Mugabe, Gramsci, and Zimbabwe at 25

Abstract

Twenty-five years after Robert Mugabe brought Zimbabwe to independence in 1980, some might interpret the current, apparent reradicalization of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front's (ZANU-PF) political project as a last, leftist, quasi-Gramscian gambit to recapture lost popular legitimacy. Many more, however, see it instead as reflecting the final throes of an increasingly compromised, corrupt, militarized, and unpopular regime. In this article, we will emphasize the extent to which present policies do indeed reflect the material-political consequences (and contradictions) of the historic class compromises Mugabe and ZANU-PF have made in Zimbabwe and the deep-seated confrontation between elite interests and those of the mass of the population that Mugabe now seeks to obfuscate with mere rhetoric and opportunist policies.For Robert Mugabe, arch-strategist and Machiavellian power broker though he may be, has now been forced to confront the material-political consequences of the historic class compromises he has made. The implications of the developing set of tensions and contradictions fostered during Mugabe's 25 years in power are the main focus of this essay. We will assess just what has been produced during that quarter-century in terms of both the opportunities for, and the obstacles to, the resumed transformation of struggle currently claimed by Mugabe to be ZANU-PF's goal.I NATIONALISM AS PRESUMPTIVE HEGEMONYFor those who were active in the international support network for southern African liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, the prospective coming to power of a majority-rule government in Rhodesia (henceforth Zimbabwe) in the late 1970s brought considerable joy, even though it produced a rejoicing that was somewhat qualified. It was not the demise of the despised white-minority regime of Ian Smith that tempered the celebration of blackmajority rule. Rather, it was the nature of the resistance itself that gave observers pause, because the nationalist movement was itself completely divided. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing in the abstract (from the point of view of long-term democratic prospects in a free Zimbabwe, for example). Yet it certainly seemed so in the immediate case of Zimbabwe-given the empty juxtaposition of personal ambitions that polarized the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and ZANU and enflamed hostilities between the two movements, and also the backward-looking and unproductive ethnic ambitions (Ndebele and Shona, to go no further) that hovered just beneath the surface of liberation movement rivalry. Thus, in the 1970s, it could be plausibly argued (as it was by one of the present authors) that the internal rivalries that racked the Zimbabwean nationalist camp smacked more of the same old wasting kind of petty-bourgeois political infighting-centered upon personalities, intrigues, and the mobilization of constituencies around ethnic identifications, all long-time features of a Zimbabwean exile politics untransformed by effective struggle.1The established militarized wings of the nationalist movement ultimately emerged to play a crucial part in the transition to majority rule.2 ZANU-PF (no longer joined at the election with ZAPU-PF in the Patriotic Front as it had briefly been but willing to share a few cabinet posts afterwards) handily won the pre-independence election of March 1980, and stood ready to take power with the coming of independence in April. Faced with such evidence of success, however, some on the left who had been skeptical as to ZANU's claims were tempted to begin to rethink the movement's radical credentials. In doing so, they were encouraged by far more conservative commentators who now also cast Mugabe as a deft man of the left, one prepared to use short-term compromises to tempt the existing (largely white) bourgeoisie into acquiescing to change-while all along harbouring long-term goals of genuinely radical transformation. …