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Zimbabwe: Contradictory constructions of the crisis in Zimbabwe
Professor Linda Freeman
October 16, 2004

A striking aspect of Zimbabwe’s crisis has been the struggle over its meaning within Zimbabwe, Africa and the wider world. Differences have split those who had been allied during the liberation struggle and have made odd bedfellows of former foes. Thus, Zimbabwe has become a site for intellectual as well as political and material contestation.

Questions of liberation and democracy have been at the heart of the debate. The discussion has reopened questions about the legacy of the liberation struggle for contemporary politics and the issues of its "unfinished business" especially in the continuing racial imbalance in land ownership in southern Africa. Central to the discussion over democracy in Zimbabwe is the question of the state’s legitimacy given highly contested results of elections in 2000 and 2002, the nature of subsequent by-elections and the closing of space for opposition forces between as well as within elections. A third important area of debate is over the significance of global pressures in creating the crisis.

At least two major approaches have emerged: one largely supportive of the actions of the Zimbabwean government and the other profoundly opposed.

For one section of opinion, the previous decades since independence have been obliterated and Zimbabwe is once again battling neo-colonialism and imperialism. The past history of ZANU as a liberation movement has been remodelled to serve as the source of legitimation for the beleaguered government of Zimbabwe.

For this camp, the key issue (indeed, the only issue) in understanding Zimbabwe’s troubles is the refusal of forces within and without Zimbabwe to accept the radical reform which has resulted in the transformation of commercial farmland from white to African farmers. The next step in redeeming what is rightfully African will include the transfer of mining shares to black Zimbabweans, with some suggestion that the process may ultimately move into the manufacturing sector.

In this view, concern about abuse of human, civil and political rights is simply a smokescreen to cover efforts to remove the current government in Zimbabwe and to restore old enemies in power. From this point of view, the Mugabe regime needs to be celebrated for completing an important task which had been integral to the liberation struggle.

A central proposition of the opposing view is that the current crisis is less about finishing the tasks of the liberation struggle than a reaction by the current government in Zimbabwe to the most serious challenge to its power since independence. In this view, the impetus for land reform was an opportunistic attempt by the ZANU (PF) government to regain popular favour. Support for Mugabe, according to this school of thought, represents a betrayal of mass public opinion in Zimbabwe and backing for a regime riddled with venality and corruption.

In sum, the first approach puts an emphasis on external factors and regards the current regime in Zimbabwe headed by President Robert Mugabe as a tribune of the South. The second school of thought focuses more on internal dynamics, the nature of the regime in power, and its refusal to accept the popular will.

Discourse #1: the Mugabe regime is a Tribune of the South

The theoretical provenance of the first approach is almost entirely structuralist and historicist. It employs the grand narratives of anti-colonialism, imperialism and even socialism. These link the Zimbabwe of the present crisis to the struggle against white minority rule which ended with independence in 1980 and the larger struggle of the South against domination from the advanced industrial world

Therefore the explanation of the Zimbabwean crisis given by this approach has the following five main dimensions:

• Land reform is misconstrued by racist opponents. Land reforms are designed to end racial inequality in land ownership and to pave the way for redistribution in other sectors of the economy. Arguments that land reforms are responsible for the decline in agricultural production are untrue and racist.
• Past difficulties which provide the larger context for the crisis are held to reside in neo-liberal structural adjustment policies which the government adopted in the early 1990s. In this view, Zimbabwe has been penalized for its refusal to continue with what it believes to be counter-productive policies and for its inability to service its debts to international financial institutions.
  By countering the common wisdom allowing the market to reign and attempting instead to continue with state control over key parts of the economy, the current government in Zimbabwe considers itself "socialist". On occasion, President Mugabe has suggested that Zimbabwe is capable of delinking from the global economy and surviving on its own resources.
• The crisis is primarily the fault of the British and also of other Western powers. These interests have imposed formal sanctions and actively plot ways to unseat the Mugabe regime. Since the beginning of the current crisis, Zimbabwe has been subject to a donor and investor strike - which it considers to be a regime of informal sanctions.
• The rise of the opposition political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999 represents the backlash of the wealthy white farming sector and its external supporters. The choice between the MDC and ZANU (PF) is thus a choice between the return of colonial domination or a continuation of rule by the party that brought Zimbabwe to independence. In this view, the MDC does not have the right to take power even if the majority of people support them. Attacks on MDC officials and supporters are justified as a means to prevent the return of Zimbabwe to white rule and a continuation of the liberation struggle in the post-colonial period.
• The liberation struggle conferred exclusive legitimacy on ZANU (PF). In this view, ZANU (PF) leaders, members and supporters paid dearly and sacrificed immensely during the struggle for independence; hence power belongs to them and them alone.

