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Britain could be a partner
Richard Dowden
April 12, 2007

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=304489&area=/supzim0407_home/supzim0407_content

It began with the double-crossing of Lobengula, the Ndebele King, when Cecil Rhodes's pioneers seized Shona territory to establish Rhodesia in 1890. From the beginning, Britain's dealings with Zimbabwe were marked by duplicity and a callous disregard for its people.

Then came the destruction of Lobengula's kingdom and the mass seizure of land for white settlement -- a policy that continued until the 1960s. After the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by whites in 1965, Britain ruled out calls for military pressure on the grounds that the rebellion would be over "in weeks rather than months".

Instead, Britain promised sanctions, which were duly broken or allowed to be broken. The minority regime stayed in power for 14 bloody years, until Britain finally accepted the surrender of Ian Douglas Smith's Rhodesian Front at Lancaster House in 1979.

But, to this day, the precise detail of what was or was not promised to the new nation is veiled in controversy.

Many Zimbabweans believed Britain would set up a fund to buy out white land. If this promise was made at all, it could have been little more than a "gentleman's agreement", finessed by British Foreign Minister Lord Carrington. Others have claimed the deal was struck amid hints that £2-billion would be made available later to fund land redistribution.

Whatever the terms, the outcome was to ensure that the vexed issue of land was taken off the table during independence negotiations. The final text of the Lancaster House agreement stated only that land would be transferred from white to black ownership on a willing-buyer, willing-seller basis.

Relations with Britain subsequently calmed. Aid flowed, despite disagreement over African demands for sanctions against apartheid South Africa. In the first few years of Zimbabwe's independence, President Mugabe established a close, if not cordial relationship, with Margaret Thatcher.

Much to the amazement of officials at the prime minister's Downing Street office, Mugabe would drop in for informal chats with Thatcher during private visits to London. "We always seem to get on better with the Tories than with Labour politicians," Nathan Shamuyarira, the veteran Zanu-PF insider and party spokesperson, told me.

The good manners survived the Matabeleland massacres of the early 1980s, when Britain kept quiet while Mugabe's Fifth Brigade killed thousands of Ndebele people. Britain also provided military support to safeguard the Beira corridor -- a vital trade route from Zimbabwe to the Indian Ocean coast of Mozambique.

The cooperation had a strategic goal. Britain's strategy to promote change but prevent revolution in South Africa needed Mugabe on board. But British officials badly misread their man, imagining that Mugabe's socialist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric was largely a tactic deployed for the purposes of the liberation war.

To the British Foreign Office, Mugabe was a pragmatist. Few doubted he would do what he was told when faced with economic pressure or the threat of cuts in foreign aid. When Zimbabwe's economic reform programme went badly off track in the late 1980s, Britain refused to condone any softening of the structural adjustment policies prescribed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

In 1997, Tony Blair's Labour government came to power. The first meeting of the two leaders, at the 1997 Commonwealth Conference in Edinburgh, ended in acrimony. Mugabe wanted Blair to provide money to buy out the white farms. Blair took the view that the past was the past, Zimbabwe was an independent country and Britain's responsibility was at an end.

For Mugabe, under pressure to assert his political gravitas while the economy deteriorated at home, this brush-off by a young English politician, who clearly did not know his history, was a terrible insult. Mugabe saw himself as a great African leader, but already his reputation had been overshadowed by the rapturous acclaim for his esteemed southern neighbour, Nelson Mandela.

Other British Cabinet ministers proved equally tactless. Mugabe exploded with rage when Clare Short, then minister for aid, suggested that her own ancestors in Ireland suffered from colonialism as much as Zimbabwe. Peter Hain, a former activist who claimed to be "of Africa", compounded this resentment by lecturing Mugabe on civilised behaviour.

Still more humiliating was an attempted citizen's arrest of Mugabe by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, ostensibly in protest at the oppression of homosexuals in Zimbabwe. To this day, Mugabe believes Tatchell's headline-grabbing stunt was carried out on the orders of the British government.

In response, he taunted Blair with accusations that Britain wanted to take over Zimbabwe again. This also suited Mugabe's domestic agenda. He headed off a growing protest movement by "war veterans" from the left by turning them on the white farmers who had funded the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. By seizing the land owned by Britain's children in Zimbabwe, Mugabe at a stroke undermined both sources of opposition to his rule.

When he found Britain was sending new communications equipment to its Harare High Commission, he had it seized. Britain responded with rhetorical denunciations and ineffectual sanctions which Mugabe skilfully threw back in Britain's face as neo-colonial bullying. By presenting this feud as a new phase of anti-imperial conflict, Mugabe has attained a certain folk hero status in parts of Africa.

The past decade has made clear Britain's weakness when it comes to standing up to tyranny in Africa. Among Zimbabweans who were suffering from Mugabe's vicious tyranny, Britain was condemned for not doing enough. Its mean-minded immigration policies frustrated Zimbabwean asylum seekers, inviting suspicion that Britain's relationship with Zimbabwe remains at least ambiguous and, at most, duplicitous.

Now, as then, Britain puts its relationship with South Africa before its relationship with Zimbabwe. But Britons in general -- and Britain's media in particular -- have a strange obsession with Zimbabwe. As a journalist who struggled to interest editors in reports from Congo, Nigeria, Ghana or Kenya, I always knew that I could sell a story about Zimbabwe to an editor.

For all Britain's policy failures, there remains a deep well of goodwill towards Zimbabweans in Britain. Once Mugabe goes, that could be turned into a partnership to rebuild the country. South Africa and China will have replaced Britain as the lead partners, but Britain still has a role to play, both as an individual donor and in Europe, to coordinate international assistance.

And it could also devise a system that would allow the thousands of skilled and hard-working Zimbabweans who have settled in Britain to contribute to the rebuilding of their country without losing their rights and status in their new home. That, too, could be a model for relations between Europe and Africa.

*Richard Dowden is director of the Royal African Society. He is a former Africa editor of the Economist

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