Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  Many whites in Zimbabwe genuinely saw themselves as white Africans and as role models for the whites of South Africa. Certainly in the early and mid-Nineties it was always a tremendous relief to cross the Limpopo. On the streets of Harare there was none of Johannesburg's tense racial body language. Whites and blacks still lived for the most part in two separate worlds. But the barriers really did seem to be coming down. The success of the Zimbabwe cricket team over England in 1996 was a source of deep patriotic pride and a reminder that pursuits identified with the old order could flourish in the new. Mugabe himself praised the game. 'Cricket civilizes people and creates good gentlemen,' he once said. 'I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe - I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.(2)

  However, as Micky Townsend was the first to concede, there was one outstanding problem that threatened to disrupt and even destroy the very foundations of his world and that was the very same dispute that had tortured what is now Zimbabwe almost since the first white man arrived there at the end of the nineteenth century -land. Townsend provided a livelihood for several thousand blacks at a time of spiralling unemployment and he was by all accounts an enlightened employer. His farm was also a cog in the wheel that helped to keep Zimbabwe's economy running: agriculture. And yet as a white commercial farmer, he was, as he knew only too well, a prime target of Zanu-PF rhetoric.

  When the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes sent a column north into what was then Mashonaland in 1890 the imperialist visionary had his eyes on the legendary riches of the kingdom of Monomapata. In fact, unlike in many other parts of mineral-rich Africa the 'King Solomon's Mines' fable was unrealized. But the pioneers did not take long to appreciate that what the territory lacked in minerals, it more than made up in land.

  The Shona were the first to lose their land to the invaders. Then three years later it was the turn of the Ndebele. In 1893, after a brief war with Rhodes' British South Africa Company, King Lobengula was defeated, and the Ndebele were forced to forfeit their lands. In 1896 first the Shona then the Ndebele rebelled in what became known as the first Chimurenga (uprising). But after scores of whites were killed, the settlers regained control and exacted a bloody revenge. Between 1908 and 1915 the company put 1.5 million acres of the country's best land into settler hands. The old way of life was destroyed. Many of the early settlers would ride out for a day from a given point designated by colonial agents. At the end of the ride they would mark out the boundary of their future farm which would stretch roughly in a circle or square. The indigenous population, mean while, was crowded into reserves and often asked to pay taxes to the colonial government, which they could raise only by selling their labour to the new white farmers. On such depredatory foundations was Rhodesia built. In 1930 the Land Apportionment Act formalized the land grab, splitting Rhodesia into European and African areas, in a division close to the apartheid system in South Africa. So Mugabe had fertile soil in which to sow his revolutionary message for the second Chimurenga in the Seventies when he spurred on his guerrillas with the slogan 'land for the people' and with promises of white farms as the reward for victory.

  Land inevitably was one of the critical issues at the Lancaster House peace talks. After much haggling, as part of the constitutional deal, Britain agreed to offer compensation for farmers on the proviso that land was only transferred on a 'willing buyer, willing seller' basis. This was on the same lines as an arrangement in Kenya, where land ownership at independence was every bit as vexatious as in Zimbabwe. In the countdown to Kenya's independence in 1963, Harold Macmillan, then prime minister, and his colonial secretary, Ian Macleod, initially insisted that Britain would not pay compensation. But they later backed down, keen for a compromise in the light of the Mau Mau uprising in the Fifties, and encouraged by the conciliatory stance of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's independence leader, who encouraged white farmers to turn their holdings into companies with black Kenyan shareholders. The process was far from perfect. Many of the beneficiaries were members of the elite. But there was at least an attempt to get to grips with the inequities of land ownership. In Zimbabwe, however, it gradually became clear that Mugabe was interested in land primarily as a means of patronage and entrenching his power.

