The news from Zimbabwe leaves me numb. Robert Mugabe, aged 89, has won or stolen another election. I don’t believe he stole it but I believe he tried to steal it, if even if he didn’t have to. That is his way.
In Mugabe’s world, the legal and the illegal are as one. In his world, legal is good and illegal is just as good.
Power is what matters and Mugabe believes that it is his entitlement, his unassailable right, to rule. This is because he led the struggle against Rhodesia’s white minority government led by Ian Smith.
After an ugly terrorist war, Mugabe came to power in 1980. But there had already been irregularities in his political base; power struggles and mysterious deaths, including a car accident where the vehicle was full of bullet holes.
Mugabe plays to win and always has.
When he came to power, Mugabe inherited what he described as a“perfect country.” Later, he said Zimbabwe should revert to the simple, tribal country that existed before the white settlers arrived in 1890.
The fact is that Mugabe found Western arms just fine when he was fighting the government of Ian Smith, and he reveled in his initial role as the new face of Africa. He maintained many of the traditions and trappings of the government he replaced, including murderous emergency powers that he embraced and has exercised with abandon.
In the beginning, he looked like the African leader that Africa needed: articulate, suave and thoughtful. He talked the bold talk of a multiethnic future. In Harare, I once spent a delightful evening with the two holdover white officers who were responsible for his security. They spoke well of him then.
There was television footage of Mugabe visiting one of the prisons where he had been held in the 1970s and talking with the white jailers as old friends might.
Meanwhile, his dreaded 5th Brigade — Mugabe’s version of the SS — was rampaging through Matabeleland, the second-largest ethnic area of Zimbabwe, killing and looting, and making a point that his Shona people were now in charge and that the Ndebele, descendants of the Zulus of South Africa, should not support his political rivals.
The public face of Mugabe darkened when Nelson Mandela — a truly saintly man — became the darling of the West.
As a native of Zimbabwe, Rhodesia in my time, I don’t mind so much that Mugabe steals elections, that he has built himself a palace, that he rages against Britain and America, or that he is a hypocrite. I mind that he has brutalized Zimbabwe, impoverished it and humiliated its proud people, 3 million of whom have fled to South Africa, seeking safety and work.
Mugabe’s thugs have stolen the innocence of an entire country; the whip, the cudgel, the boot and the gun have replaced the smile, the ready laugh and pervasive sense of caring that it was my good fortune to know growing up. I’ve visited more than 100 countries, but I’ve never known one so at peace with so little policing back then.
It’s true that there was white dominance, that the best land was farmed by whites, that although the franchise was theoretically open to all, it really was only for whites. I couldn’t take a black friend out to lunch, nor could they live in a white neighborhood, unless as a servant.
But it was also true that there was very little crime. And there was a kind of universal welfare for Africans: The state saw itself as a benefactor through paternalistic laws in health, nutrition and medicine.
As a young newspaperman I campaigned for majority rule, total equality and land reform. I sat in on the councils of the African National Congress, which morphed into Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union along with other young, idealistic whites and Indians as well as Africans, who would rise and sometimes fall by Mugabe’s hand as he consolidated power.
We — black and white and Asian — wanted to improve what we had; make it better. We couldn’t imagine that a leader, in the name of freedom, would arise who would make it worse.
What of the election? A while ago, I asked Magadonga Mahlangu of WOZA (Women of Zimbabwe Arise), who has endured prison and torture for standing up for women, she shrugged:“Elections are just about who gets a Mercedes.”
Mugabe has trashed a country, its memory and its hope.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle on PBS.