Undaunted, British conquerors and South African settlers determined that the city must have been built by non-Africans. The Queen of Sheba and the Phoenecians were two possibilities bandied about by professional archaeologists, who like their anthropologist counterparts, often served the interests of the colonial state, and whose quackery was only slowly dismantled over the next century.
The city served as the namesake for the African country which gained its independence in 1980. Great Zimbabwe also provided some of the new country’s important symbols. At the other historic site I visited, reproductions of the famous Great Zimbabwe stone birds sat atop the tall friezes which narrated the African territory’s emergence from subjugation to independence. The friezes are part of the monumental architecture of Heroes Acre, a memorial to the independence struggle, its martyrs, and the country’s founding fathers and mothers. Heroes Acre sites on the outskirts of Harare, high on a hill, overlooking the capital which can by turns seem like any other well appointed southern African city, and like a shell of a country on its knees, unable to rise to its feet.
It is at Heroes Acre that most assumed Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s first president, and the bane of many of its people, was likely to be buried. Mugabe, who died Friday, lived a life in parallel with the emergence of modern Zimbabwe, and for Americans might be best imagined as a combination of George Washington and Jefferson Davis. Mugabe was--and remains for many Zimbabweans--the hero most associated with his country’s liberation from colonial rule and its emergence as the original southern African “rainbow nation,” a title now usually bestowed on the South Africa of the Mandela era. But also became responsible for repeatedly and brutally dividing the country along ethnic lines, for empowering a military which confuses its own prosperity and wellbeing with the public good, and for setting in motion events which have led to the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy.
The territories that became Zimbabwe were conquered by European settlers and chartered companies during the late-nineteenth century as a part of the broader “scramble” for Africa. In this case, it was the British South African Company, British and Afrikaner settlers, and finally the British government, which presided over the conquest of what became known as Southern Rhodesia. Africans were transformed from the peoples of a variety of pre-colonial kingdoms, states, and communities, into colonial subjects, restricted to “tribal” reserves which often comprised and even more often became marginal agricultural land, divided along ethnic lines that were artificially strengthened by the colonial state, and subjected to a cruel and humiliating colour bar.
More than most other British colonies outside of South Africa, Southern Rhodesia became a settler state, and those settlers resisted every effort by the British government to force Rhodesia to conform to what became the envisioned timeline and mode of decolonization in the 1960s. Instead of according to British and African nationalist demands for “no independence before majority African rule,” Rhodesia’s settlers issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from an impotent British Empire, allied themselves with apartheid South Africa and the colonies of Portugal’s dictatorship, and fought a twelve-year war against African nationalists who, when civil disobedience and political organizing proved insufficient, retreated to the bush to wage a guerrilla war.
After working as a teacher, one of few professions open to Africans under colonial rule, Robert Mugabe became involved with the nationalist parties fighting the rogue Rhodesian state, and spent time in prison for his anti-colonial activities. His imprisonment coincided with the death of a child, and to add a further indignity to the violence and humiliation imposed on detainees, Rhodesian authorities did not allow Mugabe to leave prison to attend the funeral. Mugabe later rose to the top of ZANU-PF, one or the two primary parties that provided the organizing framework for political and military resistance.
At the end of the 1970s, the Rhodesians having been worn down by a drawn out civil war, Britain briefly reassumed control of the colony (the last governor was a son-in-law of Winston Churchill and the father of Nicholas Soames, a member of the British parliament recently evicted from the Conservative Party for his defiance of Boris Johnson). The Commonwealth oversaw elections in 1980 which saw ZANU-PF win an overwhelming victory in spite of multiple attempts--like by the Rhodesian security services--to murder Mugabe himself.
The same set of assumptions that led Europeans to ascribe the construction of Great Zimbabwe to a more “civilized” people meant that many settlers assumed Mugabe’s triumph would be followed by their summary removal from the country or worse. But before most of the world’s people had ever heard of Nelson Mandela, Mugabe became a Mandela-like figure, encouraging European settlers to remain in the country provided that they accepted that they were now Zimbabweans. His stirring articulation of a civic form of nationalism--in stark contrast to the Rhodesians’ ethnic nationalism--made Mugabe a figure of local, regional, and global adulation, and antidote to fears of what African governance meant, and a powerful rejoinder to the South African apartheid government’s claims about the menace of African nationalism.
