The changing of the old guard: Robert Mugabe and the revival of ZANU

Abstract

Any attempt to assess at this moment the prospects for radical change in Zimbabwe confronts a crippling imbalance of knowledge. It is all too easy to identify and to describe many of the obstacles to change. It is much more difficult to gauge the impulses towards it. We know a great deal about the surviving and inherited apparatus of bureaucracy and army; about the burden of public debt; about the humiliating dependence on whitecontrolled capitalist farming for the national food supply; about a constitution which makes compensation for land acquisition mandatory and an international environment which is not providing the funds out of which compensation can be paid. The more we know about all this the more depressing the prospects seem and any sort of over-optimism or overexpectation would certainly not be a service to the new Zimbabwe. But on the other hand we know little or nothing about vital questions on the other side. What sort of ideological training have ZANU and ZAPU cadres experienced? What sort of interactions have ZANLA guerrillas had with the people and what kind of continuing structures have emerged from them? What were the expectations of rural voters in giving Mugabe his mandate? How far have they been radicalised by means of their own experience of the war, quite apart from any input of guerrilla ideas? Is there any tension between these various forms of radicalism? We do not know. The electoral transformation is, of course, also a transformation of the research opportunity; from now on it should be possible to collect abundant data on things which were inaccessible, hidden or secret during the war. But for the moment the evidence available bears only the leadership of the liberation movements, and only on particlar elements among the leadership at that. It would be good, for example, to produce an analysis of the develoment of ideology and practice within ZAPU to match what treatments we do have