When I was a young doctor working in what was still Rhodesia, I read a book by a nun who was also a political economist. She demonstrated that land reform was not only a requirement of social justice but would lead to greatly increased agricultural output, since African peasant farmers cultivated their land more intensively than commercial farmers. Her argument was positively Euclidean in its precision and I accepted it in its entirety.
The only thing that she omitted to mention, and that did not occur to me at the time, was that the land reform would have to be carried out by men; and not just men in general, but by particular men, with all their passions, weaknesses and prejudices. Political geometry is non-Euclidean.
The man who eventually carried out, or at least presided over, the land reform in Zimbabwe was Robert Mugabe, who by common consent has led his nation to the very brink of ruin, turning a breadbasket into a basket case The author of this book, a liberal journalist who has long supported African nationalist causes, sets out to try to understand why Mugabe turned out the way he did.
She interviewed his brother, the former prime minister Ian Smith, many of Mugabe’s associates who later turned against him, his continuing apologists and, most interestingly, the man himself.
She wants to know at what point the supposed freedom fighter degenerated into a tyrant. Was he a tyrant by nature, by nurture, or by virtue of the tendency of power to corrupt? Her explanation is not simple. A combination of a naturally unsocial but domineering temperament, early experiences (which must have included the kind of petty humiliations that actually wound more deeply than rank injustices), and later political circumstances, many of his own making, combined to make him what he has become. He is the product also of cultural confusion: for, like many an anti-colonial intellectual, he admires what he hates, and longs to be accepted as a cultural equal by the former colonial masters. This leads to the fury of a rejected lover.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.