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A dream betrayed
Alec Russell, Financial Times (UK)
August 04, 2007

Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe A memoir by Judith Todd

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7e29d750-3fc7-11dc-b034-0000779fd2ac.html

As Zimbabwe slips further and further into the abyss, one of the more popular theories about President Robert Mugabe is that it is only in the last decade of his 27-year rule that his regime has gone off the rails. This is not baseless. I was one of many who reported on Zimbabwe in the early 1990s and ended up equivocating about his de facto one-party state.

After all, race relations were far better then than across the Limpopo River in South Africa; the country's education system was a model for Africa and the economy was ticking over. So it is only in the late-1990s, the argument runs, when Mugabe was well into his seventies and after his first wife, Sally, had died, that he metamorphosed into a copybook dictator.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Anyone still seduced by that theory should read Judith Garfield Todd's memoir, Through the Darkness. Todd was an arch opponent of Ian Smith, the last prime minister of white-ruled Rhodesia, and is now a stern critic of Mugabe. Her book opens at independence in 1980 and charts the steady corruption of Mugabe's elite.

First-hand accounts of government officials litter its pages - the author regularly had many of these leaders to dinner in the heady days of the early 1980s. Todd also provides a chilling reminder of the massacre and jailing of thousands of Mugabe's opponents in Matabeleland in the 1980s. For years the west glossed over this clampdown as it focused on the end of apartheid in South Africa. The middle years of Mugabe's rule were indeed relatively calm, but only because he faced no political challenge.

In the past few years there have been several powerful autobiographical accounts of Zimbabwe - such as Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin. Many tell a poignant story of decay. Most have been largely peopled by whites, and, one suspects, were published with a British and white South African readership in mind. Through the Darkness is different. This is an account of the betrayal of the Zimbabwean nationalist dream, rather than the end of a white African dream.

The author and her father, Sir Garfield Todd, a liberal prime minister in the 1950s, were loathed by most of their fellow white Rhodesians for promoting blacks' rights. White schoolchildren sang crude jokes about them in the playground. Both were imprisoned under Smith. On her release, the author found she had become a non-person whose name could not be mentioned in the press, and she lived in exile in Britain.

Now once again she has been all but forced into exile, this time in South Africa. Just as many white Rhodesians turned a blind eye as Smith repressed dissent, so under Mugabe most have until recently kept their heads down. Only a few brave individuals, such as the author, challenged the government to live up to its ideals.

This is not a literary work. The opening chapters are cluttered with names and it reads in places like the minutes of the NGO Todd ran to help veterans of Zimbabwe's war of independence. But it tells an important and neglected story: that of the suppression of supporters of Mugabe's nationalist rival, Joshua Nkomo. Her observations are all the more striking given her knowledge of the main players in Zimbabwe's tragedy. Mugabe himself appears several times. Initially he is regarded almost with a residual fondness rather than hostility, which makes the account all the more compelling.

Another key player in the current drama with a cameo role is Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's president. Todd was fond of him in the 1980s, when he was in exile trying to bring down apartheid. He rings her up one night in Harare and jokes with her like an old friend. The affinity has waned somewhat. Todd makes this clear at the end of the book as she charts in despair his refusal to speak out about oppression in Zimbabwe.

The overwhelming emotion on the pages is sadness at man's ability to betray his ideals, rather than distress at particular abuses. "I found it so hard to understand how people who had suffered at the hands of oppressors could readily become oppressors themselves," she says at one stage.

Now she is clinging to the hope that soon Zimbabwe will have a fresh start. But she is under no illusions this time. She, more than most in Zimbabwe, knows how corrupted the institutions and its officials have become after 27 years of Zanu-PF rule and how difficult it may be to turn the country around even after Mugabe has left power.

Alec Russell is the FT's South Africa correspondent.

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