II) Discourse #2: Internal Dynamics of Power Explain Difficulties

The second school of thought emerged most powerfully towards the end of the

1990s (especially after 1997) as socio-economic difficulties, political repression and corruption mounted. This understanding of the current state of affairs in Zimbabwe is based on five principal propositions:

A) External forces, especially international financial institutions and Britain, are not primarily responsible for the current state of Zimbabwe. One part of the opposition in Zimbabwe (excluding trade unions and some civil society groups but including the independent press, key economic advisers to the MDC and the private sector) supports the neo-liberal policies and ideas dominant in many northern countries and in international financial institutions.

B) The crisis in Zimbabwe is a product of the Mugabe regime’s attempts to shore up an eroding power base. By the end of the 1990s, disaffection had produced strong opposition within civil society and a new political party, the MDC. The defeat of the government in a referendum over a proposed constitutional reform in February 2000 precipitated the government’s attempt to regain lost ground. Subsequently, in two elections, the Zimbabwean government violated most norms laid down in regional (SADC), continental (AU) and global agreements specifying internationally accepted criteria for human and political rights and governance in general.

C) ZANU (PF)’s struggle to stay in power has produced an extreme non-liberal form of politics which has become highly abusive. Legislation now prohibits basic freedoms of the press, of association, and of dissent. Above all, the current government has removed the concept of impartiality before the law.

The government (1) has tightened control so that all institutions of the state and employees are meant to serve only the ruling political party; (2) has militarized the state, putting retired military figures into key positions and creating paramilitary forces drawn from the "war veterans" and then the youth militia; (3) and has developed a politics of exclusion which denies full citizenship to those who do not support ZANU (PF ). The exclusion also determines who is able to get food relief or to buy food from the government’s Grain Marketing Board - i.e. people who hold ZANU (PF) cards.

D) Land reform has had, primarily, a political agenda. In this view, land reform was less the equitable transfer of land from a small class of white commercial farmers to land-poor farmers from the communal areas than a tool in service of a regime and a president whose power rested, to no small degree, on patronage. Proof that the land reform had a largely political agenda can be seen in its reckless imposition and the resulting collapse in agricultural production.

E) The crisis has produced the Zairization of Zimbabwe. As the formal economy collapses, this school points to what they consider to be wholesale looting not only of the white commercial farming sector but also of state assets by an ultra-corrupt elite. The expensive military intervention in the DRC brought benefits to a few key individuals but not to the country as a whole.

In this period, fortunes have been made by a small class of Zimbabweans at the top while the vast majority lead a perilous existence, lacking even the basics. From the point of view of this school, ZANU (PF) has overstayed its welcome in power and has become incompetent, repressive and corrupt.

III) An assessment of the competing claims of this discourse:

A) The question of external responsibility for the Zimbabwean crisis: Here one can agree with erstwhile allies about part of their argument.

1) It is clear that the policies pushed on Zimbabwe by external forces - international financial institutions and other donors - in the late 1980s and early 1990s set the stage for the tragedy which has unfolded. The government hoped to find a way to accelerate growth, fund social services and, above all, employ the hundreds of thousands of secondary school leavers coming out on to the job market.

However, the neo-liberal policies of the IFIs did not deliver significantly in the fields of growth and investment and the government went ever deeper into debt. Significantly, the deterioration of living standards and the growing population of unemployed literate youth provided fertile grounds for opposition politics. At the same time, the Mugabe regime became increasingly frustrated at being no longer able to afford the reforms of the 1980s

(especially social sector funding) to sustain popular standards of living and thus to retain popular support.

No wonder that many in Zimbabwe still see this crisis through the lens of their relations with the international financial institutions. Clearly, external forces set the stage for the desperate struggle which the Mugabe regime has launched to stay in power.

2) However, the focus on the external input of Britain seems more a displacement of responsibility rather than an accurate portrayal of events. To be sure, Britain’s handling of the Zimbabwe crisis, especially in the early years, was inept. Two officials, Claire Short and Peter Hain, in particular, acted in ways that inflamed and aggravated difficulties between the two countries. But it stretches credulity to accept Mugabe’s insistence on the nature and extent of British sabotage of his regime.

B) Anti-imperialism and Zimbabwean nationalism: While one can argue that the IFIs and the West bear part of the responsibility, they do not provide an excuse for much of what has transpired in Zimbabwe. As lecturer Devan Pillay noted, "the "imperialist" card, like the "racist" card, is inevitably played whenever politically expedient. The Mugabe regime has used nationalism, and pan-Africanism to great effect, winning support from the region, the continent and from a wide swathe of African public opinion.