The new government went out of its way to indulge the white settlers, even reserving twenty parliamentary seats for the community, seats that were later converted into appointed seats, a ‘00s era weapon deployed by ZANU-PF against its opponents.
During the 1980s the country successfully extended access to education and healthcare to many of its citizens. The health and wellbeing of most Zimbabweans increased dramatically. The country also began halting efforts at land redistribution, designed to address the inequalities in access to wealth and land constructed over nearly a century of colonial and settler rule. However, the British and Zimbabwean governments interpreted the former’s commitment to funding this program, and when Ronald Reagan came to power in the U.S., he did not display the Carter administration’s interest in and commitment to supporting and funding elements of land reform. Land reform also placed most of the power in the hands of sellers, and focused on other forms of welfare--health and education in particular--the government did not have the resources to meet willing sellers’ prices.
Scholars, journalists, and onlookers continue to debate the combination of factors that led to the sinister events that unfolded in parts of Zimbabwe during the 1980s, some citing Mugabe’s psychological profile, others arguing that the descent into dictatorship was an inevitable feature of African politics. However, the partial division of the liberation movement along ethnic and geographic lines, the different international affiliations of the liberation parties, and restiveness with the allocation of post-independence power contributed to a climate of suspicion between ZANU-PF and ZAPU, its main rival for power once the Rhodesians were swept into marginal if still highly affluent obscurity.
These differences were deliberately exacerbated and in some cases manufactured by the highly-effective South African regime, which saw the front-line of colonial and settler states crumble before its eyes, and regarded an independent Zimbabwe willing to host South African liberation parties as an existential threat to its system of segregation. South Africans saw, in fanning the flames of dissent and difference in Zimbabwe, a way to bring to life their lie about the innate incompetence of Africans, and manufacture what they could no longer pretend was a natural state of affairs. South African plants in Zimbabwe’s military destroyed most of the country’s air force, and planted weapons caches that appeared to implicate Mugabe’s political rivals in fomenting dissent.
The result was a campaign of ethnic cleansing ordered by Mugabe, allegedly overseen in part by his successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, and partly implemented by Rhodesians who still occupied high places in the security services, and who brought forms of violence honed under colonial rule into Zimbabwe’s military. The immediate force behind the Gukurahundi was the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade (North Koreans were also the architects of Heroes Acre). Mugabe traced his roots to the remnants of the Shona people and their predecessors who built Great Zimbabwe, and his campaign of violence targeted Ndebele people, descended from communities that entered the region from further south and east in the nineteenth century. The Matabeleland massacres, in addition to making more lethal and lasting the differences that had emerged during the liberation war, also illustrated the hypocrisy of European and American powers, which barely batted an eye over these massacres, in stark contrast to the storm they raised over the eviction of white farmers a decade and a half later.
While the world’s powerbrokers largely ignored Matabeleland, they took a less indulgent approach to the deficit spending that had lifted many Zimbabweans out of poverty, and in the early 1990s the IMF began to enforce austerity--with predictably dreadful consequences--on the Zimbabwean economy. Mugabe also found himself under pressure from an emboldened and organized community of war veterans and hangers-on, the former having never received the compensation they believed they deserved for the sacrifices endured during the liberation war. As party, state, and military grew increasingly intertwined under one-party rule, Mugabe sent his military into the Congo, in the time-honored tradition of southern African war-making during the late-20th century. Like the apartheid state before it, which intervened in civil wars both to shore up regional influence and to take advantage of the chaos to plunder its neighbors, ZANU-PF and the miltiary profited handsomly from the misfortunes of the Congolese.
