A remarkable testament of hope for Zimbabwe

‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong would triumph
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.’

This comes from Robert Browning’s ‘Epilogue’. It is quoted (though not of himself) in a staggering book by an author who in my eyes holds as good a claim to exemplify its spirit as anyone in the 20th-century history of Africa. Yes, anyone, including the many brave black freedom fighters, from Nelson Mandela down, who kept their heads held high when the odds seemed all against them. Even on Robben Island, even in the winter of his discomfort, -Mandela knew that history was on his side.

David Coltart never did, and does not now — how can he? — yet still he believes, still he risks his life. I want to ask why, and how, and in what he has reposed his trust.

Coltart is the white former Rhodesian, now Zimbabwean, whose life has been spent fighting for justice, education and sound administration in the exasperating, beguiling country of my own upbringing. He started his adult years in Rhodesia’s British South Africa Police as a one-time admirer of Ian Smith and that reckless populist’s white supremacist breakaway government — I suppose you’d call it Rhexit now. It took Coltart some time to conclude that Smith was leading his country down a cul-de-sac, and in terms of black advancement was not a visionary or even a gradualist, but a reactionary.

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He developed a wary respect for Robert Mugabe, so it took him some time — and the evidence of his own eyes — to accept the reality of the Matabeleland massacres, and I sense that even near Robert Mugabe’s end, even after Mugabe’s followers’ repeated attempts to assassinate him (chronicled here like the occasional rainy day), Coltart retains some lingering sense of the greatness that was within Mugabe’s reach.