  When I spoke to Townsend in 1995, white Zimbabwean farmers were enjoying a brief period of tranquillity. It was clear by then that state reform was a sham. After independence Britain paid out £44 million in compensation before halting the payments in 1990 as it emerged that far from helping the poor, land transfers were primarily benefiting the ruling elite. In early 2000 Margaret Dongo, the opposition MP, published a list suggesting that as many as 270 of the 400 farms which changed hands in the Eighties under the 'willing buyer, willing seller' agreement were handed to members of Mugabe's inner circle. For the landless poor this was the latest case of Big Man betrayal. The danger for the farmers was that by failing to address the question fairly, Mugabe was stoking up resentment among his electors, and ultimately this could only be satisfied by extremist policies.

  Many of the farmers recognized the urgent need for land reform. But they fervently hoped that the threat of a clumsy land grab would remain unfulfilled in recognition of their contribution to the economy. In 2000 the Commercial Farmers'

  Union estimated that their mainly white members contributed 18 per cent of the GDP, 40 per cent of export earnings, and a quarter of formal sector employment. Farmers also pointed out that the availability of land was not the problem. In 2000 the opposition estimated there were about a million acres of land in government hands but unoccupied through a combination of inefficiency and corruption.

  A few hours after Mugabe's rabble-rousing Norton Park speech, Peter MacSporran, the then head of the mainly white Commercial Farmers' Union, airily dismissed the menace. He had moved from Scotland to Rhodesia in 1972, married a local, and ran a 2,500 hectare tobacco farm. With tobacco accounting for about 30 per cent of Zimbabwe's exports he exuded confidence. He brushed aside the threat of the 1992 Land Acquisition Act, which allowed for compulsory seizures: Mugabe's deeds would never match his words.

  'At independence we never thought it would turn out as well as this,' he said. 'While things are difficult, I think people have short memories. At the end of the war things were horrific. We were all sick of the war and Mugabe's reconciliation policy is fairly unique. The government is now aware that employment and production is more important than who owns the land. I wouldn't like Mugabe to run my business but he knows how to juggle. The role of agriculture is such that if you remove the commercial farms you destroy the economy.'

  MacSporran's arguments had a rationale that fitted the prevailing international perception of Mugabe. While an autocrat, he was respected as superior in intellect and record to many other of Africa's Big Men. Even in the mid-Nineties after fifteen years of his rule, Zimbabwe was still held as a relative success story: the judiciary had remained by and large independent; there was a fiery opposition press; after the atrocities in the mid-1980s it had been politically stable. Set against Africa's turbulent post-colonial history this was quite an admirable record. There was only one difficulty with this argument: economic logic seldom features prominently in a despot's plans.

  In the sombre red-velveted splendour of Harare's Meikles Hotel, a succession of veteran opponents of Mugabe, including Bishop Muzorewa, muttered to me that it was only a matter of time before the reality of Mugabe's rule became apparent. It was clear that out of prudence Townsend and MacSporran had only told me part of the story. Other farmers, who were unwilling to speak on the record, told of their forebodings that Mugabe really might soon make a move on their land. But in these middle years of Mugabe's rule there was only one consistently dissenting voice. Stubborn to the end, Ian Smith, 'Good Old Smithy' to white diehards, had stayed on after independence and his tune never changed: Mugabe was a disaster.

  Without a doubt, Mugabe's single greatest public relations coup was to allow Smith to stay on unmolested after independence. During the 'str
uggle' he had pledged he would string him up when his guerrillas marched into Harare. But instead he resisted the temptation to victimize him and allowed him not only to divide his time between Harare and his family farm but also to thunder away about the disasters of Zanu-PF rule. It was as if in one stroke he had underlined the difference between Zimbabwe and some of the more despotic states to the north. As Smith ushered me inside his simple suburban home on the eve of the 1995 election, he was the first to point out that his door is always unlocked.

