Understanding Zimbabwe: From Liberation to Authoritarianism

Abstract

Africa has known many tragic histories. But Zimbabwe’s is especially rich and quixotic. First it was Southern Rhodesia, an eponymous land created by a visionary buccaneer to help to spread British (read English) values and capitalistic exploitive methods beyond territories controlled by Afrikaners and Portugal. Consequently, Africans lost their land, their patrimony, and their freedom to continue time-honored patterns of life and work.Colonial rule followed, but it was a colonialism controlled almost exclusively by segregationist-minded local settlers, many of whom were British via the Cape Colony, others from the mother country, and a minority from the Afrikaner republics of what is now South Africa. Indigenous Africans were pushed off their ancestral lands, compelled by taxation policies to labor for whites on plantations and in mines, and educated and cared for only at the margin.About the same time (1948) as the colonial Gold Coast was being transformed into modern Ghana and the French Soudan became Mali and other new West African nations, there were nationalist, liberationist, stirrings in Southern Rhodesia. But Southern Rhodesia was a settler polity, closer in many ways to apartheid South Africa than to ex-colonies and protectorates such as Zambia and Malawi. The Rhodesian whites pushed back, issuing a Universal Declaration of Independence in 1965 that, in turn, sparked an indigenous guerrilla struggle for liberation from bases in neighboring Zambia and Mozambique.Dorman’s detailed account alludes to this liberation struggle but focuses mainly on the vicissitudes of independent Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2014. It is a curious effort because her thematic narrative, full as it is of careful accounts of the several phases in Zimbabwe’s descent from authoritative “democracy” to outright, violent, autocracy, largely avoids discussion of President Robert Mugabe’s evolution from struggle leader (although he never carried a gun) to dictator.This otherwise acute modern history of a troubled African state conveys little sense of the persons who composed and orchestrated its aberrant, inexorable, decline. For instance, it does not explicitly hold any individuals responsible for the subordination of the once-independent judicial system to the overweening state in 1999. Dorman implies that the collapse of judicial independence, like many other events in her narrative, occurred ex nihilo, without any human agency or human design.Dorman’s concluding chapter alludes to various theories of the state, but she does not bring them, or any other theoretical examples, to bear on the nature of the Zimbabwean proto-nation. She provides no discussion of how power was wielded, contested, or situated within the organization of the state. Indeed, her index has no entry for “power.” This arid history thus lacks for explanations and driving forces. Mugabe, the despot, rarely appears. Emmerson Mnangagwa, his successor and the person in charge of a massacre of 20,000 dissidents in 1983/4, never features in the narrative or the index. Nor do others who helped to destroy one of Africa’s more thriving, balanced, prosperous economies until 1997 and who were complicit in the violence and intimidation that rigged five subsequent elections.Likewise, Dorman barely mentions the catastrophic land invasions and seizures that helped to destroy Zimbabwe’s vaunted agricultural productivity, or examines how and why the Mugabe government permitted, even encouraged, the forcible transfer of property from long-established farmers to elite ruling-party and security officials (and not to the deserving, landless, poor). An exhaustive and methodologically sophisticated treatment of this cynical punctuation of Zimbabwe’s recent political and social history may be found instead in Charles Laurie, The Land Reform Deception: Political Opportunism in Zimbabwe’s Land Seizure Era (New York, 2016).Dorman’s methodological approach is far from interdisciplinary despite her training as a political scientist. She seems to have relied mostly on printed sources and few interviews; interrogation of many of the still living actors in Zimbabwean drama would have allowed her to answer a host of questions: How and why did Zimbabwe become wildly corrupt? Who profited from the Zimbabwean military intervention into the Democratic Republic of Congo? Into whose pockets did the Marange diamond wealth disappear? How did Mugabe manage to control his party and his populace so easily despite advancing age and infirmity?Zimbabwe is a textbook kleptocracy. Readers deserve to know how it was established and sustained, and how its erstwhile citizens suffered and were deprived of fundamental human and civil rights—all critical tasks for future researchers and writers.