It was Mugabe’s decision to order the occupation of some of the country’s white-owned farms that finally mobilized international public opinion against the regime. Tony Blair declaimed the responsibilities Britain had incurred for aiding land reform in the 1980 settlement (the responsible minister saying that as an Irishwoman and fellow victim of colonialism she was not party to Britain’s colonial legacy), and instead mobilized public opinion in the Commonwealth and north Atlantic world against Mugabe. In this, Blair and Co were aided by a flourishing genre of memoirs that dominated the “Africa” section of British and American bookshops, packed with subtle and not-so-subtle nostalgia for the “good old days” before Mugabe. As the song says, “Rhodesians never die.”
As the Zimbabwean economy spiralled and an emboldened opposition brought serious electoral pressure to bear on the regime, Mugabe unleashed terror and violence on the leaders and members of the Movement for Democratic Change who drew on the power of outraged urbanites in Harare and Bulawayo, trade unions, and a civil society yearning to reassert itself. Even ZANU-PF’s most shameful intimidation and manipulation couldn’t earn the party victory in 2008 parliamentary elections. Morgan Tsvangirai, MDC leader, beat Mugabe in the presidential election, but likely thanks to manipulation, did not receive the outright majority needed to claim victory in the first round. To protect the limbs and lives of his supporters as Mugabe unleashed still more horrific violence before the second round of voting, Tsvangirai withdrew from the contest, but the MDC entered government.
Many expected Mugabe’s death to provoke brutal infighting between generals and party leaders. But in 2017, his attempt to pave the way for his wife to succeed him in office infuriated generals who had bloodied their hands during and after the liberation war, and who had grown accustomed to occupying a special place in the party. They deposed Mugabe in a coup and elevated Emmerson Mnangagwa to the presidency. True to his role in Zimbabwe’s security state, Mnangagwa has proved every bit as willing as Mugabe to use violence. Unlike Mugabe, he is making his way in a global environment more disposed toward authoritarianism and less concerned about human rights.
During my few days in Harare, an opposition stronghold as poorly disposed toward Mugabe as any, many Zimbabweans were acknowledging that Mnangagwa was challenging their certainty that things could only get better, and more than a few expressed something close to nostalgia for the Mugabe years as they face kilometers-long fuel lines, fluctuating prices, currency shortages, and devastating unemployment. And Mugabe is twisting the knife from beyond the grave, for his family claim that his wishes were to be buried in eastern Zimbabwe, and not at Heroes Acre where he would be used as a symbol by those who deposed him to save their own skins.
The resurgence of white nationalism in the United States, and the global networks that ethno-nationalists are building has resulted in renewed interest in a distorted narrative about the lived experiences of white South Africans and to a lesser degree, by extension, white Zimbabweans. But the vast, overwhelming majority of victims of Mugabe’s regime, and of Zimbabweans who have fled their country or suffered for seeking to reclaim their civil and political rights, are black Zimbabweans. It is they who endure xenophobia in South Africa or bide their time in North America or Europe. And it is these exiles and “inziles” alike--the likes of Tsitsi Dangarembga, Yvonne Vera, Noviolet Bulawayo, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Panashe Chigumadzi--who have most compellingly documented Zimbabwe’s arc since UDI in 1965 and independence in 1980.
A far more troubling figure than most other nationalist figures in southern Africa, Mugabe was nonetheless an enormous force shaping the region. A liberation hero who saw the transformation of his citizen’s wellbeing in the ‘80s, he ultimately mangled the country’s economy and maimed its democracy, allowing the ruling party and the military to confuse the prosperity of their leading members with the health and wellbeing of the nation. Like many other leaders of newly independent nations--and in common with political figures across the world today--Mugabe offered at various times various answers to the question of how citizenship and belonging were defined. In North America and Europe he is a byword for the ills of African politics, but his trajectory, and the window his life offers into Zimbabwe’s fortunes the past half century, is also a mirror for his critics. It is easy to dismiss Mugabe as a depraved dictator, but more uncomfortable to think about the regional and global factors underpinning his transformation, and how very ordinary some of his politics look wherever we cast our eye around the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