  One down from the Cuban Embassy, a juxtaposition which when commented on drew a wry smile from Smith, his quarters could have been anywhere in the Home Counties. The decor was small-town suburbia, a few china ornaments and prints. There was little to show that this was the home of one of the world's most vilified politicians of the Seventies. Nor indeed did Smith himself make more than a passing reference to those years. His attempt to defy the turning of history's wheel pro longed the war at a cost of thousands of lives. If Zimbabweans had had the chance of electing a majority government in the Sixties they would surely have voted in a far more moderate leader than Mugabe. But Smith is not one for agonizing over the past, still less for repentance. His only concession to the times was that he admitted that he had been wrong about Mandela. The ANC leader had then been in charge of South Africa for a year, and Smith conceded he was deeply impressed, before returning to his familiar attack on Mugabe.

  My interview with Smith that day was never published. The material was seen as more of the same from a voice, which had been heard many times before. The next time I spoke to Smith, however, in November 1997, his words had a more chilling and contemporary ring, and were published in full. Once again he was serving warning of the dangers of Mugabe's rule. But this time there could be no doubting his judgement. Since we had last spoken, strikes had paralysed the centre of Harare; veterans of the liberation war had rioted after it emerged that their pension funds had been looted by political bigwigs; the Zimbabwe dollar was on the point of collapse. So Mugabe had decided to play his trump card. The government had published a list of 1,471 farms which it planned to nationalize. Among the land earmarked for confiscation was a large part of Smith's own family farm. There was no anger in his voice, just the deadened tones of one who had accustomed himself to the role of a Cassandra.

  'It's a great vote-winning exercise aimed at the thousands and thousands of people who are out of work,' he said. 'They have been telling the government: "Can't you just give us a piece of land for a garden to grow some food?" The government is just pandering to them because they are so unpopular. The talk of uplifting the poor is a blatant distortion of the truth. Of course, in the long term this policy doesn't even help the government. It will ruin the country.

  'The government has got plenty of land. They have more than a million acres from a previous redistribution. It's just that it's been ruined.'

  As Smith knew all too well, seventeen years earlier at independence, such grim prophecies would have been widely dismissed as the doomsaying of an old reactionary. But by the late Nineties he was no longer so out of kilter with the prevailing view. The confiscation row marked the beginning of the final act in the Mugabe drama but, tragically for Zimbabweans, not the final scene.

  Handsome Windy, the education secretary of Zimbabwe's Traditional Healers' Association, did not require a moment's thought. 'Our president is quite right,' he said. 'In our culture we don't like that. Homosexuals are seen as devils or witches. It is a foreign thing.' Gwindi smiled sweetly at us, clearly expecting a few murmurs of support, before he launched into a long lecture explaining why homosexuality was alien to Zimbabwe. His conclusion, inevitably, was bleak: 'It encourages evil. It should be punished.'

  Mugabe would have been delighted if he had heard our conversation. Gwindi was talking in his office in August 1995 in an airy block surrounded by blooming jacaranda trees in central Harare. It was just a few days after his president had launched a vicious attack on homosexuals. Mugabe's outburst was triggered when a gay and lesbian rights group tried to set up a stand at the Harare annual book fair. First he described them as 'worse than dogs and pigs'. Then he called on Zimbabweans for help to 'root the evil out'.

  Mugabe had long liked to portray himself as a stem moralist. He even favoured the nickname of the Headmaster. But his opponents had little doubt that his outburst was a populist bid to divert attention from his latest setbacks ahead of the presidential elections due the following year. Trevor Ncube, the editor of the Financial Gazette, one of the most outspoken critics of Mugabe, wearily dismissed the tirade as a farce. 'He's looking for something to distract attention,' he told me. 'What better way than by bashing homosexuals?' Even as Mugabe made his attack, his own morality was under the spotlight amid claims, which were later confirmed, that he had fathered two children out of wedlock with Grace Marufu, a former receptionist at State House.

  Gwindi's reaction showed how Mugabe had touched on a popular theme. African society is deeply conservative with no tradition of open discussion about homosexuality. Two years after Mugabe began his anti-gay crusade Namibia's President Sam Nujoma followed suit with a threat to ban homosexual acts with fines and prison sentences for offenders. Nujoma too was a liberation leader with autocratic hankerings. He was also in the countdown to an election on the back of a controversial record. As leader of one of Africa's smaller countries, Nujoma's tirade went largely unnoticed. But in the eyes of the world Mugabe's outburst marked a turning point in his rule.

