and his company, Nitram, which was ostensibly formed to generate employment for ZIPRA ex-combatants...

...Even if success comes, the experience of other African leaders—Marxist and otherwise—has shown that one-party structures always settle the nerves temporarily, but fail in the long run to turn Third World midgets into giants...

...In his typical down-home tone, Nkomo warns, "He can poach here and there but there are always some who aren't captured...

...In communal areas, revitalization efforts are hamstrung by poor roads, nonexistent local markets, and the tremendous costs of providing semi-arid lands with water...

...Later we learned the military had searched houses in the area for arms and that several beatings had been inflicted...

...Refugees from Mozambique and Zambia were settled with dispatch, and plans were made to develop rural areas along collective lines...

...Whether this is Mugabe's intent remains to be seen...

...Historical animosities between the majority Shona people of eastern Zimbabwe, of whom Mugabe is one, and the Zulu-descended Ndebeles of the west, who make up a quarter of the population, could flare up again now that the common enemy was gone...

...The South African government openly and, one might add, proudly supports insurgency forces in Mozambique and Angola...

...Everywhere, Zimbabweans are encouraged to participate in shaping local and national development projects through elected district councils (the first local governments in the country), labor unions, workers' committees, women's leagues, youth wings, cooperatives, and the like...

...The prime minister would be well-advised to factor these considerations into his one-party equation: First, crime and discontent in Zimbabwe are not necessarily linked to tribal grievances...

...By late June of last year, however, analysts of the new Zimbabwe were almost back to square one in their assessments of the country's future...

...This will not be an auspicious beginning for a democratic one-party state, nor will it augur well for genuine unity...

...Mugabe, something of a Johnny-come-lately in nationalist circles, especially compared to Nkomo, was known to be intense, highly intelligent, avowedly Marxist, and personally antagonistic toward his defeated mentor...

...But Nkomo may have a point, and more importantly, he may use his analysis to rally opposition in Zimbabwe and force Mugabe into a crisis of legitimacy...

...If so, he has a long row to hoe before the average Zimbabwean is inspired to sacrifice short-term gains for a vision of Marxist-style socialism in the future...

...One-party states are ubiquitous in Black Africa...

...Economic aid flowed—the United States alone would commit $75 million—but the Western democracies were unsettled by Mugabe's Marxist leanings, even though the Soviet Union had been informed by Mugabe that no formal diplomatic relations could be established until Moscow severed its ties with Nkomo and ZAPU...

...He is left, therefore, with two options...