The reasons may not be too hard to find. This is a region and a continent which has been force fed an economic agenda in the last 25 years which has produced widespread global impoverishment and inequality. African economies and societies have experienced directly a "policing" of internal economic policy through structural adjustment programmes which has been more draconian and severe than experienced even in colonial times. The return in the last years to an overt imperial role by the US and Britain in the Middle East has only strengthened the reaction in the South and in Africa to Northern dominance.

C) Racism and Opposition in Zimbabwe:

In terms of the claim that opposition to the current Zimbabwean regime and its policies is a product of racist attitudes, there is no question that the plight of white farmers attracted international attention and strong reactions from the British press and government.

That said, the government in Zimbabwe itself has operated on a racial basis - targeting farmers, primarily but not exclusively, on the grounds of race. At the same time, the issue of racism has had a crucially important second dimension. While the beneficiaries of the land reform are black, the overwhelming majority of victims of the land reform have also been black - not only the hundreds of thousands of farm workers and their families but also black settlers (30,000 to 35,000) who are now being pushed off farms in favour of more elite interests and the odd member of the ZANU (PF) elite that is losing out in current internecine struggles.

In addition, the membership of the coalition opposing Mugabe is primarily black as is the independent press and judiciary. The reality is that it is opposition to the regime, not the purported racist prejudice of a tiny white minority (some say now as few as 30,000 out of 11 million) and their external supporters that the government finds unacceptable.

D) The issue of the "progressive" or "socialist" nature of the current Zimbabwean state;

It is also hard to accept (as some on the left would have it) that the approach taken by the Zimbabwean government in the period since 1997 is "progressive" or "socialist".

In terms of the socialist nature of the Zimbabwean state, it can be argued that the government has imposed its will on the economy and not permitted the free reign of market forces. Secondly, Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros have pointed to the number of families originally receiving land (127,000 small farmers and 7,000 large farmers) as a fundamentally progressive reform.

In addition, Moyo has argued that the land reform has provided significant gains for the broader democratisation process. The process of land occupations, he argues, has created space for greater awareness and participation in basic social struggles hitherto dominated by formal state structures and urban civil society organisations.

Yet progressive and socialist policies have within them fundamental notions of popular control and popular benefit. On the issue of popular control, there is no question that the state played a significant role in organizing, animating, funding and transporting prospective settlers in the land invasions. While settlers may have taken the initiative in certain areas, they were responding to signals from the state and assisted by state institutions.

In other respects, the state in Zimbabwe, with its extreme abuse of human, civil and political rights, has operated in ways characteristic of a quasi-fascist rather than a ‘socialist’ state. Carte blanche has been given to paramilitary forces (the youth militia and ‘war veterans’); national security forces (police and military) have been pressed into direct service for the ruling political party; and, as noted earlier, Zimbabwean institutions have been militarized and transformed into partisan bodies.

On the issue of popular benefit, one sees an "idealism" in the Mugabe regime ’s blithe disregard for the sobering material realities of most Zimbabweans that would have done most European aristocracies proud. The blatant enrichment of a tiny elite in this period also sits uneasily with the socialist claim.

There remains the question of whether this is but an early phase of primitive accumulation which may ultimately result in progressive change. So far there is little to indicate such trends. As David Moore argues, "there is no evidence to date to show improvement ...in Zimbabwe, except in the case of a conspicuously consuming ‘élite’ (wealthier than a ‘middle class’ but with little interest in the production signifying a ‘proper’ bourgeoisie) with its base in ‘trade’ and rent-seeking at best, speculation and crime at worst.

Does this group represent the embryonic stage of a productive bourgeoisie, creating an industrial proletariat along with it? Reports on the new capitalists’ farms suggest much lower ...wages and worse conditions than those that afflicted the now decimated agricultural workers historically." At any rate, the state under ZANU (PF) has always expressed ambivalence about a successful autonomous capitalist class, giving short shrift to figures like Econet’s Strive Masiyiwa or confiscating the properties of those who fall out of favour (as in the case of Edwin Moyo’s Kondozi farm).

E) The sombre dénouement of post-colonial, post-liberation politics

A central question that this case opens for us is a familiar Orwellian one: why do "revolutionaries" come to look like their opponents in all too short a time? Why do the laws and the actions of the Mugabe regime resemble, in a macabre and eerie way, those of the government of Ian Smith?