  In his early years in power Mugabe had rather fancied himself as an international statesman. He was the leader of the 'Front line States' in the fight against apartheid. In 1991 he proudly hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit. Even after Mandela took office in 1994 he clearly felt he and not Madiba should be seen as the regional supremo. He jostled with the South African leader for pole position in the Southern African Development Community, the regional grouping. In keeping with his self-appraisal, he avoided the worst excesses or absurdities of some of his peers. His leadership cult was kept under control. State corruption while blatant was not on the scale of Mobutu or Abacha. According to Transparency International, an NGO dedicated to highlighting corruption, Zimbabwe ranked around the middle of ninety-nine nations in its 1999 index. The existence of a lively opposition press and a largely independent judiciary bolstered the argument of Mugabe's defenders that this was not just another tinpot dictatorship.

  But in the mid-Nineties this balance started to go as 'Comrade Bob' metamorphosed into the archetypal whimsical tyrant. Corruption spread among his family and cronies. His language became more and more rabid. His abuse of the distinction between the party and the state became more blatant. His attacks on Britain and his opponents became increasingly absurd. Under pressure from the growing opposition movement, deluded by his long years in power and, as gossips claimed in Harare, addled by his love for a woman half his age, it was as if he finally decided to abandon any pretence at the rule of law and slipped into the populism of Big Man rule.

  In the March 1996 presidential election he swept the board, winning 92.7 per cent of the vote. More telling perhaps was that only 31.7 per cent of the electorate bothered to turn out, and that he stood unopposed as Sithole and Muzorewa withdrew in protest at alleged intimidation. Undaunted by the apathy, Mugabe hailed the result as a glorification of his achievements and turned his inauguration into more of a tribal king's pageant with leopard skins and honorific knobkerries. Such pomp would have been unthinkable at independence when he pledged that a progressive revolution would sweep through the country. It was also rapidly eclipsed by an even more sumptuous event in August that year when he finally married his mistress.

  Sally, his first wife, had been hugely popular both inside and outside Zimbabwe. In marked contrast Grace Marufu, a woman half his age, earned a reputation for extravagance even before the wedding. The Mugabes invited 6,000 guests to a Catholic service at his 'family farm' fifty miles from Harare. It was billed as sou
thern Africa's wedding of the decade. Only after a public outcry was it established that the wedding should not be paid for by state funds. Soon afterwards it emerged that Mugabe was building his new wife a seventeen-room mansion. Nicknamed

  'Graceland', it was built in an upmarket Harare suburb with more than £100,000 of state funds, a fortune in Zimbabwe. Two years later she put it on the market, arguing that it was too far out of town.

  The moment I stepped into the Zimbabwean High Commissioner's office just off the Strand I knew what to expect. It was the day after Zimbabwean customs officials had broken with all diplomatic protocol and opened crates of British anti bugging equipment at Harare airport. The clear breach of the Vienna Convention had sparked the worst row between Britain and its former colony since independence. Very much at the last minute I had been offered the chance of an interview with Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, Harare's man in London. When I saw the four officials lined up to listen in, the dominant portrait of Robert Mugabe and Mr. Mumbengegwi's jutting chin, I twigged. I had not been asked in to help mend fences. The lines were drawn. It was the old colonizer versus the colonized. There would be no common ground. And in the prevailing emotions I should not expect logical arguments.

  Given Britain's imperialist history in Africa, I found it remarkable in my five years in the continent how seldom people bothered to play the colonial card. As often as not, when I raised the subject I was given a reply on the lines of Museveni's resounding comments to South Africa's parliament in 1997: 'blaming colonialism is like a drunken man blaming someone who steals his hat.' But when it was raised, there was a depressing rule of thumb that it was as a transparent attempt to hide the truth. And so it was with Zimbabwe in its dealings with Britain in 1999 and 2000 as Mugabe stepped up the rhetoric against Whitehall insisting that it should pay compensation for 'its children'.