How to ruin a country

As Zimbabwe celebrated its independence in April 1980 President Nyerere of Tanzania had a piece of advice for Robert Mugabe: ‘You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way.’ At first, it seemed that Mugabe would take his fellow socialist’s advice. His address to the nation on the eve of independence gave all Zimbabweans hope that, white and black, they could together rebuild the country after the miseries of the guerrilla war.

Guguletho Moyo and Mark Ashurst quote the speech in full at the beginning of their useful compendium, and Martin Meredith reminds us that, after an initial interview, Ian Smith himself reported that he had found Mugabe not ‘the apostle of Satan’ but ‘sober and responsible’.

These two books are timely and can be read together. Meredith chronicles Mugabe’s progress from guerrilla leader to power-obsessed paranoiac. Moyo and Ashurst look to the future by canvassing a broad range of opinion as to how to rebuild a country utterly destroyed by a man using yesterday’s rhetoric in an Africa that is changing rapidly.

Nyerere’s remark is interesting. Meredith chronicles very fairly the white man’s land grab in Rhodesia from Lobengula to the 1960s and how effective the land question was as a recruiting sergeant for Mugabe, Sithole and Nkomo. Equally, there are numerous references in both books to the emergency laws the Rhodesian Front introduced after UDI and the often brutal treatment of the ‘terrs’ and those who harboured them by the Rhodesian security forces. However, what shines through in Meredith’s account is how deeply implanted certain basic beliefs were in Rhodesian minds and how courageously Zimbabweans both black and white have resisted ZANU-PF thuggery in defence of their beliefs.

Take the case of Margaret Dongo. Appalled by the scale and the blatancy of the corruption of the ZANU-PF elite, this former ZANU fighter and founder member of the War Veterans’ Association broke with her former associates and stood for Parliament in the 1995 election in the Harare South Constituency.