In this case, the historical legacy of the war for liberation provides an important part of the answer - especially in the inculcation on both sides of authoritarian patterns of rule and undemocratic practices. Armed liberation struggles did not provide the experience or habits which would help foster democratic systems of governance after independence or respect for human rights.

The colonial states which liberation movements moved into had also been militarized in the war against black majority rule. Hence, when liberation from white minority rule finally came in Zimbabwe, it did not usher in the substance of a democratic culture. Instead, its vision was the one-party state.

Hence, to understand the roots of the Zimbabwean crisis one must go back to interrogate the myths, legends and historical record of the liberation movements both during the periods of struggle and also during their period in power. After all, the darker shadows of the internecine battles within ZANU during the 1970s were followed by the repressive horrors of the gukurahundi in Matabeleland and a record of rigid intolerance to opposition forces in the post-independence period.

Here the work of John Saul is extremely prescient. In an early (pre-1980) and controversial article, Saul emphasized the ways in which "petty-bourgeois politicking" - the jockeying for position within and between Zimbabwean liberation movements based on factionalism and personality and the instrumentalism of ethnic issues - had forestalled the deepening of the revolutionary project.

At the time of Zimbabwean independence, he wrote cautiously of Mugabe "cast .. in the role of Sphinx, guarding his options and seeming deliberately to muddy the ideological waters", and warned the left against "waiting for Mugabe". While he looked at the prospects for Zimbabwe moving beyond "primitive" or bourgeois nationalism to a more revolutionary nationalism

(defined as realizing the interests of the people as a whole rather than the interests of a small group), he noted that "considerable controversy swirls around the question ... of just what kind of promise of continued forward movement ZANU has to offer".

In the current period of crisis in Zimbabwe, one finds the deepening of a pathology foreshadowed by this analysis - the intense petty-bourgeois politicking as rivals begin the battle to succeed Mugabe and Mugabe still the Sphinx, guarding his options and muddying the ideological waters.

So what is left for a more hopeful future?

The broad coalition of opposition forces which emerged in Zimbabwe, battered and bruised though it may be by government repression, held and may still hold within it the promise of a different phase in the political life of the country and the region.

As Joe Hanlon argues, it might be more appropriate to use the term "Chimurenga" for this phenomenon - not as the government does to describe the initiatives it has taken since 2000, especially in land reform, but more to refer to the uprising of the next generation of political leaders no longer prepared to accept the negative side of rulers, like Mugabe and his comrades, who came to power with independence at the end of a liberation struggle.

Beyond this goal, however, the purpose of such new groupings is not clear. With such a wide array of forces grouped under the umbrella of dissent, the struggle over policies will only begin with their success. At any rate, at writing, the repressive efforts of the state have contained this promise; for the time being, the old forces of liberation have triumphed over the new.

Endnotes:

[1] See David Blair, Degrees in Violence - Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in Zimbabwe (London: Continuum, 2002), 132-138.

[2] Devan Pillay, "Playing the "imperialist’ card has cast a spell on Mugabe ’s critics," Sunday Times (SA), 26 October 2003.

[3] Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, "Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe:Towards the National Democratic Revolution," Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, eds. Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, London: Zed Books, forthcoming.

[4] Sam Moyo, "The Land Occupation Movement in Zimbabwe: Contradictions of Neo‑liberalism," Millenium: Journal of International Studies, XXX, II,

330.

[5]David Moore, "Marxism and Marxist Intellectuals in Schizophrenic Zimbabwe: How Many Rights for Zimbabwe’s Left? A Comment," Historical Materialism, (forthcoming).

[6] See C. Leys and J. S. Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword (London: James Currey, 1995).

[7] See Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo - Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

[8] Breaking the Silence Building True Peace - A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands 1980 to 1988 (Harare: The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and The Legal Resources Foundation, 1997).

[9] See Norma Kriger, "Electoral Patterns in Zanu(PF)’s Incendiary Discourse and Organized Violence", September 2004, unpub.

[10] John Saul, "Transforming the Struggle in Zimbabwe," Southern Africa, February 1977 reprinted in John S. Saul, The State and Revolution in Eastern Africa (New York and London: Monthly Review Press and Heinemann Educational Books, 1979), chapter 5.

[11] John S. Saul, "Zimbabwe: The Next Round," Monthly Review, XXXII, 4

(September 1980), 38.

[12] Saul, "Zimbabwe: the Next Round," 34.

*Chimurenga is a Shona word meaning struggle. The ‘First Chimurenga’ refers to the 19th century resistance to British colonialism and the ‘Second Chimurenga’ was the national liberation war of the 1970s.

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