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Zimbabwe: debunking the myths
By
David
R. Katerere
THERE are some cold,
hard facts we need to come to terms with as Zimbabwe and as Zimbabweans.
Only by debunking certain myths stemming from decades of propaganda,
can we be able to see our way out of the crisis tearing the very fabric
of our society and wreaking the kind of havoc which will take generations
to repair.
I was also beholden to these myths.
First, that Zimbabwe was born of a glorious revolution. When I speak to South Africans or other people who are willing to hear me out and to understand more of what is happening in Zimbabwe, I always start by telling them that there was a war in Zimbabwe: an all-out full-on war, which I witnessed as a child growing up in the Eastern Highlands, a stronghold of the Zanla forces in the late 1970’s. In fact, I have vivid memories of my mother tuning and surreptiously listening to Radio Zimbabwe, the Zanu-PF rebel radio station broadcasting from neighbouring Mozambique (years later, I would listen with her just as surreptiously to SWRadio Africa on the eve of the 2002 elections and be struck by the irony!).
I remember my mother pilfering some of our groceries to take with her when she attended “morari”, the all-night meetings which were held to “educate the masses” and “orientate” them in the ways of the revolution, and of the day when my father was taken away in the dead of night and frog-marched to the faraway mountains, accused of working for the “bishop” (Muzorewa’s Zimbabwe-Rhodesia dispensation) and therefore, like many ordinary men and women trying to make a living in war-torn Rhodesia, of being a sell-out. I have memories of misty mountain mornings filled with the roar of bomber aircraft and the thunder of reverberating bombs and shelling, of curfews and roadblocks and landmines and nights spent hiding out and beatings meted by both sides to the villagers caught in the attrition that is war. As a seven-year old rural boy, I remember these things – my earliest memories are war memories.
| "Another myth is that 'we won the war'. This then justifies why Zanu-PF clings to power because, in their eyes, they 'defeated the enemy'" |
| DR DAVID KATERERE |
And this war was
no glorious revolution – it was a guerrilla war marked typically
by attacks on soft targets: white farmers in isolated rural farms, Christian
missionaries, black children at outlying mission schools and churches
and hapless peasants. Subsequent to such attacks were the retaliatory
and punitive actions of the Rhodesian forces. Caught in between the
two protagonists the civilians, mostly black rural folk were forced
to cook and clothe the liberators (“comrades”) on the one
hand, and forced to give information on their whereabouts, and / or
detained for being collaborators by the Rhodesian army.
Most of the action was sporadic. History records that there were flare-ups
in 1972, then in the late 1970’s after the first ever confrontation
of the “Second Chimurenga” came in 1966 at Chinhoyi, which
by all accounts was botched resulting in unnecessary casualties on the
side of the guerrillas. In between there were abortive attempts to negotiate
with the rebel regime of Ian Smith, intra-party and / or tribal strife
leading to the assassinations of leaders, Herbert Chitepo among them
in 1975, power struggles and pleas from the likes of Nyerere and Kaunda
to the nationalists to show some seriousness and forge unity of purpose.
As the late Masipule Sithole aptly describes the struggles within the
struggle in his seminal account of nationalist movements.
The role played by civilians in Zanu-PF’s re-written account of the struggle, has been edited out completely. But it is precisely their unenviable position which may explain the inertia and paralysis one sees in Zimbabwe to-day in the face of Zanu-PF’s brutal repression. People in Zimbabwe do not want another war. They understand the suffering that war brings, and the trauma that they experienced in those few years of upheaval they still carry with them. The recent callous behaviour of the state in executing Operation Murambatsvina further re-awakens the memories of the suffering of the 1970’s war. The fact then is that those who talk about a people-driven revolution from the streets in Zimbabwe also perpetuate a myth. There will be no popular uprising. Least of all from the cities. The cities are held in contempt by those who fought in the war because their contribution to the struggle was non-existent. Apart from clashes in the early 1960s (which were triggered by rivalry between the various nationalist groups), and the 1972 Pierce Commission defiance campaign, the war in Zimbabwe was mainly fought, and experienced, by the rural populace, which remains cowed by the memories of the brutalities and hence prone to continue to fear Zanu-PF which never tires of reminding them that it is prepared “to back to the trenches” and bring back the suffering of those times.
Thus you have, on one hand, a timid and traumatized population (call it cowardly if you may) which knows that there is no glory in war, and on the other, an army built from the brutal former protagonists who perfected the art of cowering and intimidating the very people they claimed to be fighting for. This explains the callous actions of the police which, under Ian Smith’s regime assumed para-military powers and was then bolstered by ex-guerillas. The Zimbabwe Republic Police Commissioner Chihuri is an ex-combatant. Thus policing in Zimbabwe has always been militarised which is an affront to democratic practice.
Another myth is that “we won the war”. This then justifies why Zanu-PF clings to power because, in their eyes, they “defeated the enemy”. This conveniently ignores the fact that guerrilla warfare, by its nature, is unwinnable. All the long-running conflicts in the world from Colombia’s communist insurgents to Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army and the Phillipine’s Islamic fighters are unwinnable because they are guerrilla insurgencies and hence unconventional. Guerilla warfare is meant to put pressure on the governing regime to come to the negotiating table so that a political solution is found. In that sense, Ian Smith could have chosen to dig his heels and continue his counter-insurgency war of attrition, as, in fact, he planned to do. It was, ironically, apartheid South Africa’s John Vorster who pulled the plug on him by withdrawing his economic support and by withdrawing members of the South African security forces deployed in then-Rhodesia. Years later, Smithie would rant and rave about this “Great Betrayal” in his book of the same name.
The irony is that President Thabo Mbeki now stands in the same position that Vorster stood 29 years ago in 1976. With its financial muscle, South Africa can again pull the plug on a rebel neighbour to force Mugabe to come to the negotiation table. This should lead to a new era in Zimbabwe because the myth that we won democracy in 1980 with independence is the biggest and most pernicious of all the myths that we have been fed over the years. In fact, Zimbabwe was born out of a compromise, and a bad one at that – the infamous Lancaster House Agreement. This was a ceasefire document which essentially became a constitution. This document did not arise from the generality of the Zimbabwean population nor was it subject to interrogation by workers, the intelligentsia and other stakeholders; neither was it ever put to the test by way of referendum. It was enough for the British government that they had finally managed to assemble the various protagonists to the table after 15 years of trying and that they could salvage some dignity for themselves as good imperial masters and some breathing space for their kith and kin.
Growing up in the 1980’s in Zimbabwe it was normal not to criticize the government; to whisper in conspiratorial tones for fear of being heard. There were reports, mostly unfounded, of people disappearing all the time; dissent was not tolerated; political opposition was stifled; civil society movements were unheard of and students’ protests were brutally put down. The system of government was non-participatory and largely patriarchal. In other words “they had fought and died” for the country and knew how best to run it. When you have never lived in a democracy, it all appeared quite normal and we all believed the lie that we were living in a democracy because we had regular elections and a veneer of respectability from the rest of the world.
It is therefore
clear that anyone who is interested in the long-term stability of Zimbabwe
needs to help to plant the seed of true participatory and open democracy.
The only way of doing this and of beginning the process of bringing
Zimbabwe back into the fold of nations and fostering democratic governance
and practice is not to force the protagonists to talk, therefore producing
another “Lancaster House Agreement” or a government of national
unity (another “Unity Accord”) but rather to explore ways
of initiating a proper constitutional overhaul and ushering in a new
republic. In order to do this we must admit that we were never a democracy
in the first place and, though independent and sovereign since 18 April
1980, we have never actually enjoyed the freedoms that democracy entails.
Dr Katerere lives and works in South Africa
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